Avatar Grand Prix 2

January 26, 2012 by 13 Comments

And so we conclude this ill-conceived theme week, but at least I’m playing a game that tries to ape something released in my lifetime.  Out Run and Super Sprint both hit in 1986.  At the time, I was too busy not existing to be a fan of those.  On the other hand, Super Mario Kart was released in 1992, meaning I had been upgraded from non-existent to existent by way of parental fucking.  Crudeness aside, my first gaming memory is playing Super Mario Kart with my friend Meagan at the ripe old age of around fourish, so the series has always held a special place in my cold little heart.  It’s also probably why I’ve never cared too much for kart racing clones.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Crash Bandicoot fan, but I always thought his kart racers were kind of stupid.  It was around this time that the word “generic” entered my vocabulary, because that pretty much describes every kart racer that doesn’t star Mario.  I got a Nintendo 64 for my ninth birthday in July of 1998, along with Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing.  I loved Mario Kart and absolutely hated Diddy Kong Racing.  It was so boring, and its cast of characters so cookie cutter.  Who the FUCK was Tip Top the Turtle and why the fuck should I care about him?  By the way, it was around this age that I first learned what soap tastes like.

I haven’t played a Mario Kart clone yet on XBLIG, but there are quite a few.  Avatar Grand Prix 2 hit and I figured since I was going to do this silly race week shit, I might as well make it the grand finale.  I had my expectations set a bit low, because the screenshots looked a little on the bland side and, well, it’s an avatar game.  Those are usually underwhelming at best and skull-fuckingly horrible at worst.  So it surprises me to say this and you should be surprised to hear that Avatar Grand Prix 2 is actually a pretty good game.

It doesn’t look like much in screen shots, but the graphics of Avatar Grand Prix 2 are pretty solid.

Obviously the idea is “it’s like Mario Kart, but it has your Xbox avatar” and that creates a possible problem right off the bat.  There is a time-honored tradition in racing games.  There’s the fast cars with the shitty acceleration.  There’s the slow cars that handle the best.  And there’s the middle car that’s average in every category.  That gets chucked in the dumpster here.  There’s no karts to select from, so everyone has equal footing.  On one hand, I kind of see the advantage of that.  You won’t have four people fighting over who gets to be Wario, because we all know that Wario is the shits.  On the other hand, not having a kart with stats that cater to your skills as a gamer kind of blows.

Thankfully the handling is pretty decent.  Well, most of the time.  Avatar Grand Prix 2 is easy enough that it has a good pick-up-and-play quality about it.  The accelerator is mapped to the right trigger, and breaking/drifting is set to the left one.  The learning curve for this is fairly small, so you should be able to easily handle corners.  I figured since most Xbox Live Indie Games put as much stock in good play control as the village whore puts in monogamy, the game would handle like shit.  I was proven wrong.  And then I crashed into a wall for the first time.  This was immediately followed by me bouncing off that wall into the opposite wall.  What started as a game of kart racing turned into a game of Pong with me as the ball.

Playing through the game on the 50cc setting, this wasn’t a huge problem.  No, it became a huge problem once I started using the higher speed classes.  On 150cc, the game is significantly faster, and cornering becomes more of a reflex tester.  Hitting a wall on this setting was akin to hitting a bumper in pinball.  My kart was suddenly getting bounced from left to right for nearly the length of a full lap before I was able to correct myself.  And by the time I did, I was usually primed to hit another wall and watch the walls go all Venus Williams on my ass again.  It wasn’t just me either, because both Brian’s roomie Bryce and some random dude online were having problems with the walls as well.

There’s twelve tracks, each with four possible variations.  For the most part, they’re well designed and the variety present is pretty good.  However, they are way too short.  Without exaggeration, you can complete three laps on some courses in just over twenty seconds.  The longest any three-lap race took me was about a minute-and-a-half, which is ridiculously short.  I would have way preferred less tracks that were more substantial in length.   In the single-player grand prix mode, races only have three laps, plus one “qualifying lap” which feels out-of-place, especially when it can begin and end faster than it takes to finish taking a piss.

Once you go online, the options pick up quite a bit.  Races can last as much as 50 laps, which will still only take you about five to ten minutes, depending on what track you select.  Regardless, kart racing is always fun with more people and Avatar Grand Prix 2 is no exception.  I do wish the weapon selection was better.  Some of the items are downright worthless, like one that makes you invisible to other drivers.  In theory, that would be a good thing.  The problem is, it also makes your kart invisible to you.  Sure, the camera still centers on your kart, but not being able to see exactly where you are is not a good thing.  There’s also a force-field weapon that Bryce used while I was right on his tail.  It resulted in my kart being propelled way out in front of his, giving me the win for that track.  Not helpful for Bryce, but hilariously awesome for me.  Of course, if the shoe had been on the other foot, I would probably be getting booked on murder charges by now.

A few other glitches reared their ugly head.  The worst one caused myself, Bryce, and other players to be signed out of Xbox Live.  It happened to me more than once, and I would have to quit out of the game and sign back in for online features to work.  There were also instances of us getting stuck in the walls, which actually proved to be more annoying than the whole bouncy thing.

So yes, I have a lot of bad things to say about Avatar Grand Prix 2.  But I say them out of love, because I had a really good time playing it.  For all it’s faults, a lot fun can be had with AGP2.  Sure, it needs some patchwork to get rid of the wall recoil and a few other niggling little annoyances, but mechanics  here are really solid.  I’ve played a lot of crappy Mario Kart clones over the years, and screenshots of this were enough to set off alarms.  My worries were unfounded, and Avatar Grand Prix 2 is worth your money.  Thus concludes race week at Indie Gamer Chick.  If I ever talk about doing something like this again, you have my permission to spray saline in my mouth, tie a fork in it, and then shove me into a wall socket.

Avatar Grand Prix 2 was developed by Battenberg Software

80 Microsoft Points has never seen anyone actually pick Luigi in any Mario Kart game in the making of this review.

A review copy of Avatar Grand Prix 2 was provided by Battenberg Software to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Kairi was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review code was given to someone else to provide her with a proper online experience.  That person was not involved at all in the writing or editing of this review.  For more information on this policy, please consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Magic Racing GP 2

January 26, 2012 by 7 Comments

Update: Magic Racing GP 2 is now 80 Microsoft Points.

Well, this was quite stupid of me.  Three racing games recently hit Xbox Live Indie Games, so I said “Hey, I’ll do a racing theme week!  Sure, I don’t normally play racing games, or at least ones that don’t involve throwing turtle shells at other drivers, but that’s the point of my site!”  It seemed like a good idea, especially after I had such an easy time doing a review for Ocean Drive Challenge.  The next game on the list was Magic Racing GP 2, which looked like little more than a glorified Super Sprint clone.  How hard could it possibly be to write about?

Having spent the last hour cowering in the fetal position, mumbling to myself “I don’t understand this at all” I guess the answer is pretty fucking hard.

Magic Racing GP 2 does have gameplay similar to Super Sprint or Super Off Road, but that’s where any resemblance ends.  The developers were aiming for a more authentic simulation feel, and their dedication to this is admirable.  First things first, if you’re not a Formula One fan, you might as well stop reading this right now.  I feel like a party crasher because I’m clearly not someone who should be playing this particular type of game.  It would be like asking a Hindu for proper ways to cook a steak.

Focusing on gameplay, I found MRGP2 to control pretty much just like the arcade ports of Super Sprint or Super Off Road that I played on the Midway Treasures series.  The thing is, I could never handle those games, and I couldn’t handle Magic Racing GP 2 either.  At least at first.  Even after putting thirty minutes into it, I was still crashing into barriers, cutting corners, and getting a speed penalty for driving too fast through the pit.  I did have a breakthrough after about an hour of gameplay and could, more or less, keep my car on the track.  At least when doing practice laps.  In the game’s season mode, where you have to deal with other cars and weather conditions, the control constantly locked up on me, not in a glitchy way, but as if I had actually stalled the car.  This is probably because I have no fucking clue what different types of tires do, or how to “use the weather” or various other idiosyncrasies that Formula One fans would know.

Magic Racing GP 2 is a F1 fan service that aims for the type of crowd that insists they would rather play Tecmo Bowl over the latest Madden entry.  Gameplay is old school, yet the amount of modes is impressive and the level of customization offered is pretty intimidating.  There are dozens of drivers to choose from, all based on real F1 stars.  There is an option to edit their name, so Sebastian Vettel doesn’t have to be stuck with the more wanky moniker of “Sebastiano Vartel.”  Every other aspect of F1 is present here as well, from well-known venues to the scoring system to the team system.  Sure, you’ll want to change “Renalot” and “Mercides” to their proper names.  Or you can do what I did and give them more catchy ones, like “Hippo Riders” and “Skid Marks.”  There’s also 16-player online play, but I would guess that you’re more likely to see a Yeti figure skating with Jimmy Hoffa before you actually manage to get a full lineup of players together for it.

I can’t really tell you whether or not Magic Racing GP 2 is a good game.  The best I can do is make the following observations.  First, it’s not newbie friendly.  The game assumes you know the ins and outs of Formula One, because there is little in the way of help or instructions for you.  Second, the amount of ambition on display here is highly commendable.  The fake versions of real drivers, real teams, and real tracks easily impressed my Formula One loving boyfriend, so it hits the right cord with the type of crowd it’s aiming for.  Third, the game is playable, probably more so if you’re familiar and skilled at the classic racing titles that it builds off of.  So if you’re into this sort of stuff, Magic Racing GP 2 is the game for you.  If you’re not, for God’s sake do not buy this game.  I have never been into car racing and I can’t see myself ever getting into it.  Besides, if I want to watch cars driving really fast, all I have to do is hop over to Oakland and pull up a lawn chair to watch Formula 510, featuring the biggest stars in drug dealing hauling ass in their blinged out Cadillacs while the boys in blue give chase.  Sponsored by Krispy Kreme.

Magic Racing GP 2 was developed by Magic Studio

240 Microsoft Points played Magic Racing GP 2 by Magic Studio while wearing a Magic Johnson jersey at Magic Mountain in the making of this review. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Ocean Drive Challenge

January 24, 2012 by 11 Comments

I should probably preface this review by noting that I don’t have my drivers license.  Apparently the state of California thinks that I would be a danger to others on the account of my epilepsy.  And yet they still let Mel Gibson drive.  Hmmph.  Well, no matter.  I can still play racing games.  I play them very poorly, but I can still play them!  Over the next three reviews, I’ll be taking a look at some recent racing titles to hit Xbox Live Indie Games.  It might sound redundant to do three like-minded games, but actually all three are very different.  This is because all three picked an entirely different series to shameless copy, or “pay homage to” if you’re all googly-eyed nostalgic for this sort of stuff.

The first one is Ocean Drive Challenge.  It’s a street-racer that borrows from the Sega classic Out Run in the same way that a pick pocket borrows from you.  You choose one of three cars and try to get from point A to point B before time runs out.  That’s pretty much it.  Honestly, the game is a fairly good tribute if you’re into this sort of thing.  It’s not uncommon for an XBLIG clone of a cherished 80s coin-op to be kind of shit, but Ocean Drive Challenge really is pretty damn close to Out Run.  The cars handle the same way, the sense of speed is about the same, and the graphics are light and cartoony.  You even select what kind of music you want playing before the race begins.

All the annoyances of Out Run are here too.  Like being stuck on a two-lane stretch of road and having the left lane contain a gas tanker and the right lane be occupied by a comatose grandmother.  Or the cars interpreting your control movements as polite suggestions that can be gracefully ignored.  There’s also no modes of play besides the main arcade race.  It’s probably beatable but I was never good at these sort of games and could only make it halfway through the course.  Whether you call it Out Run or San Francisco Rush or Cruis’n USA, the time you get back for clearing a checkpoint never seems like it’s enough, at least for me.

Really though, there’s not a whole lot I can complain about here.  I can’t even bitch about this being a game that only nostalgic cocknuggets could find delight in, because it’s actually a well made game.  The cocknugget crowd that sometimes has to shut down parts of their brain to convince themselves that a bad clone is just like the childhood game they remember will probably have their heads explode when they play Ocean Drive Challenge, because it really IS just like the childhood game they remember.  Having said that, if you’re a really big fan of Out Run, why would you need this game?  Wouldn’t you already own it?  Maybe as part of a compilation disc, or on an emulator, or maybe you own the actual arcade cabinet.  Ocean Drive Challenge is close enough to Out Run to be impressive, but also close enough to be useless.  It actually makes me wonder what exactly the developer was thinking.  Making a really accurate clone of a twenty-five year old arcade game on an entirely different platform using completely different tools does take a lot of skill.  Imagine if they had taken that skill and applied it to a new concept.  The results could have been really amazing.  Instead, they did the video game equivalent of spending six years at MIT just to take a job in photocopy machine repair.

Ocean Drive Challenge was developed by need1D

80 Microsoft Points once caused a seven-car, multiple-fatality pileup on a slot car racing track in the making of this review. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

Ramen Ninja

January 22, 2012 by Leave a comment

Ramen Ninja is a stealth game starring the world’s most frugal cast of characters.  The idea is a bunch of bad guys stole all your ramen and you want to steal it back.  Can’t you buy, like, a metric ton of that shit for around $10?  Talk about a bunch of cheapskates.  And it’s not like they’re against the concept of hard work, because the guy goes to insane lengths to get his noodles back.  This involves sneaking around buildings, hiding under cover, and pushing crates around.  Meanwhile, the bad guys own those buildings and have hired dozens of security guards and mangoat-thingies to guard it.  What the fuck happened to the economy in Japan when I wasn’t looking that it has come to this?

Action in Ramen Ninja is takes place from a top-down perspective.  The idea is you have to sneak around various guards while pushing buttons and solving crate puzzles.  All the enemies have line-of-sight cones that you have to avoid, or they begin chasing you.  You also have to be silent, and this requires holding the A button to tip-toe around guards or the Y button to crawl around them.  It all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the guards are so inept at their jobs that you might as well let them see you and leg it for the finish.  This was my primary strategy.  At your normal speed you’re faster than them, so why not?  I would end up leading entire conga lines of them through each stage in a manner so wacky that the game might as well been set to the tune of Yakety Sax.  The penalty if you get seen and chased is a lower score.  The game works on a five-star rating scale.  If you get seen, the most you can finish a stage with is three stars, which was just fine with me.

Yep, they threw Zombies in there at one point. If you're an XBLIG developer and you don't include zombies, you get beat up, stuffed in a locker, and your lunch money gets stolen.

I would have played along with the stealth stuff, but I found that it often just didn’t work.  I would hide in an alcove, which the game makes a big deal of, but the guards would still spot me.  The same was true in multiple instances of hiding under tables, behind plants, and sometimes even on the other sides of walls.  I would sneak around while holding the crawl button and the guard would still be alerted to my position.  Heck, in some stages the level would start with a guard immediately onto me and giving chase.  I don’t know if this was by design or not, but considering that the guard was two feet in front of me and there was no chance of escape, I’m guessing it’s just flawed design.  The unworkable stealth aspects were just not worth the bother half the time and so I would just begin the Benny Hill sketch again.  It was always laughably easy to do that.  Again, the guards are not as fast as you.  And even if they close in, they might just fall asleep on you.  No really, they’ll be inches away from you and then doze off, complete with a “Zzzz” thought-bubble.  It’s like the diabolical ramen thieves still wanted to meet all equal-opportunity employment criteria and hired nothing but narcoleptics.  It’s something I’ve been accused of having from time to time so I probably shouldn’t jokegffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff huh?  Is dinner done?  Wait, where I am?  Oh right, Ramen Ninja review.

There’s also the mangoat-thingies that chase you around.  They’re just like the guards, only they put you to sleep by singing you a lullaby.  It leaves you temporarily stunned, but not so much that they can then run up and catch you.  Assuming you’ve been legging it, you’ll likely have enough distance to survive the nap and keep running for it.  Like the guards, you move faster than them, so unless you get put to sleep by one and caught by another, they’re pretty useless.

It’s such a shame that the sneaky stuff doesn’t work, because you see that a lot of thought went into the level design.  All the stages are designed in unique ways that would use the element of stealth.  There’s also lame stuff like crate shoving, or in this case, sleepy security guard shoving, but you never really get to experience it the way the developers intended.  Despite all my complaints, I admit I had some fun with it.  Thus, Ramen Ninja becomes one of those weird games on my site that is utterly broken and obviously unfinished, and yet I do kind of recommend giving it a go.  A little bit.  Like a quarter-teaspoon of recommendation.  I mean, the whole wacky chase thing is not what the developers had in mind, but I was often smiling and giggling along with my boyfriend while I pissed away all the intent of the game.  With some more development time, the stealthy stuff might have worked and Ramen Ninja might have been something special, instead of being the kind of special it is.  As in “forgive my daughter for licking your wallpaper.  She’s special.”

Ramen Ninja was developed by nullptrstudios

80 Microsogfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Hypership Out of Control (iOS) and Hypership Still Out of Control (XBLIG)

January 21, 2012 by 12 Comments

I think the thing that disappointed me most about VolChaos is that I know Fun Infused Games has talent.  I know this because I was hooked on Hypership Out of Control for the iPhone and iPad.  If that doesn’t impress you, it should.  If there’s one genre I dislike more than anything else, its vertical space shooters.  Yet Hypership was fast-paced, twitchy, high-score based, and loads of fun.

The idea is that you’re a ship with a hyperdrive set permanently in the “on” position.  With no way to brake, you have to clear gates and shoot any debris in your way, all while scrolling forward at break-neck speed.  There are some items that will slow you down, but for the most part you have to rely on quick reflexes and digital dexterity to survive.  You have a cannon but it fires automatically, so all you have  to worry about is using your finger to slide your ship back and forth.

Hypership on iOS is THE Hypershit!

There’s online leaderboards and multiple modes of play.  Usually when a game like this hits, one or more of the modes are total stinkers.  Here, every mode has its merits.  “Hardcore” mode is exactly the same as normal, except you only have one life, creating an awesome sense of tension.  In “Coin Down” the coins you collect on the course act as your fuel.  In SuperSpeed, you take the role of an albino hamster who is strapped to a rocket car and attempts to beat the land speed record for a rodent on the Bonneville Salt Flats, the previous record holder being Richard Hammond.  Actually, it’s just normal mode with more speed.  But I’m sure I just gave someone an idea for a bitchin’ new game.

Hypership on iPhone (or iPad if you’re a snoot) is one of the few games I’ve come across that I don’t have a whole lot of complain about.  Thankfully a vastly inferior port was just launched on Xbox Live Indie Games that I can gleefully murder.  Well I guess technically the iPhone version is the port while the new XBLIG game is a remake of the original.  It’s called Hypership Still Out of Control, and it actively sucks with all the might of a whirlpool stuck inside a black hole.

Hypership Still Out of Control has all the play modes of the iOS version, and even includes local multiplayer.  But I found the game nearly unplayable because it lacks the precision of touch control that I had grown so accustomed to on my iPhone.  Regardless of whether you’re using the D-pad or the analog stick, movement is too loose.  This is a major problem when trying to navigate past gates with narrow openings.  The whole point of the game is that your ship is moving at unreasonably dangerous speeds, so anything less than absolute flawless control is simply not going to cut it.

Another thing that I had grown fond of on the iOS port was not having to do anything to make the ship fire.  On iPhone, the ship never stops firing.  It’s pretty convenient because there’s never really a point where you won’t want it to be shooting.  On XBLIG, you have to manually fire.  It’s not really a deal breaker, because lots of games do that.  I guess it’s matter of comfort.  It’s like going from laying on a comfy mattress made of clouds to laying on a bed of nails.

Local multiplayer would be fun if the controls weren’t so loose.

And finally, there’s no online leaderboards.  Yea, the only option on XBLIG is ghettoized peer-to-peer ones that are hard to implement, but the only reason to own this game is to try posting high scores.  There’s actually an explanation screen where it’s explained that it wasn’t worth the effort and you should buy the iOS or Windows Phone 7 (ha, as if) ports if you’re into this sort of thing.  So I’ll just go by the same advice the developers themselves gave.  If you have a dollar to spare, there are few things as fun or addictive at that price as Hypership out of Control for iPhone/iPad/iPod/iPacemaker (coming in October).  If, however, you only have XBLIG, you might as well spend those 80 points on a shinny new sombrero for your avatar because Hypership on it is Hyper-shit. I knew I could work that line in there somewhere.

Hypership out of Control and Hypership Still Out of Control were developed by Fun Infused Games

IGC_Approved99¢ and 80 Microsoft Points heard Apple fanboys are now eating bacon three meals a day in anticipation of the iPacemaker in the making of this review.

Hypership Out of Control is also available for Windows Phone for $0.99 or free with ads.  These versions are unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The iOS version is Chick Approved.  The XBLIG version is not. 

Filed under iPhone and iPad Reviews, XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!

January 19, 2012 by 17 Comments

Choose your own adventure games are like being blindfolded and set loose in a pasture full of cows with irritable bowel syndrome.  Getting through one from start to finish without stepping in a pile of shit is going to require more luck than anything else.  I made five attempts at finishing Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! and I don’t think I lasted more than ten minutes in any of them.  I’ve also pretty much given up on further attempts.  As it stands, my feet are already so caked in manure that everywhere I’ve stepped in the past couple hours is properly fertilized for the next planting season.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In DDD,D! you play as an introverted virgin on his first day of college.  You’re bound and determined to lose the big V before the year is up.  It took me all of a minute to determine what the guy’s problem was up to this point: he’s a completely unlikable twit.  The first option the game gives you is whether you want to go to the bathroom, use the computer, or go watch TV.  I put myself in the mindset of a girl that’s possibly being courted by this guy and figured that it wouldn’t be very productive to be introduced to a guy who’s busting for a piss, so I sent him to the bathroom.  It was here that the guy stopped to flex for a mirror and do a few push-ups.  Oh my, a narcissistic freshman on a quest to bust his man-cherry.  What a catch.

I was determined to help steer the annoying virgin towards the promise land, but the luck of the draw was not on my side.  Like every other version of this kind of game I’ve played for IndieGamerChick, it’s just too fucking easy to “die.”  Here, death means you reach your 30th birthday as a virgin and thus become a wizard.  You know, if that were actually true, I think teenagers across the country would be way more receptive towards abstinence-only education.  Here, being a wizard is a bad thing for some reason.  I would think if the reward was actual magical powers, waiting until you’re 30 just to get laid would be worth it.  Once the magic starts flowing, you would be able to magically order up more pussy than unsuspecting customers than Soylent Blue: made 100% of street cats.

And how did I die?  Well, my first mistake was leaning in too close to talk to a girl.  Apparently I invaded her space and offended her.  How was I to know?  She was dressed like she had forgotten to do her laundry and the only thing clean was the shower curtain.

This girl’s digital restraining order against my digital annoying virgin is still pending.

When you make a mistake, it’s time to start over.  Unless you save.  But saving kind of was an issue for me, in that I couldn’t be bothered to do it.  There are no save prompts, so if you get caught up in the storyline (hey, it’s possible!) and step on one of those wrong choice cowpats, you get to relive the entire fucking story from the very beginning.  I hate it when games do this.  Saving isn’t always worth it, either.  The interface to do it with is slow and clunky.  A quick-save option would have been preferrable but the game couldn’t be bothered.

So I went through the agonizing story starring the most unlikable fictional creation since those little CGI nail fungus thingies from those one ads (shudder) and kept dying.  I died when I got beat up by some catty bitch’s boyfriend.  I died when I forgot that one of the chicks I was playing the field with didn’t like tennis.  I died right at the start when I chose “use the computer” trying to boost my intelligence level.  The game has a point system that gives you points in intelligence, charisma, and strength.  I decided since I liked the brainy girl more than shower-curtain wearing slut, I should try to make myself smarter and choosing “use computer” as the very first option was as good a start as any.  So I chose it and promptly died because my guy wanted to play Warcraft instead.  Hmmmph.

I never did figure out what the whole scoring system does.  My inability to go more than two minutes without failing to step right in line with the writer’s logic led to me starting over from scratch again and again.  I would like to remind the developer of this and every other game like Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! that video games are made to entertain people.  If you forced someone to read a book by reading one paragraph and then starting over at the beginning, go one paragraph further and then start over again, you would be subject to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.

Never got this far. Don’t know what this girl’s deal is. I would probably die a half-dozen times trying to figure it out, so fuck it.  Besides, with tits like that I’m sure she’ll have major back problems that I’ll hear bitching about day in and day out.  Who needs that?  My hand never whines like that so I got the better deal already!

So, shocker of shocks, I can’t recommend Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!  I will admit that the writing is slightly less painful than most games like this I’ve played on XBLIG.  Even if does annoyingly censor ****ing swear words.  This was probably done with the knowledge that it’s target audience have parents who frown on games with  gigantic anime boobies in them, but if the cussing is bleeped out they can hope for just one week of being grounded instead of two.  Still, I’m sure it won’t matter.  This game will sell because the aforementioned gigantic anime boobies.  And thus it’s owners will in fact reach the age of 30 with their virginity still intact.  No, they won’t become wizards.  But if they hold out another forty years, they might become Pope!

Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! was developed by “cupholder”

240 Microsoft Points would rather see a game about a prudish puritan who actively avoids trying to get laid, just to change things up in the making of this review.  

I couldn’t find anything about the developer or a trailer for this game.  Sorry.

Remember Orbitron: Revolution?  The game that I said does for Defender what Pac-Man Championship Edition does for Pac-Man?  Well, if you buy the game on Friday or Saturday, the proceeds from it will go to the BC Cancer Foundation.  How often can you play a (future) Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard game and fight cancer at the same time?  You can’t.  Well, unless you play Dead Pixels while actively getting chemotherapy.  This way sounds more fun.  For more information, click here. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

SOPA

January 17, 2012 by 11 Comments

SOPA is a tactical strategy game in which you are tasked with protecting the intellectual properties of the entertainment industry.  Playing as an agent of the industry under the jurisdiction of SOPA (which no doubt stands for Supremely Oppressive Pricks & Assholes), you get to wield unprecedented power at your own discretion to help fight for the big guys and bring justice to the unwashed masses.

I normally try to keep my cards close to my chest when I write these reviews, but I can’t hold off any longer: I FUCKING LOVED THIS GAME!  Think of all the dick moves you’ve ever pulled playing Grand Theft Auto and multiply them by a jillion.  That’s how much fun you can have as an agent of SOPA.  For example, I was perusing YouTube when I came across a video uploaded by a fourteen year old.  It was a highlight reel of his best kills in Gears of War 3, set to the tune of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.”  Now, if this was a game like Saints Row, you cap the little bastard in the back of the head and T-Bag his corpse.  BOR-RING!  In SOPA, you sue the little kid into the stone age, file charges against his parents, have their internet access cut off, and collect damages from YouTube because it was all their fault to begin with.  With this level of loosely defined parameters, you have the freedom to pretty much destroy lives in ways you never could have imagined.

Bad controls have always been my biggest sticking point in a game.  Thankfully, SOPA gives you more control over non-player characters than any game ever has.  I remember playing Mercenaries 2 and watching the dimwitted NPCs fall to their deaths by walking off a four-foot high ledge.  You don’t have to worry about that here.   Rounding up people to interrogate them over illegally hosting a 60 second long MP3 copy of the Golden Girls’ theme has never been so intuitive or easy to accomplish.  And the tools you’re given are amazing too.  Wiretaps, bully lawyers (that is lawyers who are bullies, not lawyers for bullies, although I’m sure there is some cross-pollination), lobbyists, and all the power of the federal government are at your disposal.  I used to feel pretty damn empowered when I held the Spartan Laser in Halo, but that is absolutely nothing compared to how I felt with all of the power I wield in SOPA.

And if you thought the emotion technology used in L.A. Noire was impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet.  This one time I was busting a Captain Kirk fan site for using clips of Star Trek set to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need A Hero.”  Not only was I able to tie the dude up in court for years, but I was able to go after every single person who had linked to his site in the process.  The dude had like 500 followers on Facebook!  It was like a genocide, only blood was replaced by tears, and that’s so much more evil and thus fun, wouldn’t you agree?  The look of terror on their faces and the tremble in their voices as they slowly realized that all the freedoms they had taken for granted were being extinguished is one of the most defining moments in a game I’ve ever had.

Not to mention all the employees of Facebook and all the internet service provider employees who I was able to put out of work because all these restrictions made their companies unprofitable.  It brought me a sense of satisfaction that all the nuns tied to the train tracks in Red Dead Redemption could never hope to equal.  Really, how can you go back to running over a Granny with a Buick in GTA when you can litigate a family into bankruptcy over having the theme from Days of Their Lives play in the background of a video of little Junior’s first steps?  Hey, you shouldn’t have uploaded it.  Not very smooth criminal of you.  By the way, using Smooth Criminal lands you five years in Gitmo so watch your step.

On-screen metaphors for what happens when you sue the shit out of a family making less than $40k a year.

Ultimately, your goal is to the destroy the entire internet.  Probably the biggest problem with SOPA is how easy that is.  If you’re the patient type, you can wait a few years, slowly conditioning the population to accept less and less accessibility to the internet they’ve grown so accustomed and dependent on.  And while I can see the merits of watching the people of 2022 fondly reminiscing about the time before SOPA where you could actually upload of a video of you singing the latest Lady Gaga song on your Facebook without having to lawyer-up, I simply don’t have the patience for that.  So I went all scorched Earth on the damn thing and just had Google shut down.  Hey, served them right for linking to a site that linked to a site that had a copy of the Adventures of Pluto Nash uploaded illegally to it.  This move destroyed the entire Silicon Valley economy, crippling America’s ability to stay ahead of the curve in the technology race and pretty much making us about as useless to the rest of the world as Segway access ramps.  I watched with satisfaction as the credits rolled on the game and nearly needed some, ahem, private time, as the final cut scene where Nigeria claimed a higher GNP average than the United States played out.

So overall, I heartily recommend SOPA to everyone reading this.  It does the wanton-destruction genre better than any sandbox game I’ve ever played, and it does it by a pretty big margin.  It’s the little things that make the big difference.  Sure, spraying shit on buildings in Saints Row is fun, but it can’t top watching the Feds break down the door of a sixteen year old girl who should have known better than to have downloaded that episode of Vampire Diaries.  Or busting that family for uploading a video of them singing Happy Birthday to their St. Bernard while you could clearly see the TV playing the latest episode of Family Guy in the corner of the screen.  For those of us who have always wanted the chance to know what it’s like to be truly merciless and cruel, this is the chance you’ve been waiting for.  And it’s all in the safety of a video game, where it can’t possibly ever happen in the real world.

Oh wait.  Fuck.

SOPA was developed by the United States Congress

240 Years of Freedom were flushed in the name of stopping six-year-olds from linking to unauthorized videos of Justin Bieber in the making of this review.

SOPA is not reality yet.  But unless something is done, it will be soon.  Do you really want the people who thought nine seasons of Roseanne were a good thing but fourteen episodes of Firefly was too much to decide what is right or wrong for the internet?  Visit StopAmericanCensorship to learn what you can do.

Special thanks to MasterBlud of Vintage Video Games TV for the trailer, Alex Jordan of Apathy Works for the screenshots, and Bill Stiernberg at Zeboyd Games for the cover art.

Filed under Editorials, XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

Lexiv

January 16, 2012 by 9 Comments

Being a boring person, I love Scrabble.  I play it with my boyfriend.  I play it online.  I play it on Xbox.  I play it on my iPhone.  I would even watch tournaments if they showed them on ESPN.  Sure, it’s not for everyone.  People who like exciting things or have lives usually avoid it.  Being an introvert, I’m just hard-wired to love this kind of thing.  So when I saw Lexiv, I nearly exploded excrement into my undergarments.  I mean, it’s Scrabble mixed with Sim City.  If they could have shoehorned Dungeons & Dragons in there somehow, it would have been the most introvertiest thing in human existence.

Not that I ever played Dungeons & Dragons.  I do have some dignity left.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change my underwear.

Where was I?

Lexiv.  So you’re given a rack of letters and you have to build words.  Those words make up a city.  Unlike Scrabble, parts of speech come into play.  Nouns act as residential zones for people to live in.  Verbs are the commercial zones where people work.  Adjectives and Adverbs boost the productivity of those zones.  Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections all fall under the “Etc” category and act as wildcards that boost everything.  And there’s nobody reading this anymore, is there?  Bleepy bloopy blongo blooper.  Yep, you’re all gone.  Either that was enough to sell you on the game or you heard the term “parts of speech” and fell into a coma.  Sigh.

Well, I wish you had stuck around, because I do have to sort of pick the game apart now.  I really did have a good time with Lexiv, but it does need tweaking on several levels.  Just a quick annoyance to start with: I hate that the game makes the word “Lexiv” the starting point.  V is probably the most difficult letter to work with in Scrabble, or Book Worm, or various other word building games.  I’ve spoken with professional Scrabble players (yes, they exist) who would have no problem with the letter being removed from the game.  But in Lexiv, it’s the first thing you have to deal with, every single round.  That sucks.

The game also fundamentally stifles creativity by forcing you to quickly build specific word types.  You pretty much have to get a noun and a verb on the table right off the bat.  That especially sucks when you have a rack of letters that would allow you to play them all (bingo as it’s known in Scrabble), but you have no use currently for that type of word.  You also don’t instantly get the letters replaced for you.  You have to wait maybe several intervals before you will have a full rack.  There are boosts that can help with this.  When you reach level two, you get an item that allows you to trade your current rack of any size for a full rack of fresh letters.  You also later get the opportunity to buy letters to fill up your rack faster.  Of course, your city has to be cash-flow positive to get there, and that can be tricky.  In order to get resources up, you have to be able to boost the zones you have.  Simply put, in a game that is based mostly around the luck of the draw, it’s not always possible.

Leveling up does allow you to equip "perks" that speed up the gameplay, but they take too long to get.

There’s roughly 8 to 12 hours of missions to play through, some of which use conventional Sim City themes like city defense.  Others require you to build over specific spots on the board to win.  The variety is large enough to keep things fresh through-out the playtime.  Then again, if you are into this sort of thing you probably would never get bored anyway.  I am into this sort of thing, and I didn’t get bored.

I did run into a few technical issues.  And by a few, I mean so many that it basically leaves the game broken.  When saving to the hard drive, the game had a degree of skipiness that I have never experienced in a XBLIG before.  Sometimes a game occasionally stutters, like a CD with a scratch.  Lexiv plays more like a CD that has had industrial-grade sandpaper taken to it.  In the early stages, it’s annoying.  Just a few stages later, the game is completely unplayable.  The developer is aware of this issue and is working on a patch.  Until then, placing the game’s save file on your memory card seems to clear up the problem in its entirety.  I realize that is not an option for everyone.  If that’s the case, sorry, I have nothing for you except second-hand word that a patch is in the works.

The mechanics of the game are not completely solid.  Scrolling is overly difficult and losing the cursor is too easy.  There’s also a really annoying night-and-day cycle thingie that makes visibility of the board pretty difficult.  It’s among the dumbest ideas I’ve seen a good game have on this service.  What kind of fucking moron would say “hey everyone, let’s play Scrabble with the lights turned out!  No flashlights!  You won’t be able to see anything!  This will be fun!”  No, it will be absurd and stupid, just like this gameplay idea was, and you’ll delete him from your Rolodex just as soon as he leaves the room.  Finally, the dictionary they used sucked.  Just a few quickie examples: I was forced to play “oinking” as a noun, “whim” as a verb, and “techno” isn’t even a legal word despite having been sanctioned by Websters and Oxford for more than a decade.  It needs some oinking work.

I’ve been hard on Lexiv, so I should probably make it  more clear that I really, really liked this game.  It’s so original, yet such an obvious evolutionary step for the game of Scrabble that I’m actually surprised nothing like it has come along.  For all of its flaws, which are numerous, I feel the ground work for something exceptional has been laid here.  In fact, I think it’s developer really ought to tweak the rules to make it more in line with the actual Scrabble, then place a sales call to Hasbro and license the game to them.  I could see this taking off as a licensed product called “Scrabble Cities.”  No bullshit, I really could.  So if you purchase Lexiv, you’re buying into a game that is fun already, but has the potential to be so much more.  I liked it a lot, especially because I could swear the fucking game reads my mind.

Lexiv was developed by Andrew Gaubatz

240 Microsoft Points sunk my Scrabbleship in the making of this review.

Instead of a normal trailer, I’ve included the developer’s detailed walk-through of the gameplay mechanics, not all of which I covered in this review.  If you have eighteen minutes free, it’s worth a look.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , ,

Plugemons: Part 1

January 15, 2012 by 54 Comments

As is normal when an XBLIG game is horrible but pretty, I have to start my review of horrible game Plugemons: Part 1 by noting that this horrible game has beautiful graphics.  Really, really beautiful.  That gets you really far in gaming.  It’s the reason I skipped some other review requests and went straight to it.  My exact words to Brian when I saw this on the marketplace were “holy shit, look at this one!”  Even though my instinct told me that Xbox Live Indie Games with insanely good graphics are typically quite bad (Orbitron being one of the few exceptions), I latched onto it, like a sailor caught in the call of a Siren.  Within ten seconds of playing the game, I realized I’d been had.  Again.  Who would have ever thought the XBLIG marketplace could double as Sirenum scopuli?

Plugemon is a puzzle game, not a platformer or a punisher.  This was a source of confusion for me.  You see, in Plugemon you jump from ledge to ledge, swing off of other ledges, jump on enemies heads, and try to acquire various lightning bolts scattered throughout stages like coins in a Mario game.  The game’s own description, presumably written by the Plugemon’s developer, doesn’t mention the word “puzzle” until it notes things like jumping, running, and dying a lot.

See?

So when I tweeted that the game sucked, the developer took exception to this and demanded an explanation.  I gave him a few.  “The controls are horrible and very unresponsive. Scrolling is jerky. There are issues with enemy visibility.”  Now, I expect a developer to defend their product.  It’s their baby after all.  What I normally don’t expect is for a developer to claim their product is something that it is not.  Which is what the Plugemon developer did.  He noted that the game is not a platformer, but a puzzler.

You can see why I’m so confused.  It’s true that a couple of the levels featured the ability to switch from your main character to other members of its species.  Using them, you hit switches.  That’s it.  There’s no real puzzle element that I noticed.  Granted, I only made it to world 1-8 before I finally quit because the game is an unplayable piece of shit, but still.  By the way, the switching element was only in half the stages to that point.  If you’re going to claim to be a puzzle game, step one should be having puzzles.  Instead, Plugemon has fetch quests.  You have to acquire a certain amount of red lightning bolts scattered throughout each stage to activate an exit portal.  This involves searching a level for them.  That’s not really a puzzle.  That’s just a typical convention of platforming games.

Regardless of what genre you call it, bad controls will ruin any game.  Plugemons: Part 1 has terrible play control.  Your guy moves like he just took a bath in honey.  His mobility is severely limited, and he’s not all that responsive to the directions you give him.  Despite being a puzzler that is barely a platformer at all, Plugemon primarily deals with jumping from platform to platform.  The jumping physics are completely broken.  Your character feels like he’s leaping through wet cement.  It’s slow and clumsy.  There’s also some sort of issue with landing.  Sometimes, I would land on the edge of a ledge and then slip off it for no apparent reason.  This happened a lot.  The only way to avoid it is to land dead center in the middle of the platform, but that’s not always an option.

Collision detection with the baddies is a problem too.  The main enemies are spider-like thingies that do electrical charges when you get near them.  This doesn’t actually seem to kill you as long as you land on them properly.  The problem is the actual spot to kill them is too small and more often than not, I would jump on them, only to miss that microscopic hit-point and die.  Later in the game, miniature spiders appear and they are damn near impossible to land on properly.

It’s such a shame because, once again, the game is really good-looking.  And the characters have an actual personality, unlike, say, Oozi.  But the game is unplayable because of both the control issues and the overall level design.  I finally quit on level 1-8.  The idea in it is the level is shrouded almost completely in darkness.  So you have to trial-and-error your way through it.  Which is kind of a far-fetched goal because you can’t see the springs you need to get to platforms, the cannons you need to get to others, the ledges you need to stand on, or any of the traps that can kill you.  This is “GOTCHA!” gameplay.  You walked into a spike that you couldn’t see.  GOTCHA!  You tried to walk to a platform and fell to your death.  GOTCHA!  You jump down off a cliff and into a buzzsaw hidden in total darkness.  GOTCHA!  You land on a platform and an invisible enemy kills you.  GOTCHA!

When the game’s own description notes you die a lot, you would be right to assume that the game tried to be a punisher.  The developer denied this, but there was a very telling moment in our little tweet-off.  When I brought up the bad play control, this is how they responded.

I never brought up Super Meat Boy.  Nor do I ever bring up Super Meat Boy when talking with developers of punishers.  It’s just not a game that I care to invoke.  It’s alright, if a tad bit overrated, but my experience playing it is not high on my cherished gaming memories list.  It just sort of exists.  Yet, whenever I bitch about a platforming game having shitty controls, as sure as the tide comes in, the developer will bring up Super Meat Boy.  The VolChaos guy did it too.  “Your game has shitty control.”  “Blah blah blah Super Meat Boy, blah blah blah, blah blah.”

Look, just because your game is hard to beat doesn’t make it Super Meat Boy.  In some cases, people think it’s a fair comparison just because of the difficulty level.  In the case of Plugemon, it’s clear they were actually trying to be close to Super Meat Boy.  Let’s review.  Advertising that you die a lot?  Check.  Levels shrouded in darkness?  Check.  A stage where you’re being chased by a giant-sized boss?  Check.  Buzzsaws as one of the primary obstacles?  Check.  Hey, I didn’t invite comparison.  They did.  I’m just pointing out the obvious.  The Twitter message is a classic example of projection.  I say the controls suck, they say I expected Super Meat Boy, a game that is nothing wink like the puzzle game nudge they made, elbow.

Insanely Shitty Shadow Planet

I do expect a game to control well though, and I could control Super Meat Boy, a far more complicated game.  In it, you had to wall jump, clear large gaps, and make precision landings on platforms.  I could do all that just fine.  In Plugemons: Part 1, it’s difficult to even leap a small gap, or correctly hit the weak spot of an enemy that’s pretty large in size.  Super Meat Boy also had smaller levels designed around its punisher style.  Here, the levels can be sprawling, yet there are no checkpoints.  If you die, you have to wait while the overly-long death animation takes over before respawning at the start of the level.  This is especially annoying in a game where most of your deaths are going to be the fault of the busted controls and not due to your lack of skills.

Overall, Plugemons: Part 1 is without any redeeming quality.  Yes, it’s pretty, which I’m sure will lead to some very thick people saying “it’s worth it just for the art.”  No it’s not.  What kind of simpleton plays games for their graphics anymore?  It’s 2012 for God’s sake!  Good graphics are everywhere.  If it’s worth it just for the graphics, that presumably that means you’re willing to pay a dollar to watch someone else play it.  Say, that gives me an idea.  Party at my house!  One dollar a head cover charge.  Watch me play this shitty game.  Bring your own beverages.  No fatties.

Oh yea, this is totally a puzzle game, not a punisher. The art work makes that very, very clear.

Plugemons: Part 1 was developed by Bionic Thumbs

80 Microsoft Points think those simpletons are the guys who run Dream Build Play in the making of this review.

By the way, how the fuck did Bionic Thumbs confuse their own game as being a puzzler?  They made a puzzler, Starzzle, and it was not bad. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Lots of Guns

January 13, 2012 by 3 Comments

I’m so over these climber games that are saturating the market.  Maybe they fit in better on phones where they serve to kill five minutes while you’re waiting for a bank teller or the test results on if that really was blood in your stool or red dye from Christmas cookies.  But on a console?  They feel out-of-place.  Granted, most of the ones I’ve played for Indie Gamer Chick have each been successful in its own way.  There was Who Is God, which successfully married the genre to techno-style graphics and addictive online leaderboards.  There was Meep 2, which successfully made a child-friendly version of the genre for console players.  Finally, there was Niji, which was so bad that it successfully helps control the pet population by causing any puppies in the nearby vicinity to fall down dead.

I think the major problem with them is they have a very short shelf life.  Even when they have online leaderboards, I’m not really compelled to go back and replay these titles.  But they’re fun for a day if nothing else, and Lots of Guns is no exception to that.  The gimmick here is that every 30 seconds, give or take, you reach a barrier that switches the type of gun you have.  As the title implies, there is a wide variety weapons, all with varying degrees of usefulness.  The guns are used to attack a large assortment of baddies who rain down from the top of the screen.  The actual tower you’re climbing is pretty straight forward: ledge in the middle, then two ledges on the side, then repeat.  There’s no variation on this, which is a bit of a downer because it quickens the game’s progression towards staleness even faster than what is normal for a climber.  It’s like the game has that disease from the movie Jack, only it’s funnier because Robin Williams isn’t in it.

Believe it or not, the pivoting camera actually does not distract from the game play at all.

There’s three modes here.  The first is climb as high as you can get.  The second is climb as high as you can get.  The third is climb as high as you can get.  Okay, so the second mode is the same as the first, only it’s called Auto-Scroll and the screen scrolls up automatically.  Which it actually does in the first mode too.  Yes, the game is faster in the second mode, but so what?  Why couldn’t mode one be called “easy” or “normal” and mode two be called “hard?”  This is an annoying trait I’ve noticed with indie developers of all walks.  They have to get cute when it comes to naming their game modes.  Don’t do this.  For every person who gets a very mild laugh out of it, there will be two players who never bother playing past the demo.  I get that your average indie developer prides himself on being a non-conforming, pretentious ass, but just think of how much non-conforming you can do in your day-to-day life if your game actually makes money.  Money does buy a lot of non-conformity.  I hear the FortressCraft guys don’t even need to shower anymore.

Oh, and the third mode is zombie mode.  Because, by fucking God almighty, every Xbox Live Indie Game has got to have zombies in it.  Zombie mode has nothing at all to do with zombies.  Here, you get no guns and only one life.  It’s the same assortment of enemies as before and the same sterile tower to climb.  I actually did have fun with this mode as well, but I had already tried the “no shooting” thing in the previous game.  Sometimes you’ll go stretches where the guns it gives you at random are not so useful.  After this happened to me a few times, I declared to Brian that I wouldn’t shoot the guns anymore because all they did was distract me.  This was followed about two seconds later by me saying “oooh, minigun” and abandoning that strategy.

Overall, Lots of Guns is fun while it lasts.  It’s got charming retro graphics and smooth play control.  However, it is lacking things that would extend it’s shelf life.  There’s no online leaderboards, no multiplayer options, and no incentive to keep playing after more than an hour.  I could see a reason to go on if the game guaranteed that you would only get the “fun” guns after having climbed so many feet, but that’s not the case.  When you reach the point where you switch guns, there’s always two options of which gun you will trade.  Sometimes it’s tough to choose, like picking between the awesome firecrackers or an automatic rocket launcher.  Other times, the game pulls a dick move by having one side be the wimpy handgun and the other side be the utterly useless landmines.  There is a third option: kill yourself and then respawn above the gun stations with whatever weapon you were carrying still in your possession.

Replace the generic king with the Burger King king and this could have been a horror game.

Maybe Stegersaurus thought the game would too easy if you got nothing but useful weapons late in the game.  My response would be this: who cares?  With no leaderboards or competitive multiplayer experience, it’s of no consequence to anyone if your character gets overpowered.  The game will stop being fun in about an hour anyway.  Loading a player up with power weapons might have extended that by an hour or two.  In the end, Lots of Guns is like a video game porno: you use it for ten minutes, have a lot of fun, and then regret spending your money on it immediately afterwards.

Absolutely horrible box art. It looks like someone crossed Rambo with Mr. Potato Head.

Lots of Guns was developed by Stegersaurus Games

80 Microsoft Points worked that porno reference in there just to annoy Steg in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of AarontheSplazer

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

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