I enjoyed Orbitron: Revolution quite a bit when I played it last month. I don’t really have a ton of things to talk about in this Second Chance with the Chick, because they really didn’t have all that much to fix. My main issue was it was difficult to see some enemies because of over-reliance on bloom effects.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, those are some pretty graphics.
They’re gone now. You can see everything much more clearly. A good game is now better. Orbitron is now officially a leaderboard contender. It will still continue to have crappy sales figures because 240MSP is too much for this game and most people won’t pay it. End of story.
I have a couple of Second Chances to do today, so let’s get to them. I reviewed Inferno! way back in August, and felt that it was a perfectly fine retro-themed game that had a few serious flaws in it. You might want to read that post first before going any further.
So what has changed? For starters, the ridiculous password system is fixed. Now, you don’t need to ace an impossible bonus stage just to earn the right to continue. It serves to take the aggravation factor almost completely out of the game. Almost. All the game play annoyances that were present before are still around. Limited ammo in a game where sometimes there is no way to get to the exit without shooting an enemy. The only other option is to suicide yourself into it and hope you have enough health to survive. It’s also still difficult to control your ship, especially when you get speed-ups that were presumably put into the game to help, but only make things worse. I tried to come up with a witty analogy for that, but completely failed. Sorry.
Some other additions include a simplified first bonus stage and a few extra bonus stages thrown in elsewhere. There’s also some trivial bug fixes for a few late-game issues, but I didn’t notice anything different.
The most important thing is the game has dropped in price from 240MSP to 80MSP. That was my biggest problem with Inferno! and now that the price is more reasonable for the type of game offered here, I can give the game a more hearty recommendation. The controls still piss me off so I’m still pinning its ribbon on with boogers and phlegm. I do have the flu today, so the phlegm is a nice, bright yellow. That’s extra festive!
It’s no secret that the most read review I’ve had so far was for Trailer Park King. Which is kind of shitty because it’s not one of my better ones. Hopefully I do better this time. Then again, hopefully the game is better. Not that Trailer Park King was awful. It wasn’t. It was alright. It was probably the best point and click adventure game I’ve played so far on Xbox Live Indie Games. Which isn’t saying much. It would be like saying having your pinky toe removed was the best amputation you’ve had yet.
It was the most searched game on my site because it has boobies on the cover and if you play the demo the game teases that there is porn in it. Don’t believe me? 14 of the top 30 search terms linking to my site have centered around Trailer Park King. Including “Trailer Park King Porn” and “Trailer Park King Nudity.” Of course, there is no porn or nudity in the game, because Microsoft doesn’t allow it. I know the average Xbox Live player’s IQ is on par with some forms of kelp, but don’t you think if that kind of shit was allowed, it would have been right up Rockstar’s alley? It certainly would have made the whole “Niko Bellic watches TV” shit less boring in GTA IV. Or don’t you think some other XBLIG developer would have made a game called “Oh Fuck It” where you go around sexing-up ATM machines or border collies or something?
There will be a FAQ for Trailer Park King Episode 2 at the bottom of this review. But as spoiler, there are no boobies, nudity, or porn in this game. If you actually expected that, congratulations, you now have full confirmation that you will die a virgin. This frees you to do other things with your time. I hear croquet is quite relaxing.
To the game. It picks off right where the original left off. Well, kind of. The ending sort of teased some nefarious plot twist, but that doesn’t actually happen. King’s rival, Truck, wasn’t dead. But now he’s dead again. Or for the first time. Maybe. The game starts with everyone preparing for his funeral. Only he’s not dead, but everyone thinks he’s a zombie. Didn’t Red vs. Blue already do this whole thing?
From there, you get the usual assortment of white trash jokes, potty humor, and sexual innuendos. I admit, I laughed a few times. But it was never because I found something to be genuinely funny. It was uncomfortable laughter, the type you might experience yourself if your deranged uncle stood up at Mass and declared that Moses was a closet homo.
The actual game is pretty much the same. There’s not a whole lot to point at or click on in this point and click adventure. You’ll never hold more than one trinket at a time and once you’ve clicked on something useless that doesn’t move the plot forward, you can’t click on it again. That’s actually a pretty useful feature. There are a couple of minigames this time around. One of them is a shooting range with a shitty aiming system. Thankfully you only have to play it once and it seems to make no difference in the story. The second is Tic Tac Toe. Oh well, it beats playing Raventhorne I suppose.
The storyline is so completely surreal and absurd that I’m convinced Sean Doherty could sell it as an animated series to Adult Swim and make himself a millionaire. Yes, the writing is dumb and the voice acting is horrible, but I actually kind of like the characters, and I look forward to seeing what other stupid shit they’ll get themselves into. Hopefully I don’t have to wait long. It took me well under an hour to beat Episode 2. Sean isn’t sure how he’s going to handle the progression of the series. He had to break this episode up to keep the price at 80MSP and avoid the deadly 240MSP price tag. And then, as soon as his game got approved for publishing, Microsoft changed their policies. Now he’s not sure if he’s going to release the rest of the game as patched DLC or if he’s going to sell it in another episode.
I’m frugal, so the consumer in me says “just patch the game!” But I’m also a business person, and that side of me says “you’re a God damned fucking idiot if you don’t release it as another episode.” We’re talking about a game whose review is more popular here than all other articles I’ve done combined. Well, that is if you exclude Temple of Dogolrak. You know, I’ve come to the sad realization that someone is going to create the ultimate Xbox Live Indie Game. It will combine risqué themes with a Minecraft clone and the end result will be someone at Microsoft having their head explode when they see how big of a royalty check they have to write for a game called Boobcraft.
80 Microsoft Points are just as guilty as everyone else for doing this review at 2:00AM on Friday just to have the first review of this game in the making of this review.
Psssh, they’re totally fake.
Trailer Park King Episode 2 Walkthrough FAQ Thingie
Just because I know everyone is going to want it. Below is a list of things you’ll have to do in the game. Highlight the space following them for the answers. I try to keep things relatively spoiler free, because someone actually bitched at me for spoiling the game for them last time while they were looking up answers to the game’s puzzles in the fucking walkthrough.
How do I free Truck’s body from the ice? Go to the limo and get a lighter from Vikki. Go to your bedroom and a sheep will be waiting there. Now go to Truck’s body and weep as gaming culture is set back at least ten years.
Where did “Zombie” Truck go? First, you have to go to the outhouse where Truck’s body was on ice. Then, you have to go to the bar. The lady inside will tell you that someone locked themselves inside the strip club. The magic store will now be open. Go there to get the key from Dozer. Go back to the strip club and viola!
I’m hopelessly retarded. Please just tell me how to beat the game from here on out. Sigh. Okay, go talk to Truck in his jail cell thingie. Then go talk to the spacey alien chick. Go to the bar, then the strip club and talk to Skinny. Go back to the jail and talk to Vikki. Now take Truck to the strip club. Take the book to the top outhouse. Congratulations, “you” just beat the game.
It was two months ago that I first played World Wars II. I was really looking forward to it. It seemed more like a real-time version of Nintendo’s Advanced Wars series that I was so fond of a few years ago. It also featured eight-person online play and multiple game types. I was sent a couple of review copies to make sure I could experience this game at it’s finest. Brian and I were seriously hyped.
And then we played it. Although it wasn’t bad by any means, it’s so underwhelming that it almost seems worse than it is.
In World Wars II, you’re given a squad of various troops and vehicles to command. The problems with the game start right away with unwieldy tutorial. I had to replay through it a few times and I still couldn’t get a feel for the controls or the gameplay. Everything about it seems overly complex. Steering, turning, rotating the turrets on tanks, etc. Nothing here is intuitive or user-friendly, making the game about as inviting as the welcome mat at Majdanek. It doesn’t help that it’s not possible to complete the tutorial in the eight minutes a player would be allotted to demo the game.
This is the only game play picture chosen by the developers to represent their game on the marketplace.
It also doesn’t help that the best way to learn nearly any game is to play single-player. That option is here, but for the life of me I couldn’t even complete the first mission in campaign mode. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, the enemies are absolutely flawless marksmen that will accurately fire every single shot. You, on the other hand, are just a person who has to deal with the clunking aiming and slow response time of your character. I tried. God knows I tried, but I couldn’t get past the first enemies I encounter on the first stage on the easiest setting possible.
I’ve had my skills as a gamer brought into question more than once since starting this site. And while it’s true that I’m not exactly proficient in the art of throwing a dragon punch, I would still consider myself as having pretty decent gaming ability. After my performance in World Wars II, I seriously started to question my own skills.
And then Brian couldn’t beat it. Huh.
Brian called his friend Cameron over and they tried it co-op. Nope, still couldn’t beat it.
Now, I’m not going to pick on this subject too much, because even most mainstream shooting games (coughFARCRYcough) can’t get proper AI done. But the first level, and the first baddies? Yikes. That’s some shitty AI coding.
So I used multiplayer to learn the mechanics of the game. I played several games online with Brian, and it was comically awful on both of our parts. Nothing made sense, the controls were bad, and switching between characters was a fucking nightmare.
A few days later, we played again and the results started pretty much the same way. But then things did start to click and we kind of had fun with the game. It wasn’t perfect by any means. Even after putting several hours into the game, the aiming is slow and clunky. In a game where you primarily are trying to shoot other people, that can get a bit annoying. And while you’re fighting with these mechanics, you’re also having to juggle other factors. You have to watch your gas tank on each car. You have dozens of troops to position and shuffle to. At this point, World Wars II feels more like a boring desk job than a game.
Swissplayers Game Studios helpfully included two screenshots of World Wars II’s menus on their marketplace page. Yes indeed, this does confirm the game features menus. Awesome.
We spent most of the time playing capture the flag. The name is very misleading. It’s actually a territorial-control game where you find a base and squat on it until your flag gets raised. Whoever gets all the flags first wins. There’s also a game that is more close to capture the flag. A pile of gold is hidden inside a base. You have to blow up the base, expose the gold, get it, and take it back to your base. I actually found this particular game type to be boring. But the territorial control stuff was alright.
Honestly, I can’t recommend World Wars II because it just takes too much time and effort to enjoy the whole thing. It’s probably a lot more fun with a full roster of eight people, but so is throwing yourself out of an airplane. The aiming system just blows. It would probably played better as a twin-stick shooter. The unbeatable AI cripples the single player experience. Online multiplayer is the only way to have fun, but it won’t be possible unless every player has put in the required time to actually get good at it. Somewhere in here was the trapping of a good game, but the final product doesn’t live up to its potential.
Oh, and one last gripe. The four pictures selected by the developers to represent this game on the marketplace were fucking pitiful. Only one is a screenshot of game play. Another is a screen of someone looking at the map. The other two pictures are of menus. Fucking menus! Jesus Christ, guys! These are the pictures that you’re trying to use to sell your game. At least try to be more picky about them than the DMV is.
240 Microsoft Points pointed at a box of the board game Risk and declared that your online indie multiplayer strategy game should not be more complicated than that in the making of this review.
Review copies of World Wars II were provided by Swissplayers Game Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review. The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The review copies was given to friends with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer. Those people had no feedback in this article. For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.
I sympathize with Xbox Live Indie Game developers. I really do. It’s a tough little market you guys are trying to conquer. Only a select few have been truly successful in their attempts at it. It’s mostly because your games suck. But if your game is good, it’s probably because Xbox Live Indie Games are sort of buried in the dashboard. People who were hoping that the winter update would fix the issue had good news and bad news. The good news was that Xbox Live Indie Games were now on equal footing with Xbox Live Arcade Games.
The bad news was they were both kind of buried. And the worst news is how many of the new, highly touted features of Xbox Live do not work for XBLIGs.
Mommy’s Best Games wanted to express the frustration of everyone involved and created Game Type. It’s part dashboard parody, part shoot-em-up, and completely useless rubbish. If DLC Quest restored my faith that developers were able to successfully parody the gaming industry, Game Type reminds me why most shouldn’t bother. It has nothing to do with my dislike of shooters or my somewhat indifference to the whole dashboard situation. Game Type is just not funny.
So the idea is you start in a mock-up of the Xbox dashboard. You have to “find” the actual game here. Along the way you’re bombarded by stuff not related to gaming at all. Which is what Microsoft intended the Xbox to be from day one. It was Microsoft’s Trojan Horse. Gaming was just the entry point, because making a console was cheaper than acquiring a cable provider, or a telecom company. No, really! That was the point.
Oh my God, a cat! LULZ or something.
Gamers who feel “betrayed” by the new Xbox dashboard don’t get it. Gaming was just part one of their strategy of getting a consumer item into the living room. It happened to be the cheapest way to get there. And by cheapest, I still mean they took a bath somewhere in billions to get it up and running. It’s not easy to launch a consumer product. It will probably be another decade or more before they’re not taking on any losses with the Xbox brand. But that’s how it works, and they knew that. It’s a long-term project, something most gamers didn’t realize. They just happened to be the conduit for this expansion.
The time has arrived for Microsoft to start rolling out all the other plans for Xbox, and that rubs Xbox fanboys the wrong way. I guess that’s why Game Type exists. It might aim to take the piss out of the dashboard, but it doesn’t do so very successfully. That’s mostly because they were so lazy in implementing it. There’s only a small handful of things in the fake dashboard to click on, and most of them just offer the same non-gags many times. For example, on the TV page, if you click something it takes you to a crude picture of a football player. Click something else on that page, and you get the same picture. Um, hilarious? And why does the football player also appear in the movies part of the dash? Is this some kind of Friday Night Lights tribute?
It also doesn’t help that there are ads for other Xbox Live Indie Games all over the fake dashboard. Now wait a second. If this thing is supposed to be lampooning the actual dashboard, why on Earth are XBLIGs everywhere here? I get that these guys are all friends and that Mommy’s Best is just trying to throw some of its chums a bone here, but you can’t rally against something for not doing something and then show the thing you’re making fun of doing exactly that!
Once you get to the actual game, the entire joke, gag, and purpose of this whole thing falls completely on its face. The game is fucking horrible. It’s a shoot-em-up where you play as the hoodie-wearing girl who occupies the actual GAME TYPE option on the real dashboard. You scroll her up and down, shooting at various guys, collecting the stuff they drop, and going for a high score on the global leaderboard.
Here’s the trick to it: hold down X. A semen geyser will erupt from the hoodie girl, destroying everything it touches. There’s no limit to the amount you can use this, so grab some duct tape and enjoy the ride. It ain’t much of a ride. There’s only one stage that repeats at a faster speed when you clear it. It says it adds some baddies too, but if it does the amount is negligible. Anyway, the game is a total piece of shit. And then once I finally died with a score close to four-million points, it didn’t record it. It recorded my previous efforts, but not that one. Bull. Shit. I had four million points, and I want my four million mother fucking points.
So in a nutshell, Game Type wanted to poke fun at the plight of all XBLIG developers. To do so, Mommy’s Best Games made an unfunny dashboard parody and then a game that would be embarrassing to own if it was a free iPhone app. Take that, Microsoft! I guess it was supposed to be a winking nod to other developers, but it still falls flat. Most of the XBLIG developers I know have practically been in a funeral-like mindset ever since the dashboard update took place. If that’s the case, Game Type is like eulogizing your best friend by walking up and farting in the widow’s face.
Statistically speaking, this review likely won’t be too popular. It’s a trend I’ve noticed. When I review a game from this particular genre, people immediately tune out and my page views seem to fall off a cliff. Now, after careful research conducted by top scientists from one of those fancy institute places, we’ve devised a way to keep people’s attention while informing them of a really cool game. Let’s see if it works.
Okay then. Alien Jelly is a new logic-puzzler BOOBS on Xbox Live Indie Games. Your goal is to navigate a series of cubes from one part of the puzzle TITS to the flying saucer at the end. Along the way, you’ll have to shove crates around, teleport, build staircases, and all your typical puzzle RIMJOB fare.
It’s kind of a shame that I have to be so damn shameless in writing this review. Alien Jelly has so much more going for it than your average logic puzzle KNOCKERS game. It’s got amazing graphics and loads of personality. Clearly taking inspiration from the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks, Alien Jelly is a game that practically begs to be played. As a puzzle game DIRTY SANCHEZ, Alien Jelly is also well realized. It’s quite similar to Blockt, a game I previous covered and enjoyed just well enough. You move your cubes one space at a time. Here, you can’t fall off the ledge. The only way to die is to run into a trap or by maneuvering your cube onto a space of another cube’s color.
No amount of Slim Whitman will save you from this.
In most of the forty stages, you have to move more than one block. You switch back and forth using the A button. It was here that a very fun glitch came into effect. On a few stages, the “jelly” around the cubes disappeared, leaving me just the brain. I wasn’t sure at first if this was a glitch or some kind of “you fucked up” punishment. I’m pretty sure it was a glitch, because sometimes I just couldn’t recreate it. It never happened to more than one cube each stage, so it was just a minor annoyance, but it was present.
A bigger problem is the camera. It has to be moved manually, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to position correctly. It leads to situations where you can’t see what is on the ledge below you. You can’t fall to your death, but if there is a ledge under you, the game allows you to drop down to it. Depth perception proved problematic through-out, but again, you can’t die. And if you make a mistake, there’s a nifty rewind function that allows you to quickly undo it. Rewinding also factors into the actual puzzle process, as you keep any gems you collect, even if you erase the moment where you got them. It’s pretty slick.
Overall, Alien Jelly is probably one of the best of its breed on XBLIG. Yea, the camera was inexcusably horrible, but because it can’t actually kill you, who gives a shit? The puzzles themselves are well designed, the theme is pretty good, the production values are high, and it’s just a lot of fun. Even if you’re not into this type of game, nothing here is so insanely challenging that it should leave you too stumpified. So give it a try, and maybe you’ll discover a love for puzzle games SEX HOOTERS MAMMARY GLANDS!
Sigh, this is probably where Tourette Syndrome comes from.
It happened again. I ran into another overly wrought and pretentious brawler for XBLIG, Let’s Get Fiscal. What is it with Xbox Live Indie Game developers shoehorning excellent storytelling into the pure concentrated realm of boredom known as the brawler? It would be like a movie studio taking a script guaranteed to win Academy Awards (something involving World War II and homosexuality, no doubt) and handing it over to Michael Bay. I have to give credit where it’s due, for making me almost regret rage-quitting this piece of shit, costing me a chance to see how the story would conclude. I even went back and tried it three fucking times. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s Get Fiscal is a Double Dragon style brawler. You play as an accountant going on his tenth year of sobriety, but that seems like it’s coming to an end. Throughout the adventure, he slowly falls off the wagon. Oh, and he’s not really an accountant, but some kind of hitman. As far as stories go, it’s not that bad. I actually wanted to press on, but the game bored me to no end.
There’s only two buttons in Let’s Get Fiscal. A punches, B jumps. That’s it. There’s a few combos you can pull off and a small handful of enemies to fight. In games like this, you have to find ways to amuse yourself. I did so by trying to imagine why there are hundreds of identical dudes running around. A cloning experiment gone haywire seems a bit too obvious. So I went with the idea that all these dudes were the result of some wacky prop bet involving five fraternity brothers and a sperm bank.
The Curtis pictured here has a large health bar. The actual Curtis in the game dies if you breathe on him.
Oh, and for some reason there is a black dude named Curtis who only takes one punch to kill. It seemed a bit odd. Since I’m guessing the developer isn’t just being casually racist, I figure this must be some joke that I’m not getting.
Really, as a brawler it’s nowhere near as terrible as All the Bad Parts was. The normal enemies are easily dispatched and don’t have life bars the size of an airplane hanger. The first two bosses gave me a hint that the difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up. The first boss, or should I say bosses, are annoying fucking guys who shoot lasers out of their eyes like Cyclops. And then the second boss is some dude that I can’t even describe because I was able to beat him in about five seconds. It wasn’t just luck either. Because after I rage quit on the third boss, I restarted the game and was able to beat him again in the same amount of time. I’ve seen straight lines with better curves.
And then there was the third boss.
This mother fucker.
He has the ability to regenerate his own health. If you get him down to his last half-healthbar, he puts on a protective shield and brings all his health back. None of the basic attacks or the combos seem like they’re able to break the shield. I spent three separate sessions fighting this guy, trying every tactic that seemed possible, and I couldn’t get him. I rage quit, then restarted the game from scratch (there’s no saving) a few hours later and I still couldn’t get him. I asked the developer if this was some kind of joke, and he assured me it wasn’t, but he didn’t offer any help. He wants to see if anyone will figure it out themselves.
Somebody might, but it won’t be me. Compelling as the story may be, the game itself is incredibly tedious. There’s no saving, so if you make it as far as I did and get bored after twenty cock-guzzling minutes fighting this cunt, you’ll have to start over again too. I didn’t bother going on. I tried twice, failed twice, and I don’t care to try again. A quick conversation with a few other befuddled players leads me to believe that nobody has yet quite figured out the special secret to this guy. Or even worse, what the fuck is next in the game? I mean, the first boss was a bitch. The second boss literally was a bitch. The third boss is impossible. If this pattern continues, the fourth boss will commit suicide and the fifth boss will teleport into your room and fuck your mother.
This art has almost nothing to do with the actual game.
I did a double take when I saw the screenshots for Michael’s Magical Adventure. I mean, look at it!
I know, right! The resemblance is uncanny!
It looks just like Teddy Ruxpin!
Teddy had no comment.
Oh, and maybe Super Mario Bros too. Just a little bit.
I wish it had played more like Super Mario Bros. It might have been more fun that way. Michael’s Magical Adventure really does try to invoke the look and gameplay of Nintendo’s classic franchise. It just fails miserably at playability.
I’m not the only one who had a chuckle at the brazenness of Michael’s Magical Adventure. It’s Super Mario in everything but name. Instead of Mario, you’re bear. Instead of Goombas, it’s rabbits. Instead of Spinys, it’s porcupines. Instead of turtles, well, it’s still turtles. You also traverse all the Mario standbys. Generic plains, icy hills, and haunted houses all make an appearance. Now, just to be on the safe side, Mario wasn’t the only property they plundered. There’s jungle-themed levels where you hop across the heads of alligators, just like in Pitfall. And then there’s the final boss fight against your own shadow, just like in Zelda II.
It all sounds so great, and if it worked it would be. Unfortunately, the game is riddled with control issues and glitches. Since I’m a total control freak, I’ll focus on the controls. About the only thing the game did get right was mapping jump to the A button. Yet, everything else about the jumping is wrong. It’s slow, slippery, unresponsive, and inaccurate. And if I could find more mean words to describe it, I would.
Part of the problem is related to holding down the X button to run. There’s never a point where you won’t want to run, yet you have to hold a button down to accomplish this. If only there was, say, a special joystick that could interpret various degrees of pressure in a way that could map walking and running without the need to also hold a button down. I know, wishful thinking on my part, but we still live in an era where we can only dream about such outlandish space age technology.
Not that it would help much. Michael’s Magical Adventure needs some serious debugging. I encountered many instances of getting stuck in blocks, or getting stuck floating in the air after jumping off a vine. Even when the game’s engine wasn’t crapping out on me, the level design brought my blood to a boil. In particular, two auto-scrolling vertical levels had me ripping my hair out. The level design does get to be a bit too much later in the game. To make up for this, you get access to a cosmic hamburger if you die five times in a single level. Eating it will make you impervious to enemy damage for the entire stage. On one hand, I liked it because I’m convinced some stages are impossible without it. On the other hand, I felt like the game was patronizing me. “Oh, you can’t get past a couple of little bumble bees? There, there. Eat this and just waltz up to the finish, you poor little thing.”
Hey, fuck you game. Most of the time, it was the jumping physics and not the enemies that got me. Ultimately, Michael’s Magical Adventure is exactly what I figured it would be: a poorly executed Super Mario clone without shame. For some people, that’s all they want. I’ve already seen it with this game on Twitter. People have called it “Epic” or “Ace” or “Excellent.”
No, no, and no. Why do people insist on devaluing words? The Odyssey by Homer is an epic. The Red Baron was an Ace. The blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse is excellent. Michael’s Magical Adventure is none of those things. It’s just a bad video game. And even if you convince yourself otherwise, it’s not going to bring your childhood back. The nostalgia factor is certain to drive its sales, because 30-something gamers will grasp at absolutely anything that resembles their cherished childhood treasures. Games like this are like dumpster diving for your security blanket. If you dig down far enough, you might find something vaguely resembling it. More than likely, it’s just the piss-soaked rags of a deceased hobo.
マイケルの不思議な冒険 (Michael’s Magical Adventure) was developed by HUNTERS
80 Microsoft Points said “yes, I’m aware the box art says the translated name of the game is Mysterious Adventure of Michael, but that is NOT what the Japanese text of the game says!” in the making of this review.
Orbitron: Revolution received a brief Second Chance with the Chick. Click here to read it. Consider this to be the definitive review.
Damn. This is one pretty game. To say Orbitron: Revolution has the most polished 3D graphics of any Xbox Live Indie Game is an understatement. It actually demolishes my argument that even the best looking XBLIG would still pale in comparison to 90% of the games on the market. It really looks like an Xbox Live Arcade Game. As a gamer who has always told people to focus on gameplay and not aesthetics, it’s sure made a hypocrite out of me.
But enough about the graphics. Even if they are beautiful and shiny, like getting your eyeballs gently massaged by the loving touch of a Heaven-sent angel on a mission to NO! Gameplay! Focus, Kairi!
Funny enough, Orbitron: Revolution is pretty much just Defender. You know, that antiquated space shooter from 1980. The one they tried to remake in 2002 and failed miserably at. Orbitron isn’t really about defending anything, but it’s still got that Defender vibe to it. As a ship, you scroll left or right, shooting at various enemies. When you kill one wave, another spawns. This continues until three minutes have expired, at which point the game is over and your score is uploaded to the online leaderboards.
Graphics whores might want to have a box of tissues nearby when they play Orbitron. Things, ahem, might get sticky.
So is it fun? Yes. Yes it is. It’s also got a potential for addiction that would impress your average drug dealer. I told myself I would just play a couple of rounds to get a feel for it, then move on. A couple of rounds became dozens, and soon I was obsessed with landing a spot on the top 20 of the leaderboard. The closest I came was 21st. Yea, shameful for sure. But I do have an excuse: the game is far from perfect.
The tragic irony is that those beautiful graphics are likely the biggest problem. Often times, I just couldn’t see the damn enemies because of Orbitron’s over-reliance on bloom effects. I would have to rely on the radar that’s under the play field, but it’s not exactly situated for lining up your shot correctly. Other times, the enemies seemed to blend in a little too well with the background. So although I was left gobsmacked by the graphics, I feel that a static black background would have made the game more playable. It also would have allowed the game to come in under 50MB and thus cost the $1 that the amount of gameplay present justifies. Really, 240MSP for what is pretty much a three-minute-long minigame is borderline extortion.
Yea, there’s a couple other modes. Ring Defense or whatever the hell it’s called, the second mode, is still the same as the first one. The only difference is you can get the time extended by blowing up various targets before the entire station blows up. If you can stay alive for five minutes in it, you get a third mode. I never actually unlocked it, because I found the Ring mode to be boring compared to the very intense timed mode.
The overuse of bright lights notwithstanding, there are a few other issues that kept pissing me off about Orbitron. Randomness seemed to factor in a lot more than any skills I acquired. If I got a “good spawn” from the enemies, I was bound to rake up points from the larger combos. But the combo system seemed a bit clunky as well. Sometimes it seemed like it only took a millisecond for the combo to expire and reset, while other times the cushion seemed more forgiving. Perhaps it was just my perception, but it didn’t always seem consistent. And finally, there are moments where you clear out an entire wave, only to see that there is one missile left that you didn’t tag. It’s faster than your ship and on the other side of the fucking map. Yea, it’s probably my fault for not blowing it up when I had the chance, but it chaffed my ass and I figured I should bring it up.
Despite all my complaints and my feeling that it’s slightly overpriced, Orbitron: Revolution is a really good video game. It does for Defender what Pac-Man Championship Edition did for Pac-Man. It takes a cherished yet somewhat passé game and makes it relevant in our modern gaming culture. And it does it with style and elegance. I almost wonder if the guys at Firebase could have shopped this around and got it the official Defender license. It also makes me wonder what other games they could revitalize. Perhaps Robotron: 2084 will be next on the agenda. I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any Twin Stick Shooters on XBLIG.
240 Microsoft Points took my love, took my land, took me where I could not stand, but I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take the sky from me in the making of this review.
Update: Pingvinas is now only 80 Microsoft Points.
Pingvinas is the Lithuanian word for penguins. Why would they even need a word for that? Does Lithuania even have penguins? It would be like Southern California having its own word for polar bear, or Kansas having its own word for intelligence. Well I don’t need a unique word to describe what I think about Pingvinas. I thought it was pretty good, but it’s hardly without flaws.
Pingvinas is a strategy board game where you maneuver your team of 2 to 4 penguins across a grid of icebergs trying to collect the most fish. To start the game, you take turns with your opponents placing your penguins on any iceberg that has only one fish on it. Once all the penguins are placed, you can then move one of them per turn to another iceberg that is adjacent to the one you’re standing on, or to an iceberg that’s in a straight line from where you’re standing. Once you move your penguin, the previous space it occupied sinks. Every iceberg has between one and three fish on it. Whoever has collected the most fish when there are no more possible moves is the winner. It’s a lot like various peg-based games that you’ve seen over the years, and in fact this game is directly based on a popular board game called “Hey, That’s My Fish.” Which in some European countries is known as Pingvinas. Fancy that.
The game is fun, especially on Xbox Live. With AI opponents, I found even the smartest ones (called “extreme” here) make really dumb moves. Like any board game, it’s just better to play with real people. Even then, the retarded AI managed to rear its ugly head. As a game of Pingvinas nears its end, the game has a default option where all remaining moves will be taken care of automatically by the AI, even if you’re playing with only two human players. At first, Brian and I applauded this design choice as a great way to eliminate several minutes of useless game time, especially when the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the computer was way less than intelligent and could potentially cost someone a victory that, if left to the human players, would be inevitable. Once the board has been broken apart and your penguins have been nearly completely marooned from each other, the AI takes over. Now in theory, that’s the correct time for it to take over. The only “optional” moves left would be ones that you would use to intentionally get a lower score. Guess which moves the AI does. Yep. And so you’ll see situations where a penguin is alone with only two possible moves: move left or move right. No matter what, this will be the final move that penguin is capable of doing. On the left, you have an iceberg with one fish. On the right, the iceberg has three. I swear, without fail, the AI took the iceberg with the single fish every single fucking time. If you had a string of icebergs left where option one was get every one of them and option two was only get a couple, it would always end up getting the fewest possible. I figured that maybe it was possible the game still had some kind of fail-safe in place that would prevent someone who had basically already had won from losing because of this. That wasn’t true either. It took me a while to set up the circumstances where I had enough spaces left where I would win the game if the auto-finish moved correctly. It didn’t, and I lost.
Thankfully, this dimwitted feature is optional. Just make sure that you turn it off before beginning a game. Some other bugs weren’t so optional. The game crashed on me once while I was trying to select the color of my penguins. Another time, Brian and myself were halfway through a game when it just refused to let us play any further. We still had plenty of spaces left, but the game was busy having a sulk.
Glitches aside, Pingvinas is a lot of fun and I do recommend it. This is the type of strategy game that I would love to play online as often as possible. Which brings me to the main problem with it: the price. 240 Microsoft Points is too much for what it offers. Yes, it is fun, and that’s all that should count. But in reality, most people don’t want to pay 240 Microsoft Points for a game they perceive as being an “amateur game.” Gamers get those for free all over the internet, or on their phones. Meanwhile, you can get some absolutely spectacular games on XBLIG, or elsewhere, for $1. Pricing something like Pingvinas at $3 in a marketplace with such low support as Xbox Live Indie Games seems like suicide to me.
I lost several hours this week to jAggy Race, a game I got for free* on my iPhone that slays your typical $3 XBLIG in quality. I feel the average gamer will play a game like this and then question why anyone would have the nerve to charge $3 for their "amateur" game, whether they're right for believing that or not.
Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but it is. Gamers have come to expect to pay more and get less from their mainstream games. A full disc release doesn’t typically get you what it used to. Games are smaller, typically easier, and expected to be finished in a week or so. Games like Skyrim are the exception to that, but in general most gamers expect less from their gaming dollars.
The opposite is true of indie gaming. It’s where gamers go when they want to stretch out their budget. Your game might have a value quality higher than the $3 you charge for it, but it will get ignored because that price buys three other games. Considering that some of those $1 games are of unbelievably high quality and playability, seeing games like Pingvinas come out with a 240MSP price tag almost seems arrogant. I personally had no problem paying for it, but my months on XBLIG have taught me that 240MSP games don’t sell and that I was likely to never find anyone other than Brian to play the game with. Such a shame. It’s a really good game, even if the AI makes more mistakes than a condom tester on her ninth trip to the abortion clinic.
240 Microsoft Points anxious await the hits that Trailer Park King 2 will be bringing in sometime soon in the making of this review.
*jAggy Race is now apparently 99 cents in the iMarket. I swear, it was free yesterday.
A review copy of Pingvinas was provided by Mobisation Germany to IndieGamerChick.com in this review. The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer. That person had no feedback in this article. For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.
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