The Cannon (Second Chance with the Chick)

Back in July I attempted to review The Cannon and it promptly crashed my entire Xbox four times.  As it turns out, the problem was my Gamertag (IndieGamerChick, doyyyy) was too long without any spaces.  Huh.  Figure that.  I had already put up a one paragraph review of my non-playtime with the game.  Upon being promised the game would be patched, I heard from some developers that they feel most review sites don’t go back to games that had glitches.  That’s not in the spirit of IndieGamerChick.com, so I’ve come up with Second Chance with the Chick.  A one-time-only redo for any game that I’ve reviewed that had some major issue that got fixed.  And so far nobody had taken me up on it.  Thankfully Elemental Focus has stepped up the plate to request The Cannon get a second chance.  And man, I’m happy they did, because it’s seriously fucking awesome!

Here’s the deal: I really didn’t think this game would be any good.  It seemed so bland and boring during the tutorial, and the graphics looked like someone Photoshopped a Simon on top of a generic Windows wallpaper.

See? Practically indistinguishable.

But in reality, it’s really fun.  You take control of the titular cannon and fire four different types of artillery at a handful of baddies.  Ninjas, pirates, robots, monkeys, zombies, and aliens.  All the XBLIG staples are here!  Well, almost.  What, couldn’t work in avatars or massage apps too, Elemental Focus?  Actually, it’s funny I mentioned the massage thing.  At  one point a glitch did happen and my controller wouldn’t stop vibrating.  But not like a constant shaking, like it had Parkinson’s disease.  Just a tiny “thump” once a second, like a heartbeat.  I swear, for a second I thought The Cannon had brought my controller to life, Johnny Five style.

I played through campaign mode, which features fifteen stages.  Enemies run at you from all sides and you have to shoot them using whatever kind of ammo they’re allergic to.  Each different weapon has a different effect.  For example, if you shoot a pirate with fire, it’s slows them down because it burns off their peg legs.  Not that you can actually see that.  The graphics are still shit and proud of it.  That’s the one thing holding The Cannon back, because everything else works wonderfully.  It makes the game the William Defoe of the Indie scene: hideous to look at, maybe even nauseating, but damn fine at what it does.

I found the best strategy was to freeze enemies with the ice gun, then melt them with the fireballs.  The game tells you specifically to do this to the zombies, but I thought it was pretty much the best strategy for everything but the robots and the aliens.  However, unlike some games where I can grow content using the same strategy over and over until the credits roll, here I actually felt compelled to change things up, just for the sake of variety.   If you shoot an enemy with a fireball, it will bounce off them and maybe hit another one.  That was the highlight of the game for me.  It got to the point where I was using the snaring vine to lasso enemies and drop them off close to each-other, followed by shooting a single fireball towards the pack and watching it ricochet between them.  I’ve always liked games that let you experiment with your own tactics.  It makes me feel like I’m Douglas MacArthur, only less insane.  Or more insane, depending on what time of the month it is.

In addition to the campaign, there are multiplayer modes that I didn’t get time to mess around with, along with a few variations of time attacks and survival.  Those were fun too, and I could see myself going back to unlock all the utterly generic backgrounds that were hidden in the game.  Okay, so I do have to rag on the graphics a little more, because they are so bad that they would embarrass NDSS.  Google it.  There’s also a really terrible song included during the end credits that is annoying, grating, and just horrible.  Okay, so I downloaded it to my iPod.  Doesn’t mean anything.  I swear I’ll only listen to it a dozen more times.

Overall, I really liked The Cannon a lot.  It’s got a wonderful combination of strategic action mixed with some really funny British humor.  I actually want to thank Elemental Focus for patching it, because I almost missed out on a really good time.  Sure, it’s ugly.  Big deal, so is Maggie Gyllenhaal, but we didn’t let that ruin our enjoyment of Dark Knight, now did we?

The Cannon was developed by Elemental Focus

80 Microsoft Points said “her acting almost killed it, but not her cringe-inducing looks” in the making of this review.

The original review of The Cannon can be found here, but it should be completely ignored.  Kind of a dick move on my part to even leave it up.  What can I say, I’m a bitch.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Parasitus: Ninja Zero

You know what I love about Parasitus: Ninja Zero?  It feels like a Super Famicom game that just now got translated for North America to be on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  There are a lot of titles on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace that try to feel like a 16-bit era release, but there’s always something a bit off about the presentation.  Something undoubtedly modern and out-of-place.   Parasitus is the first game I’ve seen that completely captures the look and sound of that era, as if it fell through a wrinkle in time.  It’s too bad it dragged the gameplay of that era with it.

In Parasitus you play as a sword wielding dude who runs around slicing up various mutant thingies.  That’s pretty much all I got out of the story.  There is a scene early on where the dude spins around while he gets sucked back in time, Buck Rogers style. The gameplay consists of slicing up a few baddies, walking forward and slicing up a few more baddies, then walking forward a little more and slicing up some more baddies.  It’s totally repetitive, sort of like this paragraph was, but the feel and style of the game make up for it.

You use the A button to jump and the X and Y buttons to pull of various combos.  Every so often you’ll learn a new one, which breaks the flow of the game as the graphics and frame rate grind to an awkward halt.  The new button combos appear on-screen for about a second, then disappear.  Weird, but whatever.  You can still pause the game to bring them up.  But don’t bother with that shit.  Sometime during the second level you should learn the quadruple-X combo, which is all you need to know.  X four times, bam, mutant genocide.  William Stryker never had it so easy.

Going back to the graphics, they’re really awesome.  If this had come out in 1993 it would have been hailed as a technical marvel and praised for its lighting, shading, and camera-shaking effects.  The cool part is they are done with such flare and style that they still dazzle today.  Yea, I used the word “dazzle.”  Sue me.  The music is really great too.  The sound the effects on the other hand, fucking yikes.  There’s some big, scary looking skeletal thingies and some flying, er um, whatchamathingies that dive bomb at you.  Frightening stuff, but the fucked up thing is when you kill them they sound like kittens being run over by lawnmowers.  That’s not me trying to be funny.  That’s actually what it sounds like.  It’s so wrong and out-of-place that it took me out of the experience.  The game looks cool, so it’s wrong to laugh at it, but that’s what I did a lot.

By the way, don’t bother asking how I know what a kitten being run over by a lawnmower sounds like.  Long story involving a six-year-old me, a John Deere riding lawnmower, and a calico kitten named Mrs. Flufferstein.  Sigh.  It haunts me to this day. Talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

Where was I?  Ah yes, Parasitus.  There’s five levels to play through, with only a small handful of sorted baddies.  This is exactly the type of game I normally would hate, but I really enjoyed it.  Yea, it’s just the same shit over and over for an hour, but it’s done really well.  The game moves at an extremely fast pace.  Your guy runs at a speed usually reserved for men trying to defuse a bomb surgically attached to their scrotum.  The level designs are cliched and at times kind of dull, but they zip by so fast that you don’t really have time to get bored by them.  And the combat is really well done.  Despite the fact that I treated Parasitus like an X button calibration tool, I really never got tired beating up the various monsters that it tosses at you.

So basically what I’m saying is Parasitus is worth your $3.  It’s old school done right.  It retains the look, sound, and feel of a game from that era without actively poaching any one title.  Yea, I’ve busted on other titles for doing the exact same thing.  What can I say, I’m a hypocrite.  Maybe it’s because it’s not aping a genre that was done to death during that period, like the platformer.  I can’t explain why, I just know I really liked Parasitus.  So party like it’s 1993!  Let’s all smoke crack and listen to Ace of Base!

Parasitus: Ninja Zero was developed by H.A.M. Games

240 Microsoft Points opened up their eyes and saw the sign in the making of this review. 

Note: Parasitus was apparently patched sometime before I purchased the game.  Previous reviewers likely covered an earlier version of it that had a glitch/bad design choice relating to the damage done on the enemies.  The patched version doesn’t seem to have that.  If you did review it, don’t be a bitch, redo your review.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Astroman

Damn.  I really thought I was going to like Astroman a ton.  After all, it’s a Metroid style game, which is my all time favorite genre.  It even looks like Metroid.  Kinda.  Like in a Fisher Price sort of way.  And it has all the stuff you find in these style games, like ability upgrades, health packs, energy packs, and lots of enemies inspired by Metroid.  On top of all that, I got at least a half-dozen fans writing in telling me that it was better than LaserCat.

Astroman is brought to you by the letter "A" and by contributions from people like you!

I tried not to set my expectations too high.  I’ve been disappointed a few times before on here and I always feel that maybe I’m too hard on a game if I expect it not to suck.  And I have to say that Astroman doesn’t completely suck.  It sucks just enough to still work but not be all that, like an off-brand vacuum cleaner.

You play as this dude who has to go around and explore planets for some reason.  If the story was ever explained, I missed it.  Regardless, you travel from planet to planet, looking for various upgrades for yourself and your ship.  There’s nine planets to explore, although there’s only three total environments.  Each is fairly large and full of assorted baddies.  Using your gun, you shoot them, scour each stage for upgrades, and find the exit.

Here’s the problem: it’s boring!   There’s not a very large variety of enemies, and the ones present are rarely threatening.  You have a limited amount of ammo in your gun, but I had no trouble keeping my supply of bullets well stocked.  The upgrades to your character take too long to acquire.  And those are just my minor quibbles.

The big ones are a lot more damning.  Like leaving out a map system for the stages.  That feature would have really cut down on the tedium.  For example, on the 6th planet I had to replay it five times before I found the ship upgrade needed to reach the next three stages.  Most of the stage you have limited visibility, which makes exploration feel more like a chore than an activity one would do for fun.  But I swear I checked out every nook and cranny looking for that damn thruster for my ship and, as it turns out, I passed right by it every time.  It was just easy to miss because you couldn’t see the fucking thing.  Maybe I’m more thick than I previously thought possible, but still I would like to have had a map.

The level hub system can fuck off as well.  You travel from planet to planet using your spaceship.  In order to reach planets four through six, you need to acquire a cannon to shoot away at an asteroid belt.  This takes way too long and if you leave the map screen and come back, so do the asteroids.  This is busy work, the kind your asshole boss assigns you if he feels you’re too happy.  You also die instantly if you touch any of them, or if you get shot down by a pointless UFO that cruises around.  There’s no consequence if that happens.  Hell, it doesn’t even make the asteroids respawn.  It’s just annoying, like if you had to reprogram your toilet every time you wanted to flush it.

Astroman is one of those games where the developers needed someone with a sense of discretion hovering nearby to point out what design choices were bad ideas.  The pacing is all wrong.  It takes too damn long to get cool upgrades to your suit, like the hover function.  The level designs can be annoying, especially the areas where the game is in the dark.  You often can’t tell the background apart from ledges that can be stood on, and end up having to start a tedious climb over again.

So is it fun?  Sometimes it is, most of the time it’s not.  That’s pretty much the best answer I can give.  Astroman does have a lot going for it.  It’s a lengthy and functional shooter that provides a decent challenge and has nice graphics and music.  But it’s often too plodding to really hook you in and the lack of some common-sense mechanics, like maps for levels or the ability to shoot in directions other than straight forward really sink this one.  They had something going here, and a sequel with the right additions could be one of the top games on the marketplace.  Until then, Astroman is about as exciting as water-flavored cotton candy.

Astroman was developed by StarQuail Games

240 Microsoft Points lost their heart to a starship trooper in the making of this review.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Kick’n It

Back in 1982, a woman running Atari’s North American marketing department gloated to a co-worker that she had just secured the rights to make a video game based on Rubik’s Cube.  She asked the co-worker, who ran Atari’s international marketing department, whether or not his division would be interested in handling the game as well.  “Absolutely not!” he said.  She was shocked and demanded an explanation.  “Well, you’ll have to explain to me why a $40 electronic rendition of a product is better than the $4 version that is portable and I can take anywhere I want.”

The game later became Atari Video Cube, which sold bad enough to become a hot collector’s item.  The guy who rejected the game was Steven Race, who went on to become CEO of various toy and video game companies, and the man most directly responsible for bringing the original Playstation to North America.  I never heard what happened to the girl so I’m going to just assume she suffocated to death on her own mouth.

I was reminded of that story while playing Kick’n It, which I came to know as “Video Hacky Sack” over the last couple hours.  It’s a game where you use your avatar to repeatedly kick a footbag.  No, really!  Using the A, B, and Y buttons you try to keep a footbag in the air.  You can also use the right trigger to catch and hold the bag with your foot and perform tricks.  That’s pretty much it.

Kick’n It has a lot of modes of play.  You start with a tutorial that takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes to finish.  Following that is a variety of free-style modes and “tournaments” where the gravity gets stronger.  There’s also a selection of two-player modes, including volleyball and a game where the sack is replaced by a bomb.  Personally, I find adding bombs to any equation makes something more interesting.  Candy Land with bombs?  Awesome.  Figure skating with bombs?  Radical.  Bowling with a bomb for a ball and pins made up of bombs?  Sign me up for league.  I’m slightly impressed that Kick’n It boldly goes where no endeavor in the history of humanity has gone before: adding bombs to something and getting more boring as a result.

The game sometimes works.  On the slower freestyle mode you can pull off various tricks and try to work your way onto a local-only high score board that nobody but yourself will ever occupy.  As for all other modes, there’s two major problems going here.  First, transitioning from one type of kick to another can be slow and clunky.  Second is your avatar scuttles back and forth like it just shit it’s pants and is trying to play it cool.  It doesn’t move quickly enough and neither does your ability to kick, so on the faster game modes doing the higher-scoring tricks is practically impossible.  And forget about those multiplayer modes because they all demand quick reflexes, and your avatar moves around as if it just huffed a nice lung full of paint fumes.

Overall, I just don’t see the point in Kick’n It.  This isn’t a game about living out your fantasies as an NFL player or being a space marine.  You can buy an actual Hacky Sack for $3.  I never had before, but I figured “why not?”  I mean it would kind of be silly of me to criticize something that I had never tried before.  So I went and bought one and kicked it around for a bit.  And you know what?  It wasn’t that bad.  After about ten minutes of practice I could do several volleys in a row and even catch the bag on my foot.  It felt like I had actually accomplished something.  Sure, I also developed a sudden craving to wear a backpack, start smoking pot, and collect a welfare check, but it still beat playing an utterly worthless video game version of the same damn thing.

Kick’n It was developed by K-Dog Games

240 Microsoft Points felt this game was about 160 points overpriced in the making of this review.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

The Atari Video Cube story I read in Steven L. Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games.  Check it out! 

Blow Me Up

The Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace sometimes reminds me of a thrift outlet in the middle of nowhere.  You’ll find great prices on products that sound oddly familiar, like Magnosonic or Reebonike.  You’ll try to convince yourself that it’s the same product and the big players just pay for advertising.  Chances are whatever you buy will fall apart within weeks and possibly catch your house on fire in the process.  But sometimes that Crapple ePad you bought turns out to be a pretty good deal.  Blow Me Up is feels like a thrift outlet version of  ‘Splosion Man.  But its honestly not that bad.

You play as a dude who looks like Bart Simpson mated with SpongeBob SquarePants.  In order to move him you point him in the direction you want to go, then charge up your power.  When you let go, an explosion will send him and anything within the blast radius flying.  You have a limited amount of power that gets used up based on how much you make your dude explode.  The object is to get to what looks like a pool of semen to clear each stage.

In some stages, you instead play as a pig that has to blow up all the other animals on the stage.  I found these to be a bit dull and nowhere near as challenging.  There’s thirty levels to play with, the final of which is just a useless semi-sandbox to fuck around in.  I found the puzzles to be fairly easy to figure out and rarely hard to pull off.  There were one or two times where I was momentary frustrated to the point where I was grateful there was nobody within stabbing distance of me, but otherwise Blow Me Up is breezy.

It’s also pretty fun too.  Yea, Blow Me Up feels like the skid row version of ‘Splosion Man.  I’m sure it will be a hit though.  The adult themes are sure to draw in the tween crowd who get their rocks off on anything that has the most vaguely defined sexual content in it.  It’s the reason why my review of Trailer Park King has more views at IndieGamerChick.com than all other games combined, most of which come from a key word search for “trailer park king nudity.”  Really people?  Are you that desperate?  Wouldn’t a Google search for actual nudity be more helpful?  It makes me think that if someone wants to make a smash hit Xbox Live Indie Game, they should just make one about an anamorphic cock looking for its long lost vagina.  Don’t think it would get past the Microsoft censors?  It already did, and they called it Halo.

Blow Me Up was developed by Stegersaurus Games

80 Microsoft Points believe Gears of War is just an allegory for erectile dysfunction as well in the making of this review.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Andromium

Update: Andromium is no longer available following the Great XBLIG Purge.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if you crossed a horizontal space shooter with Hot Potato, wonder no more. That’s pretty much what Andromium is, minus the shooting part. I have to admit, when I saw the trailer for this a few weeks back, I thought it looked stupid. And even when playing it, my early impression was not very good. This proves why my decision to never try demos was a good one, because Andromium is a seriously amazing game.

In Andromium you play as a pair of space ships that must continuously pass a ball of energy between them while auto-scrolling through eight stages filled with various traps.  Whether you play alone or with a partner, the game is set up with a split-screen. If you play with a partner, you both dodge obstacles while passing the ball between each other. If you hold onto the ball too long, you die. You have three hearts, and if you lose them all you also die. Losing lives deducts points from your total. The object of each stage is to clear the target number of points set for it.

If you play single player, an AI partner with no bullets or obstacles to dodge fills in and does a suitable job. The funny thing is, whether you play with a partner or not doesn’t really matter. You never really feel like you’re working with someone. There’s just too much to pay attention to that you both forget the other is there. It’s really very bizarre.  Playing with the AI felt more right to me. Don’t get me wrong, playing with someone else works great too. Especially if you’re at a point in your relationship where you feel you don’t ignore each other enough.

There’s eight stages, all of which feature randomly generated layouts. The themes for them range from dollar-store generic to “what the fuck were they on?” inspired. There’s a stage featuring beautiful neon graphics. There’s a stage themed after classic video games, complete with Mario-style coin collecting. There’s a stage where killer whales jump from toilet to toilet. There’s a.. you know what, fuck it. Once you’ve noted that there’s a stage where killer whales hop from toilet to toilet you’ve really said all you need to.

The controls are very smooth and accurate. Passing the ball is super easy too. There’s no aiming it, so you just press the A button and watch it glide gingerly from your side of the screen to your partner’s. The ball has a timer on it that was the most frequent reason I died. And you know what? I chuckled every time I blew myself up doing it. It’s amazing how you can forget such a key component to the game so many times, but I often did hold the ball too long and was always amused when it happened.

I do have a couple of complaints. One is that the ordering of the levels seems wrong. On more than one occasion I had difficulty beating one level, which was then immediately followed by one that was a total breeze. It gives the game a difficulty curve that looks like Bart Simpson’s hair. My second complaint is a little more severe. Sometimes the traps and obstacles are just not very easy to see. This is especially a problem on the final stage, where the gears that you have to avoid are not drawn in a way to stick out, making it easier to lose track of them. Finally, there’s no Xbox Live support. I don’t want to sound like a broken record but this is the second time this month I’ve played a game that would have been #1 on the IndieGamerChick leader board if it had offered online play. Developers, you have got to try harder to include it.

Oh yes, and there’s an extra single-player mode where you use the left and right sticks to control both ships at the same time. I tried it and set a new world record for fastest rage quit in video game history: 13.7 seconds. If you have the God-like dexterity needed to pull this mode off, congratulations. You are officially a freak of such epic scale that they would have burned you at the stake for it 500 years ago.

Gripes aside, Andromium is one of the best games I’ve played on the indie marketplace.  Games that are this experimental are prone to fail. On paper, the concept sounded terrible to me, and the slow start didn’t help. But after only a few minutes it just clicks, and suddenly Andromium really works. In fact, in works so good that I wouldn’t be surprised if a larger studio tried to poach this idea for themselves. It’s unconventional, well presented, and excellently realized. Great soundtrack too. Who would have guessed mixing a stale genre like the space shooter with a childhood game like Hot Potato would have worked so well? Next up I want to see if creator Mike Ventnor can mix a first person shooter with Duck-Duck-Goose.

Andromium was developed by Red Crest Studios

80 Microsoft Points said he can call it “Duck-Duck-BOOM HEADSHOT!” in the making of this review.

Cycloid

Cycloid tries to be one of those artsy-fartsy Arkanoid clones that have sprung up all over every platform since Shatter hit.  It tries, and it fails.  God, how it fails.  It fails so badly that I want to give a tearful hug to its developer’s parents.  Cycloid is such an unmitigated disaster that I feel like this review should have a Red Cross donation box on it.

The blurb for it reads “Cycloid is original Arkanoid with realistic physics.”  Yea, maybe if you’re in fucking Wonderland.  The paddle isn’t really segmented like the traditional Pong/Breakout/Akranoid one, so when you hit the ball it goes wherever the hell it wants.  And usually it wants to go right past the paddle and into purgatory.  Perhaps it’s trying to escape being in this game.  Can’t blame it.

It doesn't look bad, but trust me, it plays bad. Really bad.

Worst of all is the controls.  Arkanoid clones really kind of need accurate movement.  They didn’t bother that bullshit here.  The analog stick’s only speed is “Speedy Gonzales on meth” while the trigger buttons are set to “Slowpoke Rodriguez on Valium.”  Finding a middle ground between the two is impossible, and thus so is the game.  Analog controls would have helped, but fuck that, who has time to code that when there are reruns of Family Guy on?

Assuming you can actually make a successful volley, the ball might bounce off the paddle and hit some of the blocks.  Whether those blocks register being hit is kind of up to chance.  Sometimes it just doesn’t do it.  Combine that with the fact that blocks can take multiple hits and you better cancel your weekend plans if you want to complete a stage.  Actually I’m just joking with you there.  You’ll be game-overed long before then.  Oh, and the play field is round, so this leads to humorous situations where the balls hugs the wall and the paddle before finally saying “fuck it” and passing right through the paddle and into death.  Perhaps a satirical view of letting go late in life and embracing euthanasia while your family fights to keep you alive, but more likely just a really badly programmed game.

There’s also items that you can pick up.  Kind of.  If an item touches the front of the paddle, it just sits there bouncing up and down like it’s having a pout.  You have to wait for it to reach the outside ring before you can get it.  Naturally!  I mean everything else was poorly conceived so why not fuck up the most no-brainer aspect of the game while you’re at it?  As for the items, there’s one that makes it so you can’t break any blocks for thirty seconds.  There’s no benefit to it, it’s just there to be a dick move.  You didn’t have to bother guys.  This whole game is a colossal dick move without it.

I don’t want to pull a Comic Book Guy and call Cycloid the worst game ever, but it ranks.  It ranks way up there.  Or way down there depending on how you look at it.  It replaces Ace of Dynamites as the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve played thus far, and it does so by a very comfortable margin.  If you wish you can recreate the pain I felt playing it in a safer way by tilting your head backwards and dumping soda down your nostrils.

Cycloid was developed by Jack Spektor

80 Microsoft Points tried to remember the good old days before they were used on Cycloid in the making of this review.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Robot Platformer

Robot Platformer is pretty much what the name suggests: a tactical strategy RPG where you navigate a platoon of ravenous chipmunks through the aisles of a K-Mart hoping to land a blue light special on some off-brand footwear.  You control Mr. Finkies, the leader of the pack whose family was tragically cut down by nah I’m just fucking with you, it’s an utterly generic platformer made by some Danish twit.  And I find the whole “robot” thing suspect.  It looks more like a masked killer from a slasher movie.  Personally, I liked my plot idea better.  Feel free to steal it.

What makes Robot Platformer stick out is its graphics style.  It looks an awful lot like a sketch book come to life.  In a way, you can picture the entire game taking place between the margins of a text-book.  It’s a fun look that takes a bit of the sting out of what is, at heart, a samey-bland platforming romp.  There’s forty-two levels that have various goals.  Most of the time you simply have to get to the exit.  Sometimes you’ll have to eliminate all the baddies in a stage, and sometimes you’ll have to get to the exit before time runs out.  Sometimes you’ll have to do both.

My biggest complaint is the controls are a tad clunky.  Jumping feels too heavy while shooting feels too slow.  Collision detection seems a bit off as well.  I also don’t like how the entire stage darkens up as you take more damage.  The difficulty curve is really strange too.  You’ll be twenty boards into the game when, out of nowhere, it tosses you a level that feels more like an introductory stage and takes mere seconds to beat.  It’s like taking a quantum physics quiz and being asked at some point which way is up.

Robot Platformer wears the art-house game badge without shame.  It’s got a really awesome jazzy soundtrack that is completely out-of-place, but oddly fitting at the same time.  Although the controls are a bitch at times, it should only take around an hour to finish the game, and I can honestly say that I didn’t dislike the experience.  I guess I’m giving it a mild recommendation.  It’s not an enthusiastic one.  It’s like recommending a meal of Mexican food.  It’ll be palatable enough to eat and you might even get some satisfaction out of finishing it.  Then later you won’t even remember eating it at all while wondering where all this diarrhea came from.

Robot Platformer was developed by Cored

80 Microsoft Points taler Dansk, blandt ni andre sprog i fremstillingen af ​​denne gennemgang.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details.

Crazy Balloon Lite

Crazy Balloon Lite is a remake of a 1980 arcade game by Taito where you steer a balloon through a maze while trying to avoid the spiky walls.  The balloon constantly sways from left to right so you have to use timing and digital agility to reach the end goal of every level.  It wasn’t exactly the most popular game out there, so it’s a slightly oddball target for a remake.  My father might disagree with that.  He burned away many lunch hours playing this when it was first released in arcades.  So anyone from Palo Alto who remembers a fat, balding Cuban swearing at an obscure arcade game circa the Reagan era, you’ll be glad to know that he’s now a fatter, balder, and thirty-years-older Cuban currently swearing at my Xbox 360.  Circle of life.

I’ve already raged against nostalgia in a few previous reviews, so I’ll drop that whole bit and just talk about the merits of Crazy Balloon Lite.  On its own, it’s a perfectly fine dexterity tester.  As a remake, it’s pretty much what you would expect: the same game with a graphics overhaul.

Having noted all that, remaking a game in a way where it actually has less to offer than the thirty-year-old arcade original is pretty dumb in my opinion.  There’s only six levels in the game, and once you beat them that’s it.  There’s no extra challenges or incentives to keep playing.  The original game looped, so when you beat the last board you would start from the beginning, only the balloon would sway faster.  Here, once you beat stage six the game ends and you go back to the title screen.  The graphics seem nice,  except the background is pretty distracting.  It leads to moments where it’s tough to see where the spikes are.

The biggest complaint for me is this is a game where analog controls would have potentially made a huge difference in improving the original design.  Although the stick is an option, it has no true analog controls, so the slightest nudge will send your balloon on a full-speed path towards failure.  Finally, there are annoying moments where the camera automatically pulls in when the game assumes that you’re turning a tight corner.  It’s a feature designed to make things easier, but it does the opposite.  The transition between camera angles is jarring and led to me dying more than once.

Overall, I can’t recommend Crazy Balloon Lite.  Modern gamers will find it shallow and uninteresting.  I know I wanted it to be over by time I beat the first level.  Thankfully I didn’t have to wait very long.  Fans of the original might get a very limited amount of enjoyment out of it, but if my father is any indication it will only leave them longing to play the 1980 version.  It had more levels and cleaner graphics, plus it’s the actual game they fell for in the first place.  All Lite is going to do is set off one of those annoying “back in my day” speeches.  God I hate those.  You know, back in my day they didn’t develop shitty remakes of games that would cause people to use that phrase.

Crazy Balloon Lite was developed by Backroom Software

80 Microsoft Points had a father who said “they ought to remake Atari’s Fire Truck too” while his daughter face-palmed and begged developers not to in the making of this review. 

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook for a chance to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Click here for details. 

Zombies Ruined My Day

It’s been said that President James Garfield could write Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right hand at the same time. Pretty impressive, assuming that every single guest he performed this for could tell both Greek and Latin apart from random chicken scratches. But if it was true, it’s an amazing trick. Let’s see the smug bastard take a crack at Zombies Ruined My Day, a hoard shooter with a control scheme about as inviting as a radioactive doorbell.

The story here is your typical zombie game clap trap: zombies invade and you are able to conveniently get your hands on enough artillery to wipe out the population of a small country. The game play takes place on a single screen. There are doors that zombies march out of single-file in an orderly manner. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall, at which point they walk the other direction. You’re a dude at the bottom of the screen who has to kill them before they get you and turn you into a zombie yourself.

By the way, isn’t that the biggest flaw with all these zombie games and films? Let’s say the zombie outbreak takes place. In most cases, it’s only a handful of people who initially start as zombies. Then they bite someone and that person becomes a zombie too. Well wait a second, if zombies are trying to eat the people, how come there’s always enough left of their victims for them to turn into zombies themselves? What, are they only sampling the people like it’s demo day at Costco? Makes no damn sense.

So back to the game.  You have zombies and you have guns. You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, with the right trigger to shoot. That’s assuming you have a gun. If you’re using a grenade or putting a barrier down, you use the right trigger to increase throwing strength and the left trigger to decrease it. You press up on the D pad to throw. You cycle through your various weapons using the bumpers. And while you juggle through all that, there are dozens of zombies on-screen, all of whom will kill you in one hit. You have very limited room to move and a very limited jump button. You can never leave the bottom level of a stage, so the jumping only works to hop over zombies. The problem there is most of the time there’s a string of them coming at you with no space in-between to safely leap.

I tried playing on normal difficulty but chickened out on the second world. I switched over to easy mode and found that the game still was frustratingly hard. I thought zombie canon was well established: one shot to the head, pffph, dead. Not here. The baddies simply take way too many shots to kill. Your starter pistol might as well be shooting snap ‘n’ pops for all the good it does. Even with a shotgun you’re looking at a minimum of two shots for even basic zombies.   Later in the game you do get other shooting game standbys like a rocket launcher or a minigun.  Of course if you actually make it that far you’ll have lost your will to live. At some point in the game survivors are introduced and you have to protect them from being eaten as well, while juggling everything else. Yea, fuck that with an unlubricated, razor-encrusted dildo.

Even if the controls were more accessible, I don’t think it would matter much. Zombies Ruined My Day is just plain boring. The graphics are very nice, but that’s all it has going for it.  The game play is repetitive, redundant, and repetitive. Oddly enough, Zombies Ruined My Day seems like it was built with co-op in mind, but that feature is nowhere to be found. Having some help might have taken the sting out a little. Not likely. Suckering someone into playing a game this dull is a quick way to lose friends. The only use I could think of for it would be a drug-free alternative for medically induced comas.

Zombies Ruined My Day was developed by Mancebo Games

80 Microsoft Points felt “Yawn of the Dead” would have been a better title in the making of this review.