Okay, fine. I’ll go into a little more detail. It really is just Sokoban. The presentation is tarted-up with nice graphics and music. And for some reason they added this strange way of controlling where you click a box, and then click the spot on the screen you want to push the box. They call this the “smart” control scheme. I call it the lazy version for people who are afraid of schlepping. You can still use the right analog stick to take direct control of the mover.
Otherwise, it’s exactly the same game that has been done a million times before. If you’ve played games like this, you’ve played this one. If you want a new version of it that has almost 200 levels, grab Puzzled Rabbit. Well actually grab it on your iPad or Blackberry. It’s a much bitter fit on those than on your television screen, which should be saved for stuff like Gears of War 3 or reruns of Scrubs.
Politics really should be left out of gaming. And yes, I did bust on Michelle Bachmann twice this week. But that wasn’t making fun of politics. That was making fun of spacey, gloried Stepford Wives that became politicians as the result of what I imagine was a drunken dare. Big difference. In general though, politics is just too much of a powder-keg topic. Gamers are already high-strung enough without throwing something into a conversation that even the most balanced families have banned from the dinner table.
I wasn’t sure at first if President John America Saves America was a parody or not. It’s so over the top with anti-Obamaisms, xenophobia, and pseudo-patriotism that I didn’t know what to make of it. Perusing the game’s Facebook page leads me to believe that the sentiment shown in the game is actually sincere, especially a bit where the developer busts on Obama for not dealing with the Mexican drug cartels. Right, because that stuff wasn’t going on during the eight years George W. Bush was president. Uh huh. So either the guys behind this are pulling off dead-pan humor a little too well or this game actually is the work of the types of irrational Teabaggers that caused me to leave the Republican party a few months back. Either way, the game’s theme is incredibly obnoxious and only the types of people on Sean Hannity’s mailing list will find any amusement out of it. So let’s drop the political talk and focus on the gameplay.
John America is a simulation game that occasionally sprinkles in some light side-scrolling shooting. You play as this Arnold Schwarzethingie-like dude who just got elected President of the United States. The country is in bad shape because, Heaven forbid, a black guy was in charge for four years and it’s a miracle there’s anything left of our once pure-blooded nation. So you have to go around the world, buying supplies low and reselling them high to pay off our national debt. A debt that we mostly have Ronald Reagan to thank for, but shhhhhhh, don’t tell the Tea Party that. It makes them cranky, especially before their nap time. Okay, I swear I’ll drop the politics now.
You know, if not for the grating message the game tries to send, this would actually be a fun little title. That’s what I would say if John America wasn’t an unintuitive nightmare. It tries to be a fast-paced simulation game, but everything about controlling it is so slow and clunky that it becomes a complete disaster. You move around a map of the world, pointing at various countries. ou have to hold the trigger buttons down to enter a menu where you can choose to buy or sell supplies. From there, you have to click on the country you want to deal with (Africa counts as one country, which will only serve to further confuse Sarah Palin) and use the trigger buttons to move supplies back and forth. The problem is it’s too time-consuming to find out what every country charges for stuff. Some kind of list would be handy, instead of having to fly around from country to country to check out the current exchange rates.
Occasionally, a country (or continent, whatever the case may be) will have a little icon pop up requesting aid. In order to help them, you have to fly to the right side of the screen, click an icon that corresponds to the type of aid they want, and then go click on the country that needs it. This system fucking sucks. The icons appear and disappear so fast that you literally have to react the moment they appear. But once you actually click the country to send them aid, an airplane flies out of the United States to bring them the shit they need. The only thing is, it actually doesn’t fly straight to the country that needs it. It flies around, makes a U-turn, and then drops the package off at the designated location. So, for example, if you try to send food to Mexico, the plane will leave the States, fly over Europe, and then swing over to Mexico. By time it gets there, the icon is usually gone. It’s stuff like this that makes me believe maybe the game really is a parody, because everything here is as inefficient as humanly possible. Yea, Obama might be black, but I bet he knows how to fly non-stop to Mexico without going 5,000 miles in the wrong direction. Sorry, I can’t resist.
You can also try to schmooze or strong-arm countries into giving you better exchange rates from time to time. This is done with a meter that bounces back and forth at a speed that’s determined by how much a different country loves or hates America. It only seemed to give me a marginally better exchange rate, but half the time I would try to do it, I would somehow get booted back onto the world map, even if I stopped the meter in exactly the right spot. There’s a lengthy tutorial but I still had no clue what I was doing half the time. Things just progress too quickly and any moments of clarity that I was able to gleam were thwarted by not possessing the God-like reaction times that are required to pull off certain actions.
From time to time, a terrorist will pop up on-screen. If you click on him, you enter a side-scrolling action scene. In order to really play this, you need to unlock various gizmos and weapons. It takes too long to save up enough cash to unlock these things, so if you click the dude you end up just flying around and getting shot at. When you do get weapons, all you’re left with is a really horrible shooter with poor collision detection and unresponsive controls. I’m not sure why they even bothered with it.
You win the game by eliminating the national debt. Consequently, you lose the game if you piss off the rest of the world enough, at which point they all just nuke us back to the stone age. This can be accomplished by bombing or invading other countries. I never really came close to winning the game. John America proved to be one of those rare titles that I just gave up on. The controls are horrible, the layout confusing, and I couldn’t help shake the nagging feeling that I was somehow contributing to the fall of my own country by playing it. I don’t know how President John America plans to save America, because it’s a completely incoherent mess.
I hear the Republicans have it eyed for the 2012 Vice-Presidential nomination.
Fun fact: the very first developer challenge I received way back in the dark days of IndieGamerChick.com (also known as this last July) was for Grand Theft Froot. Go ahead and go read the review for it really quick so that you can understand why this follow-up was needed. Just click here for that review. I’ll amuse myself by doing shadow puppets. Ooooh, look, I made a ducky.
Did you read it? Okay, good. I actually came up with the idea for Second Chance with the Chick because the guys at Frooty Game Studios were so damn nice about my review, especially considering that I called them “Indian givers dispensing fun.” To my surprise, this actually became a trend. I figured I would become public enemy #1 among Xbox Live Indie Game developers. Instead, even the guys whose games I slammed thanked me for my frankness and asked for advice to help improve their games. Funny enough, the cheerleader squad tends to be more upset with my negative reviews than the developers. Thus we have humorous situations where I open dialog with a game’s designer to talk about design theory and ways to open up Xbox Live Indie Games to a more mass market. And while this is going on, Sue Sylvester is off in the background telling them that they ought to sue me.
On a side note, Nate and Hurley over at Gear-Fish have pretty damn good reviews too, that are often biting and hilarious. They’re very Chick-like. Which actually sounds insulting now that I think about it. I meant to say they review like girls. I mean like me. Sigh, I’ll just shut up now and get to the Grand Theft Froot review.
The first time around, I thought Grand Theft Froot was loaded with potential, but was way too problematic to give a positive review for. The guys at Frooty Game Studios and myself have since talked very often about their experience in designing GTF. They also stayed busy by tweeking their game with patches. Because of them, I created the Second Chance. And then I waited. And waited. And waited.
Two months and 1,682,344 patches later (give or take), Grand Theft Froot finally was finished being mended and ready for its do-over. Was it worth the wait? Mostly, yes. Since the previous review included a laundry list of problems, I’ll just go over them one by one.
Original Problem: The story and dialog pop up in the middle of the game, obscuring the play field.
Current Build: What I called a “dick move extraordinaire” is still present in the game, but now it’s moved to the beginning of each level. This is better, but not by much. Occasionally the beginning of a stage will still feature enemies who charges on you. If Frooty Game Studios had it to do over again, they tell me they would have gone with full voice acting. Unfortunately they didn’t and the game still suffers greatly from it. Ironically, they did manage to write a really compelling storyline for GTF that many people will completely skip because of this paint-huffingly stupid design choice. Live and learn.
This is still the biggest bonehead design choice I've seen yet.
Original Problem: There was no reason to alternate between your gun’s different strengths.
Current Build: This is actually a design choice that would make the game harder, but in a strategic, professional sort of way. And they did fix it. Now, the power shots drain your gun faster, which means you do have to switch up between the two levels of firepower.
Original Problem: When you die, you retained any experience points you earned but lost any gold collected.
Current Build: You keep the gold now too. This cuts out the need to grind levels repeatedly so that you can purchase items from the shop. Again, another step in the right direction.
Original Problem: Acid and/or lava pits drain too much of your health and might as well have been an instant kill.
Current Build: Damage ratios have been altered so that the pits will take your health but leave you with a fighting chance.
Original Problem: There are too many cannons that you can’t defend against, all that shoot in seemingly random patterns.
Current Build: You can shoot the cannons, temporarily disabling them. This is the biggest game changer the guys at Frooty Game Studio made, and in a way it completely alters the flow of the game. Without this last-second addition, Grand Theft Froot likely still would have been relegated to “meh” status for all eternity. Instead, this turned a game that can drag at times into a more fast-paced and thus fun title.
Original Problem: There were no maps for the sprawling levels.
Current Build: Still no maps. God damn it so much.
In my original review, I said that if Grand Theft Froot had one or two of its problems fixed, it would be one of the better games on the marketplace. Of course, I said that way back when IndieGamerChick.com was just getting off the ground, and I hadn’t really played all that many Indie games. The truth is, Grand Theft Froot is not one of the best games on the marketplace.
BUT, it is vastly improved and the playability and fairness level of it have been fixed enough that I can now safely give gamers the go ahead to give this a purchase. Hell, they even added some extra secrets and a new ending for those who played through it once already. Grand Theft Froot is a pretty decent game that offers lots of action, exploration, and challenge. Everything that was positive about the original build still shines here. The awesome level design. The engaging storyline. And the ability to see a developer that oozes with potential. GTF was a very ambitious first effort by Frooty Game Studios. If any lesson can be learned from them, it’s that developers likely should start with something more simple. Don’t jump into the deep end of the pool on your first day of swimming lessons. Of course, if you do manage to make a coherent and playable epic your first time around like the Frooty people did, gamers will salivate while anticipating what you’ll come up with next. I’m not so much worried anymore that their next game will turn out to be Froot Nukem Forever. Maybe it’ll be more like Frootblivion.
80 Microsoft Points are guessing Sue Sylvester will be contacting Bethesda in their latest pitiful attempt to get IndieGamerChick.com shut down in the making of this review.
First off, yea, I know the title is technically “Johnny Platform Saves Xmas” but I always hated the whole “Xmas” thing. Are the extra five letters needed to spell Christmas that hard? Jesus H. X, what the hell is wrong with society? This wouldn’t be a problem is Xians weren’t so damn prudish about saying the name of their savior like he’s fucking Voldemort or something.
Anyway, as those who read my review of Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp know, I put out a call on Twitter looking for a challenger for the IndieGamerChick.com leaderboard. It’s already been a great month for shaking up the board, with not one but two top contenders for LaserCat’s crown, along with a hot online shooter that will likely rank somewhere. Needless to say, the board on October 1 will look very different. Still, I wanted to make sure that games that existed on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace before I started Indie Gamer Chick had a fair shot at making the cut. I asked for nominations and the Pudgy-Pidge of the XBLIG scene, Chounard, recommended Johnny Platform Saves Christmas. In about two minutes this had enough people backing him up to make it the game to play. Well, just as soon as I played the original. Which I did. I reviewed it. I liked it. You should read the review. You should then buy it. And then thank me for the recommendation. And bake me some cookies. Oatmeal, not chocolate chip.
JP Saves Christmas is done in the same style as the original, with single-screen platforming-puzzles peppered with some hop ‘n’ bop action thrown in. Having said that, the sequel truly is a huge evolution over the original. I’ll start with the puzzle design. In the original, most of the levels were fairly straight forward and pretty easy. In Christmas, the puzzles are much more elaborate and feature multi-step solutions that require some level of brain power to solve. It’s still not overly difficult, but it’s a big step up. This time around there’s 100 levels instead of 55, so it’s almost double the value as well.
Because when I think of Christmas, I think of Egypt.
Like any good sequel, Christmas also ups the abilities of our hero. Now, in addition to a double jump, the ability to roll has been added. You can use either the bumpers or the triggers to do this. You can also double jump out of a roll to clear larger gaps. On top of all that, you can roll off an enemy you just bopped to death. And the guys at Ishisoft really made the most of this, centering many puzzles around the rolling mechanics.
Also new is elements like bombs, ice, and hot coals with puzzles themed around using them. Okay, so it’s not exactly the most creatively designed game, but every cliché is used well and the end result is one of the best puzzlers on the marketplace. No, stop! Don’t leave. It’s an action-platform-puzzler. You know, the kind anyone can play, instead of stuff like Blockt that are designed with the Mensa crowd in mind.
The problems that were found in the original Johnny Platform also make a triumphant return. The lives and checkpoint system that exists only because Gus had not yet been invented is back. And it’s more annoying than ever now because the stages take longer to complete. So if you’re one stage away from a checkpoint and you game over, you have to replay the previous four levels again. Well that’s just busy work. I don’t know why people even bother to include them anymore. Limited lives are a relic, with the only logical use for them that still makes sense is having them in games that center around high scores. Neither of the Johnny Platform games have a scoring system, so the lives function is completely worthless and only serves to add tedium to a game that would otherwise be devoid of it. That or there actually is a minimum badness quota for Indie games and including lives helped the series meet that demand.
And once again the difficult curve is all over the map, only now it’s more noticeable. One stage will be a total mind-bender and it will be followed by a couple of levels that the preschool crowd would consider to be a leisurely stroll through. Not to sound like a broken record, but this really does seem to be a common problem with Xbox Live Indie Games. The solution is obvious: developers need to leave games in play-testing longer and ask for honest feedback regarding level-progression and the difficulty curve. And to you play-testers, don’t tell the developers the curve is perfect when it’s not. You’re not going to hurt anyone’s feelings with the truth. That’s my job.
Still, those gripes were the same ones I had for the original game, and they make as little difference to the enjoyability for this one as that one. Score one for Chounard and the rest of the Twitter Twits, because Johnny Platform Saves Christmas is one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games out there. I know I’ve said that a lot this month, and most people don’t come here to watch me to sing the praises of games, but I have to call them like I see them. JP Saves Christmas is awesome, and you should buy it. Yes, it’s a contender for a spot on the leaderboard. Then again, maybe not. I mean new games are flying at me so fast that who knows if there will be room for it?
No, I’m not going soft. I’m still the spiteful critic that developers outright tell me they’re terrified of. (Side note: the poor guy behind Cute Things Dying Violently had a full-blown panic attack when I told him I had began playing his game. Jesus X guys, I’m not that tough to please!) And I’ll prove it to you all. What I need is a game so incredibly horrible that it defies the laws of reason.
You. The dork reading this. No, I’m not talking about someone else. I’m talking to you. For real. This is not a joke. I’m personally addressing you. Do I have your attention? Okay, good. Now this is going to be a bit shocking to read, but I think you need to pay close attention.
You’re going to die.
In the event of a zombie apocalypse, you’re not going to come out of it alive. You’re not going to be the last human standing among your circle of friends. There’s not going to be a tearful moment where your parents get zombified and you have to kill them. You’re not going to lead a rag-tag group of survivors through the burning streets of whatever city you live in. Not happening. You’re going to be zombie chow. You’re not even going to make it very long into the apocalypse. If a film was made about the outbreak, you’re going to be one of the nameless dudes eaten in the opening scene while the real heroes get their shit together.
No, stop! Do not reply to this review with a detailed explanation on what makes you different from everyone else reading this. You’re not. You’re dead meat. Nothing you’ve done in life has given you the abilities you will need to survive a zombie apocalypse. If the outbreak actually begins and you see a zombie, your last moments alive will be spent with tears streaming down your face and a puddle of piss collecting around your shoes. Unless you’re a decorated combatant or police officer or fireman or someone with actual survival abilities, you’re fucking screwed.
Now, now, don’t be dejected big guy. I’m going to be just as dead as you are. But at least I’m self-aware of that. If the zombie apocalypse ever begins, I’m only going to last as long as it takes for me to get the handgun I keep in my nightstand, load it, and fire it into my skull. Actually, since in my hypothetical zombie scenario I picture my neighbors Carl and Mandy getting zombified by this point, I might walk over to their house and blow my brains out in front of them. They always made the best apple pies on the 4th of July and letting the zombie-thems feast on my corpse is the least I can do to show them how much I appreciated it.
For the majority of you, this delusion that you actually could survive a zombie apocalypse comes from your experience playing video games. Ha. Yea, I’m sure playing Dead Island has really given you a leg up on the rest of humanity. No offense, but zombie video games prepare you for surviving Armageddon about as much as playing Bingo prepares you for winning the lottery. It’s just not reality, people. So just play these for the fanciful digital distractions that they are. If you want an actual crash course on surviving Dawn of the Dead: The Real Thing, join the army or something.
Okay, Dead Pixels. It’s a side-scrolling retro game where you shoot zombies and NOT a documentary on how to survive the zombie apocalypse. The first clue to that should be the fact that there are stores right in the middle of Zombiepalooza that have the nerve to charge you money for guns and ammo. If I’m a shop owner and someone has actually survived long enough to make it to my store, I’m not going to ask them for money. I’m going to toss them all the ammunition I have and hope like hell they take me with them as something other than bait.
In all seriousness, Dead Pixels is fucking awesome. This is not only one of the best zombie games on the marketplace, but one of the best games period. The potential for disaster was huge here. When I saw the trailer for it, I told Brian “oh great, another samey zombie shooter. Ooooh lookie, it has River City Ransom style graphics. I’m sure that means it won’t be a total piece of shit.” Which proves one thing: I suck at prophecy as much as Nostradamus did.
There’s still hope for the Mayans.
Dead Pixels does look like a really good 80s style Technos game, but instead of trying to look just like a title from that era and nothing more, it actually dolls up the presentation with modern effects like a Grindhouse-style grain filter and an awesome sound track. The end result is a game that oozes with more style than most big-budget mainstream titles do. I usually try to avoid praising presentation if I can, but here it really does deserve mention. And if you hate the grain filters, you can turn them off. It’s astonishing that a console title can be $1 and look this good.
Even more remarkable is how deep the gameplay is. At its core, Dead Pixels is just a just a wave shooter. A cluster of zombies come at you. You kill them with a couple of shots, collect whatever coins they drop, and move on. But where it really surprised me is the moments where you’re not fighting zombies. There’s a very rich inventory and shop system where you buy and sell items looted from empty buildings (or any extra guns you don’t need) and stock up on ammo or various other goodies you need. Unlike other games of this style, not only do you have a limited amount of bullets, but so do the shops that sell them to you. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. At first I thought this would negate the fun of the game, but instead it greatly adds to it. It’s such a smart design, and it’s so well implemented.
Another design that I initially had penciled in as a dick move was getting weighed down by carrying too many items, leaving your dude moving at a snail’s pace. Again, it sounded stupid, and I felt like an idiot when I started crawling along at a speed of about one centimeter per second thinking “well fuck, there’s gotta be a store somewhere around here that I can unload this shit at” and taking roughly an hour to get to the next one. But you know what? I realized that if that wasn’t in the game and there was nothing else to manage, it would get boring really quick. So yet another high-risk design choice that paid off, and the game never did get boring.
And then I found co-op, and it was even better, in more ways than one. Not only is co-op every bit as crazy fun as the single-player, but I discovered that Dead Pixels has randomly generated maps. Granted, it doesn’t make a huge difference since most of the streets look the same, but the stores having different weapons at different prices does add a nice touch. Also nice is the fact that you can purchase upgradable stats that actually result in a noticeable difference. In lots of games, like Castle Crashers for example, your attributes tick up so gradually that you can’t even tell you’ve changed at all. There’s none of that here. When you buy an upgrade, you feel it’s power immediately.
It is nothing short of amazing that I could like this game as much as I did. I hate upgradable stats in anything but RPGs or Metroidvanias. I hate having limited ammo in wave shooters. I hate games that punish you for wanting to collect as much stuff as possible. Dead Pixels has all three of these. Not only did the developer manage to work them into the game in a fun way, but it actually wouldn’t be anywhere near as entertaining without them. Bravo, CSR Studios.
The co-op player looks like Elmer Fudd mixed with Michael Douglas’ character from Falling Down.
I do have to keep it real and so I have one complaint, but it’s a pretty significant one: the slowdown on the final stage. No, I wasn’t weighed down with equipment. Instead, the processor was weighed down with about a gillion zombies and I was using the flame thrower on them. The framerate started chugging like it was last call. Later, I played the game co-op and we really, really came close to making my Xbox explode. So close that I’m sure two players using the right combination of weapons and having the right combination of enemies on-screen could likely cause a full-fledged system freeze.
And in some circumstances it might not be avoidable. The last stage is one of those huge clusterfuck type of finales that games always throw at you in a half-assed attempt to feel climatic. Only here, it actually did feel climatic. I mean what else could they do? It’s a fucking zombie game. One thing that did feel a bit silly was the inclusion of a kind of, sort of last boss. It was a zombie that looked like it was wearing the official football uniform of GLAAD. It was dumb looking. And it wasn’t hard to kill. The military dudes who puked acid on me earlier in the game did more damage to me than the boss zombie did, which is none at all. And why would there be a boss zombie? It’s just as dumb as the Borg having a queen, but that’s a rant for another time.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised a few times on Indie Gamer Chick. It’s funny how the two games at the top of my leaderboard (LaserCat and the soon-to-be-inducted Chester) were games that I had low expectations for. Well now you can add a third title to that list, because Dead Pixels, much to the chagrin of the poor folks at BBG Games, is now slated for that #1 spot when the Leaderboard updates on October 1st. If there’s any justice in this world, it will rise to the top of the sales charts and be one of those rare Xbox Live Indie Games to shatter the glass ceiling and make its way into mainstream gaming circles. And I’m not just saying that because they’re promising DLC if it meets certain sales expectations. Dead Pixels was an absolute blast from start to finish and the best value a single dollar has ever given me in gaming.
And I thought it was going to be shit. Shows what I know.
80 Microsoft Points think Sony is going to sue CSR Studios because, as anyone who ever bought a PSP knows, they have the market cornered when it comes to dead pixels in the making of this review.
One of the biggest surprises I’ve had since becoming the Indie Gamer Chick is how small a presence first-person-shooters have on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace. It’s kind of baffling to me because the Xbox360 is pretty much the all time leading nesting ground for the genre.
Sit down and shut up PC, nobody was talking to you.
Anyway, I’ve played exactly one FPS since starting this site, which was Send in Jimmy, a game that was so special that Michelle Bachmann is going to be running it in her anti-HPV Vaccine ads. Just about everything that could be bad about it was. It was slow and had more fogging than a Cheech & Chong concert. And yet, I have to admit it did have a degree of charm. It was like an inbred dog found at a rundown Mexican puppy farm, which you fall in love even knowing that it would piss all over the couches and eventually drown in its own water dish. So yea, I did like it, even if there wasn’t really anything about it to like. But hey, it was a buck, so what did I expect, right?
Well SEncounter was also a buck, and it was also a first person shooter, so obviously I’m ready to adopt my latest cross-eyed, over-sized-tongue-having mongrel and give it a good home. You can just look at it and know it’s going to be awful. It all starts with the name. SEncounter doesn’t seem like a good title for a video game. It looks like a fucking typo. I was really excited because this was bound to be a really good bad game that I could enjoy in the same way I enjoy a Michael Bay movie. But, as it turns out, no, it’s just totally incoherent shit, like.. well like a Michael Bay movie.
At first I thought it was going to be okay. I mean the game had nice and clean graphics and a crisp framerate. And then I encountered my first enemy. Well, maybe “encounter” is too strong a word. It was a little mobile satellite on-wheels thingie that started emptying bullets into me like I was Bonnie fucking Parker. The only problem is it wasn’t even close to me! It was way the fuck down there! And why am I pointing my finger? This is a written review. My point is it wasn’t even close to me. At first I couldn’t even see what was shooting at me. There’s a little radar thingie that tells you what direction you’re being shot from, but it’s not all that helpful. I thought the damn thing shooting at me was a piece of the scenery. And then I noticed the muzzle flash, which was followed about two years later by me actually taking damage. I felt like a total buffoon because here are bullets that are about as speedy as an octogenarian with a walker and oxygen tank and they’re still managing to kill me.
Being the expert at shooters that I am (stop snickering Bryce), I took aim and fired at the little roving satellite thingie. Then I pitched a tent and took a naspki while I waited for my bullets to actually reach it. Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration. In reality, it only takes a few seconds for bullets to reach something that’s about 50 yards away. Still, IT TAKES A FEW SECONDS FOR BULLETS TO REACH SOMETHING THAT’S 50 YARDS AWAY! God damn, what a piece of shit game.
Having destroyed my first target, I decided to move on. Only I was being shot at again. This time, the dude was way-way-way-way the fuck away. And it was an actual dude, not a machine. So logically speaking, it shouldn’t have been able to fire as accurately as it did. I mean this kind of accuracy in AI would make the producers of Far Cry hang their heads in shame. And yet here is this dude in an entirely different county than I’m standing in, firing at me with a fucking assault rifle and still being dead-on-balls-accurate every fucking bullet. Meanwhile, your character only has two weapons: an assault rifle thingie and a sniper rifle. So I pull out the sniper rifle, take aim, and fire. Without exaggeration, it took a full five seconds for the dude to die. Was it my bullet or was it natural causes? Only God knows.
So I go around the corner and I get shot at again. Only this time, it was a sniper in a tower and by time I figured out where he was at, I was worm food. Upon respawning, I was easily able to dispatch him and other enemies. Then I went through this barn thingie and got tagged and killed by a few other enemies. I respawned back in the barn, only I had exactly as much life left as I had when I entered the barn, which was about enough to survive a fly vomiting on me but not much else. Sure enough, I poked my head out of the barn and got shot. At this point, I had run out of lives and game overed.
You have got to be kidding me. A lives system? As if the broken checkpoint system wasn’t enough, a lives system? Fuck this game.
Upon returning to the main menu, I decided that I should recheck the control scheme to make sure I’m wasn’t forgetting to push the “make the game fun” button. Sadly, there was no such button. But, there was a “run” button. Using it, your guy actually runs at what seems like a faster speed than the bullets in the game do. With it, I decided to use a new strategy: ignore all the enemies and just leg it to the finish of each of the seven stages. Sure, it was shameful beyond belief, and whatever cred I hadn’t already lost when I admitted I couldn’t throw a Dragon Punch was sure to be toast, but I thought it was a valid strategy. I would just run for it, weaving back and forth like I was Mel Gibson behind the wheel of a car, which I theorized would mean the snail-like bullets would not hit me. I know, dumbest way ever to play a FPS.
It worked.
Hell, I beat the game in about thirty minutes only firing when the game outright made me. So what did I think of SEncounter? Well I would suggest the main character can go ahead and swallow the end of his own gun but I want him to die of something other than old age.
I have a proposition for Microsoft. It’s a bit radical but hear me out on this one. I think every XNA subscription should come bundled with a dude named Gus. Gus will just hang around when you are designing your games. Now if it’s obvious the project is flawed from the beginning and the developer has no talent, Gus will simply alert the guys who have confused the job of reviewing games with kissing ass to break out the Chapstick.
However, if the designer has talent and is in the process of creating a fun title, Gus will stick around and continue to observe the development process. And in the event the designer decides to include a feature that is so mind-numbingly stupid that it could potentially sink their game, Gus will empty a can of pepper spray on their face. It’s my hypothesis that this will lead to a developer more carefully thinking through design choices.
I think this is a good plan, Microsoft. You can save money by using the same guys who shoot people’s dogs when they use bad game quotes. Oh, and just because the guy is billed as being named “Gus” doesn’t mean the guy actually has to be named Gus. It’s a marketing thing, just like the “Geek Squad” is for Best Buy. I have it on good authority that some of those guys are really more like dweebs than geeks.
Okay, end of insane rant, and on to the review. I put a call out on Twitter for older releases that would be possible contenders for the Leaderboard here. The always cool Chounard was swift to nominate Johnny Platform Saves Christmas. This was quickly endorsed by multiple Twits, and thus it secured the spot in this review. Well kinda. As it turns out, JP Saves Christmas is a sequel. For some reason, it just seems weird to me to review a game without having played the original, so I figured I should grab it and start there.
Thus, Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp. It’s a puzzle-platformer where you play as this stick-figure-with-a-giant-green-head-thingie who has to navigate 55 single-room levels. I guess calling these boards puzzles is a bit misleading. They’re pretty much as puzzling as a light switch, so maybe this should just be called a platformer. In order to clear most stages, you have to hop’n’bop all the baddies in a stage. Other times, you just have to get to the door. Along the way you’ll have to make use of a double jump and occasionally push blocks or wheels into place.
JP Biscuit Romp actually is pretty good, even though it has a couple glaring issues. The first thing I should note is that the game’s difficulty has more curves than someone who has subjected themselves to reverse-liposuction. Not that it ever gets particularly difficult, but there are times where one room will offer multiple baddies and clever layouts, and the next will be a straight forward “get to the goal” type of stage that can be beaten in seconds. Actually, a lot of Xbox Live Indie Games tend to have issues with proper difficulty progression. It’s further proof that Gus is a good idea.
But where Gus would really have had a good time is when the developers decided to include a lives system. The fact that it even exists is a sin against gaming. There’s no high scores and you achieve a “checkpoint” every five stages, so what purpose does it serve besides adding tedium to the experience? It’s not really that big a deal but it does break the flow of the game and it’s really the only major flaw here, so I figured I should bring it up and someone should be washing their mouth out with Mace as a result.
Otherwise, Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp is a perfectly fine waste of an hour. I had planned to do a double-review, much like I did with the Platformance games, but Biscuit Romp was good enough to talk about on its own. It certainly gives me hope that the Christmas game will be a contender for the Leaderboard, especially since that’s the game that actually won last night’s nomination. Then again, adding Christmas to anything rarely ends well. Just look at the Ernest movies. Or Judaism.
80 Microsoft Points noted that other things ruined by Christmas include drive-time radio, prime-time network programming, and diets in the making of this review.
Logic-puzzlers are one of those genres that, while not quite on the fringe of.. wait, I’ve done this already, right? Well, HACOTAMA is a logic puzzler, but it’s more in the style of Sokoban, which you would know as Boxxle if you were into these types of games in the early 90s and had a Gameboy, or possibly Shove It! if you had a Genesis. It’s one of those “push the blocks into the designated spots” games. But this one actually has a twist that is worthwhile: it’s a 3D game, one with some really cool gravity effects. Of course, none of that really matters if you’re non campus mentis and your time is better spent playing the latest twin-stick shooter.
In HACOTAMA (don’t forget to scream the name when you say it) you play as your avatar and have to roll balls onto shiny little light thingies. The hook here is that your avatar walks off a ledge, it just sticks to the ledge and the board rotates with you. Also, instead of pushing the balls, sometimes you stand on top of them and “walk them” into the correct spots. Your character progresses one square at a time and you can’t fall off the ball your standing on, so it actually plays smoother than I thought it would. There are forty levels, many of which are breezy, tutorial-type stages. A couple of the later stages offered some brief head-scratchery for me, but for the most part the solutions are obvious and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to go about it.
HACOTAMA looks really good, with bright and colorful graphics. But there is a trade-off, because the frame-rate can get a bit choppy on some levels. Fighting the camera is the biggest pain in the ass in this game. There’s no free-camera option, so all manipulating is done with the bumper buttons, and it limits your visibility greatly. This also can sometimes obscure exactly which block a shiny light thingie is hovering over.
I liked HACOTAMA, but I recognize that this genre isn’t for everyone. The cute graphics might lure in some people who aren’t fans of logic-puzzlers, but they won’t stick around once the game’s difficulty ramps up. No matter how much it’s dolled-up, it’s still pretty much just Sokoban. If you’re a fan of that, you’ll like this. If you don’t, you won’t. I do appreciate the very unique take on the nearly thirty-year-old formula that is offered here and so I give this my personal thumbs up. Of course, years of heavy gaming have mutilated my thumbs into gnarled, wretched, stump-like appendages from which small children should avert their eyes, less they be traumatized. I guess it’s not all that good an endorsement.
240 Microsoft Points have their avatar decked out in a Princess Allura uniform that can form the Blazing Sword for the sake of fucking with the canon in the making of this review.
I’m a firm believer that a review should never take longer to write than the game I’m reviewing did to finish. In that spirit, I have about seven minutes to write this piece on the game Happy. Well actually it’s about 6 minutes and change now. Fuck, I better stop wasting time.
Happy is a side scroller where you play as a snowman-looking thingie who has to get cupcakes or something. It’s unquestionably a game designed for the kiddie set. There’s no enemies or anything. Just a few jumping sequences. You move left and right and your dude rolls. If you release the stick, he keeps rolling until something makes him stop. You can also double jump. That’s pretty much it.
I should point out that all the proceeds from this game go to T.A.G. Pet Rescue. I’m sure it’s a fine charity and the dude who made this had his heart in the right place. But I’m not in the charity promotion business. I’m a critic. And as a game, Happy really fucking sucks. It’s just such a nothing of a game. There’s no reason to really play it. It’s horrible.
The best thing I can say about it is the graphics are nice in a coloring book sort of way. Everything else is just a huge waste of hard-drive space. The levels are dull and there’s almost no personality in this title. The music would be kind of nice in county-fair sort of way, but it’s full of bad notes that sent shockwaves through my spinal column. And although Happy tries for the kiddie crowd, it even seems to fail at that.
Recognizing that this game certainly wasn’t designed with a 22-year-old curmudgeon in mind, I let the kids of a family friend give this a go. Two young whippersnappers, age 6 and 4, each gave it a complete play-through and they thought it was boring too. I think adults often fail to comprehend the things that entertain children. I remember the kind of computer software my parents would bring me at that age, whether it was for educational reasons or otherwise, and it was rare that it was something that I found engaging. Kids are more sophisticated than grown-ups realize. The twenty minutes the two kids spent on Happy was anything but a happy time for them. I had to make up for it by digging my Nintendo Wii out of storage and playing a couple of rounds of New Super Mario Bros. on it with them. I asked them afterwards what they thought of Happy compared to New Super Mario Bros. and they said it was a total piece of SEVEN MINUTES IS UP!
UPDATE: A mini Second Chance with the Chick is now included at the bottom of this review.
Excuse me for one second.
Cathy calmly steps outside, screams in frustration, and calmly returns to her desk.
There, much better.
Warning, there will be spoilers in this review. Here’s the first one: I don’t ultimately recommend buying All the Bad Parts. If you want to know why, you’ll have to read.
Now then, All the Bad Parts. So you play as this kid who finds himself in this bizarrely vacant school. You get scolded by your teacher and a fetch quest is kicked off. Along the way you have multiple encounters with a bully. Later, there are multiple versions of the same bully. Even later, the bully’s head is replaced with an alien-insect head-thingie. And then things start to get weird.
The first of four levels ends with you meeting your BFF, but then he starts to talk to you as if you’re on your death-bed, which for me was the “ohhhhh I get it” moment. So obviously the dude is in bad shape somewhere and we’re guiding him through some type of purgatory. In the second level, you meet your future wife after getting punked out by a bully. In the third level, you attend your best friend’s funeral. In the final stage, you relive your office career.
Despite having comic strip-like graphics and almost cheerful music, All The Bad Parts is very spooky and surreal. The highlight of this moodiness for me was a section in the third level where you literally start to descend into Hell. And I don’t mean that in a fire and brimstone kind of way, but in a very subtle, artistic way. With no warning, you transition from a bright and colorful church to a barren wasteland littered with coffins and shadow imps.
Without a tinge of hyperbole, this was the most unnerving and almost legitimately terrifying experience I’ve had playing any game over the last generation of consoles. The scene culminates in a meeting with a very polite fellow with a giant-sized vulture standing behind him. Like Dante, I was compelled to go on, but the game yanked me from this setting and asked me to return to the church. I was briefly disappointed, but then the hellish setting returns in very brief snippets during the final stage in the office building.
What really amazed me the most about the whole story was this was a compelling and terrifying game that came not from a big budget studio, but from the mind of one guy and a title that I paid a single dollar for. All the Bad Parts might not be a horror game in the traditional sense. In fact I’m sure there’s many out there who would say it’s not really a scary game at all. There’s no monsters to run from or startling “BOO!” type scares. But it gave me the heebie-jeebies. It’s all about atmosphere and the unknown. The not knowing what this guy did to deserve this really makes for an awesome hook to the storyline. Is he a bad guy? Is he a good guy? Is already a goner or is he going to pull through?
Unfortunately, I didn’t really get any of the answers to that. When I beat the final boss (the polite gentleman from earlier), my guy and him debated for a few seconds about whether he would want to do it over again. My guy wanted to, and the game ended when he woke up in the hospital, surrounded by his friends and family. Well fuck, that sure was a letdown.
Okay so the ending (or at least the one I got, more on that later) blew. But getting there is half the fun and in the case of All the Bad Parts I can say without hesitation that this was the best storyline I’ve seen on an Indie game. Any other title is at least a galaxy away, and comparing it to anything else would be ludicrous.
So naturally its paired with some of the very worst game play possible.
All the Bad Parts is a God damn fucking brawler.
No, seriously! The game I described above is a really horrible Final Fight or Double Dragon style beat ’em up. Between each moment of storyline progression, you traverse the halls of whatever facility you’re in and beat up whatever various demon thingies you cross paths with. You punch with B and kick with Y. You learn one or two combos along the way. Near the beginning of the game, you learn the B-B-Y combo. Two punches and then an uppercut that floors your opponents. Once you learn it, congratulations, you’re going to beat the game. Now you just have to wait about 200 minutes to get there.
The action is very stiff and clunky, while the hit detection could generously be described as “professional wrestling caliber.” There were multiple moments where I had baddies on both sides of me. I would be facing one, with the other not really very close to my back, and still damage the rear one. Sympathy pains, perhaps. You know those demons, they’re famous for their sensitivity.
The game play is everything the story is not. Your dude and the baddies are slow to react to everything. And the baddies are total damage sponges who take forever to kill. Every enemy encounter also results in invisible walls being put up. This works to your advantage. Once you pin an enemy up against the wall, you can pretty much just juggle them until they finally die just by using that B-B-Y combo repeatedly like you’re Best Buy’s stock broker. Trust me, that joke will go over well at the office.
The action never really gets better. No matter how varied the abilities of the enemies get, you ultimately only have to land that one combo to do the juggling bit. Later in the game, you’ll hold down the block button while you wait for an enemy to throw a punch. If you get punched while holding block, the baddie gets stun-locked and you can begin the same old routine.
The combat is just not any fun at all. In fact, it’s really boring. This is a problem inherit to any brawler, but if you have a wide variety of fighting styles or the ability to play with friends, it takes the sting out. Look at Castle Crashers. Sadly that’s not an option here. The first fight of the game is, more or less, the same as the last fight. It’s repetitive and it completely negates all the good stuff the storyline has to offer.
Hell, there’s even a useless lock-on feature that I actually felt made the combat harder. I fared much better when I just waited for all the present enemies to let their guard down and then start dialing in that combo. The collision detection is so damn off base that it’s easy to just flail your arms randomly in the air and take out whatever baddies happen to be around using just the power of whatever air you’re circulating at them. Maybe that’s it. He’s killing them by giving them a cold. There’s also no feeling of having any “oomph” behind your attacks. I get that the guy is established as being a bit of a pussy, but we’re still in a brawler, and the guy hits like a total sissy. When you play a good brawler, like Streets of Rage, it feels like you actually are punching people. Here, you’re just lightly poking dudes. The developer failed to make one single bit of the action feel rewarding. It’s just the same old shit from start to finish, and it killed the game.
But what really, really, really pisses me off is the fact that All the Bad Parts contains branching paths and multiple different endings. In many cases, this can be a fine way to give a game extended shelf life and reasons to play through it a second time without feeling like a total loser. Personally, I never got the whole “alternate ending” bit in video games. In DVDs, it works. You watch the movie, see the ending, and then go to the special features and call up the alternative ones. It would fucking suck to have to watch the whole movie again just to see the other endings, but that’s what you have to do in video games. And they can require anywhere from a couple of hours to a few weeks of playtime to finish. Without the ability to fast-forward through all the garbage, it can really be a chore to get there.
That’s especially the case in All the Bad Parts. The game play here is so mind-numbingly tedious that I barely finished the first time around. There is absolutely no way on this Earth that I would ever want to play through it again. It’s just not worth the time or effort, no matter how good the storyline is. So I’m really not happy with the results here. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about the ending, especially not knowing exactly what I could have done to change it. The game seemed awfully straight-forward and linear to me. I suppose there’s a few demons in the hell stage that I could have resisted clubbing, but otherwise I’m at a loss.
The dude behind this game, Ben Cook, has talent. Maybe not as a game designer, but as a writer. If you can somehow pair his skill to tell a story with an above-average game concept, the results should be mind-blowing. So if anyone out there thinks they have a winning game formula but need someone with the ability to craft an amazing narrative, he’s your guy. Even if it means shackling him and only speaking to him when you need advice, Hannibal Lecter style, do it.
When I was eleven, my parents told me we were going to a theater to watch an epic drama full of murder, suspense, and twists. What did we go to? The fucking opera. I remembered that while playing All the Bad Parts. As enticing as the plot might be, it’s told in the most frustratingly dull way possible. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a video game being opera-like. And no, I didn’t just bring up that story so that I could make a really bad “fat lady sings” joke to end this review.
Well okay, I did. But I guess it’s too obvious now so I’ll just leave it at that.
Update: Well, it’s now June of 2012, and I just replayed All the Bad Parts as an attempt at doing a Second Chance with the Chick. The game since been patched. Although the fighting is slightly less tedious, my opinion on All the Bad Parts has not changed at all. As spooky and unnerving as the story was, gameplay is all that matters to me, and All the Bad Parts does not deliver.
80 Microsoft Points can’t be bothered to make a Microsoft Points joke for this review in the making of this review.
Indie Gamer Chick 
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