VideoWars

Calling VideoWars a real-time strategy game almost seems wrong.  Game play zips along so fast that you have no time to really plan out anything.  Passive-Aggressive Action-Strategy might be a better name for it, but that would be abbreviated PAAS and I hear those Easter Egg dye people are really protective over their trademarks.

Sorry.  Sigh.  Writer’s block sure is a bitch.

Anyway, in VideoWars you play as one of six character classes themed from classic video games.  There’s a single-screen map and you start with one base, called a “node.”

No, not "Noid."

Every time you lay a new node down, it extends your territory.  Scattered throughout each map is special spaces that either give you points or increase the speed at which you accumulate money.  Using money, you can buy new Nodes, upgrade current ones with a defensive turret, build troops, or purchase missiles.  The object of the game is to destroy all the enemy bases.

It all sounded kind of like a stripped down version of Advanced Wars to me, but VideoWars is really nothing like that series.  The game isn’t turn-based for one thing, and there’s also no micro-managing like in your typical RTS.  Once you release a trooper, it will automatically do its own thing.  This design choice had the potential for disaster, but it actually works really well.  The AI is smart enough that if you are in need of defense and you unleash a minion, it will stay behind and defend your territory.  If nothing is attacking you, it will go on offense. Hell, my average team on Call of Duty isn’t that smart.

VideoWars is not a game you’re going to jump right into an instantly get a feel for.  The controls are fairly complicated.  You have to call up building options while holding the right trigger and action options using the left trigger.  CORRECTION: You do not have to hold the left trigger to do action commands.  My bad.  This gives you a lot to juggle, and it takes about twenty minutes for everything to “click” and make sense.  Sadly this is, oh, twelve minutes longer than the average player usually devotes to an Xbox Live Indie Game.

If you actually do purchase it and wait out the opening learning curve, VideoWars is a lot of fun.  It’s like a real-time strategy game as developed by someone with zero patience for any clichés the genre is known for.  The game moves along at an insane speed, with troops making short order of bases, money that builds quickly, and construction times that are minimal.  And if all that is too slow for you, or you’re sick of watching your AI troops have all the action, you can build missiles and fire them directly at whatever enemy targets you want.  You don’t even need to build anything special to get them, although you’ll acquire the ability to use them faster if you build more nodes.  The only way to defend against them is to have your nodes equipped with turrets and manually shooting an intercepting beam in the general direction the missile is traveling, sort of like Missile Command.

However, all is not perfect.  When playing the local-only multiplayer, the issue of balance came up.  There’s six classes you can pick from, themed after games like Defender, Robotron, the ghosts from Pac-Man, etc.  Once I had properly broken in my playing partner to the control scheme, we started having a really good time.  And then, we suddenly realized that the Defender ships were about as balanced as a two-year old who was just introduced to Jack Daniels.  Every character class has a super-duper power that can be activated once a minute.  For the Defender ships, it doubles their attack speed.  This allows them to pretty much steamroll over entire enemy troops and bases in just a matter of seconds.  The other character classes’ super-duper moves can’t remotely compete with that.  We tried to ban using the Defenders, but it quickly became apparent that balance was an issue in every other possible match-up.  No matter what, one class is always going to be too good to be a fair match for the other.

But, if both players agree to not use the super-duper powers, it’s actually the best multiplayer experience I’ve had in an Indie game thus far.  Really.  It’s awesome.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint.  The game’s primary focus is on multiplayer, but like damn near every Xbox Live Indie Game, there is no online support.  People tell me I need to quit bitching about this because it’s hard to program for and people don’t have the time and blah blah blah.  You know what, fuck you.  If your game could really use it and you don’t include it I’m going to call you out on it.  It’s hard to program for?  Here’s a thought: learn how to.  If it frustrates me to play a really good game with no online support then I promise you, it frustrates most non-XNA fanboys too.  You’re making games for a platform that millions of people own primarily to play online with.  Tell your average Xbox Live user that it’s just too hard to include online play and they’ll call you a newb, claim to have had sexual relations with your mother, and spend their money somewhere else, likely while teabagging their own floor.

VideoWars was developed by Baaad Dad

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T.E.C. 3001

Sigh.  I really thought I was going to love T.E.C. 3001.  It just looked so fun and polished.  Stills of the game don’t do it justice.  In motion, it’s really a sight to behold, almost like you’re running through the world of Tron.  And the early buzz on Twitter from the usual gang of idiots (™Mad Magazine) is that it was the single greatest achievement in the history of gaming and milestone for Xbox Live Indie Games.

Of course, T.E.C. is none of that.  It’s a barely controllable reflex-tester starring a robotic Sonic the Hedgehog wannabe.  Yea, it’s pretty, but calling this “great” devalues the word to such a degree that the ghost of Ivan III is now going to personally haunt every single person that would label it as such.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In T.E.C. 3001 you play as a robot that has to run around collecting batteries.  In order to clear each stage, you have to get a minimum number of batteries before reaching the goal.  I’m not sure why they bothered with this aspect.  It wasn’t until very late in the game that I actually missed the target amount, and I only failed at this once.  It seems kind of tacked on and not really necessary.

Running is handled automatically.  All you do is dodge left and right, jump with A, and slide with B.  Unfortunately, the controls fail the player more often than not.  T.E.C. is designed in a way that requires the utmost precision for all movement and jumps, but you’re not provided with anything resembling smooth and responsive controlling at all.  Your robot dude moves too damn fast, yet he handles like a shopping cart.  Thus, you’ll spend the majority of the game running off ledges or crashing into pillars.

You also have a double jump that can be a bit on the fickle side.  Sometimes it just didn’t want to work, almost at random it seemed.  I would jump and wait until I was on a slight downward arc before jumping again and it would work.  Then I would die and have to start over.  I would try the same exact move, in the exact same spot, pushing the button for the double jump at what sure as hell seemed like the same moment I previously used it, and watch nothing happen except my dude fall to his death.

Still, I’ve played games that handled less than well but still managed to have a good time.  And early on, that was the case with T.E.C. 3000.  I immediately recognized that controlling would be an issue, but the amazing aesthetics and lightning-fast game play were sure to make up for it.  And then, about four levels into the experience, I realized that everything from that point forward would revolve around trial-and-error game play so unforgiving that there would be no room left for fun.  Allow me to walk you through a hypothetical level of T.E.C.

Start the level, avoid a pillar that you see, hit the pillar you couldn’t possibly see behind it.

Start the level over, avoid a pillar that you see, avoid the pillar you know is behind it, hit the barrier you couldn’t possibly see behind it.

Start the level over, avoid a pillar that you see, avoid the pillar that you know is behind it, jump over the barrier you know is behind that, hit the larger barrier you couldn’t possibly see behind it.

Start the level over, avoid a pillar that you see, avoid the pillar that  you know is behind it, jump over the barrier you know is behind that, slide under the larger barrier you know is behind that, fall into a gap you couldn’t possibly see was there.

Does that sound fun to you?  Because it sounds tedious and archaic to me.  Games like this died out years ago for a reason: because they’re boring and people quit paying to play them.  With the absurd levels of speed your dude runs, there’s just no margin for error here.  They tried to make up for it by adding a decent amount of checkpoints in each stage, but it doesn’t help.  Clear one memory-testing section of obstacles, start a new one.  Yippee.

T.E.C. 3001 feels more like a concept build for something that, with the right amount of time and finesse, could be amazing.  The graphics are among the best I’ve seen on the Xbox Live Indie Game market so far, and the idea of an insanely quick robot running through a neon-coated futuristic wonderland is pretty cool.  But the stop-and-go nature of its game play negates the entire speed gimmick, and the controls kill off whatever pleasure remained.  T.E.C. has style, but the only substance found is a cocktail of bad controls and level design that tastes like fecal matter.

Oh and before I go, I want to set the record straight on something: I don’t troll.  If a game sucks, I say it.  If I enjoy it, I say it.  My standards aren’t even particularly high.  I have no bias against any developer, person, or genre.  I just want to have fun with a game that I purchase with money out of my pocket.  If I don’t have fun, I’m not afraid to say it.  If that rubs you the wrong way, I don’t know what to say except put on some pom-poms and a miniskirt because you are nothing but a cheerleader.

T.E.C. 3001 was developed by Phoenix Games

240 Microsoft Points said the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising still at least has a batting average good enough to start for the San Francisco Giants in the making of this review.

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Cute Things Dying Violently

Cute Things Dying Violently is a physics-based puzzler, sort of Angry Birds meets Lemmings.  Over the course of sixty stages, you have to launch these little dudes called Critters into a door.  You’re given a cursor that can move left or right.  Using it, you can grab onto the Critters or other assorted objects and fling them using the right analog stick.  If you mess up you can expect them to die in a comical fashion, sort of like how Old Yeller ends.  I keed, I keed.

I’m starting to wonder if  perhaps I’m a little too desensitized.  I started playing Cute Things Dying Violently a few hours ago.  Within five minutes of booting it up, the novelty of watching the hapless Critters die in a shower of blood had completely worn off.  I’m borderline disturbed by that.  Perhaps it’s in part because I don’t find these little creatures to be cute.  “Creepy” would be the word I use.  I mean they walk around with a totally fucked up expression of glee, mumbling incoherently and randomly swearing, completely oblivious to their surroundings or the fact that they could die at any moment.  It’s like watching the old people at a retirement home.

For me at least, the funniest moments were my own personal fuck ups.  Not the straight forward kind, like aiming a little too low and sending a Critter into a saw as a result.  No, I’m talking about the grandiose, Rube-Goldberg style fuck ups.  Shooting a dude in what I think is just the right spot, slightly over aiming, and soaking him in oil.  It takes a bounce right into a fire, which causes it to die in a bouncing rage that sets other barrels ablaze and blows up the entire fucking level.  Now that tickled my funny bone.   The other stuff?  Not so much really.

Someone do Alex Jordan a favor and send this picture to Jack Thompson. Mainstream PR bonanza!

And thus I’m just going to take the whole humor thing off the table and let the game play do the talking.  Don’t get me wrong, the violence is a stroke a brilliance, at least from a marketing perspective.  But the situations that actually did make me laugh would have been funny in any setting, gory or otherwise.  Besides, after putting a month of playtime into Mortal Kombat earlier this year, watching teeny tiny little blue things that look like they took about six seconds to draw in MS Paint get cut in half is not going to do it for me.  Well, I suppose they look better than the character model for Freddy Krueger in MK.

I didn't know Dreamcast games had DLC. Oh wait..

I actually had a pretty good time with Cute Things Dying Violently.  The ingenuity displayed in the puzzle designs surprised me more than once.  I figured I would be settling in for sixty stages of non-stop flinging.  As it turns out, many levels don’t even really center around aiming and firing the little fuckers.   Sometimes you’ll have to drag objects like springs or bubble makers onto buttons.  Sometimes you’ll be trying to time getting barrels to explode in synchronization.  And sometimes you’ll fight bosses.  The first such encounter was a bucket of lame sauce, but I enjoyed all the ones that followed.  The amount of variety on display here is truly stunning, and new ideas kept coming even towards the final boards.  How often do you see that in a game, Indie or otherwise?

But I do have a few things to complain about.  For instance, aiming can be a bit of a bitch.  It’s a touch on the sensitive side, and the arrow doesn’t always provide the best indication of where something is being shot.  This game really needed an indicator line.  Not a long one.  That would have crippled the challenge completely.  But some kind of line that sticks out further than the cursor would have made a huge difference towards reducing the frustration factor.

Some of the levels can be really unforgiving as well.  In order to unlock stages, you must have saved X amount of Critters over all the previous stages.  But on some levels, the margin of error you’re given is incredibly small.  This will lead to you making your first shot (which often is the calibrating shot that you need to get the aiming down) failing, and having to restart the level.  A major pet peeve of mine is puzzle games that don’t have a quick way to restart stages.  I hate having to pause to do it.  It breaks the flow up.  Here, you have to pause the game and hit both shoulder bumpers.  It would have been better to just be able to click both bumpers without the pausing, but they were mapped for weapons use in a completely worthless multiplayer mode that is about as much fun as finding out that mole on your back just bought you six months of chemotherapy.

You know what though?  It’s still a lot of fun.  I’ve played a ton of physics puzzlers over the last decade or so and few manage to stay fresh from start to finish.  Or sometimes they try to change things up later in the game and screw everything up.  Angry Birds  for example, where some of the bird types introduced in the later levels to keep things fresh ended up making the remainder of the game rotten.  In CTDV, every new twist works.  The oil cans worked.  The lasers worked.  Okay, the bubbles are a bit annoying, but sometimes the developer still figured out a way to make a puzzle very interesting with them.

I was often aggravated when playing Cute Things Dying Violently.  It can be maddening at times to make some very tight shots.  And, not to be a total killjoy, but the setting really wasn’t all that big a deal to me.  I’m sure it will move more units than if it was a game about flinging unicorns across rainbows or something, but I thought it was dumb and the blood splatter was worth little more than some unnecessary slowdown.  But it’s a good precision-puzzle game, and those I can appreciate.  When I made a good shot on my first try, I felt like Robin Hood.  When I beat a puzzle in a way I know the designer didn’t intend, I felt like Einstein.  Those are nice ways to feel.  Much better than playing Raventhorne or Battle High, where I pretty much felt like Aron Ralston.

Cute Things Dying Violently was developed by Apathy Works

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Battle High: Elemental Revolt

Fighting games are one of my favorite genres, so after the disaster that was Raventhorne, I really looked forward to giving Battle High: San Bruno a shot.  Well actually, it’s now Battle High: Elemental Revolt.  Either way, I was hopeful it would get the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising back on track.

Nope.  0 for 2.

Honestly, it’s not that Battle High is broken or even bad.  It’s a fairly function throwback to the early 90s era of Street Fighter or SNK style fighting games.  The problem is that, well,  it’s a throwback to the early 90s era of Street Fighter or SNK style fighting games.  Those titles have been redone and cloned and rehashed and re-released a hundred times in the twenty years that have passed since they hit.  As a result, Battle High feels like a relic that is completely outclassed by the games it took inspiration from.

There’s eight fighters to choose from, none of which are memorable in the slightest way.  Well except maybe the chubby blond kid, and only because he kind of reminded me of Stewart from Beavis and Butt-head.  Everything else feels like a colossal Street Fighter wannabe, from the fighting styles to the extracurricular activities to the special moves.  There’s not one spark of true creativity on display here.  I was kind of under the impression that this whole Indie Uprising thing was supposed to showcase ingenuity and creativity.  I must have been mistaken.

And you know, the fighting really isn’t that good.  Even on the harder settings I was able to fool the AI with just random button mashing.  The developer did try to change things up slightly by throwing in a special super-duper attack.  You have a meter that fills up as you fight and once it’s full you can use it.  Except it doesn’t really function as intended.  The button combination required to pull it off is too long, and thus it takes a little too long to pull off.  Against an actual player instead of the AI, it would be so obvious I was trying to do it that there’s no way I could see it working.  Besides, the super-duper attack can easily be blocked or, even better (or worse depending on who’s using it), interrupted with the lightest of attacks.  It’s pretty much useless.

To the best of my knowledge, this has NEVER been done in a fighting game ever before.

One other gripe is that the Xbox controller really isn’t suited for 2D fighters.  I even have the silver controller with the transforming D-Pad, and although it’s so much better than the standard controller, it still really isn’t all that good for these types of games.  Using the analog stick isn’t a good choice either because it registers full movement if a gnat so much as leans on it.  I did have a lot more success using a fighting stick, but how many people out there own those?  Oh, and a personal nit-pick is that some of the characters I played as had a special move where you have to press forward, then down, then diagonally forward-down.  Call me retarded or a newb but I’ve never been able to do those type of moves in any fighting game, and I’m not the only one who’s like that.  It’s why I never used Ryu or Ken in Street Fighter II, because I could never get that damn Dragon Punch to work.

I didn’t play Battle High with another player.  Yea, I’m sure there will be plenty of people out there that say it gets better with another person around.  So what?  The same thing can be said about dying of radiation poisoning.  Besides, if I tried to get my friends to play this, they would look at the copies of the Mortal Kombat 2011, Super Street Fighter IV, Soul Caliber IV, Tekken 6, or Super Smash Bros. Brawl on my shelf and say “why are playing this again?”

And that’s a good question.  Why?  Unless you live and die by the Indie scene, there’s really nothing at all of value in Battle High: Elemental Revolt.  It’s bland even by the standards of most Street Fighter II rip-offs that popped up twenty years ago.  And if you desperately want something that’s old school, why not just play the original?  It’s right there on Xbox Live Arcade for the low price of 400 Microsoft Points.  That’s only four dollars more than Battle High, but that also buys you online play, achievements, and all the other bells and whistles that come in the package.

Actually, I take back what I said about Battle High not being bad.  It is bad.  It fucking sucks by any standard including Xbox Live Indie Games.  It’s boring.  It’s tired.  It’s shallow.  It’s flavorless.  It’s not memorable.  I’m sure I’ll get accused of trolling on this, but really, it was such a let down for me.  One of the ten best games to showcase the Indie movement my aching ass.

In closing, I want to say that I’m really disappointing in the game selection featured in the Indie Game Summer Uprising so far.  As bad as Raventhorne was, and it was way worse than Battle High, at least it kind of felt a little original.  Battle High doesn’t have that going for it.  What did selecting it for this promotion do towards the betterment of the Xbox Live Indie Game scene?  Players who are not as gung-ho about Indie games are going to play this and let out a collective “meh.”  This was not a showcase of what I know an Indie game is capable of, and it’s not going to win over the hearts of those who don’t care to learn just how good an Indie game can be.  What it did was prove that a small development team lacking a budget and professional game design credentials doesn’t have the capability of making a halfway decent rip-off of one of the most cherished games of all time.  Hell, I could have told you that.

Battle High: Elemental Revolt was developed by Mattrified Games

80 Microsoft Points were seriously wondering when, or if, one of these games is actually going to rise up during this uprising in the making of this review.

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Inferno!

Inferno! received a Second Chance with the Chick.  Click here to read it.  Consider this review the definitive review of the game. 

Inferno is a 1984 coin-op isometric shooter by Williams where you play as a dude who has to.. oh wait, wrong Inferno.

Okay, let’s try again.  Inferno is an Xbox Live Indie Game twin-stick shooter by radiangames where.. fuck, that’s not the right game either.

Do you guys see how this can get confusing?  I mean damn, Indie games have enough trouble finding an audience without giving them the exact same names as other stuff already out there.  If you’re going to go through all the trouble of making a game, at least give it a name that will stick out in a Google search.  Yeesh.

Okay, so the game I actually played was Inferno!  I guess it’s supposed to stick out because it has an exclamation mark, as if it’s being yelled out.  Yea, well what if I walk into a room where two guys are screaming at each other over obscure, lost Williams games from 1984 that never were included in Arcade Treasure compilations?  What then, mother fuckers?  WHAT THEN?

Terribly sorry for that whole episode folks.  Won’t happen again.

So Inferno!  You play as this tank-train thingie that has to travel across rails shooting at various enemies while scooping up items and sucking up all the lava on each stage.  It’s kind of like Battle City meets Make Trax.  And if even half of you have actually played those games I’ll eat my hat.

The graphics are straight out of the 80s, a style I normally like.  Here, it’s a bit more problematic.  There are lots of different items that you can find, but they’re hard to distinguish from one-another.  I had the same issues with spotting the enemy cannons.  They don’t really stick out enough, and your dude moves  so fast that you don’t always have time to sit still and get a lay of the land.  Don’t get me wrong, the graphics are well done for the most part, but the little problems can cause some big headaches.

Where the game really shines is level design.  Early on, things are bit more straight forward.  Scoop up the lava, get to the exit.  Later, gates and keys are introduced that segment the stages and create a nice sense of exploration.  Unfortunately, at times there’s so many cannons firing that it gives Inferno! almost a bullet-hell feel.  And this is not helped by loose controlling that sometimes makes turning corners difficult, even with the D-pad.  This can be made even worse by a “helpful” item that speeds up your movement.  It reminded me of the shoe in Bubble Bobble where getting it cripples the control scheme and makes accuracy next to impossible.

The biggest flaw in the game is the continue system.  Every four levels, you play a “bonus stage.”  Normally in games, these are fun little chances to rack up some extra items.  For whatever reason, the developer of Inferno! instead went the dick-move route of having you earn the right to continue in them.  You have to get every single item to get a password (no shit, a password, in 2011!) that allows you to return to the latest world you’ve reached if you game over.  And just to complete the assholery of this, you have to do it with the game’s already slippery controls and a very short time limit.  Seriously, that whole system is as bad an idea as betting on the fattest greyhound at the track.

Overall, Inferno! was just alright for me.  The concept is neat and the level design can be inspired, but the controls are a little too unforgiving and the whole password system can fuck off.  There is some fun to be had, but you’re likely to be frustrated by game’s end.  It’s also kind of overpriced at 240MSP.  At 80MSP, I think I could have given it a slightly more enthusiastic seal of approval, instead of the one I just gave it that’s attached using boogers and phlegm.

Inferno! was developed by Williams radiangames Dante Alighieri Archifishal Software

240 Microsoft Points let us descend into the blind world in the making of this review.

UPDATE: Inferno! now costs 80 Microsoft Points as of January 7, 2012.  For more information read the Second Chance with the Chick review of Inferno!

Video courtsey of Indies onPause.

Raventhorne

It’s finally time for the 2011 Indie Games Summer Uprising to begin.  I’ve been looking forward to this, and I was totally pleased to see that Raventhorne by Milkstone Studios was going to be the launch title for the event.  I watched the trailer with my boyfriend and was impressed by the graphics.  As for the gameplay, it looked kind of like a modern version of ActRaiser.  What’s not to love about that?

Try everything.

I’m not joking.  In the five and a half hours it took me to beat Raventhorne (including the occasional break to hold a pillow over my face and scream profanity) I could not find one single aspect of its game play that I felt would even qualify as mediocre.  This is one of the very worst games on the entire Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace.  As a game, it has no redeeming value.

Raventhorne might have briefly made me think of ActRaiser when viewing the trailer, but in reality it plays like a Double Dragon style brawler with some very mild platforming thrown in.  You play as a dude who looks like he mixed and matched a Wolverine costume with that of Hawkman’s.  He carries around a sword and a hammer and he has no memory of what he was doing, but apparently he’s some fallen Norse hero. The plot is horrible, cliched, and boring.  It sets the tone for the game play nicely.

Where to begin with the actual game itself?  How about we start with the first fucking enemy.  You fight using the X button for light attacks and the Y button for heavy attacks.  So the first baddie appears and you whack him a few times.  It doesn’t really phase him.  It doesn’t even knock him down.  He’s still free to swing at you.  So I tried throwing some heavy shots.  Still nothing.  Finally I just started mashing the buttons until he died.  Now in reality this whole sequence will take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute, but it somehow feels longer.  And this is supposed to be the opening action hook of the game that draws you in.

Combat is all kinds of broken.  Your dude is slow to react to everything, and all the enemies move faster than you.  So if you try to dial in a combo, you’re likely to end up swinging at air while the enemies chew on your delicious ass.  While fighting, you can get knocked down, which seems to grant you some kind of invincibility.  That would great, except by time you get up the enemies have had a chance to close in and completely gang bang you.

Allegedly you have some kind of shield.  I say allegedly because it doesn’t really work.  The game claims there’s some kind of timing defense thing that will help restore stamina or life or mana or something, but either I couldn’t get the timing for it down (and I was trying, oh God how I was trying) or it’s so strict that nobody could reasonably expect to pull it off with any consistency.

By the way, we’re still only talking about just the combat.  And trust me, there’s a lot more to go over.  That shield I just mentioned?  If you hold it out, it might do the trick, albeit in a completely boring way.  More often than not you’ll have an enemy on both sides of you, so trying to defend against one is a waste of time. You can also sometimes pick off an enemy by taking a swing at it, stepping back, waiting for it to swing and miss, then walking forward and taking another swing.  Any rational person will also recognize this as boring.  But sometimes it’s the only way to fight something.  If you try to dial in combos, you’re going to get killed.

And then there’s the stamina gauge.  Every time you swing a weapon, you lose stamina.  If  your meter runs out, your guys collapses to one knee and starts sucking on wind like he’s been smoking by the carton since he was in the womb.  This isn’t a big issue early on when you’re fighting one guy at a time and taking your time lightly poking at baddies like you’re playing with a Nerf fencing saber.  But when there’s a clusterfuck of six guys fighting you, you’re going to need to attack in a brisk manner.  This isn’t possible because nobody ever introduced this bad ass hero of the people to the concept of cardio training.

There is a level up system, but I’ll be fucked if I can figure out what good it’s for.  No matter how high you climb, bad guys absorb damage like sponges and it never seems to let up.  There’s three different combat stances that allegedly change the amount of damage you dish out and the amount of damage you receive.  Again, it never seemed to make a difference.  My dude always took a boat load of damage no matter what stance I was in, and the baddies just stood there like the Rock of Gibraltar taking whatever I could dish out.  As a result, every time there’s more than three enemies on-screen at once, the game becomes a battle of attrition.

There is a spell system too.  To activate it, you hold the left bumper and press one of the four face buttons.  One will cause an electricity blast that effects all the enemies on-screen.  Kinda.  I’m guessing it doesn’t really do more damage than the average useless strong attack because all the baddies will still be upright, all still biting at you, and usually still several combos away from death.  I mean Christ, I’ve seen static electricity do more damage.  There’s also a spell that prevents you from losing stamina.  Sounds great, except it doesn’t last long and the average baddie in this game still has a health meter greater than most final bosses I’ve seen.

The other two spells work better.  You can restore your health with one.  The other boosts your attack strength temporarily.  Unlike the bullshit with the stances, this one does work.  However, the magic system also sucks because it takes too fucking long to fill up the mana meter.  You get a teeny tiny sliver of it for every bad guy you kill, and you can also pick up some crystals that restore it.  But every spell requires a full meter to use it, and thus you’ll only get two, maybe three uses of it each stage.

Okay, finally we’re done with the combat.  All that’s left is the level design.  It sucks.  You walk around, collecting gems and whacking bad guys.  Occasionally you’ll have to jump on platforms, but I’m not sure why they bothered with this since it doesn’t add anything to the game.  The jumping elements usually are limited to one or two rocks to hop across and maybe an option on which path to take.  But it adds nothing to the combat, and fights usually take place on smooth, flat terrain anyway.

Oh, and don’t expect an ending or any sort of climatic moment.  The game just ends with the promise that things will be continued.  Yea, fuck that.  Next time make sure the game doesn’t suck before leaving things on a cliffhanger.

How could one game get so many things wrong?  Hell, the law of averages says that some aspect of the game play would have come out decent, even if it was by accident.  That’s not the case here.  Nothing is fun about Raventhorne.  It’s riddled with horrible design choices that only serve to eliminate fun.  Like the stamina meter.  What purpose towards enhancing the experience does it serve?  Realism?  Right, because a fucking dude who’s already established as being dead is really going to have problems with oxygen saturation.  Besides, he runs and jumps around carrying a sword, a shield, and a god damn sledge-hammer.  He doesn’t get tired from that.  What, does he have tendonitis or something?

I can’t believe this was picked to not only be part of the Uprising, but the flagship title to launch the event.  No really, I mean that.  I literally cannot believe it.  Please, unveil the real game.  I want to play it.  We’ll call this one a mulligan.  Raventhorne was boring, plodding, slow, clunky, repetitive, unbalanced, and overall just a gargantuan pile of shit.

Graphics were nice though.

Raventhorne was developed by Milkstone Studios

240 Microsoft Points always loved that word, gargantuan, but so rarely get to use it in a sentence in the making of this review.

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Torque Quest

Torque Quest is a point and click game by some Spanish guys with writing so painfully unfunny that I had to quit  after about thirty minutes.  I have my limits, and this crossed them.  In the campaign mode almost every single line of dialog I encountered involved either the main character wanting to fuck everything, talking about how fuckable something was, or getting drunk.  This is a 13-year-old’s idea of humor.  I almost feel a little embarrassed for the developers.  Every line is so cringe worthy and stupid that I literally winced in shame.  It’s not even well written.  I guess when the joke is “the dude wants to fuck the tailpipe of a car” it’s supposed to speak for itself.  All it speaks to me is that any guy who would write this kind of dialog likely wouldn’t know actual pussy if it sat on his face and wiggled.

What is actually supposed to be funny here?  Oooh, there’s Cthulhu!  Look at him, doing something totally un-Cthulhu like.  Fucking hilarious!  Um, no.  It’s a joke that got tired about halfway through Cthulhu Saves the World you talentless, unoriginal cunts.  And in case that doesn’t make you laugh (it won’t), let’s call stuff “gay” and talk about cumming on things.  Oh oh oh, I got one, let’s talk about male cats raping each other.  That shit’s fucking gold baby, gold!  It’s all right there in Torque Quest, the most unfunny thing in the entirety of human existence.  You’re off the hook, Dave Coulier.

Torque Quest was developed by varga

80 Microsoft Points said to the developers “ustedes no tienen talento!” in the making of this review.

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Doc Logic

Okay, so I’ve busted on so called “retro-poser” games once or twice here at IndieGamerChick, but I do admit that I greatly prefer that style of graphics and game play over samey generic platforming or twin stick shooting.  It’s not lost on me that six of the games currently on my leaderboard have that old-school flavor to them.  But you’ll also notice that all six of those games also try to do something original and the retro graphics are just the garnish.

The advantage of a game like Parasitus over a game like Oozi: Earth Adventure is that one captured the feeling that it was a lost treasure that couldn’t find a developer.  The other seems more like a game you’ve heard of and maybe even played, but it just wasn’t memorable enough to leave an impression on you.  All the best retro-themed games manage to hit that sweet spot of familiarity mixed with originality.  The bad ones are those where the entirety of game play has already been stale for decades, like the buns they use at McDonalds.

Doc Logic is the latest game I’ve purchased off the marketplace, and it wants to be 80s style old-school so bad that it wears it’s hat backwards and listens to the New Kids on the Block.  You play as a dude-thingie who looks like the long-lost fifth Ninja Turtle that I affectionately nicknamed Raphaelotradio.  Using him, you run around shooting things and grabbing envelopes.  There’s five envelopes scattered on each stage at one time.  When you grab all five, you “level up” and more enemies appear.  When you level up five times, the map expands.  You do this until you reach level 15 in the normal game mode or level 20 in the “Turbo” mode.  And I use the sarcastic quotes for the word “Turbo” because it pretty much is just the same game at the same speed.  Why call it “Turbo Mode” then?  Wouldn’t “Same Shit Only Slightly Longer Mode?” be more suitable?  The game has a time limit, which increases by a few seconds every time you pick up an envelope.

Doc Logic almost hits the sweet spot for originality in an old school suit.  It has fast paced and very frantic game play.  But there’s quite a few things off.  The biggest problem is the collision detection sucks.  Sometimes it works to your advantage, like when you stand several platforms above an enemy and swing your weapon in any direction but where the enemy is facing and still kill it.  Of course, this means that when you’re on a mad dash from point A to point B, you have to make sure you don’t come within spitting distance of any enemies because if you do, you’re bound to take damage.  It seems to vary from enemy to enemy too.  I could kill the guys who fire projectiles at Raphaelotradio if I so much as glared at my television.  But some baddies I would hit at close range and they would pass right through my bullets or sword swinging punch weapon thingie and still inflict damage on me.  Trying to keep track of which glitches are helpful and which will screw you over is rarely a sign of a good game.  You don’t have a health meter.  Instead, getting hit causes you to sit there and convulse while seconds tick away, as if you’re trying to shake off cooties.

Honestly, I still liked Doc Logic.  It’s not a great game by any means, but its a decent waste of an hour, and the $1 price tag certainly makes it attractive.  It does manage to do a good job of creating a sense of urgency, although it’s not always fair about it.  As the map expands, the amount of time you get from envelopes should expand as well.  The amount of additional time you get from them seems almost random.  But the controls work and the graphics are nice in an Amiga sort of way.  Yea, the glitches are a huge pain in the ass, but in this case it’s not a deal breaker.  Besides, I learned a valuable life lesson: if a giant turtle thingy is standing ten feet above me and waving it’s arms at random, it means I’m likely to blink out of existence at any second.  Either that or someone spiked my Pepsi with peyote.  Again.

Doc Logic was developed by Cosmic Logic

80 Microsoft Points said that a giant turtle thingy who can kill enemies ten feet away by waving its arms in random directions is the most logical thing I’ve heard of all day in the making of this review.

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GravArena

GravArena is a local-multiplayer-only arena shooter where you play as a spaceship and watch yourself and your friends die by flying out of the play field.  That would be okay if it was a Smash Bros style “knock your opponents off the board” type of game, but it’s not.

Behold the almighty space clusterfuck in all it's glory!

The blurb for the game promises “realistic gravity physics.”  I’ve never been in space, so I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is if you use your thrusters and travel more than halfway across the board, you’re likely going to fly clean off it no matter how hard you to try to swing your momentum in another direction.  The play field is too small for what the game wants you to do with it.  It would be like trying to land a Boeing 747 on your driveway.

If you can actually get used to the physics, you’ll still have to deal with the screen being spammed with various bullets and space anomalies.  You can add or subtract gravity wells and asteroids from the play field in the options menu.  Trying to play with these effects turns an already difficult-to-follow game into an unmitigated clusterfuck.  It’s as if they were trying to take the Michael Bay approach to game design: just throw as much shit out there as possible and hope it comes out coherent.  It didn’t.

The final killing blow for GravArena is the lack of online play.  Why this wasn’t included, I have no clue.  Maybe it was too hard to program.  Maybe they knew it would be next to impossible to find more than two people silly enough to actually buy this crap.  I don’t know, and I don’t care.  GravArena sucks so hard it can whistle from its own asshole.

GravArena was developed by Squire Software

80 Microsoft Points think Uranus should be renamed Urrektum in the making of this review.

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Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie

Christ, my right hand hurts.  I began playing Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie at about noon today.  Now, it’s nearly twelve hours later and I finally have finished the game.  Oh, it doesn’t have twelve hours of game play in it.  Maybe two hours tops.  No, it took me twelve hours because Julie’s control scheme is one of the most torturous I’ve ever encountered and I required multiple breaks to ice my hand and cry.

Before I get to the game, I have to comment on the mind-numbingly fucked up storyline.  You play as a former MSA reconnaissance agent who specializes in doing flips on a motorcycle to infiltrate enemy territory.  No really.  I’m not fucking with you here.  And she gets pulled out of her gig as a stunt woman by Polish Intelligence and has to oh my God I can’t go on.  This shit is surreal.  Salvador Dalí would blush.

The game itself is a little more straight forward.  You ride around on a bike, doing flips and shooting things down.  I learned two important life lessons in this game.  First, an Uzi can take out tanks and fighter jets with just a couple of shots.  Who knew?  Second, and most importantly, injuries including but not limited to bullet wounds can be healed by doing back-flips on motorcycles.  I never would have guessed that would work.  Following the publication of this I plan on hijacking a Harley and flipping off ramps to decripple my hand.

I wasn’t trying to be cute or humorous when I started this review by immediately bitching about my hand hurting.  Even just one or two levels of Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie are enough to induce physical pain.  The control scheme is just too flawed.  You have to use the right trigger for the gas while simultaneously holding the right analog stick to fire.  Needless to say your thenar eminence is going to hate you.

Just Google it.

Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie combines elements of twin-stick shooters with stunt-racing and the end result is a game that oozes with potential.  After a couple of levels you get the ability to use a nitro burst to help launch off of ramps.  While doing this, you’re supposed to flip through the air while still shooting stuff.  Even later in the game you’re given a combo system that you can fill to restore health.  At first I thought it was dumb and ignored it.  But once I figured out the benefits of doing it, I became a combo craving nutcase.  This culminated in a bit where I went off a ramp, boosted in the air, did multiple flips while shooting at various landmines and rocket launchers, bounced across the top of five fighter jets, hit the nitro boost again, blew up the jets, flipped a few more times, then shot a tank on the way down.  Most shocking of all, I actually stuck the landing and the combo counted.  It was pretty much the coolest single moment I’ve had as the Indie Gamer Chick thus far.  Sure, my hand was filing for legal separation, but it was worth it!

Having said that, twenty levels is just way too much.  After a while the game doesn’t have anything else to offer and you just keep repeating the same missions with different backdrops.  Occasionally they’ll throw you a crap one, like having to blow up warehouses.  They’ll also send some extra baddies at you but they’re pretty easy to figure out.  Most of the dangerous stuff fired at you can be shot out of the air with one bullet.  As far as changing locales goes, on one stage the ground will be green and the next it will be white.  Feel free to sarcastically spin your finger in the air.  I would if I still had working fingers.

Motorcycle Stunt Agent Julie wasn’t much to look at.  The graphics are very minimalist and all moving characters are represented by silhouettes.  The music is perhaps the worst thing about this game.  It’s really annoying Euro-pop crap that’s sure to cause your ears to projectile-vomit out puss.  There’s also voice acting that developer Mattini Games is quite proud of.  I’m sure they are, in the same way I was proud of the ceramic duck I made when I was six-years-old.  It felt cool to be involved in its creation, even if our respective creations were of poor quality and likely to induce some kind of toxic shock upon use.

So the graphics are poor, the music is awful, the controls could very well cause injury, and the whole experience is repetitive.  Bad game, right?  Wrong.  It’s actually fun.  At least in spurts.  I really had a great time trying to pull off the highest possible combos.  Bouncing myself off planes and carpeting the terrain with bullets was hugely satisfying.  Overall, I would say that Motorbike Stunt Agent Julie is worth your dollar.  And hey, mix it with some extended Guitar Hero sessions and a good wanking or two and you could very well destroy your hand and land yourself a monthly disability check!  Cha-Ching!

Motorcycle Stunt Agent Julie was developed by Mattini Games

80 Microsoft Points regrets the jokes I found funny at age 22 in the making of this review.

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