Flick Home Run

January 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

So I go to work the other day and everyone at the office is talking about what their score is on some silly iPhone game called Flick Home Run.  The age range of people playing this game was kind of impressive.  My father, who is what I would call a causal gamer, is 63.  Along with him, two of my partners, Chris and Kevin were playing as well.  Chris is 43 and I think he has a console or two.  On the other hand, Kevin is 66 and in my four years working with him I’ve never heard him once talk about doing anything for recreation.  Side note: remind me to look into what brand of stick he has up his ass, so that I can invest in it.  It works well.

Yea! Fuck home run! Oh..

I’m not exactly a baseball fan, but I decided to give it a try.  As it turns out, Flick Home Run ! isn’t really about baseball.  It’s a casual game where a ball is pitched to you and you try to hit it out of the park.  Okay, that sounds exactly like a baseball game.  But there’s no base running, fielding, or any of that boring garbage.  I guess it’s like home run derby.  You put your finger on the left side of the screen and the ball gets pitched.  You then slide your finger at the ball in way you think will hit a homer.  You get points for every foot the ball travels, plus bonus points if it hits any balloons.  Instead of a set number of pitches, you have a lifebar that decreases with every pitch.  You get life back based on the distance you hit each ball.  You lose extra health if you swing and miss, or hit a foul ball, perhaps in tribute of the North Korean Olympic baseball team.

Each different kind of pitch is represented by a cutely drawn face.  You don’t know what kind of pitch is coming until it crosses a line on the screen.  Well actually, that’s not entirely true, but I think that’s what they were trying for.  Anyway, if you hit the ball before it crosses that line, it’s an automatic out and you lose health.  You can use a power-up to sneak a peek at the kind of pitch coming.  There are also special multiplier balls that get thrown at you randomly, which double or triple the value of your swing.

I had fun at first Flick Home Run, because it’s a very likable pick-up-and-play casual game.  But then little annoyances started to irk me.  As you play, you earn experience points.  When you level up, you can upgrade one of three things.  Naturally the game does not explain any of these three things in the slightest.  I hate it when games do that.  Flick Home Run actually has a pretty decent help screen that explains the various rules of the game in detail, except what each of the upgrades do.  The first one is power.  I guess that’s self-explanatory.  Muscle up and hit the balls further.  Which is fine, except the very first pitch I got the very first time I played the game, I knocked the ball out of the stadium and into the parking lot.  That’s actually not as far as you can hit it, but still, it seems like my finger was strong enough as it was.

The second upgrade purports to effect the bat’s accuracy.  I did upgrade this several times and noticed zero improvement in accuracy.  Actually, it kind of got worse.  I hardly ever hit a foul ball before I started upgrading this.  But then I noticed that the more I leveled accuracy up, the more foul balls I hit.  I found out that my father and Chris experienced the same thing, and apparently several others online have as well.  I think this officially makes this the worst upgrade in the history of gaming.

The third one makes more sense.  You get more peeks at the upcoming pitches.  You start with three, but you can get more.  It’s still not all that useful.  After you’ve played the game for a while you can tell what kind of pitch is coming at you by the way it starts and react accordingly.  Since your finger has to start in the same spot, there’s not a lot you can do.  After an hour or so I never needed to use the peek again.

I suspected early on that the game had more to do with luck than skill.  There seemed to be no solid method I could use to hit a home run.  I would slide my finger and whatever happened rarely seemed relevant to the placement of my finger on the screen or what angle I hit the ball on.  The only thing that seemed to change was leveling up slowed to a crawl.  As I already pointed out, that didn’t bug me too much because my upgrades either made no difference or made the game worse.  So I guess it’s fitting that the developer is charging people outrageous price of 99 cents to upgrade any one stat, or $9.99 to upgrade all three by five levels.  Out-fucking-rageous.  Overall, Flick Home Run was fun for a few minutes, but it quickly grew boring.  I can’t believe this game is currently sitting high on the best-sellers list.  Not that those are barometers for quality.  I mean, there’s a Transformers movie and two Pirates of the Caribbean movies on the all time highest grossing films list.  It’s enough to make you cry tears of blood, and I don’t think Kotex makes anything to help with that.

Flick Home Run was developed by Infinity Pocket

99 cents were busted for using finger steroids in the making of this review.

Filed under iPhone and iPad Reviews Tagged with

Trailer Park King Episode 2

January 6, 2012 by 6 Comments

It’s no secret that the most read review I’ve had so far was for Trailer Park King.  Which is kind of shitty because it’s not one of my better ones.  Hopefully I do better this time.  Then again, hopefully the game is better.  Not that Trailer Park King was awful.  It wasn’t.  It was alright.  It was probably the best point and click adventure game I’ve played so far on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Which isn’t saying much.  It would be like saying having your pinky toe removed was the best amputation you’ve had yet.

It was the most searched game on my site because it has boobies on the cover and if you play the demo the game teases that there is porn in it.  Don’t believe me?  14 of the top 30 search terms linking to my site have centered around Trailer Park King.  Including “Trailer Park King Porn” and “Trailer Park King Nudity.”  Of course, there is no porn or nudity in the game, because Microsoft doesn’t allow it.  I know the average Xbox Live player’s IQ is on par with some forms of kelp, but don’t you think if that kind of shit was allowed, it would have been right up Rockstar’s alley?  It certainly would have made the whole “Niko Bellic watches TV” shit less boring in GTA IV.  Or don’t you think some other XBLIG developer would have made a game called “Oh Fuck It” where you go around sexing-up ATM machines or border collies or something?

There will be a FAQ for Trailer Park King Episode 2 at the bottom of this review.  But as spoiler, there are no boobies, nudity, or porn in this game.  If you actually expected that, congratulations, you now have full confirmation that you will die a virgin.  This frees you to do other things with your time.  I hear croquet is quite relaxing.

To the game.  It picks off right where the original left off.  Well, kind of.  The ending sort of teased some nefarious plot twist, but that doesn’t actually happen.  King’s rival, Truck, wasn’t dead.  But now he’s dead again.  Or for the first time.  Maybe.  The game starts with everyone preparing for his funeral.  Only he’s not dead, but everyone thinks he’s a zombie.  Didn’t Red vs. Blue already do this whole thing?

From there, you get the usual assortment of white trash jokes, potty humor, and sexual innuendos.  I admit, I laughed a few times.  But it was never because I found something to be genuinely funny.  It was uncomfortable laughter, the type you might experience yourself if your deranged uncle stood up at Mass and declared that Moses was a closet homo.

The actual game is pretty much the same.  There’s not a whole lot to point at or click on in this point and click adventure.  You’ll never hold more than one trinket at a time and once you’ve clicked on something useless that doesn’t move the plot forward, you can’t click on it again.  That’s actually a pretty useful feature.  There are a couple of minigames this time around.  One of them is a shooting range with a shitty aiming system.  Thankfully you only have to play it once and it seems to make no difference in the story.  The second is Tic Tac Toe.  Oh well, it beats playing Raventhorne I suppose.

The storyline is so completely surreal and absurd that I’m convinced Sean Doherty could sell it as an animated series to Adult Swim and make himself a millionaire.  Yes, the writing is dumb and the voice acting is horrible, but I actually kind of like the characters, and I look forward to seeing what other stupid shit they’ll get themselves into.  Hopefully I don’t have to wait long.  It took me well under an hour to beat Episode 2.  Sean isn’t sure how he’s going to handle the progression of the series.  He had to break this episode up to keep the price at 80MSP and avoid the deadly 240MSP price tag.  And then, as soon as his game got approved for publishing, Microsoft changed their policies.  Now he’s not sure if he’s going to release the rest of the game as patched DLC or if he’s going to sell it in another episode.

I’m frugal, so the consumer in me says “just patch the game!”  But I’m also a business person, and that side of me says “you’re a God damned fucking idiot if you don’t release it as another episode.”  We’re talking about a game whose review is more popular here than all other articles I’ve done combined.  Well, that is if you exclude Temple of Dogolrak.  You know, I’ve come to the sad realization that someone is going to create the ultimate Xbox Live Indie Game.  It will combine risqué themes with a Minecraft clone and the end result will be someone at Microsoft having their head explode when they see how big of a royalty check they have to write for a game called Boobcraft.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points are just as guilty as everyone else for doing this review at 2:00AM on Friday just to have the first review of this game in the making of this review. 


Psssh, they’re totally fake.

Trailer Park King Episode 2 Walkthrough FAQ Thingie

Just because I know everyone is going to want it.  Below is a list of things you’ll have to do in the game.  Highlight the space following them for the answers.  I try to keep things relatively spoiler free, because someone actually bitched at me for spoiling the game for them last time while they were looking up answers to the game’s puzzles in the fucking walkthrough.

How do I free Truck’s body from the ice?  Go to the limo and get a lighter from Vikki.  Go to your bedroom and a sheep will be waiting there.  Now go to Truck’s body and weep as gaming culture is set back at least ten years.

Where did “Zombie” Truck go?  First, you have to go to the outhouse where Truck’s body was on ice.  Then, you have to go to the bar.  The lady inside will tell you that someone locked themselves inside the strip club.  The magic store will now be open.  Go there to get the key from Dozer.  Go back to the strip club and viola!

I’m hopelessly retarded.  Please just tell me how to beat the game from here on out.  Sigh.  Okay, go talk to Truck in his jail cell thingie.  Then go talk to the spacey alien chick.  Go to the bar, then the strip club and talk to Skinny.  Go back to the jail and talk to Vikki.  Now take Truck to the strip club.  Take the book to the top outhouse.  Congratulations, “you” just beat the game. 

Seriously, no nudity?  No.

No porn either?  I fucking hate you.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Name of the Game is “Google Search Friendly”

January 5, 2012 by 6 Comments

This started out as my Second Chance with the Chick review of Inferno!  But then I went off on a bit of a tangent and decided to split it up into two articles.  Here, I would like to address something that has always been a pet peeve of mine since I started this site: the generic name.

I had a little experiment I wanted to perform.  One of the few things Mr. Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus and myself agree with is that Xbox Live Indie Game developers should come up with a name that sticks out in a Google search.  Inferno! has perhaps the most generic name of any game I’ve reviewed thus far at my site, and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do this experiment for quite a while.  So here’s how it will work.  I’ll search for the game once based just on its name.  Then, once with Xbox added to the search.  Finally, once with Xbox Indie in the search.  I want to see how buried the first result that brings you to anything related to the actual game is.  Let’s begin!

Inferno!

  • Just the name: Not within the first 100 results.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 16 results down.  Most results point to Dante’s Inferno by EA.  First actual hit points to marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: 3rd video down is a gameplay video.  Third actual link points to my review.   Most results point to Radiant Games’ Inferno.

Obviously Inferno! was not a very wise choice of a game name.  It’s not an effective tool at landing eyeballs via a Google search.  It’s also not really catchy.  What it sounds like is a name that the developer put zero thought into.  It’s not reflective of the game’s quality of course, but it gives off the impression that it could be.  I mean, if they spent that little time thinking of the name, they probably didn’t spend that much time making a good game.  Inferno! is actually a perfectly fine game, but with a name like Inferno! who will remember it tomorrow?

Now let’s look at the Top 3 Google Searched games on my site.

Trailer Park King

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to my own review of the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: Same as above.  The very first result takes you to the Indie Gamer Chick review
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: The exact same.

Temple of Dogolrak

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to my own review of the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result takes you to the marketplace page of the game.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: #2 link is a direct link to my review of the game.  The 1st link is the link to the main page of my site.

Wizorb

  • Just the name: 1st result is a direct hit to their official website.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result is a direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: 1st result is to a Destructoid article on the game.

The name of your game is your first and possibly only chance at successfully marketing your game.  A good name will pull up some kind of article related to the game when entered into Google. The more generic a name is, the more likely it is to be buried.  Surprisingly, many of the Google searches that lead to my site do not contain terms like “Xbox” or “Indie” anywhere in them.  Now let’s look at two games that use common words as creative puns.

Escape Goat

  • Just the name: third result down, which links you to the official website for the game.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: 1st result is a direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Same as above.

Dead Pixels

  • Just the name: eighth in the list, links to the marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: direct hit to the game’s review at GamingTruth.com

As we all know, Dead Pixels way outsold Escape Goat, so maybe my concept isn’t entirely reflective on a game’s sales potential.  Of course, literal dead pixels are more common than literal escaped goats.  At least I hope so.

Now let’s look at games that all sound kind of the same, but are not.

Blocky

  • Just the name: 14th result down (I’m fucking shocked at that too), links to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: Direct hit on the game’s trailer. First non-video link points to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Same as above, except the first non-video link points to my review of the game.

Blockt

  • Just the name: sixth result down, which links to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: Direct hit to my review of the game.

Blocks That Matter

  • Just the name: direct hit to the game’s official website.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: same as above.

The more complex a name gets, the more likely it is to score one of those “direct hits” that do seem to make a huge difference in the amount of people who have awareness of your product.  Of course, when a game’s name is too simple, it can be a disaster, like I already demonstrated with Inferno!  If that’s not proof enough for you, check out these games.

OTO

Plague

  • Just the name: not within the first 100 results.
  • With “Xbox” in the search: direct hit to the game’s marketplace page.
  • With “Xbox Indie” in the search: direct hit to the game’s official website.

Here’s something that I’ve noticed since starting my site: most of my search results do not include the words “Xbox” or “Indie” in the search results.  People mostly search just for the game’s name.  The games that have the less complex names simply do not get as many search results.  To hammer this home, if someone is looking for a review of the game, they in general just put the name of the game and “review” in it.  If someone does that, here is what happens with all the games that have been listed above.

  • Inferno! Review: no matches within the first 100 links.  Same with if you add “Xbox” to the search, where instead you get 100 reviews of Dante’s Inferno.
  • Trailer Park King Review: 1st result takes you to my review.
  • Temple of Dogolrak Review: 1st result takes you to the XNA Round-Up review.
  • Wizorb Review: 1st result takes you to Game Critics’ review of it.
  • Escape Goat Review: 1st result takes you to Horrible Night’s review of it.
  • Dead Pixels Review: 3rd result takes you to N4G’s linked review.  First two results are for a start-up game review website called Dead Pixels.
  • Blocky Review: 1st result takes you to an N4G linked review.
  • Blockt Review: 1st result takes you to Xbox Hornet’s review.
  • Blocks That Matter Review: takes you to the IGN review of the PC version.
  • OTO Review: 16th link down takes you to the same 1up or Poison review listed above.
  • Plague Review: 64th link down takes you to an N4G linked review.

It’s said you only get one chance to make a good first impression.  Your game’s name could be that one chance.  If a game like Plague was called Captain Shooty’s Shooting Shooter, it probably would have sold better.  It certainly would have been more likely to catch your eye.  If Inferno! had been called the Adventures of the Lava Sucking Robocoaster, you might have laughed at the absurdity of the name, but you wouldn’t have forgotten it any time soon.  So when the time comes to pick a name out, don’t just put down the first thing that comes to mind.  That’s how Sarah Palin named her kids, and you’re better than that.

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , ,

Microsoft Announces Changes for Xbox Live Indie Games

January 4, 2012 by 13 Comments

I normally don’t post news items here at Indie Gamer Chick, but today Microsoft announced three major changes to Xbox Live Indie Game development policy.  They are as follows.

  • Xbox Live Indie Games can now be 500MB in size.
  • The minimum price of 240MSP now applies to games 150MB in size or higher.  Games at under 150MB can (AND PROBABLY SHOULD!!) be priced at 80MSP.
  • Developers can now publish twenty games a year.

As people know from my previous article about pricing, I have no patience or tolerance for developers that over price their games.  It’s not reflection of quality.  It’s how the market works.  Microsoft made this move so developers could be more competitive.  And for the record, this is not a race to the bottom.  Your games are only worth what consumers are willing to pay for them.  If you price higher without being forced to on some misguided principle, you’re just being silly.

Any developers who wish to use my site as a forum to announce you’ve dropped the prices of your games, you got it.  Tweet me the title of your game and I’ll note it in a daily update every day for the rest of the month.  The guys at Zeboyd Games have already done so with Cthulhu Saves the World, which is now priced at 80MSP.

I’m also interested to hear what you developers plan to do with all the added space you now have at your disposal.  You can e-mail me or let me know in the comments section of this post, and I’ll include it in those daily updates.  I applaud Microsoft for this decision in helping developers compete better with wireless gaming apps and against their own Xbox Live Arcade platform.  Well done chaps.  Now stop being assholes and get games a better place in the dashboard.

UPDATE: Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard member Antipole is now also 80MSP, down from its original price of 400MSP.  Outstanding move.  You absolutely have got to get this game right now.

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , ,

World Wars II

January 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

It was two months ago that I first played World Wars II.  I was really looking forward to it.  It seemed more like a real-time version of Nintendo’s Advanced Wars series that I was so fond of a few years ago.  It also featured eight-person online play and multiple game types.  I was sent a couple of review copies to make sure I could experience this game at it’s finest.  Brian and I were seriously hyped.

And then we played it.  Although it wasn’t bad by any means, it’s so underwhelming that it almost seems worse than it is.

In World Wars II, you’re given a squad of various troops and vehicles to command.  The problems with the game start right away with unwieldy tutorial.  I had to replay through it a few times and I still couldn’t get a feel for the controls or the gameplay.  Everything about it seems overly complex.  Steering, turning, rotating the turrets on tanks, etc.  Nothing here is intuitive or user-friendly, making the game about as inviting as the welcome mat at Majdanek.  It doesn’t help that it’s not possible to complete the tutorial in the eight minutes a player would be allotted to demo the game.

This is the only game play picture chosen by the developers to represent their game on the marketplace.

It also doesn’t help that the best way to learn nearly any game is to play single-player.  That option is here, but for the life of me I couldn’t even complete the first mission in campaign mode.  Even on the easiest difficulty setting, the enemies are absolutely flawless marksmen that will accurately fire every single shot.  You, on the other hand, are just a person who has to deal with the clunking aiming and slow response time of your character.  I tried.  God knows I tried, but I couldn’t get past the first enemies I encounter on the first stage on the easiest setting possible.

I’ve had my skills as a gamer brought into question more than once since starting this site.  And while it’s true that I’m not exactly proficient in the art of throwing a dragon punch, I would still consider myself as having pretty decent gaming ability.  After my performance in  World Wars II, I seriously started to question my own skills.

And then Brian couldn’t beat it.  Huh.

Brian called his friend Cameron over and they tried it co-op.  Nope, still couldn’t beat it.

I was sent a second review code so I gave it to my buddy Alan C with the Tea, who operates his own XBLIG blog.  Guess what?  HE COULDN’T BEAT IT EITHER!

Now, I’m not going to pick on this subject too much, because even most mainstream shooting games (coughFARCRYcough) can’t get proper AI done.  But the first level, and the first baddies?  Yikes.  That’s some shitty AI coding.

So I used multiplayer to learn the mechanics of the game.  I played several games online with Brian, and it was comically awful on both of our parts.  Nothing made sense, the controls were bad, and switching between characters was a fucking nightmare.

A few days later, we played again and the results started pretty much the same way.  But then things did start to click and we kind of had fun with the game.  It wasn’t perfect by any means.  Even after putting several hours into the game, the aiming is slow and clunky.  In a game where you primarily are trying to shoot other people, that can get a bit annoying.  And while you’re fighting with these mechanics, you’re also having to juggle other factors.  You have to watch your gas tank on each car.  You have dozens of troops to position and shuffle to.  At this point, World Wars II feels more like a boring desk job than a game.

Swissplayers Game Studios helpfully included two screenshots of World Wars II’s menus on their marketplace page. Yes indeed, this does confirm the game features menus. Awesome.

We spent most of the time playing capture the flag.  The name is very misleading.  It’s actually a territorial-control game where you find a base and squat on it until your flag gets raised.  Whoever gets all the flags first wins.  There’s also a game that is more close to capture the flag.  A pile of gold is hidden inside a base.  You have to blow up the base, expose the gold, get it, and take it back to your base.  I actually found this particular game type to be boring.  But the territorial control stuff was alright.

Honestly, I can’t recommend World Wars II because it just takes too much time and effort to enjoy the whole thing.  It’s probably a lot more fun with a full roster of eight people, but so is throwing yourself out of an airplane.  The aiming system just blows.  It would probably played better as a twin-stick shooter.  The unbeatable AI cripples the single player experience.  Online multiplayer is the only way to have fun, but it won’t be possible unless every player has put in the required time to actually get good at it.  Somewhere in here was the trapping of a good game, but the final product doesn’t live up to its potential.

Oh, and one last gripe.  The four pictures selected by the developers to represent this game on the marketplace were fucking pitiful.  Only one is a screenshot of game play.  Another is a screen of someone looking at the map.  The other two pictures are of menus.  Fucking menus!  Jesus Christ, guys!  These are the pictures that you’re trying to use to sell your game.  At least try to be more picky about them than the DMV is.

World Wars II was developed by Swissplayers Game Studios

240 Microsoft Points pointed at a box of the board game Risk and declared that your online indie multiplayer strategy game should not be more complicated than that in the making of this review. 

Review copies of World Wars II were provided by Swissplayers Game Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copies was given to friends with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  Those people had no feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Game Type

December 29, 2011 by 16 Comments

I sympathize with Xbox Live Indie Game developers. I really do. It’s a tough little market you guys are trying to conquer. Only a select few have been truly successful in their attempts at it. It’s mostly because your games suck. But if your game is good, it’s probably because Xbox Live Indie Games are sort of buried in the dashboard. People who were hoping that the winter update would fix the issue had good news and bad news. The good news was that Xbox Live Indie Games were now on equal footing with Xbox Live Arcade Games.

The bad news was they were both kind of buried. And the worst news is how many of the new, highly touted features of Xbox Live do not work for XBLIGs.

Mommy’s Best Games wanted to express the frustration of everyone involved and created Game Type. It’s part dashboard parody, part shoot-em-up, and completely useless rubbish. If DLC Quest restored my faith that developers were able to successfully parody the gaming industry, Game Type reminds me why most shouldn’t bother. It has nothing to do with my dislike of shooters or my somewhat indifference to the whole dashboard situation. Game Type is just not funny.

So the idea is you start in a mock-up of the Xbox dashboard. You have to “find” the actual game here. Along the way you’re bombarded by stuff not related to gaming at all. Which is what Microsoft intended the Xbox to be from day one. It was Microsoft’s Trojan Horse. Gaming was just the entry point, because making a console was cheaper than acquiring a cable provider, or a telecom company. No, really! That was the point.

Oh my God, a cat! LULZ or something.

Gamers who feel “betrayed” by the new Xbox dashboard don’t get it. Gaming was just part one of their strategy of getting a consumer item into the living room. It happened to be the cheapest way to get there. And by cheapest, I still mean they took a bath somewhere in billions to get it up and running.  It’s not easy to launch a consumer product. It will probably be another decade or more before they’re not taking on any losses with the Xbox brand. But that’s how it works, and they knew that. It’s a long-term project, something most gamers didn’t realize. They just happened to be the conduit for this expansion.

The time has arrived for Microsoft to start rolling out all the other plans for Xbox, and that rubs Xbox fanboys the wrong way. I guess that’s why Game Type exists. It might aim to take the piss out of the dashboard, but it doesn’t do so very successfully. That’s mostly because they were so lazy in implementing it. There’s only a small handful of things in the fake dashboard to click on, and most of them just offer the same non-gags many times. For example, on the TV page, if you click something it takes you to a crude picture of a football player. Click something else on that page, and you get the same picture.  Um, hilarious? And why does the football player also appear in the movies part of the dash? Is this some kind of Friday Night Lights tribute?

It also doesn’t help that there are ads for other Xbox Live Indie Games all over the fake dashboard. Now wait a second. If this thing is supposed to be lampooning the actual dashboard, why on Earth are XBLIGs everywhere here? I get that these guys are all friends and that Mommy’s Best is just trying to throw some of its chums a bone here,  but you can’t rally against something for not doing something and then show the thing you’re making fun of doing exactly that!

Once you get to the actual game, the entire joke, gag, and purpose of this whole thing falls completely on its face. The game is fucking horrible. It’s a shoot-em-up where you play as the hoodie-wearing girl who occupies the actual GAME TYPE option on the real dashboard. You scroll her up and down, shooting at various guys, collecting the stuff they drop, and going for a high score on the global leaderboard.

Here’s the trick to it: hold down X. A semen geyser will erupt from the hoodie girl, destroying everything it touches. There’s no limit to the amount you can use this, so grab some duct tape and enjoy the ride. It ain’t much of a ride. There’s only one stage that repeats at a faster speed when you clear it. It says it adds some baddies too, but if it does the amount is negligible. Anyway, the game is a total piece of shit. And then once I finally died with a score close to four-million points, it didn’t record it. It recorded my previous efforts, but not that one. Bull. Shit. I had four million points, and I want my four million mother fucking points.

So in a nutshell, Game Type wanted to poke fun at the plight of all XBLIG developers. To do so, Mommy’s Best Games made an unfunny dashboard parody and then a game that would be embarrassing to own if it was a free iPhone app. Take that, Microsoft! I guess it was supposed to be a winking nod to other developers, but it still falls flat. Most of the XBLIG developers I know have practically been in a funeral-like mindset ever since the dashboard update took place. If that’s the case, Game Type is like eulogizing your best friend by walking up and farting in the widow’s face.

Game Type was developed by Mommy’s Best Games

80 Microsoft Points are really truly honestly going to post a World Wars II review this week in the making of this review. 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , ,

Alien Jelly

December 23, 2011 by 14 Comments

Update: Alien Jelly is now 80 Microsoft Points.

Statistically speaking, this review likely won’t be too popular.  It’s a trend I’ve noticed.  When I review a game from this particular genre, people immediately tune out and my page views seem to fall off a cliff.  Now, after careful research conducted by top scientists from one of those fancy institute places, we’ve devised a way to keep people’s attention while informing them of a really cool game.  Let’s see if it works.

Okay then.  Alien Jelly is a new logic-puzzler BOOBS on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Your goal is to navigate a series of cubes from one part of the puzzle TITS to the flying saucer at the end.  Along the way, you’ll have to shove crates around, teleport, build staircases, and all your typical puzzle RIMJOB fare.

It’s kind of a shame that I have to be so damn shameless in writing this review.  Alien Jelly has so much more going for it than your average logic puzzle KNOCKERS game.  It’s got amazing graphics and loads of personality.  Clearly taking inspiration from the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks, Alien Jelly is a game that practically begs to be played.  As a puzzle game DIRTY SANCHEZ, Alien Jelly is also well realized.  It’s quite similar to Blockt, a game I previous covered and enjoyed just well enough.  You move your cubes one space at a time.  Here, you can’t fall off the ledge.  The only way to die is to run into a trap or by maneuvering your cube onto a space of another cube’s color.

No amount of Slim Whitman will save you from this.

In most of the forty stages, you have to move more than one block.  You switch back and forth using the A button.  It was here that a very fun glitch came into effect.  On a few stages, the “jelly” around the cubes disappeared, leaving me just the brain.  I wasn’t sure at first if this was a glitch or some kind of “you fucked up” punishment.  I’m pretty sure it was a glitch, because sometimes I just couldn’t recreate it.  It never happened to more than one cube each stage, so it was just a minor annoyance, but it was present.

A bigger problem is the camera.  It has to be moved manually, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to position correctly.  It leads to situations where you can’t see what is on the ledge below you.  You can’t fall to your death, but if there is a ledge under you, the game allows you to drop down to it.  Depth perception proved problematic through-out, but again, you can’t die.  And if you make a mistake, there’s a nifty rewind function that allows you to quickly undo it.  Rewinding also factors into the actual puzzle process, as you keep any gems you collect, even if you erase the moment where you got them.  It’s pretty slick.

Overall, Alien Jelly is probably one of the best of its breed on XBLIG.  Yea, the camera was inexcusably horrible, but because it can’t actually kill you, who gives a shit?  The puzzles themselves are well designed, the theme is pretty good, the production values are high, and it’s just a lot of fun.  Even if you’re not into this type of game, nothing here is so insanely challenging that it should leave you too stumpified.  So give it a try, and maybe you’ll discover a love for puzzle games SEX HOOTERS MAMMARY GLANDS!

Sigh, this is probably where Tourette Syndrome comes from.

Alien Jelly was developed by Collective Mess

IGC_Approved240 Microsoft Points giggle immaturely whenever an alien says it has “come in peace” in the making of this review.

My friends at GameMarx are giving away over FIFTY Xbox Live Indie Games as part of a huge contest.  Click here for the Youtube announcement video, and then click here to enter.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

Sonic CD

December 21, 2011 by 53 Comments

It’s been about a month since I blatantly trolled Sega fanboys and classic gaming enthusiasts by announcing my dislike for most things Sega.  While I admit that this was as about as transparent as attention whoring gets, I want it to be clear that I stand by and truly believe all that bullshit I said.  Every last line of it.  Classic games are not as good as you remember and Sega games suck balls in general.

But what really pissed people off was going after Sonic The Hedgehog.  By the way people reacted to me asserting that it was never a good series to begin with, you would have thought I had Mother Teresa’s corpse exhumed just so I could defecate on it.  I just can’t comprehend why this series is so treasured.  It kind of sucks.  I can’t even believe this would qualify as being good “back in the day.”  Put this up against stuff like Super Mario Bros. 3 or even the Alex Kidd games from Sega and it seems like such a step backwards.

Which is actually what they had in mind when they designed it.  It was supposed to be Mario For Dummies, where the directional pad and only one button were needed and you wouldn’t be able to die if you had at least one ring.  It kind of shows that Sega held its own customers in contempt.  So basically, Sonic only exists because Sega wanted a Mario like character but thought its own users were too stupid to play a Mario game, and that just makes the crusader-like attitude of its fanboys all the more hilarious.

So the fanboys didn’t like my hate piece too much.  Most of the comments were completely asinine statements like “name one game from that era that was better than Sonic The Hedgehog.”  I could have been a total wise ass and said “anything!” but once you’ve got the monkeys throwing out “best game ever” statements, you’ve pretty much already won the battle.  Like I said in my VolChaos review, I find the entire situation to be sad.  Here are guys who are now in their thirties and they’re declaring the best game they have ever played and will ever play is one that Santa Claus gave them when they were ten years old.  I’m only 22, and I sure as hell hope I haven’t already played the best game I will ever play.  That would be tragic.

Pictured: something not worth the hype.

Granted, my only experience with the Genesis era Sonic games comes from when I got Sonic Mega Collection as a Christmas gift.  I might have even been the same age as those fanboys when I first played those titles.  Of course, by this point it’s 2002 and I’ve already played much better games, including some really spectacular 2D Mario games that Nintendo had ported to the Game Boy Advance.  Hell, I played Sonic Advance, an original 2D Sonic game on the Game Boy Advance that I had a better time with than anything on Mega Collection.

“Oh, but there’s another Sonic 16-bit era game.  One that destroys all those that came before it” cried the fanboys.  Indeed.  It’s called Sonic CD, and it’s the best of all the Sonics.  It’s so good that Sega seemed to go out of its way to not include it anywhere.  I mean, listen to how a guy I respect, Xbox Live Indie Game guru and Armless Octopus founder Dave Voyles described it.

Sonic CD is another fine example. It took a lot of the elements which made Sonic 1 so good, and vastly grew them. The future / past scenario for example, still hasn’t been done in other games to my knowledge. Sure, the 3D parts sucked and controlled like garbage, but the rest of the game provided a lot of innovation for the industry.

Well, what do you know, Sonic CD came out on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network this last week.  Since it was only $5, I figured what the hoo haw and gave it a whirl.  It makes me wonder what exactly Dave was even talking about.  What exactly was innovative about it?  It had an anime cut scene at the start?  Nah, that can’t be it.  What about the time travel gimmick?  Nah, games were already doing that too.

I got it!  It’s insanely easy.  Yes, I get it now.  Sonic CD was innovative because it introduced us to the era of the half-assed sequel.  Before Sonic CD came around, developers actually gave a shit when developing follow-ups to games.  And then this arrived, with its totally phoned in level design, boss fights that would embarrass the viewing audience of Yo Gabba Gabba, and levels where over half the game play is done automatically.  Developers took notice and said “wow, look at how amazingly shallow and empty this sequel is.  We didn’t know you could do that!”

If Sonic games were created for people too stupid to play Mario, Sonic CD must have been created for the recently lobotomized.  Everything in it feels stripped down.  There’s fewer enemies, shorter levels, easier bosses, and almost no way to game over.  It took me all of one hour to finish it.  At which point, it gave me TWO achievements instead of one.  How sweet of it.  I guess the innovation is supposed to be how there are multiple versions of each level, because you can hit a sign post that says “past” or “future” and if you build up enough speed, you time travel to an altered version of the same stage.  I don’t know if this has any other effect on gameplay, and the game doesn’t tell you.  It was beneficial to me because I nearly had to quit in the middle of one stage due to the strobey effects.  I swear, as I was putting down the control, I bumped into one of those time travel sign posts, hit a bumper, and suddenly I was in the past, sans flashy lights.

Here’s the thing about that though: the fucking game did all that by itself.  I had already put the controller down.  That’s one of my biggest gripes with the Sonic games, that they do all the hard work for you.  The first Sonic game I ever played was in fact Sonic Adventure on the Sega Dreamcast.  Everyone who played it remembers the iconic scene in the first level of that game where you’re on a dock running from a killer whale.  When I was ten years old, that was, up to that point, the single coolest moment I had seen in a video game.  And it was cool, until you realized that the game had all kinds of moments where it takes the controller away from you and does all the fancy stuff automatically.

But isn’t that how Sonic games always have been?  In Sonic CD, you spend most of the levels doing nothing while the game has all the fun for you.  Half the time in the game is spent watching Sonic automatically coast off bumpers and through tubes at warp speed.  Granted, that’s enough to give the Sonic fanboys their jollies, but I thought this was supposed to be the Crème de la Crème of series.  Instead, it’s probably the worst.  Unless you count the Game Gear titles, which were pretty bad.

Here’s my theory: most people who had this fascination with Sonic CD never actually played it.  Probably because you needed a Sega CD to play it and their parents weren’t willing to spring the extra $300 for the attachment.  So Sonic CD became the unobtainable entry in the series.  The one that was so good it had to be put on the most expensive system on the market at the time.  It got some good press coverage, but the Sega CD was pretty much dead on arrival and by time you could afford it, the next wave of consoles were coming and all the copies of Sonic CD had already been long snatched up as soon as they hit the clearance rack.  It’s status as the lost Sonic game made it the stuff of legends.

Well, legends do tend to disappoint.  Sonic CD is bad even by the low standards of the series.  It’s everything that every other 2D Sonic has been: horrible play control, no actual platforming skills required, cheap deaths, and lots of watching the game do all the work for you.  Only this time, it’s insanely easy, to the point that it’s a little insulting.  Thankfully, it would seem even the Sonic fanboys are somewhat on my side with this one.  Within 24 hours of Sonic CD hitting the PS3 and Xbox 360 marketplaces, I saw plenty of Sonic aficionados sulkily tweet “not as good as I remember it” or “that was disappointing.”  Others are pissing and moaning because some stupid song got cut out of the game.  Which is funny to me because I always thought gaming was supposed to be about the gameplay, not the title song during the opening cut scene that most people were likely anxious to skip anyway.

It goes to show you that the older you get, the less kind reality is to your childhood memories.  Guys, Sonic CD didn’t get bad.  It was always bad.  They all were.  You’ve just played better games since it came out.  Every time I go back and play something I liked as a kid, the memories just don’t hold up.  It happened to me with Sonic Adventure, Tony Hawk, and Crash Bandicoot.  That’s why it’s best to live in the now.  Don’t go back looking for moldy oldies.  The best game you will ever play hopefully hasn’t come out yet, but you won’t know that unless you look to the future for it, and not the past.

Oh, and as a spoiler, it’s not Knuckles Chaotix either.  I realize now that Sonic CD finally has a wide release, everyone is going to say “okay, it sucked, but I totally remember Knuckles Chaotix on the 32X being the most awesome Sonic game ever!”  Wrong!  If Sega had any faith in that game they would have re-released it by now.  They haven’t for the same reason they dragged their feet with Sonic CD: it sucks, and they know it.  Deep down, you know it too.  I haven’t even played it and I know it.  Helen Keller knows it.  She might be blind and deaf, but when shit gets piled this thick for so long you can smell it coming a mile away.

Sonic CD was developed by Sega

400 Microsoft Points said “honestly, if Sega had released Bubsy the Bobcat and Sonic had been the generic lifeless mascot of some nameless game company, would you even have known the difference?” in the making of this review.

My friends at GameMarx are giving away over FIFTY Xbox Live Indie Games as part of a huge contest.  Click here for the Youtube announcement video, and then click here to enter.

Filed under PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Live Arcade Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Let’s Get Fiscal

December 19, 2011 by 8 Comments

It happened again.  I ran into another overly wrought and pretentious brawler for XBLIG, Let’s Get Fiscal.  What is it with Xbox Live Indie Game developers shoehorning excellent storytelling into the pure concentrated realm of boredom known as the brawler?  It would be like a movie studio taking a script guaranteed to win Academy Awards (something involving World War II and homosexuality, no doubt) and handing it over to Michael Bay.  I have to give credit where it’s due, for making me almost regret rage-quitting this piece of shit, costing me a chance to see how the story would conclude.  I even went back and tried it three fucking times.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s Get Fiscal is a Double Dragon style brawler.  You play as an accountant going on his tenth year of sobriety, but that seems like it’s coming to an end.  Throughout the adventure, he slowly falls off the wagon.  Oh, and he’s not really an accountant, but some kind of hitman.  As far as stories go, it’s not that bad.  I actually wanted to press on, but the game bored me to no end.

There’s only two buttons in Let’s Get Fiscal.  A punches, B jumps.  That’s it.  There’s a few combos you can pull off and a small handful of enemies to fight.  In games like this, you have to find ways to amuse yourself.  I did so by trying to imagine why there are hundreds of identical dudes running around.  A cloning experiment gone haywire seems a bit too obvious.  So I went with the idea that all these dudes were the result of some wacky prop bet involving five fraternity brothers and a sperm bank.

The Curtis pictured here has a large health bar. The actual Curtis in the game dies if you breathe on him.

Oh, and for some reason there is a black dude named Curtis who only takes one punch to kill.  It seemed a bit odd.  Since I’m guessing the developer isn’t just being casually racist, I figure this must be some joke that I’m not getting.

Really, as a brawler it’s nowhere near as terrible as All the Bad Parts was.  The normal enemies are easily dispatched and don’t have life bars the size of an airplane hanger.  The first two bosses gave me a hint that the difficulty curve is all kinds of fucked up.  The first boss, or should I say bosses, are annoying fucking guys who shoot lasers out of their eyes like Cyclops.  And then the second boss is some dude  that I can’t even describe because I was able to beat him in about five seconds.  It wasn’t just luck either.  Because after I rage quit on the third boss, I restarted the game and was able to beat him again in the same amount of time.  I’ve seen straight lines with better curves.

And then there was the third boss.

This mother fucker.

He has the ability to regenerate his own health.  If you get him down to his last half-healthbar, he puts on a protective shield and brings all his health back.  None of the basic attacks or the combos seem like they’re able to break the shield.  I spent three separate sessions fighting this guy, trying every tactic that seemed possible, and I couldn’t get him.  I rage quit, then restarted the game from scratch (there’s no saving) a few hours later and I still couldn’t get him.  I asked the developer if this was some kind of joke, and he assured me it wasn’t, but he didn’t offer any help.  He wants to see if anyone will figure it out themselves.

Somebody might, but it won’t be me.  Compelling as the story may be, the game itself is incredibly tedious.  There’s no saving, so if you make it as far as I did and get bored after twenty cock-guzzling minutes fighting this cunt, you’ll have to start over again too.  I didn’t bother going on.  I tried twice, failed twice, and I don’t care to try again.  A quick conversation with a few other befuddled players leads me to believe that nobody has yet quite figured out the special secret to this guy.  Or even worse, what the fuck is next in the game?  I mean, the first boss was a bitch.  The second boss literally was a bitch.  The third boss is impossible.  If this pattern continues, the fourth boss will commit suicide and the fifth boss will teleport into your room and fuck your mother.

This art has almost nothing to do with the actual game.

Let’s Get Fiscal was developed by Baller Industries

80 Microsoft Points are reviewing Sonic CD next in the making of this review.

My friends at GameMarx are giving away over FIFTY Xbox Live Indie Games as part of a huge contest.  Click here for the Youtube announcement video, and then click here to enter.

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://indies.onpause.org/


Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with ,

マイケルの不思議な冒険 (Michael’s Magical Adventure)

December 18, 2011 by 8 Comments

I did a double take when I saw the screenshots for Michael’s Magical Adventure.  I mean, look at it!

I know, right!  The resemblance is uncanny!

It looks just like Teddy Ruxpin!

Teddy had no comment.

Oh, and maybe Super Mario Bros too.  Just a little bit.

I wish it had played more like Super Mario Bros.  It might have been more fun that way.  Michael’s Magical Adventure really does try to invoke the look and gameplay of Nintendo’s classic franchise.  It just fails miserably at playability.

I’m not the only one who had a chuckle at the brazenness of Michael’s Magical Adventure.  It’s Super Mario in everything but name.  Instead of Mario, you’re bear.  Instead of Goombas, it’s rabbits.  Instead of Spinys, it’s porcupines.  Instead of turtles, well, it’s still turtles.  You also traverse all the Mario standbys.  Generic plains, icy hills, and haunted houses all make an appearance.  Now, just to be on the safe side, Mario wasn’t the only property they plundered.  There’s jungle-themed levels where you hop across the heads of alligators, just like in Pitfall.  And then there’s the final boss fight against your own shadow, just like in Zelda II.

It all sounds so great, and if it worked it would be.  Unfortunately, the game is riddled with control issues and glitches.  Since I’m a total control freak, I’ll focus on the controls.  About the only thing the game did get right was mapping jump to the A button.  Yet, everything else about the jumping is wrong.  It’s slow, slippery, unresponsive, and inaccurate.  And if I could find more mean words to describe it, I would.

Part of the problem is related to holding down the X button to run.  There’s never a point where you won’t want to run, yet you have to hold a button down to accomplish this.  If only there was, say, a special joystick that could interpret various degrees of pressure in a way that could map walking and running without the need to also hold a button down.  I know, wishful thinking on my part, but we still live in an era where we can only dream about such outlandish space age technology.

Not that it would help much.  Michael’s Magical Adventure needs some serious debugging.  I encountered many instances of getting stuck in blocks, or getting stuck floating in the air after jumping off a vine.  Even when the game’s engine wasn’t crapping out on me, the level design brought my blood to a boil.  In particular, two auto-scrolling vertical levels had me ripping my hair out.  The level design does get to be a bit too much later in the game.  To make up for this, you get access to a cosmic hamburger if you die five times in a single level.  Eating it will make you impervious to enemy damage for the entire stage.  On one hand, I liked it because I’m convinced some stages are impossible without it.  On the other hand, I felt like the game was patronizing me.  “Oh, you can’t get past a couple of little bumble bees?  There, there.  Eat this and just waltz up to the finish, you poor little thing.”

Hey, fuck you game.  Most of the time, it was the jumping physics and not the enemies that got me.  Ultimately, Michael’s Magical Adventure is exactly what I figured it would be: a poorly executed Super Mario clone without shame.  For some people, that’s all they want.  I’ve already seen it with this game on Twitter.  People have called it “Epic” or “Ace” or “Excellent.”

No, no, and no.  Why do people insist on devaluing words?  The Odyssey by Homer is an epic.  The Red Baron was an Ace.  The blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse is excellent.  Michael’s Magical Adventure is none of those things.  It’s just a bad video game.  And even if you convince yourself otherwise, it’s not going to bring your childhood back.  The nostalgia factor is certain to drive its sales, because 30-something gamers will grasp at absolutely anything that resembles their cherished childhood treasures.  Games like this are like dumpster diving for your security blanket.  If you dig down far enough, you might find something vaguely resembling it.  More than likely, it’s just the piss-soaked rags of a deceased hobo.

マイケルの不思議な冒険 (Michael’s Magical Adventure) was developed by HUNTERS

80 Microsoft Points said “yes, I’m aware the box art says the translated name of the game is Mysterious Adventure of Michael, but that is NOT what the Japanese text of the game says!” in the making of this review.

Couldn’t find a trailer.  Sorry.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with

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