Convict Minigames

Wow.  I am rarely stunned by a game’s poor quality, but Convict Minigames has left me nearly speechless.  I saw the trailer for it a while back and shuttered at the thought of getting challenged on it.  So naturally I was challenged a few days ago.  Now the people at Convict Interactive are very nice and friendly people.  But this is about two things: quality of games and MONEY.  Real money that real people will spend.  And I can’t take into account how nice someone is when it comes time to review a game.  If I did, almost nothing I review would get slammed.  Developers tend to be nice.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here.  Convict Minigames is by far, BY FAR, the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve played.  Cycloid is not even close.  As if that’s not bad enough, Convict Interactive had the unmitigated gull to charge $3 for this failed abortion of a title.  Of the five games presented here, four of them are completely and utterly useless as video games, which are, you know, things designed to entertain people.  The final one actually had good ideas, but the execution is so far off the mark that I don’t think it’s possible to offer it any praise.  Let’s take a look at each game one by one.

Cave In controls the best of the five, but it's still not any good.

Bop!

Bob is an alleged fighter where you pick one of three characters and try to defeat your opponent by repeatedly hoping on their head.  The controls are sluggish, the computer AI too smart, and the graphics are ugly.

High Hopes

The developers boasted that this game was made in 48 hours, as if that’s a point in its favor.  I could jab my eyeballs repeatedly with a shard of glass for 48 hours but that doesn’t mean doing so is a good idea.  This is one of those “climb high” titles.  You jump repeatedly up a beanstalk.  The same type of game has been done better for cheaper multiple times on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace.  Your $3 here buys you more sluggish controls, unfair random-level design, and piles and piles or boredom.

Jurassic Bar

You choose one of four barely mobile dinosaurs and then swat away at barely mobile cavemen.  The characters are badly animated and the controls are even more sluggish than any of the previous two games.  By the way, this is yet another 48 hour special.  While I concede that there’s a degree of difficulty in making a game in such a time frame, I could give two shits less about it.  I want to play a fun game, not a bag of digital vomit that happened to be semi-coherent within a two-day period.

Cave In

An auto-scrolling platformer where you have to jump from stone to stone, trying to avoid various pits and spikes.  Of the five games, this one might have been the best if any effort was done to give it a purpose.  You can play it with four players, which I suppose would make things interesting, but once you complete the run towards the gold-shitting monolith thingie, nothing happens.  You can’t collect the gold or anything.  Even better, there’s no “congratulations on making it!” screen.  Instead, the ceiling collapses, killing you, which was the only way they could think of to bring you back to the title screen.  This one actually controls the best of the five, but it’s still useless.

Triangle Man

The highlight of the set, which is kind of like saying getting a morphine drip is the highlight of getting stabbed through the chest with a rusty samurai sword, Triangle Man is a punishment platformer mixed with some puzzle elements.  You play as a triangle thingie that has to run around, collect all the coins in a stage, and get to the door.  It actually works, albeit barely so.  Your dude moves too fast, jumping is too floaty, and the parameters for collision detection are too undefined to actually enjoy it.

Triangle Man has a couple good ideas that are ruined by horrible play control.

Now if the guys at Convict Interactive had tossed the other four games in the garbage where they belong and focused on refining Triangle Man, and then released it at a more reasonable price of 80MSP, it would have been easy to recommend.  I especially liked the later stages where you control as many as four dudes at the same time and have to keep an eye on all of them while trying to navigate four completely separate sections of  a room simultaneously.  This is what the entire game should have been about.  It’s an original and worthwhile gimmick for a game.  But nope, the use of this doesn’t come into play until much later on, and by time it started I had already started researching what would be the most peaceful way to kill myself using an Xbox controller.

Regardless of potential, Triangle Man is still a crap game, and anyone who tells you otherwise was merely suckered into believing it after slogging through the first four shitty games in this collection.  Thus you have five games at or very near the bottom tier of XBLIG titles, all packaged together, and all for triple the price of some really great games.  It’s absolutely shameful.  Convict Minigames sounds like a pretty accurate name, because playing it feels like punishment.  Upon completion of Triangle Man, I felt like I had finally finished serving my time and was ready to rejoin society.  Sure, I’ve now got a teardrop tattoo and I’m missing my black cherry, but I’m free!

Update: Minutes before this went up, Convict Interactive told me that they were unaware that they could charge $1 for the game, on the grounds that they believed it was too large.  Convict Minigames is 36.20 MB.  A simple Google search for “Xbox Live Indie Game Pricing” brought up the Wikipedia page for Xbox Live Indie Games, which states, quote:

“Games larger than 50 MB must be priced at least 240 Microsoft Points.”

Now this policy has been in place for quite a while, so it’s not like they can claim that it was just dropped on them out of nowhere.  If you can’t even bother to do 30 seconds worth of research on the marketplace that you’re putting your product on, you don’t deserve to earn any money off it.  They didn’t deserve that anyway on the grounds that their game is a festering piece of shit, but still, you guys couldn’t even do a Google search?  Disgraceful.  And just so I’m perfectly clear, even at $1 this game is simply not worth it.  It’s terrible at any price.  Maybe Triangle Man would be okay if it was FREE, but it’s not.  Do not pay any money for this game.  Put a $1 aside and give it to one of those bell-ringing Santa thingies at Christmas.  Buy a small order of fries from McDonalds.  Do anything but spend it on this.

Convict Minigames was developed by Convict Interactive

240 Microsoft Points were victims of a genocide against entertainment in the making of this review.

Hurley over at Gear-Fish also covered this turd.

Falling Blocks

I really, really wanted to like Falling Blocks.  It’s one of those “climb as high as you can get” games, but with a twist: it’s a first-person platformer.  You can choose between trying to climb as high as you can get for local-only point leaderboards, or in a mode where every block you touch gets painted.  Being the fan of creativity that I am, I anxiously plunged into this one.  Unfortunately, the intriguing concept was failed by some very poor execution, leaving Falling Blocks as a barely playable disaster of a game.

The idea is, jump from block to block, using power-ups to remove any that get in the way or warp to a spot that’s out of reach, all while trying to avoid being crushed as the blocks continuously fall.  Sounds fine in theory.  And then the problems start piling up.  First and perhaps the biggest of all: the falling blocks don’t cast shadows on the playfield.  This is a humongous oversight on the developer’s part.  Without them, the warning that you’re in danger of being squashed is minimal.  There is a caution sign if you’re directly under a falling one, but the problem is you’re on the move, hoping from block to block, and sometimes you move into the path of one that is right above you.  The caution sign might as well say “oh, see, now you’re going to be squished.”  You can look up I suppose, but when you’re under a time constraint, having to constantly move the camera up and down is going to eat up precious seconds.

Another major problem is you can’t actually see anything about your own character.  No feet, no shadow, or nothing to give you any sense of perspective.  This makes platforming particularly hard.  I’ve never really been a big fan of first-person platforming, with only the Halo series and Metroid Prime really being close to perfect.  Since accurate jumping often requires you to be as close to the edge of a block as possible, you’ll find yourself falling as often as successfully jumping.  Your character also moves at a breakneck speed and there’s no true analog controls here, so slipping off the block your standing on is an all to common occurrence.  To the game’s credit, the jumping does feel right, without being floaty or too light.  There’s also a double-jump, but I think it’s an unnecessary design choice.  Just having a default higher jump makes a lot more sense, especially since I only needed the normal jump 1 out of every 10 times.

Falling Blocks really was a good idea, but the finished product is a disaster.  It really pisses me off because I actually want to play a game like this.  And because the jumping actually does work, it proves that the developer is capable of much better than what was presented to me here.  Of any bad game that I’ve played as the Chick, this is the one I want to give a second chance to the most.  I think if the developer added in shadows, it would make a huge difference.  As it stands, Falling Blocks is a slow-paced, directionless, depth perception-lacking mess, sort of like my mom behind the wheel of a car.

Falling Blocks was developed by Multimac

80 Microsoft Points are raining blocks, hallelujah in the making of this review.

Falling Blocks was also covered by my friends at Gear-Fish, so have a look.

Thanks to Indies.onPause.org for the video.

Antipole (Second Chance with the Chick)

UPDATE: Antipole is now 80 Microsoft Points.

Hey, remember my review for Antipole?  Remember how I said it had slowdown?  They patched it.  It doesn’t anymore.  It’s now even more awesome.  You should buy it.

Still no explanation why the protagonist looks like Michael Jackson ran into a "Fur Is Murder" rally.

On a side note, I played the Nintendo DSiWare version as well.  It’s the same game, but it’s portable.  It’s also quite awesome.  I would rather play a game like this on a television screen, so the XBLIG version is the one to get.  It’s 400 Microsoft Points, and that can be a bit of a tough sell.  But if you’re looking for a truly unique platformer, this is the way to go.  It’s better than either of the Bionic Commando remakes that hit the scene, and hell, I actually liked it more than Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or Hard Corps: Uprising.  It’s not as polished as a big studio release, but it’s better designed than most, and for that reason it deserves your dollars.  Original games like Antipole remind me of why I started Indie Gamer Chick in the first place.  And now I look forward to the sequel to this game that will be set on a Grand-Prix circuit.  AntiPole Position is coming soon.

Antipole was developed by Saturnine Games

400 Microsoft Points noted that the last line was a joke in the making of this review. 

Wizorb

Wizorb has several things going for it. First, it has style to spare. It’s one of those rare retro games on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace that tries to look like an NES game and actually succeeds without in some way pulling back the curtain so that you can see we’re still on the Xbox 360. Second, it has an honest to God gaming pedigree, having been designed by Jonathan Lavigne, who worked on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World game. And third, just look at this fucking promotional art by Michael James Brennan.

Wow. Who wouldn’t want to buy a game with flyers that look like that? That’s some sexy ass promotional art there. Of course, all the credentials, artwork, and prettiness can’t mask the fact that Wizorb is still a brick breaker. There’s really only so much you can do with that genre. Shatter on the Playstation Network stretched the limits of it, but otherwise this style of game hasn’t changed all that much since Arkanoid back in 1986. Still, for all the muck I’m about to rake up about Wizorb, it’s likely the best Breakout tribute on the Xbox 360. Not just for an Indie game, but the Xbox 360 in general. Are we clear on that? Good. Now watch me go all Lizzie Borden on this thing.

Wizorb does look good. Really good. And it looks like it tries to do new stuff with the Arkanoid formula. But it really doesn’t. A lot of people are throwing around terms like “it’s Arkanoid mixed with an RPG” or “it’s a whole new take on brick breakers.” It’s not. At all. It’s not an RPG in the slightest bit, nor is it innovative at all. It’s the same fucking game that has been around for twenty-five years now in a different coat of paint. It’s like saying painting a Pinto red makes it a Ferrari.

Staring at this picture is only slightly less interactive than actually playing in the village is.

Let’s talk about the RPG elements. Along the game’s 48 stages you can get cash that you can use to buy items, or alternatively give to the town’s citizens to help them rebuild their houses. That’s the entirety of the RPG experience. There’s no exploration, exposition, or any decision-making that has any consequence other than “give your money away, get a free life.” But it does have a shopping element, which is different from any Arkanoid clone. That doesn’t make it an RPG though, and if it does than perhaps you’ll like such other titles from the genre like Forza or Mario Party.

The whole town thing is completely underutilized. You give the townsfolk money to rebuild their houses that some evildoer thingie destroyed instead of telling them to get up off their asses and go find a job to pay for their own fucking repairs. See, this is always what happens when the democrats get the White House. If you give them a so-called “donation” you’ll come back to the town later and see that all the buildings that you donated for are fixed up and you can walk around inside them.  But what can you do in them? Not a God damned thing. They’re just there for decoration. Even if you see a treasure chest inside one, you can’t open it. There’s nothing more interactive about it than “go in building, leave building.” So what your hard-earned money got you was essentially parsley on a dinner plate and some arbitrary bonus item, like a free life or a key that you can use in a level to open up a door for a shop or bonus room. Big fucking whoop there. I figured something good would happen if I opened up most of the town stuff. Instead, I felt like a total idiot later on when I found out I could buy some crown-thingie for $10,000 and I didn’t have the money because I was busy acting like the chairman of Habitat for Humanity. I don’t know what it does, but I’m guessing I would have enjoyed wearing it a whole lot more than I would have enjoyed having some idiot I never met get to sleep under a roof while I’m off fighting monsters by way of ricocheting a ball off my wand.

So Wizorb really is an Arkanoid-like and NOTHING ELSE! How does it fare as what it is? Not bad. There’s a paddle. There’s a ball. There’s bricks. Hit the ball with a paddle and break some bricks. You’ve played this game under different names a zillion times before, and they’re all the same thing. And that includes all inherit flaws, chief of which is what I like to call “Last Mother Fucking Brick Syndrome.” You know what I’m talking about. You clear out a whole level and all that’s left is one god damned brick that you can’t seem to kill no matter how carefully you try to. It just stays there, taunting you like a raven perched on a chamber door, leaving you swearing that you’ll play this genre of gaming nevermore.

Wizorb does try to help this, or at least it gives off the appearance of trying to do so, sort of like a Good Samaritan who saves you from a mugger only to run over your puppy with a steamroller afterwards. You get magic spells to help. Using the A button you can shoot a fireball at blocks or enemies, and this works fine. Or at least it does until you encounter a level where the breakable bricks are behind indestructible walls, at which point you might as well use it to light your own farts on fire. The alternative is using the B button to change the direction that the ball is going. It does help, but all this stuff drains your magic, and later in the game it’s hard to get it. Making a few volleys in a row without breaking anything gives you 10% of your magic back, but it won’t be much help. There’s also two power spells that can be used if you press the button at the same time the ball hits the paddle. The A button power shot turns the ball into a comet that instantly destroys any breakable bricks that it touches. Sounds awesome, but in reality it lasts for about one second and then the ball returns to normal. It doesn’t even make it to the ceiling before it wears off. Fuck that noise. The B button power shot gives you control over the ball and allows you to steer it any direction you want. Again, it sounds good, but you only have about two seconds to get it where you want it to go, and usually it’s not helpful with Last Mother Fucking Brick Syndrome. Both these spells are almost totally useless and take too much magic to use. So fuck them.

There was an effective method towards combating LMFB Syndrome: suicide. If you have enough magic and you lose a ball, instead of just launching off the paddle with your next life, you can place the ball anywhere you want on the play field that isn’t occupied by an enemy or a brick and let it go. So the lesson we can take away from Wizorb is that if things get tough in life, kill yourself and everything will sort itself out.

Wizorb has cruel level design, useless “RPG” stuff peppered in it, and some fun “what the fuck moments” like the fourth boss that I killed in less than five seconds when my ball somehow got pinned to it. Also, the guys behind this were just a little too married to the concept of making an NES game. The game has two-button controls. The triggers, bumpers, and Y button go completely unused, while the X button is used to adjust the speed of the paddle if you use the D-pad like a bitch. They could have used the other buttons to create more spells and really dial-up on the action. But no, they ran with the whole NES concept. Which doesn’t explain why the game has online leaderboards, but I like those so I’ll forgive it. At the end of the day, like any brick breaker, LMFB Syndrome swiftly turns fun into tedium and frustration. During the later stages, if the developer had been within stabbing distance of me he would have been on the receiving end of more pricks than the ticket booth at Yankee Stadium.

If you go into Wizorb with the right mindset, that you’re playing a really fancy NES version of an unreleased Arkanoid sequel, you’ll enjoy it. I did. I actually feel bad that the guys at Tribute Games just so happened to be on the receiving end of this extended rant when, in reality, the first competent Arkanoid game I came across on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace was doomed to get it. Wizorb is actually really good, if you’re into this sort of game. If you’re not, it’s not going to cause some kind of epiphany and convert you. Breakout has been around for thirty-five years now, and Arkanoid for twenty-five years. If, after twenty-five years, you can still enjoy playing a new version of the same tired game that offers absolutely nothing in the way of innovation, you’ve already spent your 240 Microsoft Points on this and you’re only reading this review hoping that I will reaffirm your taste in games. For everyone else, I’ll pose you this question: did you like Arkanoid? No? Don’t buy this. Yes? Go play the Arkanoid you already own. Don’t already own one? Well than, I guess you can feel free to buy this one. Just one more question: how did they get electricity and an internet connection in the cave that you’re living in?

Wizorb was developed by Tribute Games

240 Microsoft Points fired the guy who made bricks that can be shattered by a ball the size of a marble in the making of this review.

Wizorb is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

High Gravity Wells

Well here it is, my 100th review.  Okay, so I didn’t do Fortress Craft or any legendary Xbox Live Indie Game like I thought I should to commemorate the occasion, but really, it’s not that big a deal.  Besides, I was challenged to do High Gravity Wells, and I pride myself on putting developer challenges first.  Oh, and to the guy who did Kobold’s Quest, I really am going to get to it as soon as I can round-up four players.  ETA for review: roughly 2013.  Anyway, my 100th review shall be High Gravity Wells, a space-physics puzzler-slash-reflex tester.  Well actually it’s my 101st if you count the two-in-one Platformance review, but fuck that.  Two-in-one still counts as one in my books, and if it doesn’t, um, go back to Russia or something, Pinko.

In High Gravity Wells, you try to steer a spaceship into an exit.  Like Mr. Gravity, you have no direct control over your character.  Instead, you have to activate as many as four different gravity wells and slingshot your ship towards the goal.  Each of the four face buttons corresponds to a well.  If you hold the button down, your ship will get sucked in and rocket back and forth in it until you let go.  You can also lightly tap the buttons to gently nudge gravity, although I really stunk at doing that.  Along the way, you’ll also encounter asteroids which blow you up if you run into them, black holes that suck you in (but oddly enough don’t kill you.. way to downplay the most destructive force in universe), and things that look kind of like semen geysers that repel you.

The controls are a huge pain in the ass, but actually that’s kind of the point so I can’t really bust on it.  Still, I think it’s kind of silly that you would have a spaceship without any form of a thruster on it.  It seems rather dumb that anyone would leave the job of safely getting the ship and it’s crew to port using this ridiculous system of slinging yourself back and forth using gravity wells that are so strong they can actually suck asteroids out of their orbits and possibly into the very vessel you’re trying to save.  And who do they leave in charge of these incredible devices?  Some idiotic spaz who operates them like a 90-year-old operates a Cadillac, in this case played by me.

Don't worry if this pic doesn't make any sense to you. Just watch the trailer or play the game.

I kind of like these sort of games, but they all have the same problem of having difficulty spikes so sharp that could poke your eye out even if you’re standing behind ten feet of concrete.  I cruised through the first twenty or so stages with minimal effort, when suddenly my Xbox fired a magical brain-thickening beam into me that resulted in increased blood pressure and swearing.  Breezing past levels was replaced with getting stuck for upwards of thirty minutes, multiple time-outs so I could go cool off, and even one or two rage quits.

Sometimes the level design is so unforgiving that it can bring you to tears.  Not being a sadomasochist, I don’t really get off on stuff that is not pleasurable.  I did have quite a bit of fun with High Gravity Well early on, but once you reach your 100th death on a single level, it stops being entertainment and starts being fucking detention.  I’ve played a lot of games on Indie Gamer Chick which run out of fun before they run out stages, and it always leaves me unsure of how to ultimately tilt my review.  I didn’t finish High Gravity Well, having given up on the fourth stage of the fourth galaxy.  I realized that I had been playing the game on and off throughout the course of the day and hadn’t had fun in a few hours.  I think I can still honestly say that there’s a buck worth of good times to be had here, so give it a whirl.  But beware, because once things start to go bad, you’ll want to quit and do something else with your life.  But you might not be able to.   You’ll be trapped, oddly compelled to press on even as your life becomes an increasingly bleak and futile attempt to regain the glory moments when you were actually enjoying yourself.  Also known as “Broken Condom Syndrome.”

High Gravity Wells was developed by Stockton

80 Microsoft Points can’t count to 100 in the making of this review.

Pigs Can’t Fly

I think Don’t Feed the Trolls proved my argument that online leader boards (even the ghettoized peer-to-peer ones that are the only option for XBLIGs) can make the difference between a game being worth a purchase and a game that will run out of fun before you run out of demo time. Pigs Can’t Fly is the poster child for the latter.  It’s a scoring-driven reflex tester that’s not unlike the iPhone hit Tiny Wings.  And when I say not-unlike, I mean it’s damn near the same fucking game.  Replace a plump bird with a pig and voilà, you have Pigs Can’t Fly.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if you’re going to do this kind of clone, at least get the online scoring in it to give people a reason to keep playing.

Pigs Can’t Fly is slightly different from its iOS inspiration.  It’s still based on sliding up and down hills while trying to build up momentum by going from a glide into a dive at just the right moment.  The big difference here is the inclusion of power-ups that you can buy once you’ve collected enough stars while playing the game.  There is a booster, which gives you a little extra nudge.  I found this to be almost worthless.  I figured this would be handy if you fuck up the timing on a dive and lose all your speed.  But it doesn’t help you get up a hill all that much faster.  Once you’re on the other side of a hill, you should be able to start regaining speed on your own, and all using the boost then will do is cause you to splatter your piggy and lose your speed again.

There’s also a glide, which assists in your ability to fly, and a magnet that helps you suck up stars.  These do work, and are a welcome addition to the formula.  Still, the game isn’t all that well made.  Pigs Can’t Fly is pretty unforgiving with its timing.  Sometimes you’ll dive in what sure seems like the perfect spot to do so and end up losing all your velocity because the game registered you hitting a flat piece of turf, even if you’re nowhere near it.  Because of this, my previous guess that Pigs Can’t Fly would be a good game, at least for the kiddie set, seems invalidated as well.  As it turns out, pigs can neither fly nor star in a decent clone of a popular iOS title.  If this was Charlotte’s Web the writing in the web would say “Mmmmm, Bacon” and Charlotte would be laughing her sick ass off while Fern ate her former best friend.

There’s a visual that won’t be leaving my head anytime soon.

Pigs Can’t Fly was developed by Matt Mitman

80 Microsoft Points childishly sung “birdie birdie in the sky, why did you poopie in my eye?  It’s okay, I won’t cry.  I thank the lord that pigs don’t fly” in the making of this review. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

Devil Blood

Devil Blood is a homebrew first-person-shooter for the Virtual Boy in which you must.. wait, what?  This was an XBLIG?  Get the fuck out.

Kairi looks up what platform Devil Blood is on.

Well I’ll be damned, it was an XBLIG!  Huh.  I must have played the wrong game then, because the game I played had nothing but red in it.  Hold on, let me see what game I just played on my Virtual Boy.

Kairi leaves and it takes her 36 minutes to remember she doesn’t even own a Virtual Boy.

Well, this is awkward.  Allow me to start over.

Devil Blood is a first-person-shooter for XBLIG (I think) in which you navigate ten levels shooting floating demon-skull-thingies and, um, that’s pretty much it.  Every stage you encounter stronger skulls.  There’s only one skull-type per stage, each of which becomes more and more bullet-sponge like as you progress.  You’re equipped with two guns.  One is an assault rifle type thing  and the other is some useless elephant gun thingie that I never used because I decided to pour all my upgrade points into the rifle.

When you kill a skull, it will either drop souls or it will drop runes.  You can equip four runes at one time that will alter defense, mana recharge rate, or various spell effects.  I really didn’t pay too much attention to those either, because early into the game I skipped straight to the final boss stage and managed to pick up the three way-overpowered runes that were in the room with him.  Using those along with a fourth rune that recharged my mana faster, I was pretty much unstoppable.  I also ignored all the spells but the snowflake spell (aka Stasis), because it was the only thing that slowed down the enemies.  The only way the skull thingies attack you is by running up and touching you like they’re trying to give you herpes, so anything that slowed them down was a good thing.

Most of the time, the skulls drop souls, which is the game’s upgrade currency.  Using these, you can increase the potency of your gun or spells.  I spent most of the souls on gun strength, but each increased level added fuck all to the actual game.  The damn gun never seemed to get better.  I swear to God it was slower than watching actual evolution take place.  Or, if certain Christian scientists are to be believed, watching it not take place.

If you look at this picture with 3D glasses on, well, you'll look like a huge knob.

There are ten levels, but you can play them in any order.  So after a while I decided to just grind out the third level for an hour, building up my souls and upgrading my gun.  Once I had a level 20 rifle that could carry 100 bullets at a time with a level-4 firing rate, I skipped levels four through nine and went straight to the final boss, which is, you guessed it, a giant skull that tries to touch you.  Ewwwww, cooties!  Deciding that the best strategy would be to fire the stasis spell at it and nothing else, I would simply shoot at it, keep it nice and slow, step back, recharge my gun, and keep firing.  It worked, and I beat the game after firing about 10,000 bullets into it.  Rasputin was easier to kill than this thing was.

I was being slightly sarcastic about the whole Virtual Boy thing earlier.  In fact, there are brief moments where you see colors like green and blue.  The green is for the one exit that begins every stage.  The blue is for the runes and the spells that you shoot.  Otherwise, you have ugly red corridors, red enemies, a red gun, red bullets, red floors, and red ceilings.  Just look at the game play footage below (courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org) to see what I’ve had to deal with for the last couple hours.  You know, I never actually did play too much Virtual Boy.  I was six-years-old when it was released and the kiosk for it at Target had so many warning labels on it that my parents thought it would make my eyeballs explode.  But I have heard tales of it causing headaches, and I’m suddenly inclined to think that it wasn’t because of the 3D effects.  The reason being I got a nice one going while playing Devil Blood, along with the fact that my eyes really did start to hurt.  That’s no joke.

I’m not sure what the dude behind this game was thinking when he came up with this color scheme.  It’s not like the Virtual Boy did all that well, or was deserving of some kind of tribute.  I don’t even know if that was his intent at all, but it sure seemed like it.  Leaving the color scheme aside, Devil Blood is one stupidly brain-dead shooter.  The level design is poor, the enemy design is poor, the upgrade system is painfully slow, and it just plain fucking sucks.  AND YET, it grew on me, like a tumor.  Just like Send in Jimmy, I ended up finding Devil Blood oddly endearing.  Maybe its because I figured there would be more in the way of first-person-shooters on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and almost anything that is functional will stimulate that trigger-happy little part of my brain that almost got me to enlist when I was 18, before the coward section of my brain regained it’s footing.  I don’t know why but I started with a four-alarm level of hatred for this game and after about three hours I was kind of disappointed by how easily I was able to beat it.  Maybe I’ll go back and play those levels I skipped over.  Not bloody likely, but it could happen.  When pigs fly!  Hahaha!

Oh fuck off.

Devil Blood was developed by The Lost One

80 Microsoft Points think some Red Faction fan took the name too literally in the making of this review.

Don’t Feed the Trolls

To anyone who says that online leaderboards don’t make a difference and are unnecessary, I no longer have to call you an airheaded douchebag.  Nope, instead I can just point to Don’t Feed the Trolls and say “that.”  Without online  leaderboards, it’s a glorified minigame that you would play for about five minutes and then never touch again.  With them, it’s a glorified minigame that you’ll play for an hour or so trying to land a nice spot on the list.  And hell, you might even go back and try again later.  I would say that’s a significant difference.

Don’t Feed the Trolls is a reflex-tester.  The screen is divided into four sectors, one for each of the face buttons.  When a bear pops up, you hit the button that corresponds to the sector they’re standing in.  When a troll pops up, you hit the left stick in that direction to slap it.  Every level, a new type of bear or troll is thrown at you that slightly changes up the gameplay.  Okay, okay, it really is just a stupid minigame.  But I’ll be damned if it isn’t addictive.  This won’t be the type of game that you go back to again and again, but for a buck it’s a nice way to murder an hour.  Brian and I both groaned when the developer challenge for this arrived, but it wasn’t so bad.  In fact, there was no point where I wasn’t having a good time with Don’t Feed the Trolls.  So this gets my endorsement, as there’s nothing at all really wrong with it.  It’s not deep or complex, but it is fun, and that’s what should count.  Such a shame, because if I hated it I could have made so many awful jokes, like “This game is Un-BEAR-able” or “I know I get accused of TROLLing but this is ridiculous.”  Sigh, so many of my puns are victims of good games.  Light a candle in their honor tonight, and let us mourn.

The blue "Indie Games" tag is what truly is unBEARable. Booyah! Worked it in there!

Don’t Feed the Trolls was developed by Frozax Games

80 Microsoft Points forget about their worries and their strife in the making of this review.

Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved

Remember early last month when I reviewed Who Is God by Magiko Games?  It’s back.  Only it’s less sacrilegious, made by someone else, and it’s called Meep 2 – Meep Meep, Meep Meep.  Actually, it’s called Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved because otherwise the Warner Bros. people would be very upset.  And although it plays nearly identical to Who Is God, the graphics style and the game’s structure are completely different.  Otherwise, it’s still one of those “jump as high as you can get” type of games that have flooded the wireless market.  You play as a jelly-frog-thingie that is perpetually hopping around like he’s busting a kidney holding in a bladder full of piss.  Unlike Who Is God, this isn’t a randomly generated endless game.  There’s twenty levels filled with various traps and platforms.  There’s also items that can make you float automatically upwards, teleport you randomly in the level, or launch off in the opposite angle from which you hit them.

Meep 2 actually is a fun game.  It’s got clean graphics and a smooth soundtrack.  But it’s relatively low difficulty and lack of online leaderboards will make this a limited engagement.  To help out, it has local multiplayer, where you race a second player in split screen.  I didn’t get a ton of time with this mode, but it was okay.  Not spectacular or anything, and the limited view was aggravating.  Like many games I tackle for Indie Gamer Chick, Meep 2 is clearly designed with the kiddie crowd in mind.  Unlike some other titles that try that route, I actually think this will provide a decent level of entertainment while Mommy and Daddy are upstairs, um, talking sports.

My biggest complaint is the target times for earning trophies in each level.  Simply completing a stage will earn you the bronze trophy, which is all that is required to unlock the next level.  And thank God for that, because I could not get anything higher than a bronze.  I even tried replaying the first and thus most pussified level multiple times and for the love of all that is holy I couldn’t get so much as a silver award.  This is a pretty common problem on the scene.  Developers tend to lose track of reality because they’ve been playing their own product for so long that they become Gods at it.  Meanwhile, us mere mortals are left wondering what the hell they were thinking with these far-fetched challenge times.  I encountered similar problems in games like Pixel Blocked and Ninja360° and I still managed to have a good time with them.  And I did with Meep 2 as well.  Yet when I have trouble obtaining higher trophies, I always leave a game with the nagging feeling that maybe it’s really not too difficult and I’m as thick as a cinder block smoothy.  Nah, that can’t be it.  I’m fucking perfect.  Right?  Right?

Meep 2 – Jumping Evolved was developed by Andreas Heydeck

80 Microsoft Points listened to House of Pain in the making of this review.

Nuclear Wasteland 2030

I am emailing you to see if you would try one of our previous releases and see whether it deserves a spot on your top 10. As of September 23rd the game will have been out for an entire year so I know you may not even consider trying it. But it is the game’s anniversary and what better time to play it and see how it fares against today’s first person shooters!

The game is called Nuclear Wasteland 2030 and is a FPS and is available for 80 microsoft points. I have attached some links so you can glance at it and make your decision. Shame on you for not already having this game in your video game library.  I hope you give it a go!

Actually Rube, I already owned Nuclear Wasteland.  Brian found it while cruising around and said “hey, this looks fun!”   But I only played it about five minutes before life called me away for other things.  By time I got back, I had developer challenges lined up, and trust me when I say, never was I so thankful.  Five minutes were long enough to recognize that Nuclear Wasteland would be a total piece of shit.  I was going to chalk up the 80 points spent on it to the “this is the price of starting a review website” tax and never touch it again.

And then you had to challenge me to review it while asserting that it was a contender for the Leaderboard.  Thank you so very much.

So what can I say about Nuclear Wasteland?  Well, it’s horrible.  Oh my God, what a piece of shit game.  It could very well be one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games I’ve played yet.  It’s a wave shooter, where you play as some type of cowboy dude who has to run and take cover from swarming zombies who throw arms at you like a Clay Aiken concert was going on at the moment of zombification if you catch my drift.

You have a little pistol that you can use to fire on them.  It takes roughly six years for it to reload, and the zombies move like they’re in a Benny Hill skit, so once you run out of ammo you better be ready to hold down the clicker on the left stick to run.  No really, that’s how you run.  Convenient, huh?  Oh, and after a few waves you get access to a machine gun that runs out of bullets in about two seconds and takes about five seconds to reload.  You can also pistol whip by using the right stick’s clicker, but you have to walk into the zombies for it to work.  Funny enough, they can reach you just fine from a distance of about six paces, while you practically have to molest them to get close enough for the pistol-whipping to work.  But your dude swings like he’s encased in liquid nitrogen and thus by time you kill one zombie, the rest of the swarm is sure to have sissy-whipped you to death.  Or into shame.  Either way.

And then there’s the glitches.  They are kind of fun.  Like the one where a zombies pushed me through a wall, into a closed off room.  It was neato.  I could just take my time shooting the zombies in the head and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it.  Except after they decided to break the laws of physics as well and just passed through the fucking wall themselves, at which point my gun was rendered ineffective on the grounds that the zombies had brought an invisible wall with them and my bullets could not pass through it.  Their hands could though, and I was quickly deadified.

Upon respawning, the invisible forcefield wallthingie had followed me to the afterlife and back, because now every single shot I fired hit it.  Instead of just accepting that God wanted me to be zombie smörgåsbord, I took off running.  I didn’t make it very far before getting pinned up against a fence.  For a second, I thought I was fucked.  But then, I passed right through the fence and was apparently safe.  The zombies could not cross it, so I had some time to seek the high ground.  That damn reverse force field was still with me, so I couldn’t get off a shot, but hey, at least I safe.  I watched as a group of six zombies sat there flailing at the wall like they were trying to sharper their nails.  I turned my back for a split second to get a lay of the land, and when I turned back around the zombies had teleported across the fence and right into my face.  Quite the magic trick, really.

"The first step: figure out who the hell keeps putting all these gosh darn invisible walls up."

Needless to say, Nuclear Wasteland 2030 won’t be contending for the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, at least without the aid of nitrous oxide.  It’s glitchy, unresponsive, and not any fun.  Maybe first-person shooters and Xbox Live Indie Games aren’t the match made in Heaven I figured they would be.  People have told me that they’re extremely difficult to program and that it’s a small miracle developers can even get a functional build of one working.  In which case, I suppose Nuclear Wasteland is functional and that should count for something.  Maybe that will earn it the VIP treatment when we gather up all the really bad games and march them off to the gallows, which includes a complementary last meal and your final words being co-written by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Nuclear Wasteland 2030 was developed by Sick Kreations

80 Microsoft Points said “oh just Google him” in the making of this review.