The Chick’s Monthly Top 10 Update: March 2012

March 31, 2012 by 3 Comments

What a month for gaming!  How often do you get to play two titles that rank among the best you’ve played in your entire life in a single month?  And they came from a couple unexpected sources: PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Indie Games.  Also, this was the month that gamers officially proved they are every bit as ignorant as the media makes them out to be, but more on that later.

“Luke, you turned off your targeting system!”

First, the good stuff.  We Are Cubes is the new #1 game on the Xbox Live Indie Games All-Time Top 10 here at Indie Gamer Chick.  Who saw that coming?  Certainly not I.  The funny thing is, after a couple of hours, it wasn’t even up for debate.  I actually agonized for weeks over whether Escape Goat had dethroned Dead Pixels.  It was one of the toughest calls I’ve made since starting my site.  We Are Cubes was so amazing that it made the decision easy on me.  It truly represents the potential of XBLIG better than any game that has come before it.

Joining it on the list are two crotchety old timers who probably don’t need the attention.  But, this isn’t one of those Academy Award type of deals where the old timers win more as a tribute, based in no way on the merit of their latest project.  Miner Dig Deep and Cthulhu Saves the World are on because they’re among the ten best games I’ve ever played on the Xbox Live Indie Game platform.  It’s that simple.  But, if you insist on this being an Oscar-type of deal, just play some sad music for the games that departed from the list this month.  Try this on.

Gone is Blocks That Matter, Orbitron: Revolution, and TIC: Part One.  TIC wasn’t really due to fall off the list, but it’s been nine months since the game was released and it’s been five months since they updated fans of the first when they can expect part two, or if they can expect it at all.  My good buddy and former Dreamcast rival (no joke, small world huh?) Dave Voyles tells me they’re alive and well and shopping TIC around for a publisher.  Which is all well and good, but making an episodic game and then leaving fans hanging leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I am sympathetic to the fact that the guys at Red Candy Games are in college and don’t have time to build games, but that means they probably shouldn’t have done an episodic game.  That’s how I feel about it.  If Part Two hits and is up to the standards of the first, I’ll lump it together with Part One and it will make the leaderboard.

I’ll give a special shout-out to Bug Ball, which was set to make the leaderboard, but then three other contenders hit and it’s spot was lost.  With proper online tweaks, it still has a shot at it.

I don’t have a non-XBLIG top 10, but if I did, Journey on PlayStation Network would have almost certainly rose to the top of the mountain.  What a truly wonderful experience that game was.  It moved me to tears.  What more can I say that I already didn’t?

In closing, to all you people who whined about the Mass Effect 3 ending to the point where you threatened a lawsuit.. A LAWSUIT.. all I can say is this: wow.  When did gamers get such an obnoxious sense of entitlement about them?  Needless to say, you can’t sue because you find an ending unsatisfactory, unless that ending involves a loved one and medical malpractice.  Nor does the FCC give a flying fuck. All you did was provide them with water cooler fodder.  Really, what do you think they were going to do?  Storm EA’s offices, cuff everyone who works for Bioware, ship their mothers off to Gitmo, and shoot their dogs?  No, they don’t care, and they’re laughing at you, because you’re just that funny.

Wait, that’s all I get? Where’s my lawyer’s number at? I have got to call CNN on this one.

If you could successfully sue over a bad ending, don’t you think that would have happened by now?  And that extends to other forms of entertainment.  Just imagine the dialog.

“Did Darth fucking Vader just scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?  Get the lawyers!”

“Wait, so St. Elsewhere was all a dream?  NO, IT CAN’T BE!  I’LL SUE!!”

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen?  THAT’S IT?  Fuck that, I’ll see you in Court, Jesus!”

“A sled?  A FUCKING SLED?  They’ll rue the day they thought up that shit!”

Buying anything doesn’t entitle you to satisfaction, unless it specifically says in advertisements or packaging “satisfaction guaranteed.”  If some overzealous producer says “we guarantee fans will be happy with this” guess what?  That doesn’t count.  If you can actually find a judge who will say otherwise, there will be a dozen appellate court judges who can’t stand that mother fucker and will eagerly strike down anything he or she says.  So don’t waste the court’s time with this shit.  And don’t waste the FCC’s either.  One, they don’t care, and two, they’re busy making sure Janet Jackson’s nipple never slips out at the Superbowl again.

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We Are Cubes

March 31, 2012 by 9 Comments

This is what I made Indie Gamer Chick for. We Are Cubes is simply amazing.

There’s really no point in showing pictures, since We Are Cubes is incomprehensible unless you’re actually playing it. In fact, quit wasting your time. Just go buy it.

We Are Cubes does that thing neo-retro arcade titles tend to do, where it sort of reminds you of a Golden Age coin-op classic, but not really. Hopefully you get what I’m saying, because I really suck at putting words to it. In the case of We Are Cubes, it’s kind of like Tempest, but it’s also kind of like the 1983 Star Wars arcade game, and yet it’s nothing like those games at all. I was born in 1989, so the Golden Age of Arcades was tits up, lights out by time I hit the gaming scene. With We Are Cubes, I can sort imagine what it felt like to step up to a new cabinet in a dusty old arcade of yesteryear. Games like this make me feel like I missed out.

The idea is you’re a cube in a chute that has to shoot spheres. Also, she sells seashells by the sea-shore. The spheres come in four varieties of colors. Yellow ones take a single shot to kill, green take two, blue three, and red four. Every time you hit a shot, 10% is added to your combo. If you miss a shot, you lose 20% of your combo. If a sphere touches you, you die. If you they fall past you in the chute, they get launched back onto the play field and you lose 10% of your current combo. The hook is spheres split apart and then merge whenever they perfectly bump into each other. So a blue sphere splits into two green spheres, which split into yellow spheres, which turn back into a green sphere if they bump together, etc, etc. It’s a really cool idea, and it works.

There’s two modes of play. Arcade ends after twenty-five waves, while Survival has you fight multiple “boss” orbs that shit out little baby orbs until you run out of lives. Both modes can be played in a competitive mode, where you “work together” wink nudge while trying to kill each-other by grabbing controller-jamming power-ups. Actually, most of the items in this game are pretty cool and practical, and learning how to best use them feels rewarding. Early on, I figured the laser was the best one of have, but as enemies pile up, it can get pretty dangerous to use. The freeze item works better because it allows you to shoot at enemies and rack up a higher combo.

By this point, your thumbs will be filing for legal separation.

We Are Cubes is all about landing a spot on the online leaderboards. That’s pretty much the point of the game in its entirety. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I do have a few complaints. Sometimes, the physics seem to crap out and an orb that is bouncing around ends up stuck to the wall. If your trigger finger is as itchy as your girlfriend’s crotch, those types of situations end up with a missed shot and 20% points off your combo. Of course, the flip side of that is if you’re the patient type, you get a wide open shot. A more annoying problem is the game has a slight hiccup if you unlock a fakey achievement, causing a slight pause that did kill me once or twice. If anyone from the development team had been in kicking distance of me, they would have had a size 6 1/2 up their ass.

Yes, I have teeny feet.

Despite minor problems, and I want to stress this so I’ll use bold, italics, and underlining, minor problems, We Are Cubes is one of the best video games I’ve played in years. Not just for indie games. Not just for Xbox games. VIDEO GAMES. The whole lot of them. It ranks somewhere near the top. We Are Cubes is proof that Xbox Live Indie Games is a platform worth sticking up for. It’s a game that is oddly familiar, yet you’ve never quite played anything like it. At the end of the day, it earns it’s spot as the #1 game on my site because it feels like the quintessential video game. It’s everything gaming should be. Fast paced, reflexive, play-a-little-longer fun in its purest form. We Are Cubes feels like it fell through a hole in time, straight out of the 80s and into your living room. Kind of like the cast of the Celebrity Apprentice, only it doesn’t suck.

We Are Cubes was developed by 1BK

igc_approved180 Microsoft Points are also grateful it didn’t bring back with it tacky sunglasses and Madonna in the making of this review.

Did you know I’m giving away 1600 Microsoft Points on Thursday?  Oh, you did.  You don’t care.  Sigh.  Well, you can at least humor me and vote for next week’s game.  Just follow the link for a list.

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Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World

March 30, 2012 by 18 Comments

I have no interest in making Xbox Live Indie Games myself.  But, if I were to hypothetically suffer some kind of brain trauma where side effects included a compulsion to create games that few would try and even fewer would buy, I would start by pulling out what I call the “Checklist of Annoyances.”  Everyone has their own personal list of things that are fucking stupid that pop up time and time again in gaming.  If I was to develop games, my personal goal would be to eliminate as many instances of these things as possible.  I think my homies at Zeboyd Games subscribe to that theory, because their games play like they were built around my personal Checklist of Annoyances: RPG Edition.

As many of you know, Breath of Death VII was the very first Xbox Live Indie Game I ever purchased.  I think I caught wind of it through Joystiq and figured “what the hell?”  Guess what?  I really liked it.  A lot.  I liked it so much I immediately went back to the Indie channel to see what other treasures I was missing.  Then I saw what other games were on the best-selling list at the time and decided that my Microsoft Points would be better spent on a baseball cap for my avatar.  I didn’t give the XBLIG channel a second thought until I started Indie Gamer Chick.  I did wonder if anything would become of the company that gave me the five glorious hours spent with Breath of Death VII.  As it turns out, they went on to do Cthulhu Saves the World before being tapped by Penny Arcade to do their next game.  They’re a good choice, because like Penny Arcade, Zeboyd is good at creating genuine humor that stops being funny about halfway through whatever media it’s on.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Breath of Death VII features 8-Bit graphics.

Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World are essentially the same game with different plots and graphic styles.  This is where the Checklist of Annoyance comes into the picture.  Imagine every lame RPG mechanic you’ve wished someone would do away with.  Most of them are taken care of by Zeboyd.  There’s a limited number of random encounters in every dungeon, and even in the over-world.  If you wish, you can force a battle by selecting it in the menu, and forced battles do count towards the preset number.  You get a full health-restore following every battle, and the battle system features a fun combo-based system that encourages creativity.  I especially liked the insanity system that Cthulhu has, where you can render enemies crazy to activate bonuses in your attacks.  Both games are pretty short compared to the classics they pay tribute to, and both feature fairly linear stories that are easy to follow and fun to read.  There’s no question these are the best RPGs on the XBLIG platform.

But let’s not kid ourselves.  Flawless they are not.  I really like both games, but the writing in them leaves a lot to be desired.  I’ll start with Breath of Death VII.  It lampoons the concept of a silent protagonist by starring a skeleton that has no tongue, and thus he has to be silent.  Ha, get it?  Now just imagine dozens of variations of that joke for about four hours.  Otherwise, most of the gags in Breath of Death VII are of the “drop a bad video game quote” variety, resulting in a pile of dead dogs that could rival the meat locker in a Taiwanese steakhouse.

Cthulhu’s running gag is that he has been stripped of all his power and has to become a true hero to get them back.  And it’s Cthulhu, so heroism is against his nature.  Ha, get it?  Now imagine hundreds of variations of that joke for about eight hours.  Both of these games suffer from what I like to call the “Blazing Saddles Effect.”  Blazing Saddles was 1974 satire of western films where the entire joke was a town full of white people has a black sheriff forced onto them.  That’s the entire gag in the movie.  Some people consider it a classic.  I personally feel the joke did start funny, but got old before the movie was even half-way finished.  Breath of Death and Cthulhu are the same way.

I will say that Cthulhu Saves the World has some pretty strong writing through-out, even if the overall punchline had lost its zing about an hour or two in.  I can’t say the same about Breath of Death VII.  By the end of the game, the dialog was cringe worthy and the jokes routinely fell flat.  Cthulhu actually has some really funny running themes, like encounters with “real heroes” and the hilarious banter between Cthulhu and the narrator.  Still, it never shakes that Blazing Saddles “it’s funny because he’s black” feel.  It’s funny because it’s Cthulhu.  No, it’s not.

Cthulhu Saves the World has 16-bit style graphics.

Having said all that, these are two of the best Xbox Live Indie Games ever made, and Cthulhu Saves the World especially is good enough to land a spot on the leaderboard this Sunday.  The overall package of it is perhaps the best value you can get on Xbox Live Indie Games.  You get a decent sized RPG, a second quest where Cthulhu takes the role of Charlie from Charlie’s Angels (it’s funny because he’s Cthulhu!) and orders around some chicks to save the world.  There’s developer commentary too.  I mean, this is an insane amount of content for $1.  Despite dialog problems, Breath of Death VII is no slouch either.  Both games remain pretty fun through-out, and if you’re into RPGs, it doesn’t get any better.  What I like best about them is these are games made by gamers for gamers that don’t try to be “legitimate” games with all inherit flaws.  Zeboyd seems to have checked off every convention that has no place in gaming anymore and said “why would we want to include this?”  It’s a lesson many XBLIG developers could stand to learn.  So many of them set out to make what I like to call “professional-acting” titles that include mechanics that suck on the basis that real games have them.  Don’t do that.  Focus on fun.  If something makes a game less fun by default, don’t include it.  You would think “don’t intentionally make your game less fun” would be the type of thing that goes without saying.  But then again, your average XBLIG developer is so thick you could blend them and re-purpose them as pothole filler.

Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World were developed by Zeboyd Games

80 Microsoft Points apiece said “it’s funny because she’s a chick!”  No, it’s not in the making of this review. 

You have one week to go to vote for a chance to win 1600 Microso.. ah fuck it, nobody reads past the Microsoft Points line anyway.  Way to embrace the democratic process, guys!

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The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit

March 27, 2012 by 11 Comments

The Hearts of men: Throne of Deceit is a Gauntlet clone.  As a kid, I loved Gauntlet Legends on the Sega Dreamcast.  In fact, I look back fondly on it as one of my favorite games of that era.  So I was very excited for a chance to play a loving tribute to one of my childhood favorites.  And I had good reason to be excited.  It has online play and pretty decent graphics for an Xbox Live Indie Game.  What could go wrong?

Sigh.  Sit down, COLTRAN Studios.  We need to talk about the difference between “creating challenge” and “being a dickhead.”  It’s really not that fine a line.  Here, allow me to elaborate.

  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy: Challenging.
  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy and are completely out of reach, thus making them unkillable unless you use a bomb: You’re a dickhead.
  • Enemy archers who fire with 100% accuracy and are completely out of reach, thus making them unkillable unless you use a bomb, but only placing one or two bombs in each level (if that) and not letting players buy more between stages: You’re a giant-sized dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling: Challenging.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility: You’re a dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility and floor indistinguishable from non-floor: You’re a colossal dickhead.
  • Auto-scrolling with limited visibility, floor indistinguishable from non-floor, and dead-ends that lead to instant-death that make the entire game an exercise in luck: You’re a dickhead of such extreme proportions that catching even a glimpse of you through a window makes you subject to arrest under indecent exposure laws.

Impressive screenshot, huh? Check out what the next screen they selected looks like.

By the way, if you can’t tell the difference between a challenge and being a dickhead, that makes you a special-needs dickhead.  Really, when developers make shit like this, I complain about it, and then they tweet back boastfully oblivious of what a mess they’ve made of their project, it makes me wonder if the difficulty spike is some kind of Revenge of the Nerds type of deal.  The developers suddenly went on the rag around the time they started tweaking the difficulty, remembered the time that Scott Phinigus shoved them into a locker after gym class and decided this was their opportunity to take revenge on the world.  Which it’s not really revenge on the world.  It’s just a sign that the developers had their heads firmly shoved up their own anal cavities and their games should be avoided like they’re radioactive.

Here’s a tip, XBLIGers: nobody recommends a $1 indie Xbox game because it’s hard.  That’s not a point in the game’s favor.  People recommend games based on accessibility, replayability, value, and the amount of fun they have versus the amount of time they wish they were doing something else.  Nobody says “Hey Joe, there’s this game that is sort of fun 20% of the time, but 80% of the time it’s dull, repetitive, and so frustrating that you’ll wish you had paid your 63-year-old neighbor with the coke-bottle glasses $1 to flash you her lop-sided tits instead!”

Hearts of Men does so many things right that I wish I could say “hell yes, this is $1 well spent.”  But I can’t, because every good idea is followed up by at least one bad idea.  Mapping attack to the right analog stick, turning Gauntlet into a TwickS, which is the most obvious move for the genre?  Good idea!  Lack of enemy variety?  Bad idea.  Four different hero types?  Good idea!  Useless upgrades, like getting full life-refills on meat, of which there is usually only one per stage?  Bad idea.

No, this isn't the same screen. They just didn't make any effort to get a nice variety of shots for the marketplace page. Hell, one of the pictures is of the title screen. Way to half-ass it, guys!

By the way, I wasn’t joking about the developers having their heads up their ass when they designed this.  I actually believe the creation of this game began with a few guys first taking turns shoving their heads up each-others asses.  A sort of low-budget Human Centipede if you will.  Because that’s the only way I can explain how stupid the online component of this game is.  Quick: what do you want in an online Gauntlet clone?  Co-op for the campaign, right?  I mean, what kind of question is that?  You would have to be a fucking moron to answer with anything else, and the developers would have to be jumbo-sized morons so thick that even Alabama would deport them out of shame to not do such an obvious thing.

But this is XBLIG, so of course the developers dropped the ball on it.  No online co-op.  At all.  None.  Oh, there’s online in Hearts of Men.  Only it’s a bunch of unplayable, utterly useless deathmatch-type stuff.  Who would see potential in deathmatch-type stuff in a fucking Gauntlet game?  I suppose the same guys who decided to include auto-scrolling sections in a Gauntlet game.  What really sucks is the knowledge that they wasted their time on this shit when they should have been working on online co-op, which people might have actually bought the game for.  Nobody at all would buy this shit for the type of online play they included.  Hell, if you’re not going to bother with online co-op, spend the time fixing the main game.  The third boss looks just like any other normal enemy, and you know they phoned it in because they were busy jerking off with this stuff.

I admit, the first match-type (a sort of territorial-control mixed with bomb-the-base stuff) would be fun if you could get eight players into it, but again, this is Xbox Live Indie Games.  You’re more likely to see an endangered white rhino juggling zebras while riding a unicycle than ever find eight people online playing Hearts of Men.  And besides, there’s no lobby to invite people in.  People can only enter the game once it starts.  And once it ends, everyone is dumped out to the main menu.  Seriously, what a piece of shit game.

Hearts of Men is fun at times, especially with local co-op.  But, somewhere along the line, its developers forgot they were creating something designed to be fun.  My co-op partners quit after the first auto-scroll section because the developers were so busy gleefully being dickheads that they forgot to be entertaining as well.  I stuck it out, and I wish I hadn’t.  It’s a few hours I couldn’t get back.  I didn’t even finish Hearts of Men.  By the fourth world I realized nothing remotely resembling a good time had happened in hours.  Just the same enemies, the same keys, the same doors, and the same dick moves.

Yes, it's a new picture. Too late, I'm already bored.

And then my memory kicked in and I remembered that I never actually finished Gauntlet Legends either, because it stopped being fun long before the game ended.  Maybe what the Indie market should do when paying tribute to old favorites is limit the game to an hour or two.  That way, you don’t have time to get bored.  I asked some friends and they all agreed that Gauntlet Legends was the shits back in the day, and that they never beat it because it was too long and boring.  This is a contradiction that you, XNA developers, have the ability to fix.  You know, assuming you’re smart enough to make games with the correct online features and not include out-of-place auto-scrolling sequences in them.  And since we know that’s too much to ask of COLTRAN Studios, how about someone else take a crack at fixing the problems with Gauntlet.  I’ll keep them occupied by giving them some bubble wrap to pop.

The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit was developed by COLTRAN Studios

80 Microsoft Points admit this was maybe my meanest review.  Really, I don’t think the guys at COLTRAN are morons or stupid.  Well, maybe a little stupid.  I mean, no online- co-op and fucking auto-scrolling in a fucking Gauntlet game?  For fuck’s sake, you would have to be glue-sniffingly stupid to.. in the making of this review.  Deep breath.  I’m calm, calm, perfectly calm.

I blame you guys for not voting in the Katch-Up this week despite this being my best week all month in terms of page views.  You already killed the puppy of sadness.  He drank lighter fluid, sat in the highway, and lit himself on fire.  And that was before the steamroller arrived. 

A review copy of The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit was provided by COLTRAN Studios to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Kairi was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review code was given to someone else to provide her with a proper online experience.  That person was not involved at all in the writing or editing of this review.  For more information on this policy, please consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with ,

Tales from the Dev Side: Earning Your Keep by Shahed Chowdhuri

March 26, 2012 by 9 Comments

Way back in November, I played a game that I called “one of the worst on XBLIG” and implied the developer had his head up his own ass. 

Well, this is awkward.  Because the developer of that game, Angry Zombie Ninja Cats, has taken me up on my open invite to Xbox Live Indie Game developers to do an editorial here at Indie Gamer Chick.  And unlike his game, this isn’t the worst thing since Angry Zombie Ninja Führer.  Actually, Mr. Shahed Chowdhuri has become a respected member of the Xbox community, possibly by forcing people to endorse him or he’ll subject them to more play-time with his game.  I kid, I kid.  Actually, like most XBLIG developers whose games I was, ahem, less than kind too, Mr. Chowdhuri was a good sport about things and vowed to do better next time.  He also has some words of encouragement for would-be game developers. 

Read more of this post

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The Houchi Play 放置プレイ

March 25, 2012 by 5 Comments

Japan, what the fuck? Seriously, this is why you can’t have nice things. Well, that and the constant Godzilla attacks. The Houchi Play is the most bizarre and creepy of the “raunchy” fare I’ve tried on Xbox Live Indie Games yet. As a reminder, that includes a game featuring a giant space pussy.

The idea is you’re an admittedly perverted Japanese dude who tries to sneak up on girls playing dress up. Because really, what guy out there doesn’t fantasize about being a middle-aged man who gets his knob on by stalking females “dressed up” wink, like under-aged school girls? Come on, guys. This shit is creepy as hell. Someone told me that I need to look at the comedy value of this game. I don’t really see the joke myself. It would be different if the dude got close enough to the chick and then got maced in the face or an attack dog came and bit his scrotum off. Well, I guess guys wouldn’t find it too funny then, and it’s tough to be misogynistic if the women folk get an equal share of the yuk-yuks.

The first video game that has to legally stay 1,000 yards away from a school zone.

As for the game itself, Houchi Play is just the school-yard game of Statues done over and over and over again. The chick turns around and looks away from you and you move. She turns back around, you quit moving. That’s the entirety of game. Hilariously, moving is done by pushing the left and right triggers as fast as you can. This is tiring enough that any guys who are, ahem, really stimulated by the comedy will be struck down with “wanker’s cramp” (thanks Yahtzee) before the cow is ready for milking.

Oh, and sometimes you’ll pass a bottle of alcohol, setting off a quick-time “hit the buttons as fast as you can” sequence, where if you get them all, your Pervatar will fill with liquid courage and be able to move faster. Sounds fine, except during these sections I would end up stuck because as soon as I finished the drink the chick would inevitably turn around and face me. Who wouldn’t? When some strange little man who can barely contain his tiny erection keeps inching closer to you, it’s best not to break eye contact. Next thing you know, the guy is up in your face and asking you to come write for his crappy gaming website.

I don’t think Houchi Play is erotic, funny, or a well made game. And honestly, I don’t believe that was the point at all. It’s a novelty. It’s the kind of thing you keep around so when you have friends over, you can tell them “here, let me show you something that is fucked up.” Hell, I did that once or twice myself with Fatal Seduction. Of course, as fucked up as that game was (and it WAS), playing it didn’t make me feel compelled to go down to the courthouse and volunteer to register as a sex offender.

The Houchi Play 放置プレイwas developed by Kohei

80 Microsoft Points can be seen on Dateline NBC, check your local listings, in the making of this review.

 

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Decay

March 23, 2012 by 8 Comments

Week #2 of Kairi’s Katch-Up Thursdays (it’s still Thursday on Venus!) and the winner by a landslide was the Decay series of point-and-click games.  I know I said the popular vote count would not necessarily factor into my final selection, but when 8 out of 10 votes were for it, you kind of have to go with it.  By the way, that wasn’t a hypothetical ratio.  There are only ten people voting in this thing.  One voter will win 1600 Microsoft Points on April 5.  And some of the voters have asked to not be included in the drawing.  Sigh.  This will probably be my last contest.  Don’t make me break out the sad puppy-dog eyes at you people.

Oh that’s it.  That is it!  I hate that it’s come to this.  This will hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.  Behold the power of the sad puppy dog eyes.

Are you guys going to participate and vote more?  Good.  Don’t make me do that again.

Now then, for those of you that are not curling up in the fetal position and sobbing to yourself right now, here’s the Decay review.  You know, point & clickers are the one retro genre that I can’t figure out why anyone is interested in anymore.  2D platformers can still be fun.  Old-school sports games are usually fast paced.  Classic arcade-style drivers are typically fun for at least an hour.  Even moldy old school street brawlers can work when you dress them up and slightly modernize them like Castle Crashers did.  But point & clickers?  They only existed because you couldn’t do free-roaming 3D environments in the 80s through the early 90s.  Once technology caught up to the ambitions of adventure game developers, the genre’s time for extinction had arrived.

Of course, Xbox Live Indie Games is a virtual Jurassic Park full of fossils that should have died out long ago.  I suppose that makes the Decay series the velociraptors of the market: hunting in packs, more trouble than their worth, and at the end of the day it’s still just a dinosaur.

Yea, that was pretty much the worst analogy ever.

Decay has no shortage of spooky images. Plot, on the other hand..

Decay is split into four parts.  Part one will run you $1 and will last you between fifteen and twenty-five minutes, depending on how much fucking about you do.  It sets the mood for this story about.. um.. you know, I played all four games and I could barely grasp what the whole thing was about.  Apparently a family of three have gone missing, or perhaps the wife got sick and died, or some serial killer got them, or fuck I have a headache.  There’s just too many red herrings to keep up with.

Decay is one of those minimalist-story type of deals.  This is a problem, because Koint & Knickers typically have to have a strong story to make up for the complete and total lack of gameplay.  You’re not really fed enough narrative in Decay.  At first, that was okay, because the open-ended questions left me genuinely intrigued.  Is the dude in purgatory?  Hell?  Is he reliving an event, or dreaming of a future one?  Sadly, as the story progressed, the actual answers were nowhere near as interesting as the suspense they invoked.

Decay still managed to be pretty creepy through-out, but by the end of parts two and three, my interest in the outcome had been significantly stilted.  By time Part 4 came around, I was downright bored.  The story sucks, plain and simple.  And then it ends with a ridiculous Sophie’s Choice moment which guaranteed the presence of alternate endings.  I hate it when games do this.  Games are not movies.  They take a significant time investment.  An alternate ending in a movie is easy.  Go to the DVD menu, select the ending, watch it.  Done.  In a game, you have to replay the entire fucking thing from the beginning and hope you don’t make any mistakes that would lead you into the same ending.  Now granted, in Decay you only have to start over from Part 4, but that’s still another hour or so you’ll have to invest doing the same puzzles you just solved.  And for what?  I checked on Youtube and all the endings were fucking lame as hell.  And that’s partially because you don’t know enough about the characters to give two shits about them.

So the story was a bust for me.  The gameplay did slightly better.  It really is just typical Boink & Flick stuff, so don’t expect too many surprises.  Well, besides a really horrible brick-breaker minigame in Part 2 with terrible physics and horrible play-control.  Oh, and a dexterity tester in Part 4 that was completely out-of-place.  The guys at Shinning Gate should have stuck to the logic and word puzzles, because those worked and were fun to solve.  Whenever you actually needed to do something in real-time, the game handled like a Ford Bronco driven by a drunken warthog.

I have no clue what they were thinking when they included this awful shit.

Despite occasionally enjoying the puzzles, I really didn’t care for Decay at all.  The story was boring, the setting was uninteresting, and it actually got progressively less spooky as things went on.  But the biggest problem is the price.  Combined, the game will run you 800 Microsoft Points.  That’s $10 for a series that will take you two-and-a-half hours tops to finish.  It’s a terrible value.  If you go to Target, they have an entire rack of PC Moink & Slick games that they often have 2 for 1 or sometimes even 3 for 1 sales on.  Even if you pay the full $10 asking price on them, they’re typically better games with actual storylines, and they come on the platform the genre is suited for.  Really, why would anyone want a Point & Click adventure on Xbox 360?  It would be like buying yacht and entering it into the Kentucky Derby.

Decay was developed by Shinning Gate Studio

80 Microsoft Points (Part 1) and 240 Microsoft Points (Part 2 – 4) apiece anxiously await hearing Toink & Wick fans bitch about how I’m too young to understand the genre in the making of this review.

Remember the puppy?  Good.  Now vote for next week’s Katch-Up game.  Maybe I’ll even post it on Thursday, like I’m supposed to.  Voting enters you into a drawing to win 1600 Microsoft Points.  Don’t make me post it again!  Head over to list, pick one, and vote on Twitter. 

Thanks to Michael Wilson for the banner.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , ,

Avatar Block War

March 21, 2012 by 8 Comments

Nope, I still haven’t played Minecraft.  No, I’m not avoiding it for the sake of being that one person who always has to thumb their nose up at whatever the current bandwagon is.  You won’t hear me calling it “Minecrap” or bitching about the endless clones of it that fill up the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace like pimples on the face of a 14-year-old Hershey enthusiast.

I avoid it because I’m afraid of it.  When it comes to PC gaming, I have an addictive personality.  I lost nearly a full year to World of Warcraft, another few months to the Sims, a few months to Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Plants vs. Zombies, and Bejeweled, and Peggle, etc, etc.  Basically, I have a problem.  And props to me for recognizing that and accepting that with certain games, temperance is the only solution for me.  Quite frankly, all you people like Nate Graves and Tim Hurley who keep telling me to give it a try because all cool kids are doing it are evil.  That’s right, evil.  They make after-school specials about this stuff, you know!

But if Minecraft is anything remotely like Avatar Block War, I have nothing to fear.  I’ve tried to avoid using terms like “soulless” and “cash-in” as it relates to Xbox Live Indie Games.  I have no problem with that here: Avatar Block War is a soulless cash-in.  That and it’s a buggy, crappy, glitchy, shitty, badly conceived piece of shit.  It is so bad that I think it might be the worst XBLIG I’ve played yet.  And yea, I say that a lot, but it’s not my fault you guys keep lowering the bar the way you do.

Bubbles Bubbles everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Yet.

Avatar Block War tries for the sandboxy-feel of Minecraft, but aims to be more of an arena shooter of sorts.  This was their first mistake, and leads into mistakes 2 through 285,195,106,344.  The two genres just seem incompatible.  At the very least, it doesn’t work as a kill-count driven game.  Capture the flag or territorial control might make more sense, but all that counts in Avatar Block War is the body count.  But who knows, maybe what Call of Duty really is missing is the ability to build a giant cock-shaped statue in the middle of a fire fight.  Of course, that would be a risky strategy if you played by the rules of Avatar Block War, where bullets instantly destroy blocks you lay down.  Oh, and they also kill you, because that’s sort of what bullets are made for.

There really is no benefit in building.  It doesn’t make an effective shield.  The game does have various mountains of blocks already in place, but they are of no use except to help the game find new and exciting ways to glitch out.  So I suppose I should focus on the gun-play.  It’s shallow.  It’s limited.  Bullets are represented by your gun bubbling for some reason.  The variety of guns you have doesn’t really seem to make a difference, as they all have about the same range and same kill potential.  I suppose the assault rifle is the most effective because it can destroy blocks.  That’s kind of like saying a panzer tank is the most effective vehicle during five o’clock traffic.  Only here, the panzer tank’s bullets register about three years after they’ve shot someone and the barrel doubles as a soap-bubble wand.

And now to the glitches.  Instead of picking them apart in my typical smart-ass fashion, I’m just going to list things that happened to me while I played the game using bullet points.  Mind you, I’m not going to list everything, because we would seriously be here all day and I have laundry to do.

  • Trying to climb the mountain and falling through it.
  • Being able to walk through blocks.
  • Being able to see through blocks.
  • Blocks appearing and disappearing due to clipping issues.
  • Blocks have significantly shorter draw distance than characters, so you’ll see dudes walking around long before you see any blocks, rendering hiding behind them useless.
  • Lag.  During single player.  Lots of it.
  • The most brain-dead AI I’ve ever seen.  Bots will walk against walls indefinitely.
  • In online matches, lag is truly insane.  If you shoot a person, they might go three or four minutes before the bullet registers.  I played with Bryce and Brian.  They would kill me, and then while I was respawning, the bullets I had shot at them would slowly sink in.  I would respawn, only make my way half-way to where they were at, never shooting mind you, and they would suddenly die from the bullets I had shot several minutes earlier.  This wasn’t on our connection, by the way.  We’re sure of that on the basis that SINGLE PLAYER has lag just like this, only not as brutal.
  • Also, whatever blocks you build in online play aren’t necessarily visible to everyone else.  The boys called me over to see the tower they constructed.  I came there and instead saw something vaguely resembling Stonehenge.  I also noticed they were walking on air about three feet in front of me.  As it turns out, they had built a really elaborate tower.  I just couldn’t see it.  Then I shot them in the head and they died about a week later.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  But trust me, five minutes feels like a week in this fucking game.

If not for the glitches, it's possible the game would merely be boring.

I want to once again stress that I have nothing against Minecraft.  I haven’t played it, and thus I’m not going to hate on something I haven’t tried myself.  If you’re the type that does that, grow up you fucking whinny child.  I’m also not going to hate on the fact that Minecraft clones dominate the XBLIG sales charts.  You know what?  Blame the guys making the official port of Minecraft to the Xbox 360 for taking so long.  It’s a perfectly valid market and taking advantage of a genre that is trendy is smart.  Period.  This is how the game industry works, folks.  Space Invaders was a hit and then there were Space Invader clones.  Same with Pac-Man.  Same with Super Mario Brothers.  Same with Doom.  When you bitch about crafting games dominating XBLIG, you might as well say “Someone please get me into special education because I have followed gaming my entire life and somehow still have no clue how it works at all and thus I obviously have an undiagnosed learning disability.  It’s amazing that I haven’t been killed by the force from the black hole-like vacuum where my brain should be.”

BUT, feel perfectly free to bitch about games like Avatar Block Wars, which make no effort to be fun, polished, or even working.  It’s really quite sad that it’s on the first page of the best-selling games list, or at least the daily one.  It made it look effortless, but only on account of no actual effort being made during development.

Avatar Block Wars was developed by Fredrik Stigsson

240 Microsoft Points can’t cast stones for being shameless clones of popular things for obvious reasons in the making of this review.

A review copy of Avatar Block Wars was provided by Mr. Stigsson to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Kairi was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review code was given to someone else to provide her with a proper online experience.  That person was not involved at all in the writing or editing of this review.  For more information on this policy, please consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.

Keep voting in Kairi’s Katch-Up Thursdays.  On April 5, I’ll be giving away 1600 Microsoft Points to someone who participates in the democratic process.  Even though the winner is not determined by a popular vote.  Whatever, just go vote.

Video footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest

March 20, 2012 by 9 Comments

Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest has two unique distinctions on my indie game journey.  First, it has the most unwieldy name I’ve ever come across in gaming.  Second, it’s the first Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve played that takes advantage of the raised file-size limits.  Coming in at a whopping 377.59MB, it’s the biggest XBLIG of all time.  I wish it was also exceptionally bad, so that I could say it’s also the biggest piece of shit on the platform.  Sadly, that’s not the case.  Don’t get me wrong, Ogre’s Phantasy Star Online is bad, but it’s not bad-bad.

Ogre’s Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead is sort of a bargain basement knock-off of Shadow of the Colossus.  You play as a girl with a sword that is roughly the size of a Pinto, though probably not half-as-deadly.  The object of the game is to slay giant ogres that wear football helmets.  You do this in a quite frankly impressive 3D battlefield.  Action takes place in real-time, with hordes of little goblin things trying to kill you.  All that matters is taking down the larger enemies.  Once you’ve killed all the ogres, the level is beaten.

Unfortunately, Ogre’s Phantoms Starring Ben Affleck falters in pretty much every way a game can.  I’ll start with the combat mechanics.  X does a horizontal slice and B does a harder vertical one.  Sounds pretty straight-forward.  The problem is once you’ve swung, the chick just stands there like she just simultaneously pulled every muscle in her body and is waiting to see if her heart is going to start beating again.  Granted, she’s swinging a sword so large that it defies practicality and she’s probably walking around with a hernia big enough to park a car in, so maybe they were aiming for realism.  Probably not.  I mean, the chick can jump about twenty feet in the air and pogo-stick off bad guys in a way that reminded many of my Twitter followers of the NES game Duck Tales.

The pogo stick thing is the main method of attack.  When you jump on a bad guy, you spring extra high in the air.  If you tap the B button, you do a down-stabby thing.  If you press B and then A before you land, you’ll spring off one baddie and onto another.  This also works for doing multiple attacks on ogres, which should pop their helmet off after a few whacks.  After that, you just keep bouncing until the thing dies.  Once you figure this out, most of the levels are laughably easy.  I figured I would be able to coast right through to the end.  I thought wrong.

If the only problem with the game was having a chick who swings a sword like an octogenarian brandishing a sledgehammer yet is somehow able to spring off enemy heads with all the energy of a ring-tailed lemur that’s been drip-fed cocaine since conception, I could probably still recommend Ogre’s Fantasy Football League.  But I can’t.  Why?  Because the game crapped out on me a whole bunch of times.  Whenever more than a handful of guys were on-screen, the frame rate would sputter like a jet turbine that just took in a whole flock of pelicans.  It’s worth noting that the smaller baddies respawn constantly, so it is impossible to not land yourself in a situation where the frame rate takes a beating.  And the problem only gets worse whenever one of the ogres swings at you, which is pretty much the entire time you’re engaging them.  The game also has pretty horrible draw-distance as it relates to the enemies.  Once they get about 15 feet away from you, they simply vanish.  Perhaps the chick needs to visit LensCrafters.  Or maybe she has the strangest case of Akinetopsia ever.

There are lots of little glitches too.  Enemies getting stuck in walls.  Ogres getting stuck in walls.  You getting stuck in walls.  Or an enemy attack getting “stuck on you” somehow.  I went back to level two so that I could grind-up some cash to buy the best sword in the game.  I got charged by the giant deer-thing in that level and got knocked down.  Whenever you take damage, you drop some of the money you’ve collected.  Well, the deer had ran clean past me and was no longer in sight.  Yet, my dudette was still hemorrhaging money as if she was taking damage.  It was bizarre.  Despite wanting to retain whatever cash I had, I was curious if the game was having a blond moment, so I bailed well out of the range of any enemies, just to make sure there was nothing actively biting me.  There wasn’t.

Thankfully, all you have to do is press start once and you’re instantly teleported back to the stage-select screen.  But this brings me to my next complaint: pressing start once instantly teleports you back to the stage-select screen.  There’s no option to pause in the middle of battle.  If you press start, back to the map you go.  It’s fucking annoying as hell.  There is absolutely no reason for a game to not offer the option of pausing.  I thought this was established back in the days of the NES.  Sometimes you’s gotta answer the phone, sometimes you’s gotta piss.  The only purpose this could have possibly have served is to establish the developers as colossal dickheads.  If so, mission accomplished.

I admit, I kind of, sort of like Ogre’s Final Fantasy Fan Art, but I can’t recommend it in its present state.  It feels too much like an alpha build.  Almost as if the developers had something highly ambitious in mind, but had a teeny tiny bit too much fun themselves with the early prototype and said “you know what, fuck it, this is good enough.”  With proper patchwork, this might be a special game someday.  Hey, slaying monsters so big that they can’t fit completely on the screen is fucking awesome.  I’m sure we can all agree on that.  I’m sure we can also agree that if the best offense those monsters have is butt-fucking the frame rate down to sandpapered-DVD levels of skipiness, perhaps we’re better off waging war on mushrooms with legs and turtles.  At least they fight fair.

Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest was developed by Divider Games

240 Microsoft Points said at least there’s no annoying horse to drive you crazy in the making of this review.

Keep voting in Kairi’s Katch-Up Thursdays.  On April 5, I’ll be giving away 1600 Microsoft Points to someone who participates in the democratic process.  Even though the winner is not determined by a popular vote.  Whatever, just go vote.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Dream Divers

March 17, 2012 by 8 Comments

We meet again, Team Shuriken.  Only this time you guys made an actual game instead of a lame ass series of static anime boobies peppered between completely random multiple choice options that are just as likely to lead you to death as they are to advance the story forward.  Now then, Dream Divers is a lame ass series of static anime boobies that are peppered between, um, completely random multiple choice options that are, uhhhh, just as likely to lead you to death as they are to.. advance the story forward?  Wait, what?

Oh you bastards.

Hey, 18! That means she's legal! Of course, if she was an actual human being, she wouldn't give you the time of day.

Yea, Dream Divers has gameplay more complex than “push one of four buttons and see what happens.”  You start up on a ship and use a mechanic similar to one of those double-click things they use in golf video games to decide what position you’ll dive from.  Next, you swim around collecting air bubbles and try to find a star.  If you get one, you return to the ship.  If you die, well, you still return to the ship.  In order to stay in the water, you have to get air.  The amount of air you have left is represented by a pair of tits.  Of course it is.

I figure there’s two types of people who will buy this game: kids whose only option to get risqué games is through XBLIGs, which are not subject to parental lockout due to their lack of ESRB ratings, and losers.  Either way, they’re in this to see fake boobies.  And I’m not talking about the kind you see in Playboy.  If you’ve gone so far as to purchase the game, download it, and begin playing it, the only thing that will hold your attention is the digital tits.  In the hour or so I played Dream Divers, I never even noticed the air gauge.  It’s pretty obvious when you’re running out of air, because you slow down and eventually stop moving.  The picture of breasts is just further pandering to guys playing co-op with Rosy Palm and her five ugly sisters.

As utterly shameless as Team Shuriken is, and they are, Dream Divers is not a complete abortion of a game.  Exploring underwater caverns is fun.  They make entire movies about that, some of which barely have any cleavage at all.  The problem with Dream Divers is it still relies too much on trial-and-error gameplay.  Each of the stages contains false pathways that lead you into the lair of a giant, drooling Octopus that will presumably rape and kill whatever chick you’re using.  There is a map that you can see between levels, but it only fills in once you’ve physically been through the stage.  Given that all movement has to be made with minimal forethought and there is absolutely no room left for error, they should have been nice and given us full view of the map.

Wow, it's so erotic! Paying $1 for this is totally a better idea than doing a free Google search for boobs! Those might feature, icky, REAL boobies. Gross. They have like skin and veins and stuff. That's just wrong.

The control isn’t bad.  You point the chicks and they go where you tell them too.  I guess you can’t ask for more than that.  Things do occasionally move too fast, and thus you’re forced to die and memorize exactly where to make hair-pin turns and the locations of the larger air bubbles that you will need to make it just a few feet further.  Anything after the first two stages becomes teeth-gnashingly frustrating, but I would venture a guess that most men will have pooped themselves out and taken a nap by that point anyway.

I have an idea that XBLIG developers can use to market these games: instead of pushing the sexual content, push them as an exercise game.  I’m guessing stuff like Dream Divers is the only cardio workout anyone who would want this type of shit actually gets.  But if you’re the type of person who does buy games like this, I have a better idea for you: multitask.  Use that Google search and find some real titties, and save your Microsoft Points for a game that doesn’t pander to your primal urges.  Play a good game, and if you feel the need to buck the slobbering donkey, just look over at your monitor and have at it.

Yea I know, it won’t happen.  Well, as long as Team Shuriken can live with being responsible for more spanked monkeys than a chimpanzee dominatrix, who am I question them?

Dream Divers was developed by Team Shuriken

80 Microsoft Points imagine diving underwater with two plastic floatation devices sewn into your chest would be rather difficult in the making of this review.

Keep voting in Kairi’s Katch-Up Thursdays.  On April 5, I’ll be giving away 1600 Microsoft Points to someone who participates in the democratic process.  Even though the winner is not determined by a popular vote.  Whatever, just go vote.

Video footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

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