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.
Welcome to the first installment of The Cusp! For the last few months, Brian and I have kicked around the idea that there should be some “runner-up” list to complement the Leaderboard. We implemented the first idea, that former Leaderboard games should receive recognition, and while this idea has worked, maybe it’s not enough.
So we came up with The Cusp. Three games that will be featured over a 30 day period on the sidebar here, and a post explaining why they made it. Or almost made it, depending on how you look at things. In addition, The Cusp gives the developers of the selected games a chance to talk about their game and their plans for the future.
In the future, The Cusp will likely include monthly themes, like three games of the same genre or maybe even same developer. The one thing every game featured on the Cusp will have in common is they are all good games that are worth your money. If you missed them before, don’t miss out on them again.
For this opening month, we went with a variety pack. Three games with absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they went overlooked, both at this site and on the marketplace as a whole. I would also like to point out that the inclusion of a game by Bionic Thumbs has nothing to do with paying them back for trashing their recent game Plugemons: Part 1. The Cusp has been in the works for a while and Starzzle was always one of the games that I had planned to include.
Well over a year before I started Indie Gamer Chick, I stumbled into the Xbox Live Indie Games channel for the first time. I had read about this retro-themed RPG parody called Breath of Death VII. It seemed right up my alley, so I snatched it up. It was my first XBLIG purchase. As I went to boot it up, the very first thing I noticed was there was no space for GamerScore points. In other words, no achievements. Lame.
I consider myself to be, more or less, the average video game consumer. If that was my initial reaction, I’m sure that most Xbox owners felt the same way when they booted up their first Xbox Live Indie Game purchase. Now, I’ve never been hugely into the concept of achievements, but I will admit that they’ve conditioned me to feel a sense of satisfaction every time I hear “Beep Boop” sound when I unlock one. I much prefer the Playstation trophy system over the arbitrary points one used by Microsoft. I just find something to be very wrong about a system where you get only 30 points for something as damn near impossible as beating Mega Man 10 without taking a single point of damage, while you get the full 1000 points possible in Avatar: Burning Earth by doing little more than booting up the game.
But a quick and unofficial poll on Twitter confirms that most gamers prefer the Xbox achievement system. That’s probably because most of the people who read me are Xbox users. The irony is I’m guessing the system based around numbers instead of actions is the very reason why Xbox Live Indie Games get excluded from the achievement party.
If the Xbox was more like the Playstation, where games hand out four levels of trophy based on the difficulty of the action performed, it would be extremely easy to come up with something for indie players. A fifth class of trophy for indie games that in no way can be used to abuse the entire achievement system. Xbox doesn’t discriminate, so the five points you have to work your ass off to get for the Crowning Glory achievement in Perfect Dark mean absolutely nothing more than the five points you get just for turning on The Simpsons Game. From a personal perspective, I have to say that in the six-plus years I’ve been playing on the console, I’ve seen some mighty-high gamer scores and never once have I been inclined to look and see how someone got them. I think that’s true of most players. Conversely, I have looked at people on my friends list on Playstation 3 to see if they’ve unlocked particularly difficult trophies on games I also play. I don’t recall doing that even with friends on Xbox.
But some people take those gamer scores very seriously. Too seriously. Get-a-life seriously. And they’re not going to want Indie Games besmirching their precious arbitrary numbers. The thing is, we all know what will happen if XBLIGs get their own achievements. Within the first month of it going live, no less than two dozen “instant points” games will hit the market. It’s inevitable. The majority of “solutions” I’ve seen for this issue range from impractical to laughably absurd. Some examples include having some kind of fail-safe system in place to assure that such games can’t be made. Others have suggested, possibly while stoned, that there needs to be a governing body in place that sanctions indie achievements.
All these “fixes” come at a high cost to Microsoft. Adding achievements is going to require additional infrastructure and overhead to the entire channel. The bottom line is the bottom line. Adding this feature, no matter how it ultimately turns out, will cost money. Someone will have to code it. Someone will have to debug it. Rolling it out will necessitate a system update that requires close monitoring. And people who are on the clock will have to take time out of their schedules just to discuss implementing it. It’s not as if they only have to flip the “now you have it, now you don’t” switch that some of you seem to think is there. Changing the way things are is rarely free.
Having said all that, I want to make an appeal in the name of capitalism: Xbox Live Indie Games should have achievements. Why? Because it makes them more competitive. Money is the only thing that should matter in the decision-making process at Microsoft. If a system can be created at a minimal cost with minimal intrusiveness on the current system, it should be given the green light.
I believe the most cost-effective way this can be done is by segregating the standard GamerScore with a new category called IndieScore. This score will NOT be displayed on the snapshot of a Gamertag. IndieScore would only be visible by viewing a the full card of a Gamertag.
Kind of like this.
There will be no standards, regulation, or extra moderation for how developers implement IndieScore. Sorry guys, but it’s really all or nothing. In a system as open and inclusive as Xbox Live Indie Games, adding this feature means people can and will continue to be dicks and put in as little effort as they can if they can get away with it. So while you might meticulously spend years crafting your dream game and fine tuning it to perfection, developers can and will be releasing EASY INDIESCORE XII: JUST PRESS START FOR 200 POINTS countless times in the interlude. Obviously, there will be a cap, but people will abuse the system, and developers will have to accept that it’s better than nothing. Again, if that seems flawed, remember, you are the guys who love the arbitrary number system. The scoreless Playstation trophies would be so obviously better for XBLIGs, yet not one person out of dozens on Twitter voted for it. Fools!
Maybe this isn’t the perfect solution, but it has the advantage of being the easiest to create and the cheapest to implement. It would be one extra line in the Gamertag’s card. Mind you, that one extra line will come at a cost of months of programming and overhead to create, not the mention the added infrastructure that the new system will be based around. It’s the cheapest reasonable solution, but that doesn’t mean it’s free.
So here is something I ask of developers: what are you willing to pay? Since this system will costs tens of thousands of dollars to put into place, money Microsoft is under no obligation to spend on your behalf, what are achievements worth to you? Would you pay more for your XNA membership? Would you take a smaller royalty on your sales? And don’t try using the argument that Microsoft would stand to make more money, because that’s speculation. Solid speculation based on good old-fashioned common sense, but speculation none the less. Microsoft executives are not going to cut a single check to alter the indie system that they’re perfectly satisfied with (even if you aren’t) based on a hunch.
Microsoft is willing to change the way things are to allow Xbox Live Indie Games to be more competitive with mobile gaming, or with Live Arcade games. Adjustments to pricing policy have already proven that. There is little doubt that adding achievements would make XBLIGs more attractive to consumers. Yes, the system will get abused, but so what? I just played Hypership Out of Control for iPhone and it took me all of five minutes to unlock about ten achievements on that for Game Center. That kind of thing happens all the time in iGaming. I do know that many people are less likely to buy iOS games that don’t feature Game Center support. This shit does make a difference to gamers. If you think of the Xbox 360 as a car lot, disc based games are the souped-up sports cars like Ferraris or Lamborghinis (even if the occasional Alfa Romeo finds a way in), Live Arcade games are the affordable yet dependable Toyotas, and XBLIGs are the used Pintos with shaky engines and bad handling that most people fail to see the hidden depths in. Maybe if they had shiny hubcaps in the form of achievements, people might be more willing to take them for a test drive.
Ramen Ninja is a stealth game starring the world’s most frugal cast of characters. The idea is a bunch of bad guys stole all your ramen and you want to steal it back. Can’t you buy, like, a metric ton of that shit for around $10? Talk about a bunch of cheapskates. And it’s not like they’re against the concept of hard work, because the guy goes to insane lengths to get his noodles back. This involves sneaking around buildings, hiding under cover, and pushing crates around. Meanwhile, the bad guys own those buildings and have hired dozens of security guards and mangoat-thingies to guard it. What the fuck happened to the economy in Japan when I wasn’t looking that it has come to this?
Action in Ramen Ninja is takes place from a top-down perspective. The idea is you have to sneak around various guards while pushing buttons and solving crate puzzles. All the enemies have line-of-sight cones that you have to avoid, or they begin chasing you. You also have to be silent, and this requires holding the A button to tip-toe around guards or the Y button to crawl around them. It all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the guards are so inept at their jobs that you might as well let them see you and leg it for the finish. This was my primary strategy. At your normal speed you’re faster than them, so why not? I would end up leading entire conga lines of them through each stage in a manner so wacky that the game might as well been set to the tune of Yakety Sax. The penalty if you get seen and chased is a lower score. The game works on a five-star rating scale. If you get seen, the most you can finish a stage with is three stars, which was just fine with me.
Yep, they threw Zombies in there at one point. If you're an XBLIG developer and you don't include zombies, you get beat up, stuffed in a locker, and your lunch money gets stolen.
I would have played along with the stealth stuff, but I found that it often just didn’t work. I would hide in an alcove, which the game makes a big deal of, but the guards would still spot me. The same was true in multiple instances of hiding under tables, behind plants, and sometimes even on the other sides of walls. I would sneak around while holding the crawl button and the guard would still be alerted to my position. Heck, in some stages the level would start with a guard immediately onto me and giving chase. I don’t know if this was by design or not, but considering that the guard was two feet in front of me and there was no chance of escape, I’m guessing it’s just flawed design. The unworkable stealth aspects were just not worth the bother half the time and so I would just begin the Benny Hill sketch again. It was always laughably easy to do that. Again, the guards are not as fast as you. And even if they close in, they might just fall asleep on you. No really, they’ll be inches away from you and then doze off, complete with a “Zzzz” thought-bubble. It’s like the diabolical ramen thieves still wanted to meet all equal-opportunity employment criteria and hired nothing but narcoleptics. It’s something I’ve been accused of having from time to time so I probably shouldn’t jokegffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff huh? Is dinner done? Wait, where I am? Oh right, Ramen Ninja review.
There’s also the mangoat-thingies that chase you around. They’re just like the guards, only they put you to sleep by singing you a lullaby. It leaves you temporarily stunned, but not so much that they can then run up and catch you. Assuming you’ve been legging it, you’ll likely have enough distance to survive the nap and keep running for it. Like the guards, you move faster than them, so unless you get put to sleep by one and caught by another, they’re pretty useless.
It’s such a shame that the sneaky stuff doesn’t work, because you see that a lot of thought went into the level design. All the stages are designed in unique ways that would use the element of stealth. There’s also lame stuff like crate shoving, or in this case, sleepy security guard shoving, but you never really get to experience it the way the developers intended. Despite all my complaints, I admit I had some fun with it. Thus, Ramen Ninja becomes one of those weird games on my site that is utterly broken and obviously unfinished, and yet I do kind of recommend giving it a go. A little bit. Like a quarter-teaspoon of recommendation. I mean, the whole wacky chase thing is not what the developers had in mind, but I was often smiling and giggling along with my boyfriend while I pissed away all the intent of the game. With some more development time, the stealthy stuff might have worked and Ramen Ninja might have been something special, instead of being the kind of special it is. As in “forgive my daughter for licking your wallpaper. She’s special.”
I think the thing that disappointed me most about VolChaos is that I know Fun Infused Games has talent. I know this because I was hooked on Hypership Out of Control for the iPhone and iPad. If that doesn’t impress you, it should. If there’s one genre I dislike more than anything else, its vertical space shooters. Yet Hypership was fast-paced, twitchy, high-score based, and loads of fun.
The idea is that you’re a ship with a hyperdrive set permanently in the “on” position. With no way to brake, you have to clear gates and shoot any debris in your way, all while scrolling forward at break-neck speed. There are some items that will slow you down, but for the most part you have to rely on quick reflexes and digital dexterity to survive. You have a cannon but it fires automatically, so all you have to worry about is using your finger to slide your ship back and forth.
Hypership on iOS is THE Hypershit!
There’s online leaderboards and multiple modes of play. Usually when a game like this hits, one or more of the modes are total stinkers. Here, every mode has its merits. “Hardcore” mode is exactly the same as normal, except you only have one life, creating an awesome sense of tension. In “Coin Down” the coins you collect on the course act as your fuel. In SuperSpeed, you take the role of an albino hamster who is strapped to a rocket car and attempts to beat the land speed record for a rodent on the Bonneville Salt Flats, the previous record holder being Richard Hammond. Actually, it’s just normal mode with more speed. But I’m sure I just gave someone an idea for a bitchin’ new game.
Hypership on iPhone (or iPad if you’re a snoot) is one of the few games I’ve come across that I don’t have a whole lot of complain about. Thankfully a vastly inferior port was just launched on Xbox Live Indie Games that I can gleefully murder. Well I guess technically the iPhone version is the port while the new XBLIG game is a remake of the original. It’s called Hypership Still Out of Control, and it actively sucks with all the might of a whirlpool stuck inside a black hole.
Hypership Still Out of Control has all the play modes of the iOS version, and even includes local multiplayer. But I found the game nearly unplayable because it lacks the precision of touch control that I had grown so accustomed to on my iPhone. Regardless of whether you’re using the D-pad or the analog stick, movement is too loose. This is a major problem when trying to navigate past gates with narrow openings. The whole point of the game is that your ship is moving at unreasonably dangerous speeds, so anything less than absolute flawless control is simply not going to cut it.
Another thing that I had grown fond of on the iOS port was not having to do anything to make the ship fire. On iPhone, the ship never stops firing. It’s pretty convenient because there’s never really a point where you won’t want it to be shooting. On XBLIG, you have to manually fire. It’s not really a deal breaker, because lots of games do that. I guess it’s matter of comfort. It’s like going from laying on a comfy mattress made of clouds to laying on a bed of nails.
Local multiplayer would be fun if the controls weren’t so loose.
And finally, there’s no online leaderboards. Yea, the only option on XBLIG is ghettoized peer-to-peer ones that are hard to implement, but the only reason to own this game is to try posting high scores. There’s actually an explanation screen where it’s explained that it wasn’t worth the effort and you should buy the iOS or Windows Phone 7 (ha, as if) ports if you’re into this sort of thing. So I’ll just go by the same advice the developers themselves gave. If you have a dollar to spare, there are few things as fun or addictive at that price as Hypership out of Control for iPhone/iPad/iPod/iPacemaker (coming in October). If, however, you only have XBLIG, you might as well spend those 80 points on a shinny new sombrero for your avatar because Hypership on it is Hyper-shit. I knew I could work that line in there somewhere.
99¢ and 80 Microsoft Points heard Apple fanboys are now eating bacon three meals a day in anticipation of the iPacemaker in the making of this review.
Hypership Out of Control is also available for Windows Phone for $0.99 or free with ads. These versions are unverified by Indie Gamer Chick. The iOS version is Chick Approved. The XBLIG version is not.
Choose your own adventure games are like being blindfolded and set loose in a pasture full of cows with irritable bowel syndrome. Getting through one from start to finish without stepping in a pile of shit is going to require more luck than anything else. I made five attempts at finishing Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! and I don’t think I lasted more than ten minutes in any of them. I’ve also pretty much given up on further attempts. As it stands, my feet are already so caked in manure that everywhere I’ve stepped in the past couple hours is properly fertilized for the next planting season. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In DDD,D! you play as an introverted virgin on his first day of college. You’re bound and determined to lose the big V before the year is up. It took me all of a minute to determine what the guy’s problem was up to this point: he’s a completely unlikable twit. The first option the game gives you is whether you want to go to the bathroom, use the computer, or go watch TV. I put myself in the mindset of a girl that’s possibly being courted by this guy and figured that it wouldn’t be very productive to be introduced to a guy who’s busting for a piss, so I sent him to the bathroom. It was here that the guy stopped to flex for a mirror and do a few push-ups. Oh my, a narcissistic freshman on a quest to bust his man-cherry. What a catch.
I was determined to help steer the annoying virgin towards the promise land, but the luck of the draw was not on my side. Like every other version of this kind of game I’ve played for IndieGamerChick, it’s just too fucking easy to “die.” Here, death means you reach your 30th birthday as a virgin and thus become a wizard. You know, if that were actually true, I think teenagers across the country would be way more receptive towards abstinence-only education. Here, being a wizard is a bad thing for some reason. I would think if the reward was actual magical powers, waiting until you’re 30 just to get laid would be worth it. Once the magic starts flowing, you would be able to magically order up more pussy than unsuspecting customers than Soylent Blue: made 100% of street cats.
And how did I die? Well, my first mistake was leaning in too close to talk to a girl. Apparently I invaded her space and offended her. How was I to know? She was dressed like she had forgotten to do her laundry and the only thing clean was the shower curtain.
This girl’s digital restraining order against my digital annoying virgin is still pending.
When you make a mistake, it’s time to start over. Unless you save. But saving kind of was an issue for me, in that I couldn’t be bothered to do it. There are no save prompts, so if you get caught up in the storyline (hey, it’s possible!) and step on one of those wrong choice cowpats, you get to relive the entire fucking story from the very beginning. I hate it when games do this. Saving isn’t always worth it, either. The interface to do it with is slow and clunky. A quick-save option would have been preferrable but the game couldn’t be bothered.
So I went through the agonizing story starring the most unlikable fictional creation since those little CGI nail fungus thingies from those one ads (shudder) and kept dying. I died when I got beat up by some catty bitch’s boyfriend. I died when I forgot that one of the chicks I was playing the field with didn’t like tennis. I died right at the start when I chose “use the computer” trying to boost my intelligence level. The game has a point system that gives you points in intelligence, charisma, and strength. I decided since I liked the brainy girl more than shower-curtain wearing slut, I should try to make myself smarter and choosing “use computer” as the very first option was as good a start as any. So I chose it and promptly died because my guy wanted to play Warcraft instead. Hmmmph.
I never did figure out what the whole scoring system does. My inability to go more than two minutes without failing to step right in line with the writer’s logic led to me starting over from scratch again and again. I would like to remind the developer of this and every other game like Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! that video games are made to entertain people. If you forced someone to read a book by reading one paragraph and then starting over at the beginning, go one paragraph further and then start over again, you would be subject to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.
Never got this far. Don’t know what this girl’s deal is. I would probably die a half-dozen times trying to figure it out, so fuck it. Besides, with tits like that I’m sure she’ll have major back problems that I’ll hear bitching about day in and day out. Who needs that? My hand never whines like that so I got the better deal already!
So, shocker of shocks, I can’t recommend Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy! I will admit that the writing is slightly less painful than most games like this I’ve played on XBLIG. Even if does annoyingly censor ****ing swear words. This was probably done with the knowledge that it’s target audience have parents who frown on games with gigantic anime boobies in them, but if the cussing is bleeped out they can hope for just one week of being grounded instead of two. Still, I’m sure it won’t matter. This game will sell because the aforementioned gigantic anime boobies. And thus it’s owners will in fact reach the age of 30 with their virginity still intact. No, they won’t become wizards. But if they hold out another forty years, they might become Pope!
240 Microsoft Points would rather see a game about a prudish puritan who actively avoids trying to get laid, just to change things up in the making of this review.
I couldn’t find anything about the developer or a trailer for this game. Sorry.
Remember Orbitron: Revolution? The game that I said does for Defender what Pac-Man Championship Edition does for Pac-Man? Well, if you buy the game on Friday or Saturday, the proceeds from it will go to the BC Cancer Foundation. How often can you play a (future) Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard game and fight cancer at the same time? You can’t. Well, unless you play Dead Pixels while actively getting chemotherapy. This way sounds more fun. For more information, click here.
SOPA is a tactical strategy game in which you are tasked with protecting the intellectual properties of the entertainment industry. Playing as an agent of the industry under the jurisdiction of SOPA (which no doubt stands for Supremely Oppressive Pricks & Assholes), you get to wield unprecedented power at your own discretion to help fight for the big guys and bring justice to the unwashed masses.
I normally try to keep my cards close to my chest when I write these reviews, but I can’t hold off any longer: I FUCKING LOVED THIS GAME! Think of all the dick moves you’ve ever pulled playing Grand Theft Auto and multiply them by a jillion. That’s how much fun you can have as an agent of SOPA. For example, I was perusing YouTube when I came across a video uploaded by a fourteen year old. It was a highlight reel of his best kills in Gears of War 3, set to the tune of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” Now, if this was a game like Saints Row, you cap the little bastard in the back of the head and T-Bag his corpse. BOR-RING! In SOPA, you sue the little kid into the stone age, file charges against his parents, have their internet access cut off, and collect damages from YouTube because it was all their fault to begin with. With this level of loosely defined parameters, you have the freedom to pretty much destroy lives in ways you never could have imagined.
Bad controls have always been my biggest sticking point in a game. Thankfully, SOPA gives you more control over non-player characters than any game ever has. I remember playing Mercenaries 2 and watching the dimwitted NPCs fall to their deaths by walking off a four-foot high ledge. You don’t have to worry about that here. Rounding up people to interrogate them over illegally hosting a 60 second long MP3 copy of the Golden Girls’ theme has never been so intuitive or easy to accomplish. And the tools you’re given are amazing too. Wiretaps, bully lawyers (that is lawyers who are bullies, not lawyers for bullies, although I’m sure there is some cross-pollination), lobbyists, and all the power of the federal government are at your disposal. I used to feel pretty damn empowered when I held the Spartan Laser in Halo, but that is absolutely nothing compared to how I felt with all of the power I wield in SOPA.
And if you thought the emotion technology used in L.A. Noire was impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet. This one time I was busting a Captain Kirk fan site for using clips of Star Trek set to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need A Hero.” Not only was I able to tie the dude up in court for years, but I was able to go after every single person who had linked to his site in the process. The dude had like 500 followers on Facebook! It was like a genocide, only blood was replaced by tears, and that’s so much more evil and thus fun, wouldn’t you agree? The look of terror on their faces and the tremble in their voices as they slowly realized that all the freedoms they had taken for granted were being extinguished is one of the most defining moments in a game I’ve ever had.
Not to mention all the employees of Facebook and all the internet service provider employees who I was able to put out of work because all these restrictions made their companies unprofitable. It brought me a sense of satisfaction that all the nuns tied to the train tracks in Red Dead Redemption could never hope to equal. Really, how can you go back to running over a Granny with a Buick in GTA when you can litigate a family into bankruptcy over having the theme from Days of Their Lives play in the background of a video of little Junior’s first steps? Hey, you shouldn’t have uploaded it. Not very smooth criminal of you. By the way, using Smooth Criminal lands you five years in Gitmo so watch your step.
On-screen metaphors for what happens when you sue the shit out of a family making less than $40k a year.
Ultimately, your goal is to the destroy the entire internet. Probably the biggest problem with SOPA is how easy that is. If you’re the patient type, you can wait a few years, slowly conditioning the population to accept less and less accessibility to the internet they’ve grown so accustomed and dependent on. And while I can see the merits of watching the people of 2022 fondly reminiscing about the time before SOPA where you could actually upload of a video of you singing the latest Lady Gaga song on your Facebook without having to lawyer-up, I simply don’t have the patience for that. So I went all scorched Earth on the damn thing and just had Google shut down. Hey, served them right for linking to a site that linked to a site that had a copy of the Adventures of Pluto Nash uploaded illegally to it. This move destroyed the entire Silicon Valley economy, crippling America’s ability to stay ahead of the curve in the technology race and pretty much making us about as useless to the rest of the world as Segway access ramps. I watched with satisfaction as the credits rolled on the game and nearly needed some, ahem, private time, as the final cut scene where Nigeria claimed a higher GNP average than the United States played out.
So overall, I heartily recommend SOPA to everyone reading this. It does the wanton-destruction genre better than any sandbox game I’ve ever played, and it does it by a pretty big margin. It’s the little things that make the big difference. Sure, spraying shit on buildings in Saints Row is fun, but it can’t top watching the Feds break down the door of a sixteen year old girl who should have known better than to have downloaded that episode of Vampire Diaries. Or busting that family for uploading a video of them singing Happy Birthday to their St. Bernard while you could clearly see the TV playing the latest episode of Family Guy in the corner of the screen. For those of us who have always wanted the chance to know what it’s like to be truly merciless and cruel, this is the chance you’ve been waiting for. And it’s all in the safety of a video game, where it can’t possibly ever happen in the real world.
Oh wait. Fuck.
SOPA was developed by the United States Congress
240 Years of Freedom were flushed in the name of stopping six-year-olds from linking to unauthorized videos of Justin Bieber in the making of this review.
SOPA is not reality yet. But unless something is done, it will be soon. Do you really want the people who thought nine seasons of Roseanne were a good thing but fourteen episodes of Firefly was too much to decide what is right or wrong for the internet? Visit StopAmericanCensorship to learn what you can do.
Being a boring person, I love Scrabble. I play it with my boyfriend. I play it online. I play it on Xbox. I play it on my iPhone. I would even watch tournaments if they showed them on ESPN. Sure, it’s not for everyone. People who like exciting things or have lives usually avoid it. Being an introvert, I’m just hard-wired to love this kind of thing. So when I saw Lexiv, I nearly exploded excrement into my undergarments. I mean, it’s Scrabble mixed with Sim City. If they could have shoehorned Dungeons & Dragons in there somehow, it would have been the most introvertiest thing in human existence.
Not that I ever played Dungeons & Dragons. I do have some dignity left. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change my underwear.
Where was I?
Lexiv. So you’re given a rack of letters and you have to build words. Those words make up a city. Unlike Scrabble, parts of speech come into play. Nouns act as residential zones for people to live in. Verbs are the commercial zones where people work. Adjectives and Adverbs boost the productivity of those zones. Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections all fall under the “Etc” category and act as wildcards that boost everything. And there’s nobody reading this anymore, is there? Bleepy bloopy blongo blooper. Yep, you’re all gone. Either that was enough to sell you on the game or you heard the term “parts of speech” and fell into a coma. Sigh.
Well, I wish you had stuck around, because I do have to sort of pick the game apart now. I really did have a good time with Lexiv, but it does need tweaking on several levels. Just a quick annoyance to start with: I hate that the game makes the word “Lexiv” the starting point. V is probably the most difficult letter to work with in Scrabble, or Book Worm, or various other word building games. I’ve spoken with professional Scrabble players (yes, they exist) who would have no problem with the letter being removed from the game. But in Lexiv, it’s the first thing you have to deal with, every single round. That sucks.
The game also fundamentally stifles creativity by forcing you to quickly build specific word types. You pretty much have to get a noun and a verb on the table right off the bat. That especially sucks when you have a rack of letters that would allow you to play them all (bingo as it’s known in Scrabble), but you have no use currently for that type of word. You also don’t instantly get the letters replaced for you. You have to wait maybe several intervals before you will have a full rack. There are boosts that can help with this. When you reach level two, you get an item that allows you to trade your current rack of any size for a full rack of fresh letters. You also later get the opportunity to buy letters to fill up your rack faster. Of course, your city has to be cash-flow positive to get there, and that can be tricky. In order to get resources up, you have to be able to boost the zones you have. Simply put, in a game that is based mostly around the luck of the draw, it’s not always possible.
Leveling up does allow you to equip "perks" that speed up the gameplay, but they take too long to get.
There’s roughly 8 to 12 hours of missions to play through, some of which use conventional Sim City themes like city defense. Others require you to build over specific spots on the board to win. The variety is large enough to keep things fresh through-out the playtime. Then again, if you are into this sort of thing you probably would never get bored anyway. I am into this sort of thing, and I didn’t get bored.
I did run into a few technical issues. And by a few, I mean so many that it basically leaves the game broken. When saving to the hard drive, the game had a degree of skipiness that I have never experienced in a XBLIG before. Sometimes a game occasionally stutters, like a CD with a scratch. Lexiv plays more like a CD that has had industrial-grade sandpaper taken to it. In the early stages, it’s annoying. Just a few stages later, the game is completely unplayable. The developer is aware of this issue and is working on a patch. Until then, placing the game’s save file on your memory card seems to clear up the problem in its entirety. I realize that is not an option for everyone. If that’s the case, sorry, I have nothing for you except second-hand word that a patch is in the works.
The mechanics of the game are not completely solid. Scrolling is overly difficult and losing the cursor is too easy. There’s also a really annoying night-and-day cycle thingie that makes visibility of the board pretty difficult. It’s among the dumbest ideas I’ve seen a good game have on this service. What kind of fucking moron would say “hey everyone, let’s play Scrabble with the lights turned out! No flashlights! You won’t be able to see anything! This will be fun!” No, it will be absurd and stupid, just like this gameplay idea was, and you’ll delete him from your Rolodex just as soon as he leaves the room. Finally, the dictionary they used sucked. Just a few quickie examples: I was forced to play “oinking” as a noun, “whim” as a verb, and “techno” isn’t even a legal word despite having been sanctioned by Websters and Oxford for more than a decade. It needs some oinking work.
I’ve been hard on Lexiv, so I should probably make it more clear that I really, really liked this game. It’s so original, yet such an obvious evolutionary step for the game of Scrabble that I’m actually surprised nothing like it has come along. For all of its flaws, which are numerous, I feel the ground work for something exceptional has been laid here. In fact, I think it’s developer really ought to tweak the rules to make it more in line with the actual Scrabble, then place a sales call to Hasbro and license the game to them. I could see this taking off as a licensed product called “Scrabble Cities.” No bullshit, I really could. So if you purchase Lexiv, you’re buying into a game that is fun already, but has the potential to be so much more. I liked it a lot, especially because I could swear the fucking game reads my mind.
240 Microsoft Points sunk my Scrabbleship in the making of this review.
Instead of a normal trailer, I’ve included the developer’s detailed walk-through of the gameplay mechanics, not all of which I covered in this review. If you have eighteen minutes free, it’s worth a look.
Right before I posted my review of Plugemons: Part 1 last night, I sent out a preemptive apology to two guys in the XNA community who I have the utmost respect for. One is Jesse Chounard, the guy who developed Bluebones Curse and whose dog I had shot. The other is George Clingerman, an XNA MVP who is probably the most respected individual in the entire Xbox Live Indie Game community. Both these guys played a major role in educating me in the inner-workings of the community and gaining acceptance among Xbox Live Indie Game developers.
Both guys also really don’t like it when I go completely Lizzie Borden on games. I figured since the Plugemon review was my first really brutal one in a while, I should give them a preemptive heads up on it. I guess the result was George having this epiphany about what role I play in the development process. The end result was this episode of Tales from the Dev Side. I almost didn’t post it, because I felt maybe an article that was about me posted on my own site would come across as obnoxious.
As is normal when an XBLIG game is horrible but pretty, I have to start my review of horrible game Plugemons: Part 1 by noting that this horrible game has beautiful graphics. Really, really beautiful. That gets you really far in gaming. It’s the reason I skipped some other review requests and went straight to it. My exact words to Brian when I saw this on the marketplace were “holy shit, look at this one!” Even though my instinct told me that Xbox Live Indie Games with insanely good graphics are typically quite bad (Orbitron being one of the few exceptions), I latched onto it, like a sailor caught in the call of a Siren. Within ten seconds of playing the game, I realized I’d been had. Again. Who would have ever thought the XBLIG marketplace could double as Sirenum scopuli?
Plugemon is a puzzle game, not a platformer or a punisher. This was a source of confusion for me. You see, in Plugemon you jump from ledge to ledge, swing off of other ledges, jump on enemies heads, and try to acquire various lightning bolts scattered throughout stages like coins in a Mario game. The game’s own description, presumably written by the Plugemon’s developer, doesn’t mention the word “puzzle” until it notes things like jumping, running, and dying a lot.
See?
So when I tweeted that the game sucked, the developer took exception to this and demanded an explanation. I gave him a few. “The controls are horrible and very unresponsive. Scrolling is jerky. There are issues with enemy visibility.” Now, I expect a developer to defend their product. It’s their baby after all. What I normally don’t expect is for a developer to claim their product is something that it is not. Which is what the Plugemon developer did. He noted that the game is not a platformer, but a puzzler.
You can see why I’m so confused. It’s true that a couple of the levels featured the ability to switch from your main character to other members of its species. Using them, you hit switches. That’s it. There’s no real puzzle element that I noticed. Granted, I only made it to world 1-8 before I finally quit because the game is an unplayable piece of shit, but still. By the way, the switching element was only in half the stages to that point. If you’re going to claim to be a puzzle game, step one should be having puzzles. Instead, Plugemon has fetch quests. You have to acquire a certain amount of red lightning bolts scattered throughout each stage to activate an exit portal. This involves searching a level for them. That’s not really a puzzle. That’s just a typical convention of platforming games.
Regardless of what genre you call it, bad controls will ruin any game. Plugemons: Part 1 has terrible play control. Your guy moves like he just took a bath in honey. His mobility is severely limited, and he’s not all that responsive to the directions you give him. Despite being a puzzler that is barely a platformer at all, Plugemon primarily deals with jumping from platform to platform. The jumping physics are completely broken. Your character feels like he’s leaping through wet cement. It’s slow and clumsy. There’s also some sort of issue with landing. Sometimes, I would land on the edge of a ledge and then slip off it for no apparent reason. This happened a lot. The only way to avoid it is to land dead center in the middle of the platform, but that’s not always an option.
Collision detection with the baddies is a problem too. The main enemies are spider-like thingies that do electrical charges when you get near them. This doesn’t actually seem to kill you as long as you land on them properly. The problem is the actual spot to kill them is too small and more often than not, I would jump on them, only to miss that microscopic hit-point and die. Later in the game, miniature spiders appear and they are damn near impossible to land on properly.
It’s such a shame because, once again, the game is really good-looking. And the characters have an actual personality, unlike, say, Oozi. But the game is unplayable because of both the control issues and the overall level design. I finally quit on level 1-8. The idea in it is the level is shrouded almost completely in darkness. So you have to trial-and-error your way through it. Which is kind of a far-fetched goal because you can’t see the springs you need to get to platforms, the cannons you need to get to others, the ledges you need to stand on, or any of the traps that can kill you. This is “GOTCHA!” gameplay. You walked into a spike that you couldn’t see. GOTCHA! You tried to walk to a platform and fell to your death. GOTCHA! You jump down off a cliff and into a buzzsaw hidden in total darkness. GOTCHA! You land on a platform and an invisible enemy kills you. GOTCHA!
When the game’s own description notes you die a lot, you would be right to assume that the game tried to be a punisher. The developer denied this, but there was a very telling moment in our little tweet-off. When I brought up the bad play control, this is how they responded.
I never brought up Super Meat Boy. Nor do I ever bring up Super Meat Boy when talking with developers of punishers. It’s just not a game that I care to invoke. It’s alright, if a tad bit overrated, but my experience playing it is not high on my cherished gaming memories list. It just sort of exists. Yet, whenever I bitch about a platforming game having shitty controls, as sure as the tide comes in, the developer will bring up Super Meat Boy. The VolChaos guy did it too. “Your game has shitty control.” “Blah blah blah Super Meat Boy, blah blah blah, blah blah.”
Look, just because your game is hard to beat doesn’t make it Super Meat Boy. In some cases, people think it’s a fair comparison just because of the difficulty level. In the case of Plugemon, it’s clear they were actually trying to be close to Super Meat Boy. Let’s review. Advertising that you die a lot? Check. Levels shrouded in darkness? Check. A stage where you’re being chased by a giant-sized boss? Check. Buzzsaws as one of the primary obstacles? Check. Hey, I didn’t invite comparison. They did. I’m just pointing out the obvious. The Twitter message is a classic example of projection. I say the controls suck, they say I expected Super Meat Boy, a game that is nothing wink like the puzzle game nudge they made, elbow.
Insanely Shitty Shadow Planet
I do expect a game to control well though, and I could control Super Meat Boy, a far more complicated game. In it, you had to wall jump, clear large gaps, and make precision landings on platforms. I could do all that just fine. In Plugemons: Part 1, it’s difficult to even leap a small gap, or correctly hit the weak spot of an enemy that’s pretty large in size. Super Meat Boy also had smaller levels designed around its punisher style. Here, the levels can be sprawling, yet there are no checkpoints. If you die, you have to wait while the overly-long death animation takes over before respawning at the start of the level. This is especially annoying in a game where most of your deaths are going to be the fault of the busted controls and not due to your lack of skills.
Overall, Plugemons: Part 1 is without any redeeming quality. Yes, it’s pretty, which I’m sure will lead to some very thick people saying “it’s worth it just for the art.” No it’s not. What kind of simpleton plays games for their graphics anymore? It’s 2012 for God’s sake! Good graphics are everywhere. If it’s worth it just for the graphics, that presumably that means you’re willing to pay a dollar to watch someone else play it. Say, that gives me an idea. Party at my house! One dollar a head cover charge. Watch me play this shitty game. Bring your own beverages. No fatties.
Oh yea, this is totally a puzzle game, not a punisher. The art work makes that very, very clear.
One of the reasons I generally avoid doing iPhone reviews is because you never know what price a game will be from day-to-day. I got Sunny Seeds for free today, but it’s one of those games that comes in both free and paid versions. The one I got would normally cost you some form of money. I’m not sure how much. 99 cents I’m guessing. I probably would have never paid for it, but IGN put it in their daily update and I figured “why not?” Even though I absolutely hate crossword puzzles, Sudoku, Minesweeper, and other math-based games. It’s almost serendipity that I downloaded Sunny Seeds, because I fucking love it.
In Sunny Seeds, you have a grid of numbers that you have to clear. You remove two numbers at a time. To do so, the numbers have to be touching each other, or have no numbers between them. They also have to either match each-other or add up to 10. For example, you can clear 1 and 9, or 4 and 4, but not 6 and 5.
Wow, does that ever sound boring. But it’s not. It’s highly addictive and surprisingly rewarding. In my first play-through, it took me nearly an hour to clear the board of numbers. Once you’re past the learning curve, time will fly by while your brain progressively gets more wired to spot those matches. You can also shuffle the numbers by rotating your iPhone 90° at a time, opening up new matches. New tiles spawn every few seconds, but once you’ve eliminated a number completely from the board, it never returns.
Look, I get that nobody comes here expecting me to dish out verbal blowjobs to games, but I can’t really think of anything bad to say about Sunny Seeds. As of this writing, you can still snag it for free off the App Store. If it goes up to 99 cents, you should still grab it. It’s a really good time passer. I guess I can gripe about the name. I don’t get why it’s called Sunny Seeds when it has nothing to do with suns, seedings, or any related images those two words might invoke. That, or it’s a joke that is way over my head. If it’s a gag, bad call. Sunny Seeds is a great game, but it’s saddled with an absolutely horrible name. Usually if a joke needs explaining, it’s not funny. It’s what I call the “David Spade” rule.
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