Unnecessary Violence is a car-combat game set on the largest stretch of straight road in the world, yet has the least diversity in vehicles. I saw no ambulances, no motorcycles, no convertibles, and no buses. Plenty of taxi cabs though. Not sure why someone would be in a taxi on such a long stretch of road that has no turnoffs. With the cost of taxis being what they are, you would think renting a car and taking it on this road would be cheaper.
I had a witty caption for this, but then I fell asleep while playing and forgot it.
The basic idea is you’re a car tricked out with various weapons. You drive on a road, shooting at cars. Then it tells you to shoot a specific car. You shoot it, then shoot other cars until it tells you shoot a different specific car, rinse, repeat. Sorry if that sounded unenthusiastic, but never before has an XBLIG with no major technical flaws gotten me so bored so quickly. This is mostly on the fact that you’ve seen pretty much everything the game is about within the first five seconds of playtime. The monotony wears thin quickly, and Unnecessary Violence does very little to change things up.
The weapon variety is lame. You get a machine gun with no “oomph” to it that overheats if you use it for more than a few seconds. You get rockets that take multiple shots to blow up a car. If I have a rocket launcher and it takes two shots to blow up ANYTHING, I’m going to be oh so pissed at the asshole I bought it from. Land mines are present. I found them to be unsatisfactory, mostly because I want to actually see the shit I’m blowing up, not having to glance at the rear-view mirror. Enemies have mines too, and they’re fucking impossible to avoid, because you’re traveling at high speeds. There are anti-tank guns, which require you to carefully select your target, hard to do when you’re cruising at warp-speed and often rear-ending all other cars present. There are anti-air missiles for helicopters that don’t show up until the third stage, at which point you’ll have quit and started a better game. Finally, there’s nuclear weapons, which create a nifty explosion but otherwise I could not figure out what the fuck they’re useful for. To activate them, you have to input a five-button code. Again, this is while you’re in the middle of busy traffic, often pressed for time. How could they fuck up the entire assortment of weapons in a car game? Couldn’t they get just one right?
So bored. Please kill me. Make it stop.
By the end of the third stage, I decided I should either quit the game or kill myself. I chose the former, obviously. There’s just no variety in Unnecessary Violence. Lots of weird stuff that I hated too. Your car is able to set off a nuclear fucking explosion, but you can’t bump other cars off the road. If you’re driving at 140 miles an hour and you bump into the back of a car, it doesn’t even nudge forward, yet it cuts your speed down to a snail’s pace. You do have the ability to give yourself a nitrous boost, but it seems to do little more than give the appearance of moving faster. The rate at which traffic appears while using it doesn’t seem significantly higher than it is when you’re just putting the regular pedal to the non-nitrous metal.
Despite having fairly decent graphics and control, Unnecessary Violence feels unfinished. It’s one objective repeated in a loop in a way practically guaranteed to comatize anyone playing. I almost wonder if the developers had more ambitious plans, but gave up once they had something vaguely resembling a decent video game running. It needed something else to keep things fresh. Instead, it just drags along like it’s got worms.
80 Microsoft Points said you know the game is going to be bad when the FAQ is the most entertaining part of it in the making of this review.
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July of 1998. My parents take me to Toys “R” Us to scope out potential toys for my upcoming ninth birthday. This included a trip down the video game aisle to see the latest and greatest PlayStation games. At the age of seven, Santa Claus brought me my PlayStation, along with Crash Bandicoot. Previously, my father had an NES and SNES that I occasionally played, but gaming was not a big deal to me. That changed with the PlayStation. Gaming became my favoritest thing in the whole wide world. My forthcoming birthday would no doubt bring me to places I couldn’t even imagine. What far out realms would my Sony device take me?
And then I saw Banjo-Kazooie on the Nintendo 64 demo display. It looked way cooler than anything on PlayStation. It had better graphics. It had more stuff to do. The worlds looked bigger. I had to have it. Low and behold, on July 11, Santa and the Easter Bunny gave word to their associate, the Birthday Badger, that I had been a good little girl and the Nintendo 64 arrived, complete with Banjo-Kazooie. And I was totally hooked. I became obsessed with finding every item that could be collected. I spent the better part of two months doing it. Then I beat it. And I wasn’t happy about that. In fact, I cried.
As a child, I wasn’t very expressive, and rarely emoted. Crying was a super rare thing for me to do, and it broke my Mom and Dad’s hearts. I remember my Father actually called the Nintendo consumer support number to find out when a sequel could be expected. Mind you, this is only two months after the game came out. Instead, we went to Software Etc. to find the closest Banjo substitute. When we asked the clerk, he said that Banjo-Kazooie was really just a ripoff of Super Mario 64, and if I liked Banjo, I would love Mario. What could go wrong?
Smaller levels. Less to find. Not as much stuff to collect. Kind of easy. Don’t get me wrong, still a great game. But it was a huge letdown after Banjo. If you ask people today which was the better game, they say Mario 64. It wasn’t. It was just the game they played first. For most players, it was the first truly 3D game they played, and thus it created the best memories for them. Some people actually have the audacity to call it the best 3D platformer to this day. Really? Over fifteen years later and the genre has never been done better? That really makes you sound like you’re stuck in a time warp.
By the way, I treasure my memories of playing Banjo-Kazooie as a child, but I don't delude myself into saying it's a game that holds up to repeated play. I bought the Xbox Live Arcade port and immediately regretted the loss of $15. You know what? It's okay to say a game you loved from your childhood doesn't hold up today. If doing so spoils your memories of it, you probably know deep down you didn't like it as much as you thought.
Of the four branches of the Unholy Quartet of Gaming Nerds, Nintendo fanboys are probably the most docile these days. That’s probably because it’s tough to be a cheerleader for a company that puts out systems named after the babytalk word for urination. At the same time, they seem to suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome. They never want to grow up. They’re stuck playing reskinned, repackaged versions of the same games for their entire life. If any deviation hits, the fans shit a collective brick. Take Zelda, for example. Ocarina of Time was brilliant. Majora’s Mask was gutsy, but still kind of the same game. Then came Wind Waker. It was still the same game as the rest, but the graphics were changed to make it look like a living cartoon. This was simply too much for the fanboys, who were left inconsolable by this besmirching of their manhood. In fact, the first time I remember hearing the term “gay” used to describe something outside of San Francisco was someone talking about Wind Waker. Right. Obviously Nintendo’s plan was to demasculate the American dweeb population, setting the stage for Pearl Harbor II.
Nintendo wanted to try something different. Probably because stamping out the same game year after year gets old. But no, fanboys couldn’t handle it, so we returned to more of the same old shit with Twilight Princess. Ocarina of Time was my first Zelda, so I didn’t have the 2D games as a reference point to chart the deterioration of the series. Having said that, I was a veteran of three Zeldas by that point, and I got bored about halfway through Twilight Princess and never finished it. It never at any point had me. Ocarina of Time did. Majora’s Mask did. Wind Waker did. All three of them had me from the very start. Twilight Princess felt like an apology for Wind Waker, but I didn’t think Nintendo had anything to apologize for. Just like that, Zelda wasn’t fun anymore. Then they came out with Skyward Sword, which felt like it had less content than any previous 3D Zelda, and it had horrible, delayed, boring, exhausting motion control tacked on. Different? Yes. Fun? No. Nintendo isn’t likely to experiment with actual gameplay anymore. Different, less intuitive control inputs? That’s fine. As long as there’s an elf with a boomerang and a grappling hook, the fanboys won’t throw their first-born into a bonfire.
Skyward Sword felt like a step backwards. Nintendo has become masters of that lately. They brought out two 2D Super Mario games over the last generation, and they just set the internet abuzz with word that a game is coming called “Super Mario 4.” I’m hearing things on Twitter like “finally!’ and “I always wanted a sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3.” I guess Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, New Super Mario, New Super Mario Wii, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Galaxy 2 just weren’t sequelish enough for them and their lives have been incomplete ever since Bowser crashed through the last brick at the end of Mario 3. Let’s talk about the New Super Mario games. The ones with “new” in the title, named as such because adding a “4” would suggest some kind of advancement and “rehash” was frowned upon by the guys in marketing. Nintendo had a chance to show they still had it. In my opinion, they didn’t.
They should call the next Nintendo platform the "Nintendo Microwave" since all they'll use it for is rewarming old stuff.
I first really played the original Mario titles when they were ported to the Game Boy Advance and I thought they were just swell. But there’s something very telling about the ordering of them that Nintendo chose. They didn’t bring the games out in the order they were originally released. First came Super Mario 2, then they went to Super Mario World, then Yoshi’s Island, then Super Mario Bros 3. This is Nintendo admitting that they never did better than Mario 3. That’s why they saved it for last. So Nintendo has clearly stated what the benchmark is. Then comes New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. Not only did it feel like a gigantic step backwards from any of the four games listed above, but the real kick is Nintendo didn’t even try to make it better. They were content releasing a stripped down, bare bones, no frills Mario game. Sure, a whole generation of fans never were exposed to Mario, but even the fanboys beat themselves blistered over it. The Wii version was the same way. Both these games felt like deleted scenes from good Mario games. Fans reacted to these half-assed efforts the only way Nintendo fans can: they made them two of the best-selling games of all time. Gimmie an N! Gimmie an I! Gimmie an N! Gimmie a T!..
Nostalgia should have a place in gaming. But a company shouldn’t be able to live in cruise control based solely on it. Nintendo can though, and it does. And the fanboys treat every new Nintendo release like a reunion. Maybe I’m not wired to be able to understand this. I crave new experiences. I can’t believe anyone out there anxiously awaits the announcement of yet another fucking Mario Kart that changes nothing. “Oooh, which obscure character will join the roster this year? I bet it will be Pauline from Donkey Kong!” For real, show of hands, who here got bored and never finished Skyward Sword? Mario Galaxy 2? Metroid Prime 3? New Super Mario Bros. Wii? And be totally honest with yourself. Were you having fun, or telling yourself that you were? I’m not anti-Nintendo based on some kind of bizarre principle. My favorite system ever is still the Nintendo DS, which gave me the most new and original experiences of any platform in recent history. You know what though? Fuck Nintendo. What have they done for me lately?
48 Chambers hasn’t even had a chance to fall off the first page of my site and it’s been updated to include more backgrounds. Oh, and a casual mode with no limit on lives for the crybaby population among us, specifically me. Well, at least now I can see what chambers 21 through 48 look like. And they look swell. Most of them at least. Some of them are just reskinned previous chambers with extra traps added, but that’s fine. At least 48 Chambers is now a game that can be played (and finished) by anyone, and that’s good enough for me to recommend it.
HEY, wait, I still had some stuff to say. Damn jumpy Microsoft Points joke. Just wait your turn. You’re not even funny this time around.
How I hated this fucking stage.
So I did enjoy playing 48 Chambers in casual mode, mostly because I was able to escape the sense of dread that it would take me weeks of getting good at this just to see the inevitably lame “Thanks for Playing” screen. You see, just because I like something doesn’t mean I can’t nit pick it to shreds. In the case of 48 Chambers, I don’t think the developer went far enough with it. It feels more like a concept than a fully realized game. Do you know what would have killed in this? A multiplayer race mode. Local or online, doesn’t matter. Just racing the mazes would have beefed up the content. Level select once you’ve cleared a stage or a time trial mode would have been swell as well. I’m told level select is on the way. Time Trial following that should be a no-brainer.
For you sadomasochists out there, Discord also added a hardcore mode where you get exactly one life to finish the game. Yea, fuck that. I was told by the developer that some people actually did manage to finish the game in its original incarnation. Psssh, whatever. Freaks. Either way, I’m just glad that my suggestions thus far have been realized, so I figured I would chime in with a few others. It’s nice to have the developer’s ear in a strictly metaphorical sense for a change. I mean, like, it’s always a metaphor! It’s not like I cut off ears and wear them as a necklace or anything. I swear. Quit staring at me!
80 Microsoft Points watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. It’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving in the making of this review.
Quiet, Please! is pretty much a point and clicker set in 2D side-scrolling frame. I’ve been lambasting the genre for a few weeks now, making it clear that I hate these games. Quiet, Please! is better than most because it doesn’t use static screens and it feels like you’re actually doing stuff. I will say that it makes me wonder if I’m starting to hate the genre because of what it’s doing to me. Psychologically.
As I pointed out in my Without Escape review, these games usually involve a degree of logic so unglued that it’s probably dangerous to speak of it in the presence of others. Following my play-through of Quiet, I’m now certain these games also rewire your brain. The basic idea is you’re a girl who wants silence in her house so she can get some sleep, forcing you to figure out ways to shut off anything making noise. The actual ways this is accomplished are as sane and valid as any P’n’C title I’ve come across. However, the ways I hypothesized I would do it are probably enough to get me sectioned.
For example, you have a brother who chases you around and won’t stop bugging you. I don’t have any siblings, so I can’t relate. Among the items in the house are a remote control car and a comic book, both of which he seemed to be drawn to. The game begins with you being dropped off on the sidewalk. If there’s a sidewalk, there must be a street. If there’s a street, there are moving cars. So I theorized that I would use the remote control car to lure my brother onto the busy street, thus killing him, or at least maiming him into silence.
I wish I was making that up.
Hey little bro, do you want to go play with the big zoom zooms?
Oh come on, don’t look at me like that. The first thing you do is distract your mother by plying her with wine. I figured if that was copacetic, why wouldn’t splattering your brother be justifiable? It still doesn’t excuse a later moment in Quiet, Please where you have to pacify three noisy kittens. At the same time, there’s a neighbor who has a lawnmower going all day and all night. I turned to Brian and plainly, calmly, and completely seriously said what is perhaps the worst sentence uttered out loud since the fall of Nazi Germany. “I probably need to get him to run over the kittens with the lawnmower.” And I meant every word of it.
As it turns out, you can deal with the kittens by giving them a ball of yarn, and the lawnmower thing is also handled in a rational (albeit totally illegal) way as well. This is what playing these games has done to me. I’ve gone from being grounded in reality to dealing with problems in the most roundabout way possible. In a way, I should thank Quiet, Please! because it’s one of the first games that you deal with problems the way they should be dealt with. Lull your brother to sleep with comic books and clean pajamas. No murder. Huh, makes sense.
So I won't silence Daddy by smothering him with a pillow? Huh. Weird game.
So how is the actual game? Well, it plays well enough and it’s a nice change of pace from how this type of crap is usually presented. It only takes about thirty minutes to finish, if that, so you don’t have to clear your schedule or anything. I guess I’m squeezing out a mild recommendation on it. If nothing else, it won’t cause any further damage to your psyche. It also won’t undo any damage already caused by point and click games, so if your first instinct when handed an object is to do something insane with it, sorry, you’re stuck that way. There is no turning back. Just do what I did and find someone like Brian to follow you around and remind you that if you pick up a stick, do with it things sticks are usually used for. Apparently, this does not include waking up your friends by sticking it up their peeholes.
The name of the game is School? That doesn't sound very fun. Oh wait..
80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend have who is saying “that’s just wrong” at the moment this is being typed in the making of this review. “You wouldn’t actually do that, would you?” Christ, I don’t even know anymore.
There’s some cool buttons right below this review that allow you to share my stuff on all kinds of social networking sites. Help my site grow by taking twenty seconds to click one and share. If you don’t, I will switch the Puppy of Sadness‘ food from his preferred Kibbles ‘N Bits to a generic, off brand food, causing his sadness to reach weaponized levels that I will then unleash upon the masses, ridding the world of joy forever.
I think I would be hard pressed to come up with a game that’s a bigger violator of what I call the “Google Rule” than Dark. Let’s put it this way. I searched for “Dark” on Xbox.com and set the results per page to 90. Dark falls all the way to 88th, the very bottom of the first page. And once you get over to Google, good luck. The word “Dark” alone brings up nearly two billion hits. And then my point was lost as I typed this, because when I searched for “Dark Xbox” it was the second result. Ah ha, but then I added “Indie” to “Xbox” and it somehow dropped Dark completely out of the top 100 results. My point is, it needed something other than Dark. May I suggest adding “Crap” to the title?
Dark is really, really awful. It tries to mix Limbo-esq minimalistic presentation in platforming with Little Big Planet-style manipulable environments. Well actually, this came out before Limbo, so another point is lost. Meh. Off my game tonight.
The problem with Dark is the physics are horrible enough that I couldn’t get the floor to correctly break apart the way it’s supposed to on the second stage, after multiple attempts. With no direction given, I’m not entirely sure I was doing enough to accomplish this. As best as I can tell, I was supposed to push a large rock off a cliff and let gravity take over. The problem is, gravity didn’t put in enough effort and the flooring got sandwiched between the rock, then stopped moving. I tried jumping on it to smooth things along, but my dude had no weight about him and I somehow got pinned between the two things, unable to move at all.
Given that each section of the game could take as little as a minute to finish, it seems odd that a chapter-skip option is included. After three or four failed tries to break the floor properly, I realized why it’s there and skipped to chapter 3. About five minutes later, I finished Dark, because the whole thing takes like ten minutes to beat. So what did I think? Didn’t find the graphics impressive despite what others would say. Bad play control. Unclear objectives. Physics that don’t work. A final puzzle that took me literally under ten seconds to solve on my first try. It’s maybe the biggest waste of a dollar I spent this year. It’s between this and some novelty chewing gum I bought for a buck that dyes your tongue black. I gave it to an intern at work to screw with them and they didn’t care about being the butt of a joke because “whatever, it still tasted good.”
Screw it, I only played this because my buddy Mark at GRcade told me I could finish it quickly if I was short on time for a Katch-Up. Which I was. Now I can pretend this never happened and move on to Fez. I would tell you not to play Dark, but actually this game came out three years ago and probably would have been totally forgotten if I had just left it alone. What can I say? Oops.
80 Microsoft Points were absolutely shocked to read the critical praise this game got. Well, different strokes for different folks I suppose in the making of this review.
There’s some cool buttons right below this review that allow you to share my stuff on all kinds of social networking sites. Help my site grow by taking twenty seconds to click one and share. If you don’t, I will switch the Puppy of Sadness‘ food from his preferred Kibbles ‘N Bits to a generic, off brand food, causing his sadness to reach weaponized levels that I will then unleash upon the masses, ridding the world of joy forever.
If someone asked me what my favorite genres are, I probably wouldn’t think of tower defense. That’s kind of odd, because it’s not uncommon for me to like the tower defense games I play. It’s actually funny. When the time comes to rattle off my favorite games, stuff like Plants vs. Zombies, GemCraft, PixelJunk Monsters, Crystal Defenders, or Ninjatown probably wouldn’t warrant a mention. Yet all the games I just listed have likely stolen more life from me than smoking has. I can’t put my finger on why this niche genre doesn’t hold a special place in my heart. Perhaps it has to do with these games having a drop-off point where they stop feeling fun and begin feeling more like a time sink. It’s the same reason why MMOs like World of Warcraft or Phantasy Star Online also wouldn’t make the short list of most amazing games I ever played despite investing years of my life playing them.
One of four screenshots chosen by AirWave Games to showcase their game on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace. And thank God. I was worried this would be one of those titlescreenless games for a second there.
I’m not sure that’s it though. Because I’m typically satisfied when I finish a tower defense title. And not just in a “thank God I don’t have to play any more of that” type of way. Oh, that factors in a little bit. Among other things, it’s typically around that time that my brain starts to remember to do important things like doing my job and taking a shower. But it’s bizarre, don’t you think? It’s almost like upon completion of a tower defense game, my brain immediately deletes any record of me having fun. Some kind of survival mechanism, no doubt.
Spoids is the first traditional tower defense game I’ve reviewed thus far. I’ve done hybrids like XBLA’s Dungeon Defenders, action-bent ones like Video Wars, and whatever the fuck you would classify The Cannon under. Oddly enough, the two XBLIGs were leaderboard games and Dungeon Defenders was one of my favorite games of 2011. I honestly don’t know why this isn’t one of my favorite genres. I’m starting to think I might be unconsciously racist against it. Maybe that’s why I was so apprehensive to review Spoids. It’s one of those games.
Spoids has a nifty presentation and semi decent voice acting (which might be a problem for other reasons, more on that later), but this is really a plain-Jane, no frills, utterly generic tower defense game. It’s kind of fun too. Unfortunately, the balancing in difficulty is a bit off, and by “a bit” I really mean “there is no balance at all.”
There’s eight levels in Spoids, so the game is pretty short. It’s single player only, so the only replay value comes in the form of medals. Every stage is graded on the platinum-gold-silver-bronze scale and is based on various benchmarks the game sets for you. Each objective is clearly spelled out, but usually comes down to staying alive for X amount of time and/or not taking damage. This is a problem. I totally aced the first stage and figured I was going to be gung-ho to rip Spoids to shreds in about an hour. Nope.
It’s rare that I talk to my fellow critics about a game before I write my own review, but in the case of Spoids, I talked to my amigo Tim Hurley of Gear-Fish, who did a review of this a few days ago. Like me, he didn’t score many medals outside of bronzes. He also didn’t finish the game. As it turns out, I actually made it further than he did. What it comes down to is the speed of which enemies hit is much faster than you can reasonably be expected to build your defenses. You only get extra money based on the enemies you kill, so you’re very limited in what you can do to defend yourself. You can set turrets to attack specific enemy types, or fire on them based on parameters that you set, but otherwise the scope of what you can do is limited. In later stages, where there are multiple enemy entrance points and various channels for them to deviate from, I tried and tried and tried to do anything to score better than a bronze medal and couldn’t do it. I’m convinced that it’s probably impossible sans one specific method which the developers themselves figured out in development.
Spoids was the straw that broke the camel’s back and inspired my recent editorial on game difficulty. As maddeningly tough as stages 4 through 7 were, at least I was able to beat them (after multiple attempts with each), albeit in the most minimum way possible. Stage 8’s only goal is “fend off the entire attack.” Couldn’t do it. Spoids has several enemies that you have to build specific towers to fend off. There’s invisible enemies that phase in and out. You need to build radar towers to make them visible. However, these have a limited range (I swear it seemed more limited by game’s end) and cost money that can’t be spent on things that actually attack. Likewise, waves of flying enemies come in that are only vulnerable to missile towers, which don’t attack anything else. The thing is, the missile towers kind of suck at their job, so you need to build a lot of them. But, they cost way too much money given that they can only attack one enemy type that appears only sporadically. Yet, even when caking half the screen in them on level 8, the flyers still got by. I shit you not.
There’s also carrier enemies that are total bullet sponges. Even when putting up the most powerful turrets, along with stuff to slow them down (which you can’t really afford on stage 8 given all the other shit you need to be doing), they take an absurd amount of hits to destroy. And once they die, they unleash fast-as-hell enemies that skate right past your defense and lead to your failure. You have to juggle all of this. I never came remotely close, and I probably tried no less than fifty times using no less than fifty different combinations of defense. Again, I’m sure someone on the development team beat this (at least I sure hope they did) but literally nobody I talked to this week about the game (six people, including Tim) could.
Despite having fun, I can’t recommend Spoids in its present state, because I believe in a fair fight and I don’t believe you get one with it. I do have to note, before hitting the brick wall at the very end of the game, I did have fun. I think. Again, my brain deletes all memories of joy related to tower defense titles. But I have found various post-it-notes scattered throughout my house saying “Spoids is fun. Don’t forget.” Yes, it is fun. It’s also infuriating and maybe even impossible. You know what? I want them to fix the issues and I want to do a Second Chance With the Chick on this game. It’s very rare I say that in a review, but it’s true.
Oh, and in closing, the Spoids is 240 Microsoft Points, which is overpriced in my opinion. Of course, their hands were tied because it came in at 200MB. The cut off for 80 Space Bucks is 150MB. Which leads me to ask this question: where the fuck is all that 200MB going? Maybe in voice overs. It has those. They’re nicely done, but totally unnecessary. Otherwise, the graphics are kind of simple. Not horrible, but not exactly cutting edge or anything. I can’t tell you what I thought about the music because I typically play games with the sound muted. I like to hear myself think. But seriously, what happened to this game? How did it balloon to 200MB? Why is it so fucking hard? And why am I tempted to go take another crack at it? It’s got some Spoiding to do.
See, I did a Ricky Ricardo thing there. He was Cuban, like me. Also, not funny.
240 Microsoft Points have a father who thinks doing the Ricky Ricardo “Lucy, I’m Home” voice every single time he gets home never gets old and is WRONG in the making of this review.
I want to once against note before I begin this monologue that I’m not a game developer. I’m just a chick who plays games. Because of this, I’m not sure how well any advice I offer towards the process of development will be received. That’s especially true when you consider that I haven’t been involved in Xbox Live Indie Games for a full year yet. However, I have something I think needs to be said and I have reviewed nearly 200 XBLIGs. That’s probably more than most developers have played. So I feel somewhat qualified to offer you advice in the politest way possible. Let’s see, how should I start this?
You guys are stupid dickweeds.
That’s usually what I think when I play a game where the difficulty curve spikes straight up out of nowhere like it just popped some digital Viagra. I won’t go so far as to say it’s the biggest problem on Xbox Live Indie Games, but it is the one that has ruined the most good games. This also isn’t a plea to dumb down your titles. I like a challenge as much as anyone. But I like a fair challenge, one that I feel tests me on the level of which I have progressed. Often, XBLIGs play out at a rate equal to instructing a child on proper cap-gun safety, then shipping them off do front-line infantry duty in Baghdad.
Games should challenge a player. A game that is too easy has to be exceptional to leave an impression on the player. On the flip side of that, a game that is too hard is more than likely to leave impressions on a player. And also the player’s controller, couch, television, walls, etc. Now granted, some gamers want that. But those that do have a genre all to their own for that. This isn’t an editorial on punishers. I’ll leave them out of it. This is about any average game where a developer loses track of reality.
Lumi's difficulty curve could be more accurately described as a straight horizontal line immediately followed by a straight vertical line, and it ruined the game.
I’ve spoken with many guys on the XBLIG scene, and we all agree that developers often forget that they are the best player at their own game. What happens is they play the game themselves hundreds of times, to the point where they know every little nuance about it. They know the best ways to defeat enemies, the best angles to clear jumps, the best places to camp, or the best places to situate your defenses. In no time at all, the game suddenly seems too easy. The worried developer tries to correct this by beefing up the difficulty in a way to challenge themselves. As a result, the finished project is an impenetrable mess fueled by swearing and rage quits. The perplexed developer doesn’t realize this, because they could still beat the game, so everyone else should be able to as well.
Of course, the developer forgot that they were making a game to challenge everyone. That’s really what it boils down to. They created a game that was challenging for them but not impossible. By time the game enters peer testing and peer-review, the developer is (perhaps rightfully) full of pride. After all, they just made their very own video game. Unfortunately, the resulting ego trip usually makes them oblivious to real concerns of difficulty that are brought up.
From what I’ve gathered from my time on the scene, there seems to be three types of peer-review testers in existence. The first is the genuine tester who will play a title all the way through and give honest feedback. The second is the cheerleader. These are the guys who are just a little too in love with the scene and treat every game they come across like the mother of a spoiled child with a sense of entitlement. They offer no constructive criticism, because that might hurt someone’s feelings. Chances are they probably don’t even play a game all the way through to begin with, and if they dislike it, they’ll still slap on the pom-poms and congratulate you for whatever miniscule thing they can come up with. “Way to not misspell the title of your game. Man, XBLIG’s fucking rule!” The third is the kickback reviewer. They also probably don’t play games all the way through, nor do they offer any feedback. They’re simply trying to pass games so that when their title is up for review, they can get it passed with minimum resistance.
The next-to-be-reviewed Spoids is a genuinely fun game that morphs into a lump of digital hatred for humanity in its final act.
So basically, two-thirds of peer-reviewers out there don’t actually do any work. If someone with real concern over a game’s difficulty says something, the developer ignores it. After all, nobody else said anything, and they were still able to beat their own game. Maybe the guy who said the game is too hard simply has no skills. I’m guessing there is also the occasional tester that’s too embarrassed to admit they found a game overly hard. Guys, don’t worry about it. I admitted I couldn’t throw a Dragon Punch in Street Fighter II and was able to weather the gentle barbs that followed.
Dragon Punch? Ha Ha!
Developers often don’t realize how difficult their games are. It comes down to play testing for this to sort itself out. It also comes down to expecting straight-forward honesty in the process. Do your due-diligence in the testing process. How reliable are the testers you’re getting? If they lean too much towards the cheerleader set, make note of it, and don’t look to them for the real answers to the questions you should be asking. Stuff like “is my game too difficult?” or “do the controls feel right?” Don’t rely on just your fellow developers either. Bring your friends into it, and be clear to them that they can’t possibly hurt your feelings if they think your game sucks. Even if that’s not true. I concede that getting people outside of the scene to play an XBLIG is tough. But hell, you’ve already spent X amount of dollars. What’s spending $20 more on a pizza and some soda? Gather your friends. Gather their friends. And when they play the game, keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. Don’t offer any tips or pointers. If possible, don’t even tell them that it’s your game. Just watch it play out. You’re about to find out exactly how good it is.
There are some developers out there who truly don’t give a shit what anyone has to say and want no feedback outside of kudos and congratulations. There’s no point in reaching out to them, because there is no helping them. This goes out to everyone else: you can do better. You deserve better too. Developers need to ask for blunt honesty before their game goes on the marketplace, because the last thing they want is to hear it first from me.
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I really, truly don’t get the appeal in point and click games. I’ve seen my father, a fairly jovial individual if there ever was one, lose his shit and degenerate into a snarling, swearing madman whenever he can’t find his car keys. Somehow, the old man always misplaces them and it drives him crazy. Point and Clickers are the video game version of “where the fuck are my keys?” A scavenger hunt where you go from room to room looking for trinket A that goes into hole B based on the always batshit insane logic of the developer.
Without Escape cranks the nutbar meter up all the way to raving lunatic with some of its logic. You play as a dude who wakes up in his house and everyone is gone. It tries to present itself like one of those “escape the room” games, but it fails. It feels like any other Plicker game, right down to the stupid “pick up the items and use them in ways you would never actually use them” idea. I’ll give you some examples. In one scene, there’s something shiny in a toilet, but the dude refuses to put his hand in it. Right, because when you’re in a situation where you’re alone and terrified, you’re really worried about getting a little shit on your hands. If I’m in the dude’s situation, shit is already in my pants by this point and probably trickling down my legs, so what does it matter?
What's the number for Ghost Busters again?
But no, Mr. Prissy wants to avoid the poop in the toilet in his own bathroom (which means it’s probably his own) and needs something to reach down and get it. Now despite being in his house, with all his belongings, he has no idea where anything he could use to get this is. Off the top of my head, I could rattle of multiple things I could use to fish a key out of a toilet. Right next to the bathroom is his closet, which I’m guessing has a coat hanger in it. Just bend the coat hanger into a fishing hook and not only do you have a way to retrieve the key, but you also have an emergency abortion kit if the need ever arises.
Oh wait, the closet door is locked. And we’re also too much of a sissy to kick the door open. Or any door, for that matter. Why does nobody ever kick open doors in these games? They search around for a key that they need to accomplish some important task when their foot and the laws of physics are right there the whole fucking time! Hell, if someone really is fucking with you, kicking doors open might be a good way to show them who the boss is. But no, he doesn’t want to hire someone out to fix the door, so he searches around for something he can use. And what does he find? A sweater. No really, that’s what you use. He wraps his arm in a sweater to grab the key. The character even notes that it doesn’t work all that well. Mind you, there’s a shower curtain right fucking there next to fucking toilet! Shower curtains being things that repel water. I’ve worn sweaters and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I promise you, they do everything BUT repel water.
I can’t really complain all that much, because this happens in every point and click game. I can complain about the graphics. The screen is too dark and you can’t adjust the settings for it. In some rooms, the back walls are nearly completely enveloped in darkness. After much complaining from Brian, I finally relented and adjusted the brightness on my television. It didn’t help. Stuff was still not viewable. Stuff that apparently should have been. I clicked in the darkness and my dude described a painting to me that I couldn’t see. It’s really annoying.
The ending is fucking abysmal too. The game sets itself up as a psychological breakdown, but ends up going a bizarre Sci-Fi route involving the destruction the entire universe and you being handpicked to build the next one. It makes no sense at all why they would choose to fuck with you the way they have. Whatever. The story sucks, but the game doesn’t really suck any more or any less than the average point and clicker. If you’re into this type of thing, you’ll probably enjoy this. If you’re like me and think they’re fucking stupid, it won’t change your mind. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hide my father’s car keys again.
Easter is upon us, so I figured I would review a game based on the Easter Bunny. Even though I’m still not sure what bunnies with colored chicken eggs has to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Quite frankly, a zombie game review would be more appropriate. Actually, the explanation for bunnies and Easter is kind of comical. Apparently people in the middle ages were stupid and assumed that rabbits were self-reproductive. Thus, they would give birth as virgins and had some kind of connection to the Virgin Mary. Okay, so I’m still not sure how this ties to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Screw it, let’s play Choc-a-riffic.
It’s a physics-puzzler where you play as a rabbit that has to push chocolate eggs to an exit. You do this by pushing them with your body, or shifting the position of your arms with the right thumb stick. You jump with the right bumper, because the developers decided to make things as inconvenient as possible. And, well, that’s pretty much it.
Here comes Peter Cottontail, hoping down the bunny trail.. and he's coming for your immortal soul.
Choc-a-riffic is crap-a-riffic. Hopefully everyone understands that I’m trying to convey that it’s terrible. The physics are unstable. A few times I pushed an egg, saw it bounce into another egg, and then launch into the air. Other times, I would try to jump in the air and fling upwards like I had just huffed two condensed tons of helium. The controls are crap, and the main character is a little creepy. Based on the subject matter, I’m guessing Choc-a-riffic is aimed at the kiddie set. If so, they should be warned that -I- was almost traumatized when I “accidentally” steered the rabbit into a fire, then left him there just to see what would happen. I figured he would eventually do what every video game character in the situation would do: a backflip followed by laying down. Instead, the little fucker caught fire and continued to walk around in screaming agony, like he was the bunny version of Freddy Krueger. Wait a minute, Freddy kept dying and coming back from the dead. Just like.. oh my God, IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
80 Microsoft Points said Father forgive me for I have sinned. It has been seven days since my last confession. Well Padre, I believe I screwed the pooch this time. I compared my Lord and Savor Jesus Christ to Freddy Krueger. No, it wasn’t exactly directly. More in a roundabout kind of way. It’s not that I believe that Jesus would knife kids in their dreams or anything like that. Wait, just to make sure, Jesus didn’t do that, did he? Father? Father? In the making of this review.God, I hope my parents never read this one.
Unnecessary Violence was developed by Tackemon
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