I should preface this review with an acknowledgement that I’m not huge into vertical space shooters. I have nothing against them, and on occasion I’ve been known to get into them for short periods of time. But, while I try to remain open to games of every genre, I admit that shmups are the genre you’re least likely to see me playing.
Are we clear about that? Good. Now onto the review.
Oh my God, I fucking hated Dragons vs Spaceships. I kind of figured I wouldn’t encounter games with this level of staleness on the XBLIG service. Hah. Shows what I know.
Dragons vs Spaceships is pretty much your garden variety shoot ’em up. The screen scrolls vertically while waves of enemies descend upon you. Like the 1987 arcade classic Dragon Spirit, the gimmick here is that your ship is actually a dragon. Okay, so it’s not totally original. I suppose at this point I should just be thankful that it’s not a zombie.
Regardless of what it actually is, the gameplay is all that matters. Here, it’s a clunky mess. The controls are stiff and not responsive. The enemies move too fast and your ship-dragon-thingie moves too slow. Oh, and the enemies are mostly of the bullet-sponge variety. Given how slowly your dragon shoots, if you have anything but the highest grade of weapon, you might as well not bother to shoot at all. Then again, sometimes when an item is on the screen, if you don’t pick it up at that very nanosecond, an enemy will swoop down and take the item away. Dragons vs Spaceships does so many things wrong it almost makes me wonder if the game is intentionally horrible.
I usually make an honest effort to finish games here, but that wasn’t doable in this case. I admit that I’m not the most skilled of shooter players. Still, when a game asks me if I want to continue when I game over, I sort of expect the ability to continue. I made it to the second stage twice. Here, it takes only one death and you are pretty much toast. Why? Because your bullets are slow and useless against this stage’s enemies, yet it’s impossible to pick up any upgrades because as soon as they appear they get stolen. So I game overed, and was asked if I wanted to continue. I selected yes. And then I was sent back to level one.
No, for real. It asks you if you want to continue and then ignores you. It’s as if the game is saying “Continue? Why you silly little bitch. This is a game engineered around being as unfriendly, poorly designed, and unentertaining as possible. Now go back to level one and love it you whore.” I’m not sure what that was about, but it wasn’t like it was the first thing in the game that I had managed to break. I was twice able to make the first boss fail to spawn. The music for it would cue up, but because I’m a shooty type of person, I held the fire button down. The boss would peak its head out, one of my bullets would lightly graze it, and it would disappear, never to be seen again. The music kept playing and I kept flying down an endless hallway, but there was no boss. There’s also no way to restart the game without actually exiting the game and going back to the dashboard. So I was stuck. Forever. What a well made game.
No, I’m not this game’s target demographic. I didn’t grow up in an era where games like Gradius or R-Type would eat my ass for lunch and then skip out on the check. But, I still know the difference between a good game and a bad game. Dragons vs Spaceships is an absolutely horrible video game. It’s often broken and glitchy. Ignoring the boss that failed to RSVP, there were a few times where I was flying on an empty screen with no bullet or enemies and my dragon just up and died anyway. After a while, I came to expect something to fail with the engine. And you know what? It was actually more entertaining waiting for something to glitch out than actually playing the game. What’s here isn’t fun in the slightest way. Bland weapons, useless secondary “power” weapons, boring enemy design, uninspired attack patterns, and just so much generic nothingness. This might be one of the worst games I’ve played on the marketplace. You can’t just mix mediocrity with dragons and expect the product to improve by default. They already tried it with Dennis Quaid and the results speak for themselves.
240 Microsoft Points spent twenty minutes last night arguing with their boyfriend over whether or not Reign of Fire is an entertaining movie or not (it’s not) in the making of this review.
And no, I didn’t play this co-op. Proceed to whine that I didn’t play it right in the comments section.
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I really should send a card to Red Crest Studios. A while back, I reviewed their game Avatar Trivia Online. I paid for my copy, while Brian received a code for his. After just a few days, the game was pulled from the marketplace, never to return. That means the copies on our hard drives are the only copies that are in the hands of the public. I think that makes them worth around three trillion dollars each. Hopefully in twenty years that will still be enough money to put our kids through college.
I don’t blame Red Crest for pulling Avatar Trivia Online. It was kind of a piece of shit. A trivia game with no scoring, no structure, and no reason to exist at all. It really disappointed me because I had fallen in love with his previous effort, Andromium, which spent a few months on my leaderboard. Mike Ventnor assured me that it was pulled for a reason and would be resurrected, better than ever. Hell, anything would be better than what it was before.
Now it’s back out, and it’s called Avatar Trivia Party. It’s also an actual game, with an actual method to win, rules, and a reason to exist. The idea is sort of Chutes & Ladders meets Trivial Pursuit. Each round, players are randomly assigned the order they’ll go in. You’re given a trivia question. If you answer correctly, you’re given two dice to roll. If you answer incorrectly, you’re given only one dice. The first player to reach the goal wins. Along the board, there are special spaces that will send you backwards, forwards, through shortcuts, roll extra dice, or trade spots with a player. It creates the Mario Party scenario where even the player who is far and away the most skilled can still be fucked half the time by random chance.
You troll Altered Beast one time and suddenly it starts stalking you everywhere.
It’s still a lot of fun though. I have to admit, there’s something hilarious about watching myself build up a 40 space lead on my boyfriend only to have him hit the “switch spaces” thing when I’m right next to the finish line. I should be steaming and looking for something acidic to spray in his eyeballs, but instead we’re too busy laughing together. Isn’t that what board games are supposed to be about? Randomness to level the play field is the heart of all board games. There’s always going to be someone better at trivia than you, or spelling, or real estate speculation, or at feeding hippopotami. So it wouldn’t be fun if I, Senorita Egghead, ran roughshod over Brian every game just because I’m smart and he’s a retard.
Okay, actually that would be fun. For me. Not so much for him.
80 Microsoft Points answered “September” in the making of this review.
A review copy of Avatar Trivia Party was provided by Red Crest Studios 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.
If you enjoy Indie Gamer Chick and want to show your appreciation, you can do so by donating to Autism Speaks. This is an amazing organization that has made a profound impact on my life, and a donation to them will contribute towards making a difference in the lives of others.
Bah, humbug. I hate Christmas themed games. For every Johnny Platform Saves Christmas, there are a dozen horrible yuletide offerings that are more akin to getting a lump of coal in your stocking. And by coal and I meant tumor, and by stocking I meant breast. Seriously, they turned Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, the cherished childhood classic, into a Wii game. Is nothing sacred? Hollywood already turned Santa Claus into a self-centered twat using the Tool Time guy, and let us not forget that Will Ferrell played an elf in a movie whose title I forgot. Both those movies spawned some Grinch-like video games, although I’m guessing neither one of them were as bad as the Grinch Dreamcast game my father got me as a gag gift when I was eleven. A dick move on his part for sure, especially after I put so much thought into my gift for him: new brake lines for his car that he could install as soon as he found out that I cut the old ones.
Elfsquad7 sent a shiver down my Scrooge-like spine, but that was based solely on my memories of Jingle All the Way and the smell of the Santa Claus at the Standford Shopping Center. Well, I suppose Peppermint Schnapps is kind of Christmasy. Anyway, going off the screenshots I was expecting something more like a platformer. Instead, it’s more like a gallery shooter with some light hopping and bopping thrown in. Playing as a helper of the jolly socialist thingie, you hop around a small stage, shooting various presents that rain down on you. After a couple of shots, the presents become wrapped and you have to collect them before they bounce off the screen. To clear a stage, you have to get a set number of wrapped gifts before the time limit runs out. You can also unlock items between stages in a shop. Well, thank God they didn’t forget to include all the commercialism aspects of the holidays. ‘Tis the Season!
Elfsquad7, despite the horrible name, is a decent game. It’s not spectacular or anything, but it’s playable, fast paced, and kind of fun. The whole game only takes about ten minutes to play through from start to finish. That doesn’t sound like it’s long enough, but the game is designed with family co-op in mind. I only played one round using the local-only multiplayer, and I realized that ten minutes is perfect. Any longer and things were bound to get stabby. Up to four players can come along for the ride. I don’t even know the names of that many people, so I dragged my father, Whatshisface, into the game with me. Probably not the best idea since this is a game aimed at children, but I have to work with the tools I have. Now I consider my old man a relatively smart guy, but for the life of me I couldn’t get it through his thick skull that every time he walks too far away from me, it tended to make the screen scroll off of me. Thus, I couldn’t see what I was shooting at. This went on the entire game, with me doing the majority of the work and him just wandering around aimlessly like a five-year old. Perfect!
There’s three difficulty settings in Elfsquad7. Easy mode is suited for people playing alone, while I believe that the medium and hard difficulties absolutely require multiple people to finish. The game controls fine, although I found using the butt-stomp jump to be difficult to pull off accurately. The graphics and music are pretty well done. My biggest complaint is that the game often freezes up for a second or two, usually completely at random. It’s as if you’re watching a scratched-up DVD. It was noticeable in single player, and at times highly annoying in multiplayer. Not as annoying as my Pops was, but it needs to be looked into.
I still liked Elfsquad7. It’s a neat little distraction for fifteen minutes, and it’s priced accordingly. I think with four people it might get maddening trying to keep everyone on-screen, especially if you’re playing with young children or their fat, balding, 62-year-old Cuban equivalents. It’s well done ascetically and I’m sure children actually will enjoy it. The controls could be smoother and the choppiness (which I’m sure will get patched out) is irritating, but as a game it’s just fine and it’s worth your money. In fact, you probably should buy it. If it doesn’t sell, the developer is threatening to make his next game be “Zombie Fart Doctor vs. the Obese Ninjas” and.. you know what, change that. Nobody buy this.
80 Microsoft Points are now certain to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in the making of this review.
If you enjoy Indie Gamer Chick and want to show your appreciation, you can do so by donating to Autism Speaks. This is an amazing organization that has made a profound impact on my life, and a donation to them will contribute towards making a difference in the lives of others.
Despite what my naysayers would have you believe, I have absolutely nothing against retro games. The target of my scorn is old games. They’re not necessarily the same thing. The assertion that I’m against old looking games on principle is absurd. The last I checked, the #1 game on my list was Dead Pixels. And let’s not forget LaserCat spent months on top of the leaderboard.
I had a nice discussion with Kris Steele, the creator of VolChaos, and we both ultimately concluded that my mindset is the result of a generational thing. I’m 22 years old. I’m guessing that’s significantly younger than many of you reading this. And while I’m sure a lot of you will hike up your slacks, spit out your dentures and call me a whippersnapper whose opinion is invalidated because of my age, I’ll remind you that I am and always have been a serious gamer. So while I was raised in an era of Playstations, Dreamcasts, and Nintendo machines with increasingly silly names, I also have always looked to the past in my endless pursuit of the perfect game. During the fiasco with my anti-Sega tangent, someone told me, not an exact quote here but this is the gist of it, “Sonic the Hedgehog (the first one I presume) is the best game I’ve ever played. I first played it when I was 8 years old and I never have played anything better. Why would I want to spend $60 for new games when I’ve already played the best game I’ll ever play?”
When I read that, I thought to myself “I’m only 22 years old. I sure hope I haven’t already played the best game I will ever play in my entire life.” Don’t you think that would be kind of sad?
I swear there's a VolChaos review coming at some point in this article.
It’s not about how old the game is. It’s about the game itself. At my age, I can’t look back on games that were around before I was born and say “well, they were good for their time.” I don’t honestly know if that’s the truth. I do know that the games from my time aren’t really that good. I grew up with Spyro the Dragon, Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, and everyone’s favorite 64-bit era title, Goldeneye. Each and every one of those games fucking sucks today and if you disagree with that, I say this: go play them. Right now. And tell me they’re every bit as fun as they were back then. They’re not. Many of my childhood favorites just aren’t fun today. Some have aged better than others, but in general games really don’t stand the test of time. The games that are exceptions, those are true masterpieces. I first played Super Mario Bros. 3 in 2003 on the Gameboy Advance. It blew my mind that it was, more or less, a direct remake of a game from 1988. That’s a full year before I was born.
Likewise, I first played Sonic the Hedgehog on my Nintendo Gamecube in 2002, when it was released as Sonic Mega Collection. So I actually played Sonic before I played Mario 3. It wasn’t my first experience with Sonic as a franchise. I got Sonic Adventure when the Dreamcast launched and I fucking loved it. At the time at least. Years later I would play it again and realize it’s an absolutely abysmal game. I probably should have caught onto that over the years when I played such masterpieces as Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog. In 2002 I was thirteen years old. I should have been right in the target demographic that Sega carefully tailored Sonic to appeal to. But I simply could not enjoy the original Sonic games. I’m not arguing they are terrible. They’re not. They’re just not spectacular games. Quite frankly, they’re kind of bland. Maybe they were good, but I don’t know that. Given what other games were doing at that period, stuff like Super Mario World or Wonder Boy III (one of the most awesome gems I found on the Wii’s Virtual Console), Sonic just seems so simplistic, sterile, and plain.
Maybe it is a generational thing. I can’t put myself in the mindset of you old farts who fondly remember getting your shit pushed in by Ghosts & Goblins or Battletoads. The uber-difficult games of the 8-bit era are something I just don’t understand the appeal of. It doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t find them fun. I would say Smash TV is kind of hard, but I did have fun with it. Or Mega Man. It was alright. I just don’t equate being fun with being difficult. Some do I guess. And that applies to modern games as well. Yea, most games these days are laughably easy, but every once in a while a game like Dark Souls comes around. When that came out two months ago, I remember everyone raving about how hard it was. And I was like, “who gives a shit how hard it is. Is it any fun?”
Hard games can be fun. Take Aban Hawkins. It was the second game I ever reviewed and it still holds up as one of the better punishment platformers I’ve played. Most of that had to do with the game having fairly decent play control. In a way, it demolishes the theory that I’m against retro punishers because it was in fact an 8-bit styled retro game. So were the Platformance games as well, and it’s not as if they had flawless control. Going into VolChaos, I knew it was a punisher. I knew it was retro-style. People assumed I would hate it because of one of those two reasons.
No, I hate VolChaos because it controls like shit. Conceptually, I have nothing against it. In fact, I actually should like it. My favorite moments in platform games are ones that are filled with urgency and tension. VolChaos is a game that is designed specifically with those two things in mind. As a cowboy who looks absolutely nothing like Chuck Norris in the slightest way, you have to run for a goal while trying to stay well above an ever-rising ocean of lava. If you want, you can simply make a mad dash for the goal. If you want a supreme challenge, you can try to collect all the gems scattered throughout each stage. There’s also a handful of sentient fireballs and malicious flaming birds. By that I mean they’re on fire, not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. What birds do in the privacy of their own nest is nobody’s business but theirs.
I had a few problems with the game. The minor stuff includes the fact that there’s no countdown to when a level begins. In my opinion, it would make a huge difference. A 3-2-1-GO to open every stage would allow me to set myself. Since you’re basically racing against lava, having a countdown seems kind of necessary. I disagree with Kris that it would fuck up the pacing of the game. It doesn’t need to be a slow, Ben Stein-style countdown. Just something other than fading in with everything already moving, including the Cowprick. Yea, if you move the stick before the screen fades in, your dude will have already moved and likely roasted himself.
I also have to admit that I have no interest in getting a 100% completion in this game. Yes, doing so unlocks “expert” mode for each level. That likely would be worth some amount of gaming cred, but in order to do so I’m guessing I would have to devote weeks, maybe months, towards becoming a professional VolChaos player. I’m not really looking for a game that would require that big of a time investment, especially from the XBLIG marketplace. Besides, I’m guessing that being a professional VolChaos player wouldn’t pay all that well.
Of course, my biggest problem is with the overall control of the game. I found it to be just too loose and floaty. VolChaos is primarily about jumping from narrow ledge to narrow ledge. The tool you’re given to do that is a jump that feels out of synch with the overall movement physics of the game. When you jump, the Cowhole seems to build up more speed and momentum than he should. Since the ledges are often only the width of the character himself, this will usually lead to you overshooting your target and falling into the lava. There’s almost no way you can naturally jump and hit the platform. I spent the entire game doing what I call Joystick Jitterbug, leaping with the stick and then immediately having to pull it in the opposite direction to avoid overshooting. Then to make sure I don’t undershoot, I have to pull the stick forward again. The ensuing dance was the only way I could manage my way through the game. It also left a powdery residue on my controller that I could bag and sell in Oakland if I was the unscrupulous type.
I guess some people like this sort of control. Kris told me he had people congratulate him on the floatiness, and given the reaction to my Sega piece, I believe it. If his aim was to make an old-school platformer with extremely high difficulty and spotty play control, mission accomplished I suppose. For me, a platformer absolutely has to have good control. VolChaos is hard, no doubt about it, but why is it hard? It’s not the level design, or the lava. It’s the controls. They’re what killed me the most. Call me crazy, but when I’m failing at a game, I want it to be because I’m a fuck up. In VolChaos, my most common method of death was landing on a platform, trying to jump again, not jumping, and watching my guy walk off the ledge and into the lava. It took me about two hours to get the “normal” ending, almost all of which was spent fighting with my own controller. Well that’s not the mark of a great game. That’s just annoying.
But I’m sure people will disagree with me and say I’m just being a hater or a troll or whatever. As Kris pointed out to me, I’m the only person who’s said to him that VolChaos is no good and I’m not the type of person the game was intended for in the first place. And it’s true that people are tossing themselves off in glee over his game, which already has been called game of the month by those NeoGaf dudes that link in here every once in a while, and Twitter has lit up congratulating him on creating such a wonderfully frustrating game. I’m truly glad they all enjoyed it. I didn’t. For me, VolChaos is the worst volcano themed form of entertainment I’ve ever encountered. Yes, yes, I’ve seen Dante’s Peak. Yea, I saw that other flick with Tommy Lee Jones too. Okay, third worst ever.
No, I didn’t see that Tom Hanks volcano movie. No, I don’t want to see it either. Quite frankly, I would rather play through VolChaos again.
80 Microsoft Points think the Cowboy dude looks like he’s wearing lipstick. Fun Infused said the Cowboy was supposed to look like Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris does not wear lipstick. In fact, I think suggesting he does gives him the legal right to rip your arm off and beat you to death with it in the making of this review.
My review of Chain Crusher was unique because it is the only game I’ve done so far at my blog that I liked but told people not to buy. Why? It cost 400 Microsoft Points. At that price, it positions itself as a game that competes directly against some modestly priced (or on sale) Xbox Live Arcade games. With only one mode of play and very simplistic game design, I think Chain Crusher’s price point put it well out-of-bounds. That review actually haunted me for a while, because I’ve always maintained that fun is all that matters to me. If I enjoy a game, I recommend it. I didn’t do that with Chain Crusher, and that really did bother me.
Well, the game has been updated. Chain Crusher now has three modes of play and online leaderboards.
It’s still not worth $5.
The new modes of play are really just the same game. Mono-Shot is the lowest difficulty level. Standard is Chain Crusher on its medium setting, while Ancestor is the game on hard. At least I think so. No official explanation was offered, but that’s what I gathered from my play session. So really, the major difference here is online leaderboards. Yes, it’s nice to have them, especially in a game that’s sole purpose is to get high scores. But it doesn’t justify the price tag. Neither does the addition of an award system.
Going back to Chain Crusher, I still had fun playing it. It actually is a good, addictive video game. At 240MSP, I could easily give gamers my personal go-ahead to get this. At 80MSP, which it originally could have sold for as it was well under 50MB in size, this might have even contended for the IndieGamerChick leaderboard. At 400MSP, I simply can’t tell people it’s worth the money, because it’s not. It’s a time-sink arcadey shooter, the kind that you would expect to get on your iPad or phone for 99 cents. I know some developers argue that many games on the service are actually under-priced, and that might occasionally be true. It’s not true of Chain Crusher. $5 for this game was just plain stupid. The dark cloud of greed hangs over it, and I finally see that. I think I’ll sleep just fine tonight.
400 Microsoft Points could have bought 5 much deeper, better games, and the developers should have known that so phooey on them in the making of this review.
Now that I have your attention, Temple of Dogolrak is a point-and-click game, only without the pointing and clicking. That’s pretty much what I expected when I saw the screen caps the guys behind this game chose to put on its marketplace page. Actually, I expected a lot more than that, given that the pictures are a bit risqué. And by “a bit risqué” what I really meant is “a spaceship shaped like sperm flying into a giant astro-snatch.”
Subtle.
It’s always amused me (and creeped me out) that guys are into this sort of thing. Like really into it. Like “I know the FBI is likely keeping tabs on me and I don’t care!” into it. I just can’t get myself into the mindset where being aroused by a cartoon character is even possible. As it turns out, there’s a name for this sort of thing. It’s called “schediaphilia.” Imagine my disappointment when I found out that is what it’s called. You can’t even make a joke out of it. But it’s a real thing and guys really do get off on animated characters. And if they’re anime characters, statistically speaking they tend to be under age. If that applies to any of you schediaphiliacs watching this, then yes, that does in fact make you a pedophile.
But let’s say you’re not using some teenage cartoon (or video game) character to give your hand motivation. Let’s say you’re thinking of Wilma Flintstone. It’s still a cartoon character! In theory, there is a slight, slight, slight chance that you, the ugly dude reading this, might one day fuck a Playboy centerfold. Hey, it could happen. Zombie Holocaust! Last man left alive in the entire world. An amazing adventure of survival across the country. By total chance, you happen upon Miss November 2011. You save her life once or twice, three times tops and BAM, you’ll never look at your hand the same way again. That could happen! Sure, it’s a long shot. 1 in 4 odds at least. But it could happen!
But you will never ever get to fuck Wilma Flintstone. Why? BECAUSE CARTOONS ARE NOT REAL! You could become the richest and most powerful mother fucker on this planet who can have any girl he wants, because believe me, every girl has a price (I’ve personally calculated my price to be $1,057,295,285.98, not including the tax I’m sure California will manage to charge you) but you still never will get to fuck a cartoon character. And why the hell would you want to? They’re kind of weird-looking! Especially anime characters. They have great big eyes, tiny slits for a nose, disproportionate jaws, and pale skin. It would be like fucking Michael Jackson’s corpse.
Really guys? It looks like someone spliced the DNA of a smurf with a feather duster then gave it the mumps.
Okay, so I’m supposed to be doing a game review. But it’s kind of hard to because there is no game here. This is just one of those “choose your own adventure” books from when you were a kid, only with worse writing and a handful of raunchy anime static screens. And by a handful I mean there are four. Yep, the four high-resolution screen shots on its marketplace page that look like softcore anime pornography are in fact the only ones in the entire game. Or at least the only ones I saw in the fifteen minutes it took me to finish it and see the “you win” screen. Everything else is really bad graphics that would be embarrassing if they were on an early 80s computer. Misleading? Oh yea.
So what does the 240 Microsoft Points get you here? A few racy static screens of digital girls and a piss-poor, incomprehensible storyline that takes all of fifteen minutes to complete. I guess I should make it clear that I strongly advise that you do not purchase Temple of Dogolrak, but chances are I already lost most of you one way or another when I posted the picture of the giant astro-snatch.
Yea! My first review of a sequel. Well, a sequel to a game I actually played at least. Of course, I hated Oozi: Earth Adventure when I played it back in August. It controlled poorly, had paint-by-numbers level design, and was just so utterly generic that my tiny little black heart could not open up at all to it. Well now we’re in the future and Episode 2 has arrived. Be ready to have your minds blown, gents: it’s actually a decent game.
Let’s get the ascetics out of the way first. Like in Episode 1, Oozi is one fucking beautiful game. For all those people who said that Raventhorne was worth the $3 they had the unmitigated nerve to charge for it on the grounds that it was pretty, Oozi is pie in their eye. It’s one of the few XBLIG titles that I can say looks like an honest-to-goodness professionally made video game. Of course, it still doesn’t sound like it. Oozi continues to lack in sound effects and music that better suits the themes of each level. Something more rock-like and less orchestral would likely be more fitting. Selection of music is very important, after all. If Mega Man 2 had Super Mario’s music, it would be silly. If Indiana Jones had the theme to Star Wars, it would be pretty dumb. If they played Steam’s “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” at a funeral, it would be just plain wrong. And hilarious. But wrong.
As far as the actual game itself goes, not a whole lot has changed from Episode 1. The controls are still stiff and the ever-so-slight pause in turning around is annoying as hell. And there is still not one iota of creative thought or design anywhere to be found in this title. So logically speaking, I should have hated Episode 2 every bit as much. And through the first couple levels, I did. Oozi still seemed content to regurgitate every platforming cliché in the book with minimal effort. Trampolines over spikes. Ice levels. Been there and done that thousands of times.
But then the game stopped sucking around level 3 and it pretty much stayed suck-free for the remainder of my stay in it. Well almost. The last boss fight briefly made me contemplate whether I’m capable of murder or not. But the final three levels were well done. For the first time in the series, I felt a need for actual platforming skills, a sense of urgency, and, gasp, FUN! Don’t get me wrong, Oozi is still completely devoid of originality or a personality to call its own. But it does manage to be entertaining and that’s all that has ever counted in my books.
Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after playing this boss, as it might cause drowsiness.
So Episode 2 is clearly a step in the right direction. I still think the controls need refinement and the boss battles need to be less tedious. Yet, I’m thankful for Oozi Episode 2. It’s a reminder to me that conventional game design is that way for a reason: it works. While Oozi 1 felt a bit empty and lacking in any real passion, Oozi 2 feels more like a love letter to the good old days when you could shoehorn any generic mascot into any generic platformer and the resulting mess would still feel like a worthwhile distraction. Well unless that mascot was a blue hedgehog in a psychedelic clusterfuck of cheap level design, unavoidable traps, and artificial coolness that anyone with half a brain would recognize as a transparent attempt at trying to appeal to kids using the “don’t be a square, all the cool kids should.. I mean DO love Sonic because he’s hip and edgy and has attitude!” method they perfected from studying the finest drug dealers in all of Tokyo.
80 Microsoft Points said if she wanted to troll she could have just saved time and called Sonic “Hitler” in the making of this review. Which would be grossly misleading anyway. I mean, Hitler had a mustache. Now Mario, that mother fucker is Hitler!
Correction to this review: Shahed Chowdhuri, the developer of this game, does not have a shitty attitude. He is one of the most generous, kindest, and intelligent men I’ve ever met. And now my friend as well. I was so off base about his attitude in this review. He’s one of those developers who wants to improve, and has the drive to see that through. He’ll be a force to be reckoned with some day. Mark my words. I stand by every criticism of Angry Zombie Ninja Cats. But in regards to Shahed, I know no finer man. I’m sorry, Shahed.
Naming your game might be the most important aspect of the creation process. If you give your game a shitty name, it might not sell very well, even if its well made. On the flip side, giving a mediocre game an eye-grabbing name could propel it’s sales into the stratosphere. In that spirit, we have Angry Zombie Ninja Cats, one of the worst games I’ve played on XBLIG coupled with one of the most blatant attempts at a quirky name dreamed up since Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills. Let’s break it down.
Angry: As seen in Angry Birds, a game with five-hundred million downloads to its name. Now obviously the “Birds” part of that title is not what made the game so popular. Birds are simply annoying sky-vermin that terrorize Tippi Hedren and shit on our cars. No, it’s the “Angry” part that caused the green to come rolling in. Anger is trendy right now. What, with all the tea party nonsense and this occupy everywhere hogwash featuring a bunch of idealistically bankrupt people on both sides of the political spectrum that, if pressed for answers, have no fucking clue what it is they are mad at. Indeed, “Anger” is the new “Hope.” I expect more companies to take advantage of this, and look forward to the announcements of such titles at Angry Halo and Pissed Off Pong.
Zombie: It goes without saying that your XBLIG simply has to have “zombie” in the title somewhere. After all, what would the Xbox Live Indie Game scene that touts nonconformity and innovation be if every developer didn’t staple their tongues to the zombie bandwagon and get dragged along for the ride? Not having zombies in your game makes you the square kid in school who tries to make do with his Payless shoes and eMachine desktop while the cool kids walk around in their Nikes and play on their iPads. Nobody wants to be that kid, so get the biggest shoehorn you can find and start cramming those zombies into your game before someone notices what a dork you are.
Ninja: If you fail to possess enough socially repressed chromosomes that you’re not gaga for zombies, well, lucky you. Spending your time talking with girls and driving in cars instead of thinking of ways you’ll survive the Zombie Apocalypse while rubbing yourself and fantasizing about all the now zombified bullies in your life that you will get to legally shotgun in the face. Well, if you’re not a Zombie Groupie you obviously must be a Ninja Devotee. Statistically speaking, you’re one or the other. And although zombies have certainly overtaken ninjas as the gaming flavor of the month, Ninjas in general tend to be more bankable. That’s why the 1990 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made twice as much as the highest grossing zombie film of all time, Zombieland. Putting ninjas with zombies is the best way to hedge your bets and make sure your game is a success.
Cats: Oh come on. At this point, you’re just outright pandering. Introducing cats to the equation is the most transparent attempt at creating weaponized irresistibility in gaming history. First zombies, then ninjas, and now cats? And they’re all angry? Why you sly little cunts.
Put them all together and you have Angry Zombie Ninja Cats. With a name like that, quality doesn’t matter, even if it’s an unparalleled piece of shit. And it is. My God, what a wretchedly awful video game. It’s a platformer with jumping physics so loose it’s as if your controller got raped by a crowbar. It’s thirty minutes worth of processed boredom that is capped off by a final level so poorly designed that the developer had to create a video to explain to all us thickies exactly how to beat it, as if it’s our fault that the game sucks.
I get ragged on occasionally for “making fun of developers.” It’s not something I make a regular habit of doing. I mostly make fun of games, which some people take as a personal attack. I for one think that speaks more about them than me. But sometimes a developer really does deserve a good tongue lashing, especially when their attitude with “this game really has shitty level design” is to treat the players like they’re the idiots and say “wow, don’t you get it? Here, let me show you. How could you not figure this out?” It’s a shitty attitude to have. So remember, children, if you get stuck it a horribly executed XBLIG game, the secret to solving a stage requires you to stop and think to yourself, “well, if I was an egotistical game designer with my head stuck so far up my own ass that I could give myself a colonic using my tongue, what would I have done here?”
Confession time: I never played any of Smudged Cat Games’ previous titles. They must be pretty dang good, because they managed to get a game released on Xbox Live Arcade called The Adventures ofShuggy. I swear, one of these days I’ll get around to it. Growing Pains is my first experience the Smudged ones. It’s a 2D punishment platformer, with the twist being that the main character continuously gets bigger. Why they named it after a horrible 80s sitcom starring a horrible religious nutcase is beyond me. Wouldn’t “The Adventures of Bob: The Jovial Malignant Tumor” have been more catchy?
You play as a spiky, hedgehog looking thing that has to jump around a psychedelic wonderland collecting little rainbow pill things. Okay, so maybe it should have been called Sonic the Cancerous Mole but I’m sure Sega would have sued over that. Despite it’s gimmick, Growing Pains has fairly straight-forward dexterity based platforming. There’s no action buttons at all, just the ability to jump, wall-jump, and increase your own rate of growth if the situation calls for it. There’s nine levels, each with three difficulty settings: Bronze, Impossible, and Fucking Impossible.
I thought Growing Pains was okay as a game, but it’s riddled with problems. First and foremost, sometimes the main character is so small he’s practically invisible. I have a television that could comfortably double as an aircraft carrier and I still couldn’t make out my tumorhog thingie sometimes. Sometimes there’s an arrow indicating where he’s at on the screen, but it’s not very helpful at all because you can’t get any perspective from it. It also doesn’t help that the character, when he’s small in stature, gets lost easily among the psychedelic backgrounds, and so do the enemies. In the later stages there are cannons that shoot missiles that explode into four spiked thingies. Those can be very difficult to spot, like the clitoris of a flea.
The controls aren’t always perfect, either. Part of the problem comes from how the jumping physics seem to over-scale, depending on the size of your anamorphic lipoma. There were often times I found the movement too fast and my dude’s jumps too springy to clear a stage. And mind you, this is all on the bronze difficulty settings. On silver, the game is maddening. On gold, I’m not fully convinced the game isn’t the first step in some evil scheme by a super villain. It’s cruel, as if you’re being shamed by the game. For the life of me I can’t see how anyone could have fun playing a game this difficult. But remember, I’m a child of the 21st century. Games from my era didn’t come prepacked with a box of tissues to cry in and the number for the suicide hotline.
Even with all these problems, I liked Growing Pains because it was just so damn quirky. It’s a novel idea, one that didn’t always work so well but at least it’s different. Sure, I couldn’t always see my dude. Sure, the game’s non-retard difficulties could legally charge you by the hour in Nevada. Sure, the online leaderboards never even worked when I tried them. Sure, I think it’s way overpriced at 240MSP when it really should have been 80MSP. But I still liked it. Ultimately, it’s fun. This is exactly the type of game I started IndieGamerChick in search of. Plus, I can appreciate any game whose protagonist was cast straight out of the pancreas of Steve Jobs. Too soon?
240 Microsoft Points showed me that smile again. Don’t waste another minute on your crying. We’re nowhere near the end. The best is ready to begin. As long as we got each other, we got the world spinning right in our hands. Baby you and me, we gotta be the luckiest dreamers who never quit dreaming. As long as we keep on giving, we can take anything that comes our way. Baby, rain or shine, all the time, we got each other sharing the laughter and love.
Avatar Panic is by Milkstone Studios, creators of Raventhrone AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Sorry folks, I’m having traumatic flashbacks to the Indie Summer Uprising over here. Although a handful of good titles came out of that excursion in digital fecalness, the one game that still sticks out the most to me is Raventhorne. Perhaps that’s because it was just so fucking awful. Seriously, if you haven’t played it you can’t comprehend how awful it was. If Hitler was reincarnated in the body of a Terminator fueled by the souls of aborted fetuses, it would not be as awful as Raventhorne.
But Milkstone obviously has talent. They wooed me early on in my Indie Gamer Chick career with MotorHEAT, a slick arcade racer. Now, they’re trying to win me back with Avatar Panic, an 80MSP clone of the arcade classic Buster Bros. Perhaps shucking originality was a good thing for Milkstone. They can now once again flaunt their developer chops without making the player question the existence of God or taking a table saw to their own wrists.
For those unfamiliar with Buster Bros, it’s a single-screen action game where you have to pop balls bouncing around by firing a harpoon at them. When you hit a ball, it splits into two smaller balls. Hit one of those, you get two more, etc, etc. Occasionally enemies will drop power-ups that allow you to fire your harpoon faster, shoot more than one at a time, have the harpoon stick to the ceiling, or shoot two at the same time at diagonal angles. Most of this will be familiar to fans of the Buster Bros formula.
The graphics are very well done and the music is cheerful. Okay, okay, Avatar Panic is pretty good. It has smooth play control and it’s so well done that it might be the best version of this format to come along in a while. Earlier this year I played a PSP Mini called Run Ghost Run that was in the “not so good” category. Avatar Panic totally slays it, and does so with style. There are even online leaderboards to be found here. The one and only problem is there’s no save feature, so you’re expected to beat all 50 levels in a single sitting. But I’m sure Milkstone can fix it with a patch. So does Avatar Panic erase the memory of Raventhorne? Absolutely. Assuming you play the game while hitting yourself in the head with a mallet and drinking pure grain alcohol.
Avatar Panic was developed by Milkstone Studios
80 Microsoft Points think they should make another clone of Buster Bros with whales instead of balls and then submit the game to PETA for an “endorsement” in the making of this review.
Dragons vs Spaceships was developed by Game Production Studios
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