I want to try an experiment. Let’s start by having you pat yourself on the head. Good. Now, try rubbing your belly at the same time. Can you do it? Impressive. I can’t even chew in both sides of my mouth at the same time, so I salute you, oh dexterous one. I have one final challenge for you. Keep rubbing your belly and patting your head, then boot up Super Mario Bros. and try playing it. Because that’s essentially what NYAN-TECH is about.
Okay, so maybe the concept is more like Twister meets Solomon’s Key. You play as an adorable kitty cat person thingie that has to grab a key and exit a level through a door. The gimmick here is that the platforms you must hop across are activated by holding down various buttons on the Xbox controller. Usually the combinations are something ridiculous, like holding the X button and left bumper down while jumping, then releasing X mid jump and pressing the right trigger. To be perfectly frank, I’m not capable of it. Dexterity is not something I’m famous for. Well, unless you count my ping-pong ball trick.
I was able to finish NYAN-TECH, mostly by placing the controller on the table in front of me, freeing my hands up to do the proper stretching needed to complete the stages. Sadly, this wasn’t nearly enough to make the game playable. Issues with jumping physics, or to be specific, landing physics, kept me firmly grounded in misery. The ground is slippery, as if the game is set on a glacier. It’s not. At least I don’t think so. It’s kind of hard to tell, what with the camera pulled so far back that you practically need a telescope to decipher things. My TV could be used by Godzilla as an ironing board, and yet I had trouble seeing which buttons some of the things required me to push.
Finally, I had a big issue with the time limit that is imposed. Especially on level 3-4, which took me an hour (it felt more like days) to finish. In NYAN-TECH, the timer only shrinks when you move. In most of the 27 levels (excluding tutorial stages) you’ll have more than enough time remaining to finish. But near the end of the “hard” stages, things get a bit fuck-youish. In 3-4, you literally cannot make a single misstep. We’re talking about a game that requires you to do things with a game controller that someone with a third arm growing out of their torso would find difficult to pull off, and that’s on top of the questionable physics. I admit, it felt world-conqueringly amazing when I beat the stage, but then I remembered that I had lost sixty minutes of my life and felt like crying the entire time, which made me feel not so good.
I asked for an XBLIG I missed that could contend for the leaderboard here. I got a few recommendations of NYAN-TECH, so I gave it a try. Do I regret that? Not completely. After all, I started Indie Gamer Chick looking for new and experimental types of games. Does that mean I can recommend NYAN-TECH? Well, no. Even if I concede that some people are better suited for the type of hand-yoga it requires, the technical flaws still outweigh the gameplay to a significant degree. That or I’m way off base and the game is spectacular if you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Which I can do, by the way. It’s just that I have a 50% chance of somehow landing myself in a coma while trying.
Indies in Due Time is coming back this week. There hasn’t been a new installment since October, and the reason for that is we haven’t had enough developers send us trailers for the feature. In the four months since it went MIA, I’ve had dozens of requests to bring it back, but when the time comes to actually work on it, nobody sends me their trailers. Apathy gets you nowhere.
Oh, and there was that time those one guys sent me a bogus cease-and-desist order over one installment of Indies in Due Time because I pointed out that their game was kinda close to another game and the fonts were very similar to a registered trademark of a highly litigious entertainment company and they got bad advice from someone with a vendetta against me who figured they could bully me off the Indie scene so that their site would reap all the kudos in for eliminating the threat of me or some such delusional nonsense, but that’s neither here nor there.
Well, the feature is coming back. I’m opening it up to Indie games across all platforms. I define “indie” as a game developed by a smaller, self-funded (or angel-investor supported) studio. If that includes you and you develop for Xbox Live Indie Games, iOS, Androids, or PCs, I’ll take your trailer. If you need a reminder of what Indies in Due Time is like, what follows is the “lost episode” that we got halfway through way back in October. We simply ran out of trailers. In general, Brian and I prefer a minimum of five. We’re willing to bring this back as a once-a-week feature, but we need you, the development community, to be active in it. If necessary, coordinate together.
Expect it to return sometime this week. Until then, enjoy this lost episode. Yes, one of these games is already out. What can I say, I hate for any of my writing to go to waste.
EvilQuest confused me. In it, you play as the villainous Galvis, a magnificently evil bastard whose goal is to murder God and destroy the world. Let’s see: in touch with his emotions. Goal-oriented. Has a spiritual side to him. Hey hey, I think I found someone I can bring home to my folks if things don’t work out with Brian.
"Mr. Aladdin, Sir, what will your pleasure be? You ain't never had a friend like me!"
But while Galvis is at times utterly delightful to play as, what with his fondness for casual genocide, or the fact that he’ll ignore the pleads for euthanasia of a frost-bitten old man just because letting him linger in pain and suffering is that much more evil, he’s also a bit of a pussy. Despite being somewhat billed as a character who breaks all the rules, Galvis walks the line with such determination that he might as well be wearing a hall monitor sash. He still pays for items from stores with actual cash. He goes on fetch-quests for random people. Sure, he’ll occasionally knife someone after they helpfully give him an item, and in the end of the game, spoiler alert, he makes the human race extinct. But come on, paying for items? That’s not evil. Even little kids have the balls to shoplift.
So I’m going to ignore the whole “play as the bad guy” stuff because Galvis is provably less evil than Lindsay Lohan and just treat EvilQuest like the generic action-RPG that it is. And, let’s face it, that’s the only way to describe it. A lot of people are calling it “Zelda-like” but that’s a load of crap too. Zelda had some puzzles. EvilQuest is all action, all the time. You walk around killing baddies, then you walk around some more. Sure, there’s the occasional switch, or maybe a maze-like dungeon, but really, it’s just knifey-knifey, killy-killy, walky-walky for the entire length of the game.
I will admit it’s a little fun. Not a whole lot. I certainly don’t get why the XBLIG cheerleader brigade is constructing a human pyramid with only their erect penises to act as support beams over EvilQuest. It’s a bit on the busted side. As you progress through the game, you can level-up your stats. As is my typical strategy in these situations, I just pumped every single point I earned into my attack power. As a result, by game’s end I was able to kill most of the enemies in a single whack. Two tops. And bosses would take me about ten seconds to beat, even on the medium setting. There was no point in forming any strategy to take them out. I was easily able to max out the amount of health potions I had, quick-map them to the Y button, and then just tap it while attacking. I went into the last boss battle with 99 hi-potions and was able to finish all four stages of the fight in about a minute tops, only using 6 of them. In retrospect, I wish I had played the game on hard. On medium, EvilQuest was about as easy as kitten piñata.
EvilQuest would have probably been a really strong game about twenty-five years ago. In 2012, it’s basic even by the standards of modern retro-games. I will say that it at least looks the part. It successfully fends off the uncanny valley effect of looking old but having a feature that is decidedly modern ruin the entire feel of it. And I would like to thank the guys at Chaosoft for including an option to disable flashing effects so that epileptics such as myself can more comfortably play their title. It was a classy move, and hopefully the start of many developers adding similar options to their games. Of course, Galvis wouldn’t stand for that himself. He would intentionally try to set off a seizure in me, then skull fuck me while I was twitching. Or maybe not. I mean, if he’s willing to tip a stripper with a C-Note, he can’t be THAT evil.
80 Microsoft Points said, spoiler alert, if he kills every human, doesn’t that mean he mercifully put the frost-bitten old man out of his misery in the process? Wow, talk about a mixed-message in the making of this review.
Old people creep me out. And by old, I mean anyone over 50. Have an odor they do. It’s the stench of death ripening on their increasingly scaly skin. So I probably shouldn’t have played a game where the object is to escort one across a psychedelic wonderland while avoiding ninjas and alien monster thingies. Octogenarian VIP is exactly that.
The basic idea is you and up to three friends have to lead “Granny” around. Right away, I encountered a laundry list of problems. Let’s go through them.
Problem #1 is that Grandma looks more like Grandpa. So I’ll call him Grandpa, because that’s how I roll.
Grandma needs a toupee.
Problem #2 is that Grandpa looks like he’s miserable and ready to die. Why would I want to escort him to safety? I should fulfill his wishes and escort him under a pile driver.
Problem #3, and this one is pretty significant, you have no form of defense to keep him alive. Offensively, you have a cane thingie to swing around. Why Grandpa’s younger, more nimble escorts would be wielding canes when swords or guns would make more sense against ninjas and monsters is beyond me. The only explanation I could think of is senility is now contagious. Meanwhile, there are several stages where the level begins with you and Grandpa being attacked. And by that I mean the level begins and a ninja or monster is occupying the same space as you, rapidly draining away your lifebars. Perhaps an allegory for the fact that the grim specter of death is always with you once you get to that age, but more than likely it’s just shitty game design.
Maybe it is a sword. Hell, I dunno. It would have to be the dullest sword in the history of weaponry.
It really didn’t become too much of an annoyance until later in the game. When I reached a stage called “bad medicine.” Never mind keeping Grandpa safe. I could not keep myself, the young and fit protector of the old fart, alive for more than a few minutes because all of the enemies gang-bang you all at once. The ninjas are capable of throwing stars at you, and if there are any present on the level, they will throw them at you whether you can see them or not. And they will. Without any way to block them, your only hope is to jump over them. That really doesn’t work so well, especially when Grandpa is always a bit slow to react. The ability to block would have made all the difference. Well, the game would have still sucked, but it would have been more tolerable. It’s like the difference between a kick in the shin and a saber through the throat.
Problem #4 is how bad Grandpa’s AI is. I suppose it makes sense, given that he’s old and therefor decrepit and useless. But we’re also in a video game where Grandpa is able to jump eleven feet in the air to avoid aliens and ninjas, so to hell with continuity. Either way, Grandpa is useless. He can’t defend himself when being attacked. You have to lock him into following you, but he’s not as spry as you. Your dude can jump like twenty feet in the air (good genes in this family), but if you’re still completing your jump while grandpa is landing, he’ll jump again. When you’re trying to zig-zag from platform to platform, that gets quite annoying.
Problem #5 is there’s no old-person sound effects. None at all. No moaning. No complaining. Hell, the critters in Cute Things Dying Violently were more like geriatrics than Grandpa is. What, with the random swearing and constant mumbling, it was just like being in the audience of Wheel of Fortune. All you get here is a completely out-of-place generic metal track. The graphics suck too. There’s no blood and limited animation, yet the game somehow got a 2 out of 3 in violence from the XNA community. Where is the violence that justifies that score?
Problem #6 is that ultimately Octogenarian VIP is boring. Escort missions are boring in any game, but games based around just escorting characters are fucking awful. Okay, maybe Ico is an exception to that. Fine, Resident Evil 4 was too. Kind of. That actually gives me an idea. A game where you tie Ashley Graham to the Grandpa from this game and then feed them feet-first into an industrial wood-chipper. That’s money right there.
I so want to tell you to drop what you’re doing and go pick up Warp on Xbox Live Arcade. Even if it means dropping your newborn infant into an industrial-sized blender that will re-purpose its flesh as Soylent Green. But I can’t. Among other reasons, I’m pretty sure doing so violates my probation. I swear, you mistake one hobo for a skateboard ramp and you pay for the rest of your life. But that’s not the topic. The topic is Warp, and why I strongly recommend you don’t buy this game that I got a lot of enjoyment out of.
Hear me out on this one. Warp is sort of what Portal would be if it was a character vehicle by Pixar as directed by Quentin Tarantino. You play as Zero, an alien captured by some science guys. While in captivity, he gains the ability to teleport a small distance. You can also teleport inside objects. You know, when the game started and I saw that it was actually rated M, I was kind of perplexed. I mean, the character is cute and chirpy. It reminded me a lot of Stitch, of Lilo & Stitch fame.
And then I teleported into my first human.
And then I spun the control stick.
And then the human got fat.
And then he exploded in a huge cloud of blood and gore.
And it was fucking awesome.
It never gets old either. I blew up hundreds of humans throughout the game. Alternatively, I would teleport into humans, get them shot by other humans, then teleport into the shooter, blow them up, and then teleport back into the corpse and finish the job. Maybe I’m easily amused, but I was able to sadistically giggle every single time. It helps if you pretend the guys you’re blowing up are your colleagues. “Yea, take that AJ! That’s what you get for getting me a Snuggie when you were my Secret Santa, you rat bastard!”
At its heart, Warp is a stealthy-puzzle title. The delightfully gushy murders are just window dressing. In fact, you don’t even need to kill anyone, and you get rewarded with an achievement if you decide to play the game like you’re a member of Greenpeace and humans are slightly malnourished whales. It’s an achievement I could never hope to get even if forced to at gunpoint. The real point of the game is to acquire more powers, save a companion alien being held in the same facility as you, and escape. Along the way, you’ll gain the ability to teleport items inside other items (or people inside other people, another juicy fatality that will make the Mortal Kombat people hang their heads in shame), switch places with objects, or launch the objects you’re inside of at high speeds. All these abilities are incorporated cleverly into various puzzles scattered throughout the four to five-hour playtime. Well, give or take. I never actually finished Warp, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Warp is broken. I’ll just come out and say it. This is a game that is full of awesome ideas, but something went wrong along the way. I’ll start with the camera. The game plays from a top-down perspective, but the camera is angled in a way that prevents you from seeing objects pinned up against a wall. You can almost move it to the point where you can make stuff out, but not quite enough to help. What the game really needed was a better form of ghosting so that you can more clearly see what objects are available for you to beam into.
The game also suffers from what I like to call Blair Witch Syndrome. No, this doesn’t mean it’s going to gross 500 times it’s budget and that it’s talentless star will go on to be an advocate for legalized marijuana. For one thing, I think Zero actually has talent, although I can see him shilling Excedrin, for obvious reasons. No, Blair Witch Syndrome means you’re given little or no direction on what to do, leaving you to wander around aimlessly. Boringly. Possibly for hours. Hell, in the Simpsons Arcade Game, the only thing you have to do is walk to the right. If you’ve recently suffered some kind of head trauma and are unable to remember which way that is within five seconds of clearing a room, a giant arrow appears telling you “HEY STUPID, THIS WAY!” Well, maybe not so rudely, but you get my point. In Warp, you get no such arrow. There is a map, but it’s hardly helpful. Midway through the game, I went backtracking from room to room, trying to figure out what I missed. As it turns out, it was a teeny tiny little escape pipe on the other side of a wall that doesn’t stand out at all.
I guess the argument is that a puzzle game shouldn’t give you any direction. But when you throw a free-roaming environment into the mix and then intentionally distort that environment, that’s not creating a puzzle. I’m not exactly sure what you would call it, so I’ll settle for “colossal dick move.”
Don't be scared, buddy. Hey, ever see that movie Scanners?
When you’re actually in a new room, with new puzzles and more meat sacks on legs to blow up, the game is fun. Like, really fun. And the sense of satisfaction you get when you clear a puzzle without resorting to GameFAQs is hugely rewarding. Unfortunately, all the “what next?” wandering kind of negates that. If it doesn’t, what if I told you that you can get inches away from the final room of the entire game only to find out that somewhere along the line you did something to render Warp unbeatable?
It’s apparently true, and it happened to me. Near the end, you rescue a little sparkly alien thingie that’s trapped in a containment field. You’re then told to go South. I checked the map for my path of escape. A spot is clearly marked that tells you “this is the place to go.” So I try to get there, only to find that the final room, the one next to the FUCKING END OF THE GAME, was inaccessible. Period. There was no way to get past it. I did everything to try to figure out a way through it, including pretty much backtracking through every previous room I had access too. But I couldn’t. It was completely off-limits. I put over two hours into just trying to get through this one door, or find some other way to it, and couldn’t. Game over.
I haven’t looked up stuff on GameFAQs or used anything resembling strategy guides since I was sixteen years old. I’m not a big fan of having someone beat a game for me. But I did relent on Warp and looked to see what I was missing. All I discovered was others had pinned themselves in too. The only option left for me is to replay the entire game from the start and hope I don’t fuck up this time. In theory, I shouldn’t have been able to, since the power needed for me to fuck it up with I wouldn’t have acquired by that point. I’m really not sure what happened. I just know that the game wasn’t beatable the way I played it. Even though the game encourages you to destroy everything you see. It keeps a running score of your kills, and compares it to what your friends have done. So what the fuck, Trapdoor? Who did you get to playtest this for you? Did you only test it internally, using guys who know exactly what to do and where to go? Here’s a thought: rent a conference room at a hotel. Set up a bunch of stations that have your game. Put an ad on Craig’s List asking for people with five or six free hours to kill to come in for free games and pizza. Then just watch. Don’t offer help. See if they can beat it. If just one person renders the game unbeatable, your work is not done.
The sad thing is, the game is beatable. I know this because while bitching all weekend about all the directionless wandering in Warp, I had people telling me “just wait until you see the last boss. It’s annoying, not fun, and damn near impossible.” I can’t really comment on that, because I only got within sniffing distance of the fucking thing. What a tease. It especially stings for me because I really, really hate replaying games. And no matter how satisfying it is to trick the enemies into shooting each other (and it is! I’m wet just thinking about it), I’m not now, nor have I ever been, interested in playing a game I already played through once. So basically, Warp can go fuck itself and the guys at Trapdoor can feel free to warp themselves into a jet turbine.
What do you get when you cross Space Invaders with Missile Command? You get an Xbox Live Indie Game that I could play in about fifteen minutes so I could get a review up while I wait to finish EvilQuest and XBLA House Party title Warp. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Space Command. It combines the enemies of Space Invaders with the city-defense firing mechanism of Missile Command. So what does the offspring of these two iconic games look like? Well, let’s just say that I think they might have been cousins.
Really, there isn’t much I can say about it. The blast radius of your missiles doesn’t seem big enough and it disappears too fast. And the whole point of Missile Command was that it had precision aiming via use of a trackball, something a joystick can’t hope to recreate. Otherwise, it plays exactly like a mutant hybrid of Space Invaders and Missile Command would play like. So if you ever wondered, now you have your answer. As for me, I’m still longing to know what a game that mixes the rhythm and brawler genres would be like. Sigh, we shall never know.
The Cusp is a monthly highlighting of three Xbox Live Indie Games that came up just short of the leaderboard here at Indie Gamer Chick.
Way back in August, the 2011 Indie Summer Uprising launched ten games as part of a promotion to bring more attention to Xbox Live Indie Games. The results were a bit of a mixed bag. Of the ten games, only one landed a spot on my leaderboard. That’s at a time when I was still new to the scene and the leaderboard was primed for the taking. The truth was, I thought some degree of quality control was going to be involved in the selection process. Instead, games were selected on the basis of variety. Bad move. Some of the games were truly horrible, especially the title selected to kick off the event: Raventhorne. A few others were solid in their concept, but deeply flawed in execution, like T.E.C. 3001 and SpeedRunner HD.
Ultimately, despite receiving attention from lots of mainstream gaming outlets, the promotion was a bit of a bust. That’s a shame, because I owe the initial growth of my site in part to my participation in the event. Interviewing developers gave me a crash course on the XBLIG scene. But once the games started hitting, in the words of Cute Things Dying Violently developer Alex Jordan, I started assassinating them one by one. It wasn’t for the sake of being spiteful. I truly felt the quality of the games failed to match the amount of hype the event was given.
Despite that, there were some pretty good games in the mix. Although only one made the leaderboard, three other games were up for consideration. This month, the Cusp honors those games. But first, I’ve got some comments from the two guys who organized the event: Dave Voyles and Kris Steele.
The Summer Uprising may not have had the best games ever featured on the marketplace, but it certainly contained a collection of some of the most diverse. We had something for everyone in there, from a hack-and-slash all the way to a train simulator. The brief organization period which drove rushed development schedules didn’t help the cause either, but I’m confident that we put together a solid package. Some of the developers didn’t put their strongest foot forward, but I believe have since released games which trumped their prior attempts.
Chester was my favorite Uprising title.
I really don’t know if there will ever be another uprising again. I know the community is stronger than ever, but it’s difficult to promote games when they continue to be buried among a poorly organized and support marketplace. I’d like to see the ability to sort by genre, in addition to linking a developer’s other titles when you select their newest one in the marketplace before we begin to organize another one.
As a whole, the Summer Uprising games sold a decent number, but nowhere near what I was expecting, in relation to the amount of press coverage we were receiving. I don’t think the $3 price point helped any of the sales out, but all of the Uprising games have dropped to $1 since, and seen increased sales.
The future of XNA is shaky at best, as we have yet to hear word as to how it will be supported in the next generation of consoles, and we know that XNA created applications will not supported in the new Windows 8 app store. Perhaps if we were more informed, or had a means to speak with Microsoft in a more direct manner, either through a controlled forum or community manager, then I believe we could see the XBLIG marketplace receive the attention it deserves.
I’ll illustrate all of this and more next month at GDC, where I’ll be speaking on behalf of everyone involved in the Summer Uprising in a 60 minute speech.
I never expected to receive the kind of attention from developers and the media that we did when we set out to create the Summer Uprising. We quickly had 50+ developers wanting to be included in the promotion and got a ton of press coverage even months before any of the games were released. So much went right in terms of getting developers on board and getting the word out to consumers through the press.
Unfortunately all the press coverage didn’t translate well into downloads of the games themselves. Some out there were critical of the selection of games (like Kairi) and blamed that for the poor downloads but I’ve never believed that to be the case. If it were, you would have seen higher downloads (at least for the first couple games released) and low sales conversion rates. Right from the get-go, downloads were not high. And while not everyone liked all the games, they were all of higher quality that the average XBLIG title.
VolChaos wasn’t finished in time for the Uprising, but it was certainly crappy enough to fit right in. Sorry, Kris, couldn’t resist.
The Microsoft dash promotion was the only aspect of the Summer Uprising that really seemed to drive additional sales but the overall numbers weren’t huge. It was nice to see Microsoft take notice of the Indie Game channel for once. Perhaps too little, too late though.
I certainly learned new things about marketing throughout this process and learned I severally underestimated the time involvement of running a promotion like this. I highly doubt I will be able to devote this kind of time to another promotion nor will I have my own game to include. In terms of Xbox Live Indie Games, it really only reinforced opinions of the service I already had, perhaps the biggest one being that gamers might take interest online but they don’t often make it to the Xbox to try the games themselves. This makes me sad because XBLIG has a lot of quality games but finding the service isn’t always easy and finding the good games within it is even more difficult. I wish this was something I saw improving but XBLIG today is more buried than it was this past summer.
If another Uprising is to ever occur, one or more people need to step up and take charge. It’s easy to talk about ideas that would be cool but there needs to be someone pushing things forward. I worry that developer interest would not be as high as it was last time though. It’s not a big secret the Uprising sales were disappointing and many developers have fled XBLIG for greener pastures. For all the complaints about the quality of the Summer Uprising games, it would be hard to top the recent selection of titles given that so many developers are looking elsewhere now. That’s not a failing of the Uprising itself but rather Microsoft neglecting and burying the XBLIG service to a point where very few serious developers can be financially prosperous.
What went right? Some clever physics-based puzzles were married with over-the-top violence to create the best-selling title of the Uprising.
What went wrong? I’ve always felt that puzzle games are better suiting for smaller gaming sessions on portable devices. Extending playing sessions of any puzzle game on a television usually lead to me getting bored quickly. There were also some issues with aiming that have since been patched up.
If you asked me a year ago, “Will Cute Things Dying Violently become an important touchstone in your life?” I would’ve agreed wholeheartedly. Today, I still agree wholeheartedly. Although CTDV doesn’t mean what I thought it would when I kicked off development back in June 2010, the emerging answer is an order of magnitude more revealing.
Back in 2010, I thought I had XBLIG by the balls. I’d been watching it intently, noting what games succeeded, noting what games failed, and I used that knowledge to formulate a game idea that would be in line with the market’s interests (small, funny, quirky) while also being something that I would enjoy making.On top of that, I had a name in mind that was about as subtle as a frying pan to the face. I thought I was going to kick ass and take names. Realistically: 10,000 copies to be sold, easily. Optimistically: 100,000 copies! Next stop, Newt Gingrich’s moon base!
What happened next is instructive. CTDV took 14 months to develop (10 months longer than I expected), hitched a ride on the Indie Games Summer Uprising, reaped all the good press that the Uprising afforded, and landed with good to great reviews. It sold 10,000 copies in less than a month and hit 21,000 copies sold in less than six. Hell, even Kairi managed to not hate it outright, although that might be because she thought I didn’t have a Fainting Couch nearby and was afraid I’d hurt myself when exposed to her vitriol. (It’s like opening the Ark of the Covenant.)
Soon to be a major motion picture by Pixar.
CTDV wasn’t life-altering moment, of course. It didn’t become the next XBLIG darling… not even close… and I didn’t make enough off of it to quit my day job. Hell, I didn’t even make enough off of it to live in a shack outside of Bumfuckleton, Iowa (founded in 1878). 70 cents per purchase (before taxes) doesn’t get you very far in this world. I never truly thought my moment in the sun would come, but hey, who doesn’t entertain that notion every now and then?
But as I said earlier, the experience was instructive. CTDV was a good game that could’ve been better. It needed and still does need a lot of work, especially its graphics. Sales were great on XBLIG, everything considering, but I can always do better. And that’s why CTDV is so revealing, and why it’s an important touchstone in my life. And, dare I say, a lesson for just about anyone out there: life is a work in progress. You can always do better, there’s always so much more to achieve, and get-rich-quick options are few to nonexistent. Just because you didn’t make your pie-in-the-sky expectations doesn’t mean the journey was wonderful and valuable.
Which it was, of course: the best side effect of developing CTDV was how it brought me closer to so many interesting, talented people. Fellow developers, gaming journalists, ardent fans, supportive friends… for me, creating games would be only a fraction as fun as it is without the pleasure of knowing and interacting with these people.
I’m not done yet, not by a long shot. CTDV is on its way to PC, I’m entertaining the idea of porting it to mobile devices (if only to get everyone to shut up for three seconds), and there will almost definitely be a CTDV2. With some elbow grease and a little bit of luck, I’ll do a bit better next time, and a bit better the time after that. Hey, that’s life, right?
It took more than one year for Doom & Destiny to become what it is now and we are proud of every character, map, dialogue line and misspelling in it. We don’t care if it’s not in the top 10 of XBLIG, that’s the place for mincraft clones with busty zombie in it. We don’t really look down on the Marketplace, but it’s clearly rewarding low-level marketing rather than quality.
But most of all, we are proud of our fans! Their support and enthusiasm keep us releasing updates with new content, bug fixes and hopefully less misspellings.
Our dedication to the game was the main reason why we did not lower the price to 80 MSP. We believe in the quality of our product and we don’t want to undervalue it with the minimal price tag, just to lure some cheap consumer.
We are just two joyfull nerds wanting to make videogames we would like to play.
No compromise!
Well maybe a few… given we are just two guys with limited resources.
We dream of making bigger games, we dream of expanding our team with talented artists and musicians, we dream to become famous, rich and conquer the Ultraworld… No wait, that’s the dream of the villain in Doom & Destiny.
Right now we are still working on another Doom & Destiny update, the third big one in a few months.
Fans want a ship, a zeppelin and a new continent to explore and we are gonna give them just that!
The WP7 and PC versions are coming soon and we hope to join all the other indie games on Steam and various indie bundles (and make more Golds).
We are also helping a duo of friends into creating a spy themed inspired puzzle game for XBLIG, WP7 and PC.
Last but not least, we are, drum roll, working on a Doom & Destiny sequel!
We just need a 60 hours day long to accomplish all our goals and we are done!
What went right? An awesome 2D online shooter that features a variety of maps, character types, and objectives. Take Arms came the closest of any game in the Uprising to making my leaderboard. Well, besides Chester, which did make it on.
What went wrong? The game’s fun is so tied to online play that it makes it a risky investment.
Creating our debut title Take Arms was a true labor of love. It was a culmination of almost 5 years of partnership between Tim Dodd and I. We went through failure after failure, with some projects never even getting off the ground. Our ideas were just simply way beyond our reach. We would get a few months into a project, and either reach a challenge we couldn’t achieve technically, or crush ourselves under the weight of a flawed design we just kept throwing more at to make it fun. Our dream games turned out to be just that: dreams. As time wore on, we knew that something had to give. Either we were going to throw in the towel, or figure out some way to actually get a game made.
As a last-ditch effort, we decided to make the “simplest” game we possibly could that still caught our interest and did something different. We started with just the idea of a 2D version of Battlefield for XBLIG, and the design quickly evolved from there. We finally started to learn from our failures, and focused on getting the core gameplay working quickly to make sure it was fun. Simultaneously, we worked on the design and were consistently cutting fluff and keeping it as lean as possible. After getting a playable prototype and finalizing the design document, we spent the next 18 months working tirelessly on just that. We very rarely strayed from the document and only added details, not features. It’s awesome when people take notice of small things such as the camera zooming out when you crouch for increased visibility. If you can nail good core gameplay, everything else is just in the details.
As we wrote in the post-mortem and other places, doing a multiplayer based game for Xbox was very difficult due to a variety of factors. That combined with the incredibly flawed launch, the over-inflated expectations of sales and market size, and the total lack of traction pretty much just devastated us both. Tim decided to call it quits to focus on other stuff and I started looking into mobile development to keep the studio alive. I don’t think either of us found what we were looking for, and after the New Year we slowly began talks of a new game. It started as an idea I had for a mobile game, but it continued to evolve as we threw ideas back and forth. After we were comfortable with the concept, we approached Take Arms artist Jianran Pan and got him back on board. We’ve settled on PC as our primary platform this time, with our eyes dead set on Steam. Hopefully we can take the skills we’ve learned over the past 5 years, and finally go full-time doing what we love. Look for an official announcement of our next game in the coming weeks!
Muuuuh. It’s hard to muster up the energy to properly convey how horrible SpaceFighter4000 Training is. It’s so boring that it sucks your ability to give a shit from you. It’s also hard on account that I only played so much of it that I might as well have lit 240 Microsoft Points on fire and just played the demo. But I wouldn’t do that. Among other reasons, Microsoft Points lit on fire smell like a combination of ethanol farts and burning hair.
Unbeknownst to me, SpaceFighter4000 is a tribute to a Playstation/Saturn/3DO title that predates my gaming history by a couple of years. I’ve never even heard of it, but it must have some form of a following. I know this because when I took to Twitter to bitch about what a miserable time I was having with it, I got a couple of people telling me that the original was better because it had homing missiles. This might seem like an insignificant thing to bring up, but actually it probably would have made the difference between a recommendation or taking a rusty chainsaw to my own hands just to avoid ever being this bored by a game ever again.
SpaceFighter4000 falls into the same category as UnBound, Cell: emergence, and Merball Tournament in that it feels more like a prototype or a technical demonstration than a commercial game. From a purely visual standpoint, SpaceFighter is a slight cut above your typical 3D XBLIG. It has an impressive draw-distance without fogging, much like Flight Adventure 2. It also maintains this without a lot of slowdown. But that’s as far as complements will go in this review. Everything else is pitiful.
What it really comes down to is the bad firing mechanics. You have three weapons at your disposal: missiles, bombs, and an unlimited laser cannon. There’s no cross-hairs, so aiming is a bitch. Also, despite the impressive draw distance, depth-perception is very bizarre. I could be tailgating an enemy ship and firing my lasers, but centering yourself for a straight-shot is almost impossible. As a result, I felt more like I was piloting a TIE-Fighter, where my lasers hit everything but the thing I was shooting at.
Even when the lasers hit, they don’t do a lot of damage. They’re also watch-Grandma-wheelchair-up-Lombard Street slow. Which is weird. I would think light would be able to travel faster. Instead, your laser shots seem to get pushed out of trajectory, as if they’re being effected by the wind. Maybe it’s not lasers you’re shooting. Maybe it’s paper-mache. Maybe it’s pink balloons. Either way, the laser is worthless. So are the missiles. Again, there’s no cross-hairs, so you can’t line up a shot. The camera is often slopped at an angle, so it’s hard to get the right feel for where the missile is going to go. And if the object you’re shooting at is at any distance greater than right on top of you, you’re bound to misfire.
I have no fucking clue why some form of locking-on wasn’t included. It’s such a no-brainer move. The game is problematic enough with controls that are slow to respond, a camera that could induce motion sickness, and the problems with perception. There’s other weird things too. Take the bombs. They’re simple gravity bombs, but when you drop one they land in front of you. How is that even possible? I tried for over 30 minutes to land one on a target and never could accomplish it. Nor could I shoot an enemy out of the sky. The lasers were too slow, and the missiles are even slower. And mind you, this is only the first stage. Apparently enemies will start firing back at you after this. Yea fucking right. As it stands, I had trouble taking out the stationary ground targets without having a piece of the debris slowly drift upwards and blowing up my ship. So much for me getting drafted into the war with Xur.
$3 down the drain for a game I could have just as easily played the demo for. I’ll never learn. And yes, it’s another case of an unfinished, broken, clunky, glorified-tech demo that is way overpriced. It’s beyond obnoxious. 240 fucking points for this? Are you fucking kidding me? You know XNA developers, $3 buys a LOT in video gaming these days. You can get three Xbox Live Indie Games for that price. Games that are actually finished. You can get DLC for mainstream games for that price. If you charge $3 for a game and nobody buys it, you officially forfeit the right to complain that nobody bought your game.
And no, it’s not because it’s a race to the bottom. Where did you guys get that term from? There is no nice way of putting this: you sound like fucking idiots when you say that. “CRRRRYYYY I’m not going to charge only one dollar for my game. I don’t want to be in a race to the bottom.” First off, you’re developing for Xbox Live Indie Games. That is the bottom. Second, you’re an independent game producer that nobody has heard of. Third, you’re competing with mainstream games across various platforms that cost the same amount. At Christmas, I could buy the entire EA catalog on my iPhone for $1 a game. One fucking dollar a pop got me any game by the biggest video game producer in the history of the world. Are they racing to the bottom? Is Rovio? Activision? No. It’s called smart business. So if you’re worried about being in a race to the bottom, chances are that’s exactly where you belong.
240 Microsoft Points said the only thing Rovio and Activision are in a race to the bottom of is a giant silo full of money in the making of this review.
Our esteemed heroine took time out of her busy schedule working on a cure for cancer and rescuing orphans from a fire to play an episodic platform game for Xbox Live Indie Games called Oozi. The graceful and magnanimous Kairi forgave the first installment for being such a generic bore that it caused joy itself, manifested corporeally as a beautiful baby koala, to commit suicide by throwing itself in the path of a steamroller. The villainous Oozi, regretful that it had erased joy from the world (and made a gruesome yet morbidly hilarious mess of a patch of forest in Queensland in the process) reformed itself with episode two. The sequel proved just fun enough to play that the puddle of gore that formerly was the Koala of Joy started to piece itself together. However, the threat of Oozi still existed. Will Episode 3 cause the Koala of Joy to re-liquify itself, or will it spring to life and bring happiness to sad children? We rejoin the mighty Kairi, already in progress.
As you can see, Oozi: Episode 3 brings us to a science lab. Ooooh, that’s bold innovation, fellas. What’s next? A castle? A desert? A sewer? I bet it’s a sewer. It can’t be an action video game if there isn’t a sewer level. It’s a sewer, right?
Okay, so originality was never what Oozi was about. I’ve actually had people explain this to me like I’m some kind of idiot. “You know, I think it’s actually supposed to be completely devoid of a personality of its own. That’s the point. I think.” Even if that’s so, let me pose this question: does anyone really think back fondly on the time they played Prehistorik Man? Gex? Spanky’s Quest? Plok? Of course they don’t. They remember playing Mario, Crash, and yes, even Sonic. Paying tribute to the also-rans of gaming sounds more like a skit from Family Guy than a potentially lucrative XBLIG concept.
All bullshit gaming philosophy aside, not a whole lot has changed for Oozi. The graphics are still far above the standards of a typical Xbox Live Indie Game. In fact, they’re so good that you can’t help but notice how many corners they’ve managed to cut. Back when I reviewed Episode 1, I noted that there’s no unique drowning animation, or gurgling sound effect that accompanies it. Episode 3 has so many situations where a comical death scene could be used for effect, yet Oozi simply disintegrates into a pile of ash or just flops up in the air. Having a larger variety of animations might have given the game some kind of personality, which is what the series desperately needs.
Really though, any complaint that I could make about Oozi has pretty much been made by me here on this site. And also through a bullhorn in front of the police station, but they asked me to quit doing that. Episode 3 doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It does try to, but it fails miserably at it. The feature that stands out the most are these annoying parts in one stage where you have to avoid security lights. If you set one off, a gate shuts and you have to walk out of the security zone and start over again. Don’t mistake this for stealth. It’s not. In fact, the security lights operate under the same principles as various traps and enemies do. The only difference is instead of taking damage, you have to just wander backwards and then start over. Some might argue that’s actually worse than death.
Oh, and there’s a boss, just like the last two times. And, like the last two times, it’s fucking boring as hell to fight. Oozi boss encounters always operate like the telephone game. They do one series of attacks at you, then open themselves up to be hit. Then they repeat the same cycle of moves as last time, adding one new twist before opening themselves up for attack again. Finally, they repeat all the previous steps, add one final twist, and then leave themselves open for the killing blow. It’s so fucking tedious, and the opening attacks (the ones that get repeated the most) are so insultingly easy to avoid that I wonder what they were thinking making you go through over a dozen rounds of them. A lobotomized blind wino would brush them off. It’s just busy work. Meanwhile, the later attacks are so cheap that you’ll inevitably die a couple of times, forcing you to go through the same lazy attacks again and again.
Snore.
You know what? I really am bitching too much here. I did have fun with Oozi’s third chapter. I can’t even say I think the game got off to a slow start, like Chapter 2 did. It actually got my interest right from the start and held on until the boss fight bored me out of the mood. The level design is so much better than the previous two games, and difficulty is much sharper, if a bit inconsistent. It looks like the next chapter will be a wrap on Oozi’s tales, and by golly gee wiz, I’m actually looking forward to it. Mostly because I actually believe it will see the light of day sometime before I start collecting Social Security. Hey, Red Candy Games, we all like Valve and everything, but you don’t have to follow their lead and treat episodic gaming like you’re operating a bizarre nerd version of a time-share scam.
80 Microsoft Points believe Half Life 2 episode 3 is currently being playtested by Santa Claus, Batman, and the Koala of Joy in the making of this review.
Cell: emergence costs $5 on Xbox Live Indie Games. That’s 400 Microsoft Points. That’s the cost of some pretty good Xbox Live Arcade Games. What does it get you here? An obviously unfinished piece of shit with horrible graphics, busted play control, and antiquated gameplay. What a bargain.
"What did I tell you about licking toads?"
The story revolves around a child being infected with some kind of mystery illness. Instead of doing the sensible thing, IE calling Dr. House, you inject the kid with some kind of computerized yellow beam shooting thingie to fight off the disease. At this point, the game starts and things go downhill faster than a soapbox derby racer powered by a jet engine. The first level starts with a screen of purple voxel gunk. You’re not given any real instructions other than A shoots and Y zooms in. I wasn’t sure if the purple stuff was good or bad, and the game doesn’t explain this. Or anything, really.
Well, the purple stuff started multiplying fast, which clued me in that it might be a bad thing. So, I started shooting. However, waiting a couple of seconds proved to be too long, as the purple stuff quickly overran the screen and the child died. That’s Obamacare for you. Once I was able to restart the stage, I started firing right away and cleared it in approximately three seconds. The second stage was basically more of the same “shoot the gunk” type of stuff, and this time I earned my medical degree in Voxelgunkology and cleared everything in about five seconds. I was starting to think Cell: emergence was trying to be a Wario Ware clone, only instead of a new game loading up every second, it loaded up every three minutes.
That all changed on the third stage. A purplish ball that I guessed was a tumor was present in a white cylindrical shaft. The only instruction given was “Shoot membrane to assist antibody diffusion (projectiles coat membranes with prion gel).” What the fuck does that mean? The game doesn’t tell you what exactly the membrane is, or what the antibodys look like, or what prion gel does. It took me several rounds of failure before I realized that it meant shooting the walls, ignoring the tumor-thingie, and watching some little flickery spark thingies dance around. I guess those were the gel. After a few minutes, I actually thought I failed the level, seeings how most of the stage had still been obliterated. Instead, I had won and was moved to the next stage. Sure, the kid would have been bleeding internally, but I’m a glass is half-full type of gal. That vein wasn’t 96% dead. It was 4% functional!
The next level is where I gave up. It was another “shoot the wall” level, only this time there were germs flying in. Once again, the only instructions given were vague. “NEW ENEMY: Germ is invulnerable to all known weaponry. Defend membrane and observe.” What. The. Filth. Well, I decided I’m obviously supposed to lube up my membrane, so I started firing on it. And then the biggest problem suddenly became apparent: there is no visual indication of what wall has been “protected” and what one has not. The “membrane” doesn’t change colors. A orange-red streak does go through it, but it fades out, and the game doesn’t give off any indication of whether it’s a positive thing or not. Red is usually a sign that something has gone wrong, and the enemies, or germs, are in fact represented by simple red dots. I spent about a dozen rounds firing on the surface, adjusting the angle I shot from, and it still didn’t matter. I continuously died, or rather the little kid did. You know what, fuck you kid. It’s your mom’s fault for letting some strange “doctor” (for all she knows it’s drug dealer trying to hook the boy on smack) inject you with a needle full of God knows what instead of taking you to the emergency room.
If you think this screenshot is baffling, just wait until you actually play the fucking thing.
In case you couldn’t tell, I fucking hated Cell: emergence, so much so that I can pull out the not-at-all-hyperbolic “new worst game I’ve played on Xbox Live Indie Games” title for it. It’s that bad. The graphics are horrible. The camera is unmanageable. It’s not so much a game as it is a proof-of-concept demo for 3D gaming. Which would be fine, if this was 1992. I’ve played games on XBLIG that felt this way before. UnBound for example. But at least they had the decency to only charge a buck for them. Cell: emergence costs five bucks. 400MSP that can get you five extremely awesome titles, and the guys behind Cell: emergence expect you to instead spend it on their obviously unfinished game. That takes a lot of nerve. The hubris on display here is sickening.
Cell would be boring even if you knew what was going on. It’s a glorified gallery shooter, only the graphics are indistinguishable blobs of digital vomit. Hell, the shit you shot at in Space Invaders, a game that is thirty-four years old, actually look like things. Nothing looks like anything in Cell. The lack of direction given to a player is irrelevant. The way things were going, the child is just as likely to get bored to death. The syringe might as well have been full of air for all the good it does him, and that would have been way more humane.
NYAN-TECH was developed by Dot Zo Games
RSS - Posts
You must be logged in to post a comment.