Indie and Retro Gaming Reviews from the one and only IGC
May 27, 2012 9 Comments
We’ve got trailers, yes we do, and we have a special guest, Mr. Alan C with the Tea, the operator of the Indie Ocean. He has assured us that he actually wants to participate and he’s not here just to hide from the army of half-naked women that Team Shuriken sent to kill him after his review of Avalis Dungeon.
May 26, 2012 6 Comments
I’ve met a few developers who don’t totally hate my guts. Or at least I don’t think they do. One is a dude named Daniel Steger, who has made a couple of games I’ve reviewed here that, while I didn’t detest them, I didn’t actually love them or anything either. They were just sort of there to exist. I get the impression that Steger has the talent to do better than he actually does, but sort of just falls in line and pushes stuff out. He’s had a couple successes on the XBLIG market. He’s the proud developer of the #8 all-time selling game on the platform, Baby Maker Extreme. Haven’t played it yet, and I don’t intend to. I have played a couple of his non-hits, Blow Me Up and Lots of Guns. I’m noticing a theme with his games: they tell you exactly what they are, right there in the title. Blow Me Up involved blowing a dude up, Lots of Guns involves shooting lots of guns. Okay, so I don’t think Baby Maker Extreme involves a sperm bank and a turkey baster, which is the only true way to make babies in extreme ways. Well, besides parachuting while having sex, but I hear the rights to that are tied up by MTV, who plan to include Parahumping in the next X-Games. Of course, no actual babies will be made during it, because I’m sure they’ll enforce a strict “condoms only” rule. MTV is all about the safety of its competitors. Jesus, this has gone off topic.
The graphics are colored at random and sometimes completely match the flooring in a way that you can’t see them unless you tilt the camera the right angle. Just like that third test from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only not as fun.
Today’s “truth in advertising” games are Avatar Falls Down Stairs and This Is Hard. Well, I guess in the case of Avatar Falls Down Stairs, it only falls because you push it. Otherwise known as “murder.” Details. It’s sort of an XBLIG version of the popular game Stair Dismount. I liked Stair Dismount. It was good fun for the whole family, and by that I mean I took pictures of my family, stuck their faces on the ragdolls, and pushed the ragdolls down the stairs. It was cathartic, and a good way to blow off steam. Steam that accumulates from playing horrible XBLIGs, like Avatar Falls Down Stairs. The concept is just not as good. Stair Dismount awarded points based on the total physical damage you inflict upon the doll. AFDS (sounds like a football league) awards points based on hitting orbs on your way down. It doesn’t really work well, because you really can only hit so many of them. Once you shove, you can’t move your avatar anymore. And, unlike Stair Dismount, you can’t target a specific area of your avatar to shove. You can angle it around the midsection, but that’s it. It feels so stripped down and half-assed that you can’t help but shake your head. Graphics are horrible and the physics are pretty weak too. Stegs told me he built the game in only a week, and I believe it.
I figured that while I was talking about Stegs, I would get to this week’s way late Katch-Up and use it on This Is Hard, his punisher from two years ago. I’m not a huge fan of this genre, and This Is Hard doesn’t really change my mind about it. It’s got a lot faults to it. It is one of the loosest controlling games I’ve ever played. It almost feels like he was trying to achieve a Super Meat Boy sense of speed and jumping, except that, as Brian just pointed out to me, that came out AFTER this did. Either way, it becomes one of those punishers that’s really only difficult because it controls like shit. Once you get used to that, the levels are just typical trial-and-error, memorize the layout type of stages. It’s not a total abortion, but there’s much better punishers on XBLIG, both in playability and in looks. If you’re desperate to get your ass kicked, you’re probably better off going to a screening of the Avengers and screaming out “Where’s Batman?”
I will give This Is Hard this: it’s playable. Avatar Falls Down Stairs is only playable in the sense that it doesn’t make your organs shut down. I still like Stegs, but there’s something missing to his games. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s that sense that I’m playing something special. He’s had some best-sellers, but he hasn’t quite had that game that just is overwhelmingly fun. He makes stuff that is good enough to entertain for thirty minutes, maybe an hour, and then toss away and forget about it. I actually enjoyed Blow Me Up and Lots of Guns, but they wouldn’t be high on my games-to-recommend list. I’m willing to bet he’s capable of doing better. It’s like watching a bad Al Pacino movie (which is pretty much everything he’s made after Insomnia) where you can totally tell he’s like “you know what, fuck it, I’m not even trying. I’ve got boat payments to make.”
Avatar Falls Down Stairs and This Is Hard were developed by Stegersaurus Games
80 Microsoft Points apiece think Steg needs to start getting trailers up in the making of this review.
May 25, 2012 2 Comments
Do you know what Heroes of Hat needs? Some anti-psychotic medication. With level design centered around over-powered enemies bombarding you with unavoidable attacks, dick move leap-of-faith jumps, and over-reliance on overly-slow special abilities, it feels like the gaming version of climbing a water tower with a telescopic rifle and going to town on the townspeople. It’s a game that needs help, the kind of help that involves a straight jacket and a padded room. You have to be off your fucking rocker to think anyone would find this type of utterly unfair, annoying gameplay fun. And they expect four people to do it together! It makes me wonder if this was really designed by the University of Utah’s game design program, or was it really by their sociology department as some kind of “how far can someone be pushed before they start killing and eating their fellow humans?” hypothesis. If that’s the case, the answer is 51 minutes. Don’t ask how I know. *burp*
If there’s a storyline, I missed it. You’re a little monster dude thingie that has to hop around levels looking for a goal. Along the way, you’re given a variety of hats that allow you to do various special attacks. The hats don’t really mean anything. Once you reach a certain point, you just have the new ability and can use it as much as you want, whenever you want. The first one is being able to fire arrows. You just press X to release an offensive shot, or charge X for a couple of seconds and release it to create a barrage of slow-moving arrows that you can then use as a platform. The second one is a bomb, which you can detonate under you for an extra boostie or chuck at enemies. You can’t aim the arrows upwards, so bombs are your only option. I have no idea what the third hat is, because I didn’t bother playing past the fourth stage, but whatever it is, I’m willing to bet it’s slow and useless.
Either way, enemies soak up damage and keep coming at you, rendering attacking moot. I only encountered three enemies. There were bees, which took something like eight arrows to shoot down. They dive bomb you AND they fire projectiles at you, and you can bet your ass they’ll be strategically placed in the worst possible sections, which are typically right above narrow ledges. There were bomb throwing guys who are unfairly accurate and don’t leave enough time between attacks. You can kill them by lobbing three bombs at them. Mind you, in the time it takes you to load up a bomb, charge it (you have to charge it to be able to aim it, otherwise you just drop it), aim, toss, and detonate (you have to detonate every bomb you throw), the enemy has lobbed either two or three at you, and probably killed you. Fair? No. Fun? No. An example of developers getting too good at their own game and losing track of reality? Probably. I also fought one or two snails that soak up arrows and fire spikes at you.
The level design is just one instance of dick movery after another, like they went through a checklist of things an asshole would do when designing a game. Leaps of faith? Check. Enemies situated in places that you can’t possibly fight them? Check. Needlessly confusing level layouts? Check. I’m half-shocked they bothered with checkpoints, but I guess those were there for the benefit of the co-op mode. I didn’t bother with it. I play video games to make friends, not lose them. Even with friends, most of the things that are bad about Heroes of Hat would still be the same. Overpowered enemies that are out of reach are still overpowered and out of reach whether you’re alone or with others. Leaps of faith are still leaps of faith whether solo or in a group. Actually, they tend to be worse, because if just one fucker doesn’t jump, everyone else has to wait for him. Assuming the screen scrolls with the three and doesn’t stick with the one hold-out, which would lead to everyone else dying. Again, I didn’t play Heroes of Hat multiplayer, so I don’t know how much better or worse (I’m guessing worse) it is with friends. They do say misery loves company, but I want to go on the record of saying that company is rarely eager to join in on being miserable.
If you gave me all day, I could not think of one positive thing to say about Heroes of Hat. The graphics are ugly even by the standards of 1996. The controls are too loose. I fell through the geometry at least once and I was only four levels in by that point. The mechanics are clunky. The enemies too powerful. The level design is abysmal. This is one of the worst games I’ve played this year and I would sooner recommend you pay someone a dollar to kick you in the face than play this. What’s really weird is that it looks just so damn innocent. I mean, look at it!
Adorable, isn’t it? But, make no mistake, Heroes of Hat is horrible. This is like the type of game that evil doers who run orphanages would give their children, just to complete the sense of being downtrodden.
Heroes of Hat was developed by Utah Game Forge
80 Microsoft Points give this game an F, tells students to write “we will not make crappy games that make Indie Gamer Chick want to cut herself” on the blackboard 100 times in the making of this review.
May 24, 2012 3 Comments
UPDATE: 5 Minutes RPG is now $1.
5 Minutes RPG, or 5MinRPG as its known on the marketplace for reasons that baffle me, is a little misleading in its name. It’s not really an RPG in the strictest sense, nor does it only last for five minutes. It plays more like an action-based dungeon-crawler. At least I think it does. This is one of those “tough love” games that mostly leaves players to figure things out on their own. There’s a couple help screens, but they’re not much use. The first level acts as a sort of tutorial, but ended before my head scratching did. And trust me, I don’t have head lice.
Anymore.
The idea is you’re a wizard (or wizards, but I didn’t get a chance to play co-op, more on that later) who has to work his way through a series of randomly generated dungeons, fighting monsters, opening treasures, and slaying bosses. There are six levels and one final boss fight. I didn’t even make it half-way through the quest without giving up, so I can’t tell you what you fight in the end. I will say that you better hope it’s not straight above you, because otherwise you’ll be in big trouble.
I get the impression that 5 Minutes RPG started out as a turn-based strategy game and devolved into the sloppy hack-and-slasher that ended up on the marketplace. Screens are broken up into hexagonal segments that limit what direction your character can move and shoot. You can go straight in a horizontal line, but you can’t move vertically up and down, only diagonally. This makes no sense at all in an action RPG. It makes all movement feel clunky, and lining up to attack enemies a chore. I quit on the third boss, because I was getting surrounded on all sides by enemies. Even with a weapon that could attack in all six directions, it didn’t really work as advertised. I could still only damage the one enemy I was pointing at. While the enemies on the other five sides could leisurely chew on my ass, my attack (of which the animation did seem to touch them) had no effect. What is the point of even having something that attacks in all six directions in a hexagonal based game if the developers didn’t take the time to make sure its range actually covered all six directions?
If it wasn’t for that, I could probably recommend 5 Minutes RPG. It wouldn’t be stellar or anything, but it would probably be a decent waste of time with a few friends. I really do get the impression that you need to play in co-op to have a fighting chance. Even when I took the time to kill all the enemies and level up my weapons, I couldn’t get past that third boss because I was being absolutely gang-banged on all sides by the boss and minor baddies. If someone had been there to take the load off, I might have been able to fight off two or three guys. By myself, I would enter the boss chamber and watch my health go from full to empty in just seconds once all the enemies spawned around me. And this was on the normal difficulty. I’m guessing on anything higher, the enemies would have raked my face across the pavement and then poured quicklime on my quivering body.
If 5 Minutes RPG was an experiment, let’s call it a failed one and move on. It’s not the biggest conceptional stillbirth I’ve seen here, but it’s close. The combat system just doesn’t work, and never really had the potential to. I like the idea of bite-sized, randomly generated dungeons that I can complete in a couple of minutes while I wait for my bagel to get toasted. Do you know what I like more? Being able to move in a straight vertical line. I find it to generally be an important aspect of gameplay. I never liked how Q*Bert controlled either, but at least I’m young enough to say I think that game sucks and have old timers pass it off as being a smart-assed whippersnapper. Of course, comparing Q*Bert to 5 Minutes RPG is unfair. The only thing they have in common is you need some kind of inner-ear disorder for the controls they use to feel intuitive.
5 Minutes RPG was developed by Andreil Game
Points of Sale: Xbox Live Indie Games
$3 still have no clue what the point of having enemies drop gold was in the making of this review.
May 22, 2012 3 Comments
You’ll probably get 80 Microsoft Points worth of entertainment out of MiG Madness. It’s a solid wave-shooter in the styling of Time Pilot that features four player co-op. No storyline or bullshit cut scenes. It’s just you, your buddies, some power-ups, and some bad guys. There’s not a lot of meat on the bone, but what it here is fairly palatable, making MiG a solid waste of an hour. I almost have nothing to complain about.
Almost.
MiG’s graphics are not spectacular or anything, but it does have decent character models and pretty looking clouds. I would probably have liked these things more, but it quickly became obvious that MiG could serve as a poster child for developers allowing ascetics to get in the way of gameplay. MiG suffers from all kinds of visibility issues. You often can’t see your bullets, but more importantly, you often can’t see those of the enemies either. In a game that is all about shooting things and dodging bullets, that is pretty significant problem. The bullets just blend it too much with the background, and sometimes the planes do too, depending on what color the backdrop is. The game constantly switches between day and night, dusk and dawn, meaning that no matter what color ship you choose, keeping an eye on it can be troublesome. I had the best luck with yellow, even if it made me feel like I was flying a giant Twinkie.
I’ve played other games here where the graphics got in the way of gameplay. I do get it. Better graphics equals more commercial appeal. However, I don’t think anyone is going to look at a game that looks like this:
And say that they’re sold on it based on how gosh darn swell the clouds look. A person is either going to want a quirk-and-dirty wave shooter themed on vintage military planes or they won’t. MiG is not a bad game by any means. It’s fun in single player or co-op, has a nice variety of weapons (even if some of the missile-based stuff is too slow to be useful), and controls pretty decently. It’s the type of game that you can spend a buck on, play for an hour, feel satisfied, and never go back to it again. If it wasn’t for the graphics getting in the way, I wouldn’t have to include “but..” with all of that. Sadly I do. It’s a big but, I cannot lie. You developers have got to try. When a title shows up with a pretty face but busted gameplay all over the place, it is dung.
MiG Madness was developed by Bionic Shark Studios
80 Microsoft Points promise to never do that again in the making of this review.
May 21, 2012 19 Comments
Believe it or not, there are people out there still who insist the Earth is flat. As in, they still exist. Today. In 2012. I’m not joking. They have a website and everything. This is not a tongue-in-cheek movement. These guys really, truly believe that the entire population of Earth has been bamboozled into believing the world is round. This an example of a phenomenon in society called “denialism.” Denialism is defined as a conscious rejection of an indisputable fact to avoid an uncomfortable truth.
Denialism is practiced among some Xbox Live Indie Game developers. They still cling to a belief that selling their games above the minimum price Microsoft requires is a viable strategy. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they truly believe that their game will be the exception to the reality of the marketplace. In essence, they are telling people that the world is flat, and they’re willing to throw themselves off the edge of the Earth to prove it.
Imagine how Ian Stocker, creator of the sublime Escape Goat, felt when he discovered the world was not flat.
It was announced today that pricing policy has once again changed for Xbox Live Indie Games. As of this Wednesday, developers can change their prices once every seven days. The immediate reaction this? “Finally, we can have sales!” Oh dear.
Here is the reality that you, Xbox Live Indie Game developers, have been dealt. You have no marketplace share. You have less representation on the Xbox 360 dashboard than accessories for avatars. There is no tab that announces when an indie game’s price has been changed. There is no tab that announces when a game has been patched. XBLIG sites do less than a fraction of the traffic of mainstream gaming sites. In short, you probably have a better chance of being struck by lightning than having a hit Xbox Live Indie Game.
I’m going to pull a number completely out of my ass and guess that 99.9% of all XBLIG sales come from impulse buyers. People who have just a few spare points left and would rather have a game than a sombrero for their avatar. The games they purchase are selected directly from the dashboard, not from reading sites like mine. When they go to the marketplace, there are four tabs for indie games: sort by genre, sort by name, best-selling, and new releases. New releases and best-selling are the key here. This is where almost all decisions to buy an Xbox Live Indie Game are made. It’s not on Xbox.com, it’s not from Kotaku, and it’s not from Indie Gamer Chick. It’s on the dashboard. The point of sale. Xbox Live Indie Games are a pack of gum next to the cash register at a grocery store.
This is why temporary sales on Xbox Live Indie Games won’t work. Because most consumers don’t pay attention to the scene. They select games based off the available tabs on the dashboard, and that does not feature a “recent price drops” tab, at least for XBLIGs. It probably never will. Without that, a price drop means diddly squat to consumers. If they see a game that is 80MSP that normally sells for 240MSP, they don’t know they’re saving points. Consequently, they have no way of seeing if a game they were previously interested in has gone on sale, unless they gain that knowledge directly from the developer or from following the scene. As I’ve previously established, there’s very little interest from consumers in taking the time to do so. The scene is so small that calling it niche almost feels like a stretch. If you price at anything above what your minimum requirement is, you miss that one chance. If you’re lucky enough that someone takes the time to look at your game on the marketplace, it’s probably off of the new release tab. Once that 240MSP price tag is spotted by the consumer, your game’s hope of being purchased by that individual is likely gone. Forever. After all, you’re competing directly against hundreds of games that will price at 80MSP. Consumers get four screen shots and a brief description of the game to go off of. Maybe your 240MSP title is better than the three 80MSP titles that person has their eyes on. But is it one-for-the-price-of-three better, when you have so little info of the game there to base your decision on? I really hope this is sinking in.
“Hey wait, FortressCraft and TotalMiner has grossed over $1,000,000 and they’re priced at 240MSP! See, the world is flat! I told you so!” Um, no. The world you’re living in really is round. Those guys live in an entirely different universe altogether, where your laws of physics don’t apply to them. Which is ironic given that the physics in such games are typically way fucked up, but that’s beside the point. Minecraft just became the best-selling Xbox Live Arcade Game in record time. Before it came to the platform properly, the original PC game had spawned an entire cottage industry of clones, mods, and communities. It’s fair to say that the genre is trendy right now. The games that climbed the best-selling charts did so because there was an immediate demand for that type of game on a console. Period.
Pictured: A really good game that did not have tens of millions of people drooling over the prospect of it.
Of course, sometime soon one or both of those games will probably have a special one-week-only 80MSP sale, which will cause a spike in their sales figures, and this will be all the proof that XBLIG flat-Earthers need that sales can work. They’ll probably also point to games like Escape Goat and Take Arms, which started at 240MSP and then caught on fire after their prices dropped. But that’s also a little different, because both games dropped their price around the time that Microsoft’s original price-change policy went into effect. It got mainstream attention and larger sites covered it. Escape Goat and Take Arms happened to be two of the best games that took advantage of that, even though both games were small enough to have been priced at 80MSP from the get-go. Ask those guys what they would do. If they knew then what they know now, they would have priced their games at 80MSP. They’ve both said so on this very website and elsewhere. Hell, if some misguided developer had a wonderful game and plans to overprice it, they would probably get on their hands and knees and beg the person to reconsider. Why? Because they care about the community, and they know the reality they live in. It might not be fair or just, but it is the cards you’ve been dealt. You can keep trying to prove the world is flat, but the only thing that is going to fall off the face of the Earth is your game’s sales figures.
May 20, 2012 13 Comments
My intent here had originally been to review both parts of Sonic 4. However, after slogging through Episode I and encountering the single most boring final boss in the history of video games, I don’t think I have the strength in me to even try it. It doesn’t help that most people are telling me that some of the stuff I will be complaining about below got fixed, yet the game is still worse. How is that even possible? It’s like unclogging a toilet by blowing up the building and calling it a job well done.
Long time readers probably expected me to hate Sonic 4 before I even started it. Whether it was my hate-article against Sega, my review of Sonic CD, or the fact that my Twitter picture was typically me figuring out different ways to torture and kill a stuffed Sonic The Hedgehog doll, I think the message is clear: fuck Sonic. By the way, I would have kept up with the Sonic killings, but wood-chippers are shockingly expensive and there’s a bullshit 7-day waiting period on flame-throwers. To me, the franchise represents everything wrong with gaming: generic character with committee-designed personality that’s best viewed through nostalgia goggles. Sonic is the gaming equivalent of Poochie. Every attempt at modernizing Sonic has failed, with fans rightfully bitching that they suck and they just want an old-fashioned 2D Sonic game. The only problem is, those old-fashioned 2D Sonic games weren’t really all that good to begin with. As a child, they were neat for you because they pushed new technology and did stuff games hadn’t done to that point. Today? They don’t hold up, and neither do attempts at recreating the magic. Stuff like Sonic Colors and Sonic 4 continue to get lambasted. And whenever something with Sonic that is borderline not shitty comes along, like Sonic Generations, fanboys treat it like Jesus just emerged from his tomb. You guys are easier to please than my dog, and all I have to do to make her happy is throw her a teeny piece of pizza crust.
I honestly don’t even think the graphics look that good.
I had only played the demo of Sonic 4 Episode 1 (which ought to have been subtitled The Phantom Appeal) when it came out back in 2010 and I honestly thought it was just a remake of one of the earlier Genesis games. Can you blame me? Same stupid opening level, same enemies, same rings, same abilities, same loops, and same power-ups. I imagine anyone with just a passing interest in Sonic would think this was just a graphical upgrade of an existing title. The full game’s other worlds include a casino, an underwater temple, and an industrial zone. I mean come on, Sega! This is like trying to rob your own home.
Everything bad about Sonic games is also here. Same cheap ass enemy placement, same “gotcha!” level design, and every single thing people never liked in Sonic games to begin with. I have never once met a person who said they enjoyed the water stages in Sonic The Hedgehog. I’m sure there might be one or two stragglers out there who insist they’re brilliant, just like I’m sure that there’s one or two people out there who genuinely enjoy squirting wasabi up their nostrils, but it doesn’t mean anyone else would want to do it. The water levels here are particularly painful because of how bad the controls are. Sonic runs like he’s wearing concrete shoes, so building up speed becomes an issue. Once you actually get some momentum going, good luck stopping when you need to. I tried holding back on one of those accelerators just to see how long it would take me to stop and go back to it. I had to press the left directional button nearly 100 times to get there. Granted, nobody is going to play the game like that, but when you design a game around something that is moving fast and then punish people playing it the way it is intended, you’re a colossal asshole.
Of course, things are totally the opposite in the water stages. They give you a game where you’re supposed to run fast, then submerge the character in maple syrup. It becomes so slow and clunky that I honestly wonder if they keep putting these fucking stages in these games hoping that fans will start taking their own lives in protest. I’m telling you, I think I’m on to something here. There are parts in the industrial stages where you have to outrun a giant, um, not sure what it is besides a hunk of metal, and if you die you go back to a check point. From there, you have about two seconds to run up a series of slopes or risk dying. The problem is, you’re not given the ability to build up the required speed to get up them. I had to spin-dash up one, hope to stop, do it again, hope to stop again, and then do it one more time. Once you get past that, you basically just have to hold forward and wait for the game to start playing itself for you like every Sonic game seems to do. Once again, I took a running count. Not sure how accurate it is because I think I might have accidentally counted a couple of sections twice after dying, but regardless, I counted 77 times where I could advance forward in a level without pushing anything. That’s over the course of only twelve stages. Whether it’s bouncing off springs, rolling through tubes, or running past accelerators, Sonic games sure have a hard-on for not letting you play them. As I pointed out in my last review, Sonic was originally designed by Sega to be Mario for idiots, but game design like this strikes me as Sega having outright contempt for its own fan base. Are you getting the message Sega is sending you, Sonic fans? THEY HATE YOU! What do you think they were trying to tell you with all those 3D Sonics? They weren’t fucking Valentines!
Come on! They didn’t even change the first boss from the first Sonic game! Short of knocking you out with chloroform and shitting in your mouth, what else can they do to show you they don’t like you anymore?
I pressed forward and eventually got to the last boss. Well actually, before you fight it, the game ends with a boss rush. I guess Robotnik felt that all those previous attempts at murdering Sonic with various contraptions that often failed within twenty seconds were worth a second look. Once you dispatch them, you’re placed against one final, giant robot. At first, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. It was slow. It was easy to attack. So I started to bonk it. And then I kept bonking it. It would fly up in the air, crash down, and I would keep bonking it. After EIGHTEEN coma-inducing bonks, the boss finally entered its second phase. It takes eighteen hits to get there! Mind you, this thing doesn’t put up anything resembling a real fight. It just sort of lumbers around, waiting for you to smack it. In the second phase, you can’t attack its body directly, so you have to wait for it to fire one of its arms at you. Once you avoid it, it floats downwards, and you have to bonk it back to the robot to stun-lock it. Of course, the game is kind of fickle about when something constitutes “hitting it” versus “getting hit by it.” The arms have spikes on the bottom, so I would wait until I could attack it at a downward angle, hitting the top of the arm and thus avoiding becoming a Sonic Skewer. This worked, oh, about half the time. The other half the time, I would do a lock-on attack directly to the top of the glove and still die. Grrrrrrrrrr.
Once you die, you get to go back to the 18 bonks before reaching the second phase and hoping like hell your lock-on attack doesn’t crap out on you, forcing another restart. Well, on one such attempt, luck was on my side, because I had kept all three rings I got at the checkpoint, I had gotten to phase two, and I was able to successfully attack the boss another dozen or so times. I’m not sure how many shots are actually required to kill it. Possibly it’s some hypothetical number, like a quajillion, but I won’t know because the game had one final dick move supreme to pull off on me. You have exactly ten minutes to beat every stage, including in boss battles. I had eaten up about four minutes getting to the last encounter, and another three minutes getting to phase two of the final boss. Well, as it turns out, the last boss has random attack patterns, only one of which opens itself up to attack. After getting a bunch of hits on it, with about two minutes and change left until time expired, the game flipped me the bird and never again did that one attack I needed it to do. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Time expired, life lost, back to the start of the fight, cuss words screamed, controller thrown, power off, and Sonic 4 and go fuck itself.
“Dear Sega, less water stages in Sonic games please.” “Did you say more water stages?” “No, less. Preferably none. Nobody likes them.” “More water stages it is!”
And that is when it hit me: the guys Sega stuck this project with hated making it as much as I hated playing it. They just didn’t care. That’s the only explanation I can think of for sticking such a tediously boring boss at the end yet another redundant Sonic game. Maybe this was their attempt at killing the franchise once and for all. Maybe this was their attempt at trying to avoid drawing the Sonic assignments any further. Maybe they were outright trying to get fired. Whatever the explanation is, Sonic 4 Episode 1 is one of the worst pieces of shit I have ever played. But the games sell, so they’ll keep making them. I bought this one and I just bought Episode II, so I’m part of the problem. Excuse me, I need to go flog myself now.
Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Part I was developed by Sega
I honestly don’t remember how much I paid for this. I think it was like $1 at Christmas on PlayStation Network or something like that. Quite frankly, I can’t justify spending any amount on this game.
May 19, 2012 11 Comments
Well I do. They gave us Polish Dogs and.. um.. I’ll come up with something later. To the trailers. I seriously think this is the best collection of trailers ever done for Indies in Due Time. I’m not saying that to hustle you. If you’re reading this, you’re already here. But really, these are five pretty dang good-looking games. And the last trailer is mind-blowing. Are you hyped yet?
May 18, 2012 12 Comments
Having never played the original Miasma, I wasn’t sure if this would be one of those instances where I would feel like a party crasher. But, the developer sent me a review request, the trailer looked slick, the graphics were really good-looking for an XBLIG, and I think it’s probably a good idea to only piss people off every 48 hours. Thus, I shelved my planned Sonic 4 review again and bought Miasma 2. I mean, how bad could it be?
Well, it’s not that Miasma 2 is bad, or at least it probably isn’t if you’re into turn-based tactics games. I wouldn’t say I hate them, but I rarely get into them. I finished Final Fantasy Tactics and a couple of the Advance Wars games, and I kind of, sort of dug Valkyria Chronicles. But I wouldn’t describe my relationship with Tactical games the same way I would with Tower Defense, where I never think about them but tend to get hooked on them when I actually play them. Tactical shit generally has to be exceptionally good for me to get into it. Or so stupidly idiotic, like Valkyria was, that I keep playing just to ogle the train wreck.
For what it’s worth, the game really does look this good.
So I struggled with Miasma 2, because I just found the whole thing to be so damn bland. Everything here is generic. The character designs, the enemies, the backdrops, and especially the story. The game allows you to choose between playing as a chick or a dude, so I chose the chick. The opening tutorial stage requires you to take out a couple of enemies and rescue your husband. Right from the get-go, Miasma 2 doesn’t do a good job explaining the play mechanics. All movements and actions feel overly complex and unintuitive. Special abilities aren’t well explained, damage ratios barely get mentioned, and it ended before most of my questions were answered. It’s like getting swim lessons from an instructor that is secretly taking bets on what child will be the first to drown.
The tutorial ended with me saving my husband. And then there was the story. Lots and lots of boring story. And inconsistent story too. So the dude I rescued is my husband. At some point, he asked me why I saved him, if it was because he was a soldier or if there was more to us than that. And then you get to choose which one it is. Well, this is kind of fucked up on account of it already being established that we’re married. God, it would suck to serve with these two. They’ve already tied the knot and yet all their conversations still sound like the clumsy small-talk of two preteens with puppy love in their eyes. I only played a few levels before getting bored and quitting, so I’m trying to picture what kind of dialog I’m missing. I would not be surprised if at some point the wife turns to her husband and asks if he wants to go steady with her.
Between levels, you navigate a small hub world from a first-person perspective, and it’s pretty well done. I almost wish they had figured out how to add guns to that and just turned this into a Perfect Dark clone. Once things get back to the battlefield, the tedium returns. In the second level, you are given a tank-thing that you can barely move, a couple extra guys to move around, and some frag grenades, which I quickly used to take out a couple grunts and a mech-thingie. Then more baddies came in, and I was already dying on account that I didn’t grasp the concept of hiding behind shit to avoid getting shot. I decided to restart the level. Except this time, the game forgot to give me my grenades back. I don’t know if I somehow walked over something that picked them up and didn’t realize it, or if the game glitched out, but I had no grenades. I also was so bored out of my fucking skull by this point that Brian suggested it might be on account of me needing a nap. So I took a nap, woke up, restarted the game, got my grenades back somehow, finished the stage, and it still wasn’t fun.
Thankfully, you can make the whole stage’s grid visible in the options menu. Why on Earth would you want to play with it turned off?
I did try the third level, but I realized quickly that there was no potential left for myself to have any entertainment with Miasma 2, so I bailed on it. I’ve done that a few times here at Indie Gamer Chick, but this time it really wasn’t out of spite. I just didn’t enjoy anything at all and I saw no potential for it to get better. I’m not one of those critics who will say “yea, it wasn’t for me, but the graphics were really well done and they obviously put a lot of work into this game, so you should try it.” I can’t do that. I didn’t even hate Miasma 2. I just don’t want to ever play it again. I can say firmly that if you enjoy Tactical stuff on the same level I do (which is barely at all), this game won’t cause an epiphany. If you’re a fan of the genre, I honestly don’t think you’ll get any amusement out of it besides the fact that it’s $1 and functional. I might be wrong. Maybe Alan, Tim, or Tristan will say otherwise. I would like to see something else by ESP Games, because they clearly have the technical chops. Now they just need to figure out how to nail down that whole “don’t make a boring game” thing and they’re set.
Miasma 2 was developed by ESP Games
80 Microsoft Points said the only thing they could have read on my mind while playing this was BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHH in the making of this review.
May 17, 2012 Leave a comment
Trying to keep regular updates on my site can be a bit of a bitch at times. Clearing 200+ reviews in under a year was probably not the best idea, because finding time to keep up that established pace can be trying. I had to put a slight delay on my planned massacre of Sonic The Hedgehog 4, and here it is, 11:00PM and I still haven’t done a review today. Thank Christ for Xbox Live Indie Games, where titles that can be beaten in five minutes or less are as abundant as McDonalds, although not nearly as healthy for you.
Well, it is Thursday, and thus it’s time for a Katch-Up. I had been given a heads-up that A Madman’s Guide To Happiness was short, shitty, and insane enough for me to get a good review out of it. Well, they got two out of the three right. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s shitty. That’s mostly because it doesn’t last long enough to leave any impression on me at all, really. I hate to call any game I play a Mulligan, but Jesus, five minutes isn’t a lot to go on.
Are there any annoying kids in your life that you never want to have to speak to again? Show them that picture, tell them you turn into that whenever there’s a full moon, and you won’t have that problem ever again.
The basic idea is you’re reading the computer of some psychotic dude who sets up a couple of puzzles for you to solve. And by puzzles, I mean stuff that seems like it was copied straight out of Highlights for Children that had its innocence stripped away by being forced to watch Nicolas Cage’s snuff film collection. Basic math questions, a trick-question style riddle, and even one of those “count the triangles pictured, but don’t forget that small triangles make big ones” things. It’s as if John Wayne Gacy was forced to repeat the first grade.
Between all these brain teasers that are about as stimulating as a medically induced coma, you get to read these rambling, incoherent ravings by the titular madman. I have to say, at first I figured the game was trying to be weird for the sake of being weird, but actually I was sort of taken in by the creepiness of it all, the same way I was with Silver Dollar Games’ Fatal Seduction. I became a little invested in it. And then it ended in roughly half the time my average bowel movement takes. The really weird part? Like a good bowel movement, it was oddly satisfying. I don’t know if that makes it worth the $1 it costs, but hell, people pay more than that for X-Lax. Sometimes you just need a nice, satisfying dump.
A Madman’s Guide to Happiness was developed by Jaded Horizon
80 Microsoft Points honestly, truly cannot believe I ended up liking this weird ass piece of shit enough to give it a positive review in the making of this review.
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