At first glance, one might mistake Castle of the Pixel Skulls for an entry in the Platformance series of games. It’s got the same punishment-platformer gameplay in an 8-bit suit of armor vibe going for it. The controls even feel similar. There’s three very prominent differences. The first is you have an attack button. Second, the game has multiple levels. And third, Castle of the Pixel Skulls is fucking impossible.
You play as this skeleton-knight-thingie that has to jump over spikes, avoid other spikes, hop across platforms, and occasionally fight baddies while making your way to the exit of a stage. The level design is reminiscent of the Platformance games as well, so you know what to expect. While in a stage, you have an infinite amount of lives at your disposal. If they just left it at that, I would be okay with the game. Instead, the developer Josep Monzonis decided to pull a king-sized dick move supreme by having every level run on an outrageous sixty-second timer. If the timer runs out, there’s no continues or level select option. You have to start the entire game over from the beginning.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that the game was designed in this way. I’m sure the argument is “well back in the old days games like Donkey Kong didn’t let you start from where you died at.” If that was the point, it’s still fucking ridiculous. This isn’t 1981. We’re thirty years into the future, and games have come a long way from those days. There are no incentives to keep playing. There are no high scores, but hell, there are no other game modes or even options to choose from either. The only thing you can do is press start to begin the game.
The far-fetched game design extends to the levels themselves. Starting with the fourth level, the check-points become further apart. If you die, you’ll have to start a ways back. As the levels get more sprawling, the time limit seems more and more impossible to accomplish. If you die once, you might as well start over because you can’t possibly hope to make up the ten seconds you just lost. And because Castle of the Pixel Skulls is a punishment-platformer, it relies on trial-and-error gameplay. That system can produce fun games (see Aban Hawkins), but being forced to start from the beginning every time you do the “error” part of trial-and-error is bullshit.
I put well over an hour into Castle of the Pixel Skulls and only made it to the fifth board. I briefly thought about carrying on just to retain whatever integrity I have left as a gamer. But then I decided that I would lose dignity playing this mess any longer. It’s not fun or original. It’s just insanely difficult. Big deal. There are lots of things I could do that qualify as that. I could try to run the Boston Marathon wearing a suit of armor. I could try to fly off the Golden Gate Bridge using a grand piano as a hang glider. Of course, people would say I’ve gone insane if I tried those things. And they would be right. So it’s my duty as a gamer to tell you that if you devote any length of time to try and beat Castle of the Pixel Skulls, you’re a raving lunatic who should be put in a padded cell.
In some ways, this review is a Second Chance with the Chick. I first played Blocky a few weeks back when it’s developer challenged me. And I actually liked what I played. It’s got an old school reflex-testing vibe to it, with small bits of action and experience upgrades peppered in. And then it all went to hell with one of the most infuriating boss fights I’ve ever come across. I was so pissed off I didn’t even bother to write the review. Instead, I took to e-mail and gave the developer holy hell for it. But then, being the benevolent goddess that I am, I told them I would hold off on my review until this one little bitty issue was patched up. See, I’m nice. Modest too.
Blocky feels like the type of casual game that would be developed by PopCap Games. Hey, don’t scoff at them until someone buys you for $650,000,000. You play as a square that has to avoid making contact with various baddies that move randomly around a static play field. There’s a wide variety of goals present. In some levels you have no offensive options and just have to try avoiding the enemies. In some, you have to destroy the enemies using power-ups that spawn in random intervals, or by causing them to get sucked up in whirlpools. In some levels you’re expected to collect as many coins as possible or gather a high score. Not all levels are equally as fun. I personally found the whirlpool levels to be the low point. In them, you’re supposed to use the magnetic power-ups to repel enemies to their deaths. However, the magnet power isn’t very strong, nor is it easy to steer the enemies. Having said that, if you just wait a while the baddies usually end up killing themselves. Maybe this is the evil spiky circle-block thingie way of committing Seppuku for failure to kill me in thirty seconds or less. Hell, I don’t know.
Blocky isn’t easy on the eyes, but the enemies are distinctive, even if the backgrounds have this psychedelic quality that can be a bit distracting. But overall the game is pretty fun, and at times a bit intense. In later levels, enemies spawn faster than mutant babies in a village full of moonshine-plied hillbillies. For the most part, you have to simply avoid them. You do have hope in the form of a handful of power-ups. I already mentioned the utterly useless magnet, but there’s also a fork that allows you to eat enemies for a few seconds. There’s a shield that allows you to bump into a single enemy. There’s a flashing thingie that slows enemies down. And finally there’s a hammer, which pauses the game to allow you to select a small radius of enemies to destroy, but it’s pretty rare to get. In fact, up until the boss fight, I had only gotten one via random spawning, but certainly that wouldn’t factor in later, right?
Oh, and there are experience upgrades. They seem really out-of-place in a game like this, and they’re really not all that helpful either. One of them increased the radius of the hammer, which again, I had only seen once over the entire length of the game. Hell, I’ve seen Sasquatch more times in my life. Another option increases your character’s speed. I never did this one because it seems like a recipe for disaster. In a game where dexterity and precision are so important, why on Earth would I want to make my character move faster? Maybe it does actually work, but I’m going off of nearly 20 years of gaming experience that says the faster anything moves, the harder it is to control. So I ended up pouring all my points into things that increase the amount of money you collect, and to my character’s gravitational pull for sucking money towards him when I’m too lazy to go grab it myself, in what I call the “Merrill Lynch Effect.” You can spend the money in a shop between stages to buy extra shields if you’re smart like me, or on stuff like the hammer that will kill one small cluster of enemies that will respawn anyway. There’s also stuff that slows baddies down or creates an escape portal for you, but I stuck with just the shields because I accept that I’m a total failure who will bounce off more enemies than Tiger Woods parachuting into a monogamy enthusiast convention.
I really did like Blocky. And then I got to the boss. There’s actually two bosses that you fight at the same time (later there are even more). Each has a symbol of a power-up inside of them. Once you get that symbol, you touch the boss and then mash the A button on them to inflict damage. Simple enough. The first boss I took down fairly easily. The second boss had a hammer symbol on him. Again, up to this point, I had only gotten one hammer in the entire play-through. “But surely since this is a boss that requires the hammer, they will appear more often, right?”
The game’s answer was “Fuck you, and don’t call me Shirley.”
TWENTY MINUTES! That’s how long it took me to get my very first hammer while “fighting” a boss that required a hammer to beat it. That’s not an exaggeration. Twenty minutes. And that hammer did so little damage that I figured it would take several hours to beat the damn thing. No thanks. So after thirty minutes of nothingness against a boss that has no attack, in a big room where all I had to do was avoid it, I decided to quit out to the menu and purchase some hammers. Only once I exited, I found out I would have to play the entire sixth world over again, only without shields I used to get there in the first place. After all, I had just spent all my money on hammers. World six was very difficult. I would have to play it again.
What followed I believe is known as a “conniption.” I absolutely blew my stack. I’ve seen a lot of good games with questionable design choices, but this was the absolute worst yet. First off, the game didn’t need a boss. Second, WHAT THE PISS GUZZLING HELL WAS THE DEVELOPER THINKING? So I sent off a calm, completely rational e-mail to him explaining to him that he had murdered fun and was going to jail for it.
This is a picture of the boss fight that drove me crazy and NOT a trip caused by the peyote you just took.
Actually, he took it really well and corrected the problem. So now if you play it the boss is so easy to beat that it’s laughable. Not that I’m complaining about that. Again, I think the entire concept of a boss in this kind of game is dumb. And it wasn’t difficult in the slightest bit to begin with. Tedium and difficulty should not be confused, and something that simply takes a long time to complete doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to do. Unless it’s running a marathon. That actually is long and difficult. But my point still stands. Also, I was able to directly enter the boss room this time. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.
With the boss issue corrected, Blocky is now an overall pretty good game. Hell, there were more levels after I beat the boss, and I wanted to keep playing them. It’s been a bad month for Xbox Live Indie Games, so maybe I’m just all for anything that offers me even the slightest amount of stimulation. I don’t think that’s the case though. Blocky has some really good twitchy-gameplay and I genuinely had a fun time playing it. It’s not mind-blowing by any stretch, and the added “retro” mode where you just go for a high score is useless without online leaderboards, but I do give the game my official seal of approval. And now that the boss battles are fixed, I won’t even be pinning it to the developer’s chest using a rusty nail and a sledge-hammer.
Milie & Telly is one part TwickS, one part shump, and 100% horrible. I hesitate to call it the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve yet played, because I’ve used that one a couple of times and I don’t want to sound like a person prone to hyperbole. Still, I put about 90 minutes into Milie & Telly and I’m hard-pressed to think of even the slightest complement to pay towards it.
It’s a shump. One that, for the most part, only had a couple of enemies on screen at a time. All of which are total bullet-sponges. They come in either a red or yellow variety and you have to shoot them with the correct bullet, like Ikaruga. It’s also a TwickS, so you in theory should have precision aiming. Instead, your gun fires one or two flimsy bullets at a rate so slow that it makes killing even the basic enemies such a slow process that it will sap your will to live. It certainly made me contemplate whether I could successfully bludgeon myself to death with my own controller.
The levels are long too, but that’s not a point in the game’s favor. There is no variety, and there are no power-ups. Just shoot a couple bullet-sponges, wait for more to appear, and start shooting them. Oh, and you have shields too. There are bosses, but I never successfully beat one, even on easy. I’m really trying here to say something positive about Milie & Telly just so I don’t come across like a negative meanie. The graphics are wretched, like they were lifted straight out of an animated banner ad from ten years ago, and the sound effects are more invasive to your senses than being skull-fucked by a rusty jack hammer. You know what, fuck it. Milie & Telly is weaponized boredom and should be subjected to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.
NOTE: If you’re unable to download Xbox Live Indie Games (or any games for that matter) off the marketplace, you’re not alone. I’m told they are now aware of the problem and it should be corrected shortly.
UnBound purports to be an “open world adventure game.” If this were true, all those juvenile delinquents who get ordered by courts to pick up trash on the side of a road should feel extra privileged. The only adventure offered in UnBound is to pick up various orbs scattered throughout a rocky coastal mountain. There’s no enemies to be found and the only objective is “find all the crap lying around.” So the slogan attached to the box art is misleading.
Unbound takes place from a first-person perspective. As stated above, the game is about finding orbs. There’s three game modes. In challenge, there’s five different scenarios for you to complete. These games play more like connect-the-dots, which you’ll know better as an activity for three-year-olds and NOT an adventure of the open-world variety. You basically just follow a string of orbs until you’ve collected every one on the map. The first two “challenges” really offer no challenge at all. And then you get to one called “Flood”, where the difficulty level curve goes so steep that it might be the world’s first successful space escalator. In it, you’re still collecting orbs, only this time you can’t touch the continuously rising water. The problem is it rises too fast, forcing you to hop back and forth to get each Orb. The jumping is floaty enough that you might over-shoot your target and lose precious milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds. That’s how little time you have to react.
I will say this: UnBound would have made a cool Virtual Reality game.
The other modes offer a slightly more pleasurable time. In adventure mode, you have to find 35 hidden blue orbs on an island. Here, the connect-the-dots gameplay is significantly toned down and it gives the game a true sense of exploration. As you collect the hundreds of green orbs lying around, your character becomes faster and can jump higher. It’s kind of neat, making you feel like a budding superhero. Unfortunately the land you traverse is lifeless and empty, so there’s not a whole lot for you to see or experience. It’s like choosing to vacation in death valley.
Finally, there’s Survival mode, where you have a health bar that slowly depletes, forcing you to scramble around the map collecting orbs as quickly as possible to replenish it. The object is to survive for as many days as possible. I played through it four times and never made it to the second day, so obviously I’m doing something wrong. Then again, I could never keep a goldfish alive for longer than a day either so maybe I’m not suited for this type of situation. I do feel that the developer could have explained exactly how you’re supposed to stay alive longer.
Overall, UnBound feels kind of like a tech demo that would have been used two console generations ago. It’s not exciting or engaging in the slightest bit, but it is functional and at times a teeny-tiny bit fun, especially when your character has all his stats maxed out and he’s jumping around the tops of mountains like he’s got Flubber on his shoes. But the thrills are short-lived because the environment is so sterile that it almost feels like it leeches pleasure from your very soul, and that’s not cool. Everyone knows souls that leak pleasure fetch lower prices in this market.
In the land of video games, it’s hard to get caught up in Mayan Calender predictions when the world as you know it ends just about every other week. Either political stability is shaken up when a dragon kidnaps your royal family, or a meteor is going to crash into whatever planet you are on, or hostile aliens arrive and fuck shit up, or the undead inconveniently rise up around the time AK-47s are declared so street-legal that you can fish them out of garbage cans. So your average game character would take a look at those 2012ers and call them a bunch of pussies.
In Platform Hack, the end of the world scenario befalls a young man, who doesn’t have time to catch his breath before a wizard appears to tell him that his girlfriend and family are all dead. Apparently the story is set in some utopian society where they have no knowledge of swords or guns or violence or any of that kind of shit. Which is odd because I thought there was already a game set in Sesame Street that had released recently.
See how little space you have to fight the dragons here? Imagine doing that 50 times a level.
Once you get to the actual game, it’s a hacky-slashy platformer. I never would have guessed by the name. In the early stages, Platform Hack feels kind of like Raventhrone, only not shitty. You run around, chopping up monsters and looking for a door. When you kill an enemy, you earn XP that you use to level up and buy upgrades. After the first boss, you acquire a gun, which becomes more effective once you upgrade it with rapid fire and a spreader. I never really had to swing my sword again once I had my gun pimped out.
Unfortunately, it was somewhere around this time that things started to spin out of control. Up to this point, Platform Hack had been fairly easy. My dude was pretty much a human panzer tank, ripping through enemies like they were tin-foil. But then the stages reached ROM-hack levels of ridiculousness. It all started when I had to grab a key that was well out-of-place, near the bottom of the screen, with no platforms around it. By this point I had acquired a triple-jump through various XP upgrades, only it wasn’t enough. I could get to the key, but I couldn’t get back to the platform with it.
As it turns out, I needed either the grappling hook or the flight-jump-thingie abilities that you can buy when you get enough XP. Because I had no points left, I had to go back and grind out several older levels to get them, completely destroying the pace of the game. Until then, I was ready to write off Platform Hack as a “decent bad game.” It wasn’t very good, with frustrating controls and awkward jumping physics, but it at least had charm. Now, it didn’t even have that. It’s like meeting a really ugly guy who woos you with his personality, only to ruin the mood by doing armpit farts.
It only got worse from there. The levels became more sprawling, requiring you to search for multiple keys, all while fighting the same three baddies in every stage. In the second world, it was dragons, knights, and birds. Platforms became more narrow, yet they would have two or three dragons stuck on every single one of them. A good platform game allows a player to have a sense of urgency and speed, but you can’t do that if every microscopic inch of terrain is coated with enemies that you have to take the time to kill by firing multiple bullets into them. There’s a map, but it has a limited visibility and thus it’s not all that useful in finding where the keys are located.
By the end of the second world, I had acquired the flight-jump-thingie, and it briefly restored a sense of fun. Sure, Platform Hack is still a bad game, but those can occasionally be entertaining too. And not just in a train-wreck sort of way. But then I reached the third level. Well actually, I first had to fight a giant dragon boss. The first time it popped out, it instakilled me. After a couple of attempts, I figured out that it couldn’t shoot it’s fire straight down the edge of the screen, so I would just wait there and shoot upwards with the gun. In the end, it was only slightly easier than the first boss, which I killed in one shot. I had grown sick of the same old “up in the clouds” bullshit of world two. And then I got to world three, which made me long for more clouds and dragons. Suddenly, even the flying creatures (now hornets instead of birds) were bullet sponges. Combine this with scorpions and warlocks, all of whom shoot projectiles, and my good-bad game was just bad-bad. I was suddenly in a bullet-hell, unable to move at all because you don’t get temporary invincibility when you take damage. No matter how hard I tried, I kept getting juggled by shot after shot, all while a group of hornets were buzz-bombing me from above. Thirty minutes later, I declared “fuck this game” and shut it off.
Quick show of hands: how many people saw this picture and thought "Super Star Wars?"
I wasn’t even half-way through Platform Hack, either. This is one long beast of a game. But the story is not compelling and the gameplay is repetitive. I have no clue what the developer was thinking with a difficulty curve like this, or why items that are actually necessary towards progression have to be obtained via level grinding. It’s a fucking platformer! Level grinding does not belong in it! Once the enemies became overpowered and the stages became less linear, any remaining semblance of entertainment was sucked from it. All that’s left is a long-winded, clunky, broken mess, like a video game version of Charlie Sheen, only not as fun.
I was a mere three-years-old when the Sega CD came out, so I pretty much missed the golden age of Full Motion Video based games, or FMVs. And thank God for that. It wouldn’t be until my teens that I first got a taste of what this genre really had to offer. Which is to say, not a lot at all. I was much younger when I played one for the first time, which was Mad Dog McCree. It was cheesy, shallow, poorly acted, and really horrible. Yet, at the age of seven, I thought it was the bee’s knees.
Mom?
Which proves my point that all kids are fucking stupid. It’s one of the reasons that Dragon’s Lair could be so popular. I’ve seen DVD menus that offer more interactivity than it, yet it’s remembered fondly as “one of the all time classics.” My ass it is. It has pretty Don Bluth animation, but it barely qualifies as a game. In fact, I think one could say that if you were to lock yourself in a room with a metric ton of uranium and try to guess how long it will take for you to die of radiation poisoning, that’s more of a game than Dragon’s Lair and it’s kin.
I hear two things when people defend games like Dragon’s Lair or Night Trap. The first is usually “you had to be there.” Thankfully I wasn’t. I’ve been exposed to enough 80s media that I get down on my knees and thank Jesus Christ almighty every day that I wasn’t a child of that fucking decade. I was born in 1989, but I feel that was God’s way of telling me “you were THIS close to watching Full House and movies starring Judd Nelson. Now be good!”
The second thing they tell me in defense of FMV was “it was good for its time!” Again, I call bullshit on that. I’ve yet to meet any FMV enthusiast that could tell me with a straight face that Dragon’s Lair was remotely in the same universe as stuff like Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. I mean really people. It was a cartoon that told you to push a button every five seconds to see the rest of the show. If the latest Pirates of the Caribbean DVD told you that you had to hit a button on the remote control every five seconds to continue watching the movie, you would call it the worst thing in the history of the anything. Which technically it already is to begin with on account of it being the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but I digress.
A new FMV game in 2011 seems like drinking-Pepsi-with-a-spoon madness, but this is the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and so I guess it’s not a surprise that the absolute worst type of video game that ever existed would rear its grainy head here. Hell’s House by BM Games is about a girl who has to spend a night in a haunted house. The gameplay is kind of like a rhythm game. You just press the face buttons when they line up with the indicator, all while watching the absolute most boring “scary” movie of all time. You’re off the hook, Blair Witch Project.
Oh shit! An Italian! Run!
The movie is bad, but the not in a good way. It’s hard to believe you can fault a game for having good acting, but one of the things that people wax nostalgically about with FMVs is their camp value. The acting was always a big cheese sandwich and the plot was usually something horribly contrived and silly. Here, the acting is actually not bad. Really! Hell, if you squint really hard, you might even confuse the girl for Sarah Michelle Gellar. But without the cheese, there’s nothing here except a really generic fan movie.
There’s nothing really creepy about it. The house doesn’t have an ominous feel to it. There’s nothing special about the house, it’s decor, it’s location, anything! It just looks like any other house. It’s not even an old one. Meanwhile, the game purports to have “death scenes” but there’s nothing here that will frighten or even shock. It’s 2011! We’ve had four Scream movies, seven Saw movies, a dozen Friday the 13ths, and we’re on our sixth season of Dexter. Anyone attempting to do horror in this day and age has way too much desensitization to compete with. You have got to do something spectacular. Death by live embalming using vinegar, via IV tubes inserted into eyeballs, swabbed with alcohol to prevent infection. That I might cringe at. A little.
As a movie and a game, Hell’s House does absolutely nothing for me. I admit I might not be this game’s target audience, because I don’t look back lovingly on FMVs. I look back on them and think “God, I’m so lucky to have been born when I was.” This isn’t even one of those cases where you can say “games have gotten so much better since FMV died out.” Video games were always better, even before FMV came around. Talking about the good old days of FMV is like fondly reminiscing about the time you got run over by a combine harvester.
Have you predicted the phone would ring right before it did? Have you ever dreamed about the winning lottery numbers the night before the drawing but forgot to buy the ticket? Have you bought a Big Mac knowing that you would win a free medium french fries from the Monopoly promotion? Neither have I. Which is weird because Cuban women are supposed to be have some kind of clairvoyance. It’s true. It’s something they brag about. Which doesn’t explain why nobody saw Castro coming. Or the Bay of Pigs. Or Michael Moore. Hell, you would think they could smell Moore coming. That’s one of the normal senses, right? And his smell is utterly unmistakable: a combination of bacon and farts.
My mother often claims to be a psychic. For proof of that, she offers up that she knew I would be a girl when she was pregnant with me. Sure, the odds were 50/50, but she did predict right, so obviously she’s got the sixth sense. And not the spooky “I see dead people” kind. I mean the kind that can accurately predict a coin flip about half the time. Shit, even I should have that. Here watch. Heads!
Let me try that again. Heads!
Seriously, one more try. Heads!
Okay, fuck you, maybe it skips a generation or something. Thankfully I have Remote Viewer to practice up on. For the low-cost of 80 Microsoft Points, I can hone up my ability to randomly guess things spit out by a computer. That will come in handy if the Robopocolypse ever starts.
Remote Viewer has ten “levels” that allegedly will help you fine tune your ability to read people’s minds. Or something like that. I’m not actually sure how it’s supposed to work. I mean, what good is reading the thoughts of a machine? If I can see what it’s thinking, doesn’t that make me a Technomancer and not a psychic? I’m so confused.
Levels 1 through 6 all offer the same game: pick the card that’s covered up. Each level adds another card. In level one, you start with only two cards. In theory, the average person should finish with 50% accuracy. I finished with 40%. Six times in a row. Well, at least I’m consistent. Level 2 adds another card. In theory, I should be right 33% of the time. Instead, I got 0% on my first try. So not only am I not psychic, but I’m so far removed from it that it defies the laws of probability. I’m fairly proud of that.
Oh, is that what those letters stand for? I thought it was “A Keen Queef.”
Things really start to get weird with level 7. It’s called “Influence.” The idea is the game will spit out a number between 80 and 120 several times over the course of a minute. You’re somehow supposed to magically cause the game to select a number that’s less than or equal to 99. If you do so, you get a point, while you lose a point if it’s more. Now mind you, I’m not making anything about this game up. It really wants you to do this using the power of your mind. There’s no buttons to press or anything.
I played along and tried to focus. But, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to focus on. The TV is where the numbers show up, but the Xbox is what’s generating the numbers. I’m not one of those people who can move my eyeballs independently so focusing on both wasn’t possible. I decided I should go with the Xbox. So I stared at it, but that didn’t seem to work. The numbers kept coming up high. I tried humming. I’ve seen psychics do that before, but it also didn’t work. I briefly thought about sacrificing a virgin to the console but the cops made it clear I shouldn’t try that again. Finally time ran out and my accuracy was 40%. Goddamnitsomuch!
So I wasn’t able to manipulate random numbers vomited out by a machine using just my brain waves. I’m a total failure. But hope did come when I tried level 8. It was the same as level 7, only this time I wanted the machine to spit out high numbers. Mustering up all the brain wavage I could find, I was able to score a whopping 58% accuracy on it. Holy shit, I’m better than average! Dionne Warwick, I’m coming for you next, bitch!
Level 9 features one of those Eye of Horus pyramid thingies that is out of focus, and using the power of my mind, I had to bring the picture into focus. I briefly thought about cheating and adjusting the reception of my screen, but I realized that was a waste of time. So back to the focusing. This time I pointed at the screen while holding a finger to my temple. I see psychics do that all the time, so it must be how it’s done. And the end result was 50%. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. The game doesn’t tell me. If a student gets 50% on a test in school, he gets an F. Did I get an F? I need to know. My self-esteem depends on it!
The final level is trying to guess the results of a three digit “lottery” drawing. You have 30 seconds to visualize the numbers before they appear. I had two thoughts while playing this test. #1: I’m a magnificent idiot for having spent a dollar on this game. #2: anyone who accurately predicts all three numbers in sequence will want to slit their wrists for doing it in a video game that offers no rewards when the actual lottery is right there and would have made them some money. Needless to say, I got zero of the numbers right in the five tries I made at it. And then I was done with this game. I’m pretty sure playing this constitutes dabbling in witchcraft, and if I’m going to be burned at the stake for that I want to at least float a couple of inches off the ground while three weirdos chant “light as a feather, stiff as a board” around me.
I did make a prediction before buying Remote Viewer: that I would immediately regret doing so. And I was right. But that doesn’t make me a psychic. THIS makes me a psychic. Pick a whole number between 1 and 10 right now. Don’t wait to see where I’m going with this. Just do it.
Do you have it? You have a picture of it in your head? Okay, highlight the space below this line.
Every Thursday, I put a call out on Twitter for a classic Xbox Live Indie Game that could be a possible contender for the Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard. This last Thursday, three possible candidates came out. The ultimate winner was Protect Me Knight, a sort of action-based tower defense game that you haven’t seen my review of yet because I haven’t been able to play the game with three other players. I didn’t exactly do my research on the game before buying it. As a spoiler, I think it’s perfectly fine game that is not at all a contender for the list. Expect a review of it sometime next week.
The runners-up were Leave Home and Shoot 1Up. As it turns out, I already bought the latter when I started Indie Gamer Chick and never got around to playing it, so it became last week’s default winner. And then I forgot to actually play it for a few days. My bad.
Shoot 1UP is a space shooter of the bullet-hell variety and not a biography on Robert Downey Jr. set during the 90s. There’s six worlds and three degrees of difficulty, plus a survival mode. The gimmick here is that instead of having a wide variety of power-ups, the game spits out a ton of 1UPs. Instead of building a stockpile of them, each immediately adds another active ship to your fleet. If you play it safe, you can build an army of dozens, all on-screen, all at once, and all firing at the same time. It’s original, that’s for sure.
Of course, in a game that’s themed around dodging a ton of bullets, you can’t always have your fleet spread too far apart. You use the triggers to expand and retract the ships. On the harder difficult settings, even a small extension will lead to you taking heavy losses. If a ship is destroyed, you get a small shield from the explosion that will leave you briefly protected, so you shouldn’t expect to lose dozens of ships at once. Ha, take that, Spain!
Unfortunately, I didn’t really like Shoot 1UP as much as some readers assured me I would, and it has to do with the overall design. It’s awfully bland. The backdrops, the enemies, and the bosses are mostly forgettable. Sure, there’s also what I think might be a giant space cock escaping an astrovagina and a big-breasted mechabitch that you have to perform a plasma-lasered mastectomy to, but it’s nothing that the Japanese haven’t already done before. In fact, overall the design comes across as generic and trying too hard.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this whole "that looks like a gigantic space-dick coming out of a quadruple-cunted astrovagina" thing.
There’s some weird design flaws too. After a couple of minutes on a stage, you’re given the option to keep flying forward or go into an all-range mode. Even on all-range, the game still keeps you attached to rails, but you’ll be flying in different directions. That sounds fine, except entering this mode somehow causes your bullets to not go all the way to the edge of the screen. It’s bizarre, because when you’re scrolling vertically, your bullets do go all the way to the end of the screen. The enemies are still at the edge, but they become untouchable unless you get closer and put yourself at greater risk.
Then again, maybe not.
I still recommend Shoot 1UP, because it is a solid shump. But a leaderboard contender it is not. The 1UPs building a fleet of ships that you control gimmick is unique and makes the game stand out in a crowded field. At 80MSP, it’s a way better deal than the recent XBLA release of Radiant Silvergun. On higher difficulty settings, the game’s six worlds do get longer, and the challenge is increased dramatically. Yet it’s generic and bland and the gimmick isn’t enough to keep this from being totally forgettable once you finish. If you’re a bullet-hell fan, you’ll likely enjoy this a lot more than I did. Then again, you would also likely enjoy it if I dressed like a dominatrix and threatened to spank you, you sick fuck. Besides, I don’t even like wearing leather.
So the Zombie Apocalypse broke out. Again. And this time I’m stuck in an abandoned courtyard of what looks like a slum. I’m all alone. Well, except for this seven-foot tall dude holding a camera that always walks about three feet behind me. I’m not sure what’s up with that, but he doesn’t seem to eat or sleep, so whatever.
Thankfully this slum was well stocked with guns and ammo, but that should come as no surprise. I mean, what else are slums good for? Well, besides drugs and cheap hookers, or cheap hookers on drugs? Either way, I’ve got a wide variety of weapons at my disposal here. Shotguns, automatics, sniper rifles, and pistols. This could be fun.
Zombie Survival Diary: Day Two
Oh my God I’m so fucking bored. These zombies just slowly hobble around, and for some reason they’re wearing workout pants. I lose about 10% of my health every time one flails its arms at me from a distance of five feet. I’m stuck in this courtyard, which is empty and sterile and doesn’t offer anything in the way of entertainment. And for some reason I have to hold the left click button my Xbox controller to run. Also, like a total idiot, I only carry limited ammo for the more fun guns but unlimited ammo for my pistols. The bullets for both seem just about equally as effective, so why wouldn’t I want to carry unlimited ammo for the gun that is more fun? And why do I only take one fun gun and one pistol out with me when I go outside to mow down zombies? This makes no damn sense.
Zombie Survival Diary: Day Three
The zombies seem to be getting faster. Which is counter-logical. Shouldn’t the zombies have been at their fastest at the beginning of the Apocalypse and not days afterwards? I mean, they are dead, right? So by now rigor has set in, their flesh is rotted more, and their muscles should have lost the ability to flex, which is what you need to move swiftly. So in theory, they should be stiff as a board by now, unable to move at all, which would allow me to walk by and finish them off in more leisurely ways, like using a coping saw to slowly cut their head off.
But no, they’re faster. It makes me wonder what I was thinking when I decided to bring a sniper rifle out with me today. Sniper rifles are more suited for things that can’t run the 100 meter dash in five seconds. You’re meant to set your shot, take aim, and fire. Here, you don’t have a chance to. Not that it matters. I don’t even have to aim, or apparently even hit the zombies to kill them. I can just point the gun anywhere in their general vicinity and it seems to do the trick. Man, this Zombie Apocalypse kind of sucks.
Zombie Survival Diary: Day Four
Well so much for that. The zombies seem to be bullet sponges now. When I shoot one, a huge cloud of red stuff that I’m guessing is supposed to be blood but looks more like the type of fire-retardant that airplanes drop explodes out of them. And once the dust clears, it’s not unusual to see them still walking, gasping as if they’re trying to catch their breath, which makes sense since I shot them in the lungs, but it doesn’t make sense because they’re supposed to be dead and not breathing. Meanwhile, some of the zombies are getting stuck in the various trash cans lying around, or stuck halfway in buildings, or in staircases. Maybe they’re polterzombies.
Either way, this whole experience has not been particularly difficult. Or fun, for that matter. For the most part, all I have to do is run a big circle around the courtyard, all while holding the click button on the left stick down. Once the zombies are in a line, I just gun them down, fast ones first, then slow ones. If they get too close, I just repeat the follow-the-leader process all over again. It’s lame. I feel like the Pied Piper, only zombies aren’t half as much fun to kill as children.
Sometimes my own policies come back to bite me in the ass. And I’m not talking about stuff like not being able to turn away a review request. At least those typically provide me with material to write a fun, rewarding, and catty review. No, I’m talking about the whole “I can’t play demos” thing. 99.9% of the time, I have no desire to do so, but every once in a while a game will come along that tests my resolve.
I had no problem purchasing ARP Halloween Edition. New releases have been slow this week, and the premise for this looked interesting, at least to me. This is one of those auto-running games that’s more about reflex testing than platforming. Playing as your avatar, you run across the top of a moving train, trying to collect cookies, jump over barrels, avoid barriers, dodge birds, and try to get a high score.
Honestly, the game is okay, but there’s nothing really to it. It’s actually pretty slow for a game based on reflexes. You can clearly see all the objects coming and have plenty of time to prepare yourself to hit the right button. I’m guessing the developers set out to make it more child friendly, and if that was the goal I’ll assume its a successful one. Anyone over the age of six is likely to find this pretty dull, and without online leaderboards there’s not a whole lot of incentive to keep playing.
Oh, and the birds are a bit of a dick move. You can’t really predict which way they’re going to fly until you’re close enough to them that you’re likely going to take damage. The bane of my avatar’s existence was actually the gaps between the trains. For whatever reason, I usually missed them and would fall between cars and lose a bit of my health. Thankfully, you can pick up candy that restores it. It just goes to show that my avatar is nothing like me. If I fell between cars on a moving train and survived, I would only want candy if it was made of pure morphine.
I was sort of frazzled (great word) about the whole “Halloween Edition” thing. That meant there was a previous release of ARP that I missed. As it turns out, the original release came out in April and is called Avatar Rail Panic. This is where the “not playing demos” thing took a chunk out of my precious behind. Just looking at the original Avatar Rail Panic, I figured it was the same exact game as the Halloween one, only with a wild west theme to it. Watching the Youtube video seemed to confirm that. But, BUT, curiosity did get the better of me and I wanted to try it just to make sure. The only problem is I’ve clearly stated that I would never play demos here. And I really do stick to that, so another 80 Microsoft Points were spent and presto, I had the original game.
And yea, the prophecy was fulfilled. It’s the exact same fucking game. And I mean that. Same item placement, same level breaks, and all the same objects, only with a different skin. Instead of candy, its hamburgers. Instead of cookies, it’s coins. Instead of spooky trees, it’s cacti. Instead of ravens, it’s vultures. Instead of a money-bag, it’s a.. well actually it’s still a money-bag. The money-bag opens up a sort of bonus section where you run really fast collecting coins. It fits the wild west motif, because you could presumably be a bandit robbing a bank train. Granted, a poorly run bank train that left all its money up on the roof. Must be from Wells Fargo.
But how does the money bag thing fit in with the Halloween theme? You mean to tell me that they couldn’t even bother to re-skin all the items? That’s laziness on a scale that would make the Teamsters union blush with shame. Show of hands, who here could think of a better object to use as a power-up in a Halloween themed video game in about two seconds? Let’s see, you in Arkansas, I see you’re saying “Jack-O-Lantern.” See that, Bedroom Studio guys? A guy in fucking Arkansas could come up with something better. And you know what those guys do with their cousins. Shameful that you couldn’t come up with that.
So that’s Avatar Rail Panic and it’s inbred spinoff. I can’t really say either game is a complete waste of time, but without online leaderboards, there’s no reason to keep playing. You can give the demo a try if you wish, and thank your lucky stars that you never told anyone you would never ever play demos, because you’ll likely have as much fun as I did and save two bucks in the process. Avatar Rail Panic is not horrible, but it’s not compelling enough to warrant a purchase. Oh, and why the fuck is it called Avatar Rail Panic? You’re not really running on rails. You’re running on the thing that’s running on the rails. Hey, it’s a big difference. Have you ever tried to actually run on a rail? I did, and as a result, somewhere in Palo Alto there’s a handrail that I technically had intercourse with, and a bloody imprint of my face about four feet below it.
Castle of the Pixel Skulls was developed by 2KSomnis
Indie Gamer Chick 
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