Indie Gamer Chick

Hell’s House

I was a mere three-years-old when the Sega CD came out, so I pretty much missed the golden age of Full Motion Video based games, or FMVs.  And thank God for that.  It wouldn’t be until my teens that I first got a taste of what this genre really had to offer.  Which is to say, not a lot at all.  I was much younger when I played one for the first time, which was Mad Dog McCree.  It was cheesy, shallow, poorly acted, and really horrible.  Yet, at the age of seven, I thought it was the bee’s knees.

Mom?

Which proves my point that all kids are fucking stupid.  It’s one of the reasons that Dragon’s Lair could be so popular.  I’ve seen DVD menus that offer more interactivity than it, yet it’s remembered fondly as “one of the all time classics.”  My ass it is.  It has pretty Don Bluth animation, but it barely qualifies as a game.  In fact, I think one could say that if you were to lock yourself in a room with a metric ton of uranium and try to guess how long it will take for you to die of radiation poisoning, that’s more of a game than Dragon’s Lair and it’s kin.

I hear two things when people defend games like Dragon’s Lair or Night Trap.  The first is usually “you had to be there.”  Thankfully I wasn’t.  I’ve been exposed to enough 80s media that I get down on my knees and thank Jesus Christ almighty every day that I wasn’t a child of that fucking decade.  I was born in 1989, but I feel that was God’s way of telling me “you were THIS close to watching Full House and movies starring Judd Nelson.  Now be good!”

The second thing they tell me in defense of FMV was “it was good for its time!”  Again, I call bullshit on that.  I’ve yet to meet any FMV enthusiast that could tell me with a straight face that Dragon’s Lair was remotely in the same universe as stuff like Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.  I mean really people.  It was a cartoon that told you to push a button every five seconds to see the rest of the show.  If the latest Pirates of the Caribbean DVD told you that you had to hit a button on the remote control every five seconds to continue watching the movie, you would call it the worst thing in the history of the anything.  Which technically it already is to begin with on account of it being the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but I digress.

A new FMV game in 2011 seems like drinking-Pepsi-with-a-spoon madness, but this is the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace and so I guess it’s not a surprise that the absolute worst type of video game that ever existed would rear its grainy head here.  Hell’s House by BM Games is about a girl who has to spend a night in a haunted house.  The gameplay is kind of like a rhythm game.  You just press the face buttons when they line up with the indicator, all while watching the absolute most boring “scary” movie of all time.  You’re off the hook, Blair Witch Project.

Oh shit! An Italian! Run!

The movie is bad, but the not in a good way.  It’s hard to believe you can fault a game for having good acting, but one of the things that people wax nostalgically about with FMVs is their camp value.  The acting was always a big cheese sandwich and the plot was usually something horribly contrived and silly.  Here, the acting is actually not bad.  Really!  Hell, if you squint really hard, you might even confuse the girl for Sarah Michelle Gellar.  But without the cheese, there’s nothing here except a really generic fan movie.

There’s nothing really creepy about it.  The house doesn’t have an ominous feel to it.  There’s nothing special about the house, it’s decor, it’s location, anything!  It just looks like any other house.  It’s not even an old one.  Meanwhile, the game purports to have “death scenes” but there’s nothing here that will frighten or even shock.  It’s 2011!  We’ve had four Scream movies, seven Saw movies, a dozen Friday the 13ths, and we’re on our sixth season of Dexter.  Anyone attempting to do horror in this day and age has way too much desensitization to compete with.  You have got to do something spectacular.  Death by live embalming using vinegar, via IV tubes inserted into eyeballs, swabbed with alcohol to prevent infection.  That I might cringe at.  A little.

As a movie and a game, Hell’s House does absolutely nothing for me.  I admit I might not be this game’s target audience, because I don’t look back lovingly on FMVs.  I look back on them and think “God, I’m so lucky to have been born when I was.”  This isn’t even one of those cases where you can say “games have gotten so much better since FMV died out.”  Video games were always better, even before FMV came around.  Talking about the good old days of FMV is like fondly reminiscing about the time you got run over by a combine harvester.

Hell’s House was developed by BM Games

80 Microsoft Points are only scared by crows and Rosie O’Donnell in the making of this review.

Remote Viewer

Have you predicted the phone would ring right before it did? Have you ever dreamed about the winning lottery numbers the night before the drawing but forgot to buy the ticket? Have you bought a Big Mac knowing that you would win a free medium french fries from the Monopoly promotion? Neither have I. Which is weird because Cuban women are supposed to be have some kind of clairvoyance. It’s true. It’s something they brag about. Which doesn’t explain why nobody saw Castro coming. Or the Bay of Pigs.  Or Michael Moore. Hell, you would think they could smell Moore coming. That’s one of the normal senses, right? And his smell is utterly unmistakable: a combination of bacon and farts.

My mother often claims to be a psychic. For proof of that, she offers up that she knew I would be a girl when she was pregnant with me. Sure, the odds were 50/50, but she did predict right, so obviously she’s got the sixth sense. And not the spooky “I see dead people” kind.  I mean the kind that can accurately predict a coin flip about half the time. Shit, even I should have that. Here watch. Heads!

Let me try that again. Heads!

Seriously, one more try. Heads!

Okay, fuck you, maybe it skips a generation or something. Thankfully I have Remote Viewer to practice up on. For the low-cost of 80 Microsoft Points, I can hone up my ability to randomly guess things spit out by a computer. That will come in handy if the Robopocolypse ever starts.

Remote Viewer has ten “levels” that allegedly will help you fine tune your ability to read people’s minds. Or something like that.  I’m not actually sure how it’s supposed to work. I mean, what good is reading the thoughts of a machine? If I can see what it’s thinking, doesn’t that make me a Technomancer and not a psychic? I’m so confused.

Levels 1 through 6 all offer the same game: pick the card that’s covered up. Each level adds another card. In level one, you start with only two cards. In theory, the average person should finish with 50% accuracy. I finished with 40%. Six times in a row. Well, at least I’m consistent. Level 2 adds another card. In theory, I should be right 33% of the time. Instead, I got 0% on my first try. So not only am I not psychic, but I’m so far removed from it that it defies the laws of probability. I’m fairly proud of that.

Oh, is that what those letters stand for? I thought it was “A Keen Queef.”

Things really start to get weird with level 7. It’s called “Influence.” The idea is the game will spit out a number between 80 and 120 several times over the course of a minute. You’re somehow supposed to magically cause the game to select a number that’s less than or equal to 99. If you do so, you get a point, while you lose a point if it’s more. Now mind you, I’m not making anything about this game up. It really wants you to do this using the power of your mind. There’s no buttons to press or anything.

I played along and tried to focus. But, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to focus on. The TV is where the numbers show up, but the Xbox is what’s generating the numbers. I’m not one of those people who can move my eyeballs independently so focusing on both wasn’t possible. I decided I should go with the Xbox. So I stared at it, but that didn’t seem to work. The numbers kept coming up high. I tried humming. I’ve seen psychics do that before, but it also didn’t work. I briefly thought about sacrificing a virgin to the console but the cops made it clear I shouldn’t try that again. Finally time ran out and my accuracy was 40%. Goddamnitsomuch!

So I wasn’t able to manipulate random numbers vomited out by a machine using just my brain waves. I’m a total failure. But hope did come when I tried level 8. It was the same as level 7, only this time I wanted the machine to spit out high numbers. Mustering up all the brain wavage I could find, I was able to score a whopping 58% accuracy on it. Holy shit, I’m better than average! Dionne Warwick, I’m coming for you next, bitch!

Level 9 features one of those Eye of Horus pyramid thingies that is out of focus, and using the power of my mind, I had to bring the picture into focus. I briefly thought about cheating and adjusting the reception of my screen, but I realized that was a waste of time. So back to the focusing. This time I pointed at the screen while holding a finger to my temple. I see psychics do that all the time, so it must be how it’s done. And the end result was 50%. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. The game doesn’t tell me.  If a student gets 50% on a test in school, he gets an F. Did I get an F? I need to know. My self-esteem depends on it!

The final level is trying to guess the results of a three digit “lottery” drawing. You have 30 seconds to visualize the numbers before they appear. I had two thoughts while playing this test. #1: I’m a magnificent idiot for having spent a dollar on this game. #2: anyone who accurately predicts all three numbers in sequence will want to slit their wrists for doing it in a video game that offers no rewards when the actual lottery is right there and would have made them some money. Needless to say, I got zero of the numbers right in the five tries I made at it. And then I was done with this game. I’m pretty sure playing this constitutes dabbling in witchcraft, and if I’m going to be burned at the stake for that I want to at least float a couple of inches off the ground while three weirdos chant “light as a feather, stiff as a board” around me.

I did make a prediction before buying Remote Viewer: that I would immediately regret doing so. And I was right. But that doesn’t make me a psychic. THIS makes me a psychic. Pick a whole number between 1 and 10 right now. Don’t wait to see where I’m going with this. Just do it.

Do you have it? You have a picture of it in your head? Okay, highlight the space below this line.

Seven.

Told you.

Remote Viewer was developed Developer 25

80 Microsoft Points just blew the minds of about 10% of the readers here in the making of this review.

“Gameplay” footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

Shoot 1UP

Every Thursday, I put a call out on Twitter for a classic Xbox Live Indie Game that could be a possible contender for the Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard.  This last Thursday, three possible candidates came out.  The ultimate winner was Protect Me Knight, a sort of action-based tower defense game that you haven’t seen my review of yet because I haven’t been able to play the game with three other players.  I didn’t exactly do my research on the game before buying it.  As a spoiler, I think it’s perfectly fine game that is not at all a contender for the list.  Expect a review of it sometime next week.

The runners-up were Leave Home and Shoot 1Up.  As it turns out, I already bought the latter when I started Indie Gamer Chick and never got around to playing it, so it became last week’s default winner.  And then I forgot to actually play it for a few days.  My bad.

Shoot 1UP is a space shooter of the bullet-hell variety and not a biography on Robert Downey Jr. set during the 90s.  There’s six worlds and three degrees of difficulty, plus a survival mode.  The gimmick here is that instead of having a wide variety of power-ups, the game spits out a ton of 1UPs.  Instead of building a stockpile of them, each immediately adds another active ship to your fleet.  If you play it safe, you can build an army of dozens, all on-screen, all at once, and all firing at the same time.  It’s original, that’s for sure.

Of course, in a game that’s themed around dodging a ton of bullets, you can’t always have your fleet spread too far apart.  You use the triggers to expand and retract the ships.  On the harder difficult settings, even a small extension will lead to you taking heavy losses.  If a ship is destroyed, you get a small shield from the explosion that will leave you briefly protected, so you shouldn’t expect to lose dozens of ships at once.  Ha, take that, Spain!

Unfortunately, I didn’t really like Shoot 1UP as much as some readers assured me I would, and it has to do with the overall design.  It’s awfully bland.  The backdrops, the enemies, and the bosses are mostly forgettable.  Sure,  there’s also what I think might be a giant space cock escaping an astrovagina and a big-breasted mechabitch that you have to perform a plasma-lasered mastectomy to, but it’s nothing that the Japanese haven’t already done before.  In fact, overall the design comes across as generic and trying too hard.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this whole "that looks like a gigantic space-dick coming out of a quadruple-cunted astrovagina" thing.

There’s some weird design flaws too.  After a couple of minutes on a stage, you’re given the option to keep flying forward or go into an all-range mode.  Even on all-range, the game still keeps you attached to rails, but you’ll be flying in different directions.  That sounds fine, except entering this mode somehow causes your bullets to not go all the way to the edge of the screen.  It’s bizarre, because when you’re scrolling vertically, your bullets do go all the way to the end of the screen.  The enemies are still at the edge, but they become untouchable unless you get closer and put yourself at greater risk.

Then again, maybe not.

I still recommend Shoot 1UP, because it is a solid shump.  But a leaderboard contender it is not.  The 1UPs building a fleet of ships that you control gimmick is unique and makes the game stand out in a crowded field.  At 80MSP, it’s a way better deal than the recent XBLA release of Radiant Silvergun.  On higher difficulty settings, the game’s six worlds do get longer, and the challenge is increased dramatically.  Yet it’s generic and bland and the gimmick isn’t enough to keep this from being totally forgettable once you finish.  If you’re a bullet-hell fan, you’ll likely enjoy this a lot more than I did.  Then again, you would also likely enjoy it if I dressed like a dominatrix and threatened to spank you, you sick fuck.  Besides, I don’t even like wearing leather.

Hey boys, that's not where that stuff goes.

Shoot 1UP was developed by Mommy’s Best Games

80 Microsoft Points never got more than 19 ships at once in the making of this review.

The $1 Zombie Game

Zombie Survival Diary: Day One

So the Zombie Apocalypse broke out.  Again.  And this time I’m stuck in an abandoned courtyard of what looks like a slum.  I’m all alone.  Well, except for this seven-foot tall dude holding a camera that always walks about three feet behind me.  I’m not sure what’s up with that, but he doesn’t seem to eat or sleep, so whatever.

Thankfully this slum was well stocked with guns and ammo, but that should come as no surprise.  I mean, what else are slums good for?  Well, besides drugs and cheap hookers, or cheap hookers on drugs?  Either way, I’ve got a wide variety of weapons at my disposal here.  Shotguns, automatics, sniper rifles, and pistols.  This could be fun.

Zombie Survival Diary: Day Two

Oh my God I’m so fucking bored.  These zombies just slowly hobble around, and for some reason they’re wearing workout pants.  I lose about 10% of my health every time one flails its arms at me from a distance of five feet.  I’m stuck in this courtyard, which is empty and sterile and doesn’t offer anything in the way of entertainment.  And for some reason I have to hold the left click button my Xbox controller to run.  Also, like a total idiot, I only carry limited ammo for the more fun guns but unlimited ammo for my pistols.  The bullets for both seem just about equally as effective, so why wouldn’t I want to carry unlimited ammo for the gun that is more fun?  And why do I only take one fun gun and one pistol out with me when I go outside to mow down zombies?  This makes no damn sense.

Zombie Survival Diary: Day Three

The zombies seem to be getting faster.  Which is counter-logical.  Shouldn’t the zombies have been at their fastest at the beginning of the Apocalypse and not days afterwards?  I mean, they are dead, right?  So by now rigor has set in, their flesh is rotted more, and their muscles should have lost the ability to flex, which is what you need to move swiftly.  So in theory, they should be stiff as a board by now, unable to move at all, which would allow me to walk by and finish them off in more leisurely ways, like using a coping saw to slowly cut their head off.

But no, they’re faster.  It makes me wonder what I was thinking when I decided to bring a sniper rifle out with me today.  Sniper rifles are more suited for things that can’t run the 100 meter dash in five seconds.  You’re meant to set your shot, take aim, and fire.  Here, you don’t have a chance to.  Not that it matters.  I don’t even have to aim, or apparently even hit the zombies to kill them.  I can just point the gun anywhere in their general vicinity and it seems to do the trick.  Man, this Zombie Apocalypse kind of sucks.

Zombie Survival Diary: Day Four

Well so much for that.  The zombies seem to be bullet sponges now.  When I shoot one, a huge cloud of red stuff that I’m guessing is supposed to be blood but looks more like the type of fire-retardant that airplanes drop explodes out of them.  And once the dust clears, it’s not unusual to see them still walking, gasping as if they’re trying to catch their breath, which makes sense since I shot them in the lungs, but it doesn’t make sense because they’re supposed to be dead and not breathing.  Meanwhile, some of the zombies are getting stuck in the various trash cans lying around, or stuck halfway in buildings, or in staircases.  Maybe they’re polterzombies.

Either way, this whole experience has not been particularly difficult.  Or fun, for that matter.  For the most part, all I have to do is run a big circle around the courtyard, all while holding the click button on the left stick down.  Once the zombies are in a line, I just gun them down, fast ones first, then slow ones.  If they get too close, I just repeat the follow-the-leader process all over again.  It’s lame.  I feel like the Pied Piper, only zombies aren’t half as much fun to kill as children.

The $1 Zombie Game was developed by rmm5

80 Microsoft Points are waiting for the $0.01 Zombie Game in the making of this review.

Hurley, whom I hear has a tattoo of me on his butt, also reviewed this for Gear-Fish. 

Avatar Rail Panic and ARP Halloween Edition

Sometimes my own policies come back to bite me in the ass.  And I’m not talking about stuff like not being able to turn away a review request.  At least those typically provide me with material to write a fun, rewarding, and catty review.  No, I’m talking about the whole “I can’t play demos” thing.  99.9% of the time, I have no desire to do so, but every once in a while a game will come along that tests my resolve.

I had no problem purchasing ARP Halloween Edition.  New releases have been slow this week, and the premise for this looked interesting, at least to me.  This is one of those auto-running games that’s more about reflex testing than platforming.  Playing as your avatar, you run across the top of a moving train, trying to collect cookies, jump over barrels, avoid barriers, dodge birds, and try to get a high score.

Honestly, the game is okay, but there’s nothing really to it.  It’s actually pretty slow for a game based on reflexes.  You can clearly see all the objects coming and have plenty of time to prepare yourself to hit the right button.  I’m guessing the developers set out to make it more child friendly, and if that was the goal I’ll assume its a successful one.  Anyone over the age of six is likely to find this pretty dull, and without online leaderboards there’s not a whole lot of incentive to keep playing.

Oh, and the birds are a bit of a dick move.  You can’t really predict which way they’re going to fly until you’re close enough to them that you’re likely going to take damage.  The bane of my avatar’s existence was actually the gaps between the trains.  For whatever reason, I usually missed them and would fall between cars and lose a bit of my health.  Thankfully, you can pick up candy that restores it.  It just goes to show that my avatar is nothing like me.  If I fell between cars on a moving train and survived, I would only want candy if it was made of pure morphine.

I was sort of frazzled (great word) about the whole “Halloween Edition” thing.  That meant there was a previous release of ARP that I missed.  As it turns out, the original release came out in April and is called Avatar Rail Panic.  This is where the “not playing demos” thing took a chunk out of my precious behind.  Just looking at the original Avatar Rail Panic, I figured it was the same exact game as the Halloween one, only with a wild west theme to it.  Watching the Youtube video seemed to confirm that.  But, BUT, curiosity did get the better of me and I wanted to try it just to make sure.  The only problem is I’ve clearly stated that I would never play demos here.  And I really do stick to that, so another 80 Microsoft Points were spent and presto, I had the original game.

And yea, the prophecy was fulfilled.  It’s the exact same fucking game.  And I mean that.  Same item placement, same level breaks, and all the same objects, only with a different skin.  Instead of candy, its hamburgers.  Instead of cookies, it’s coins.  Instead of spooky trees, it’s cacti.  Instead of ravens, it’s vultures.  Instead of a money-bag, it’s a.. well actually it’s still a money-bag.  The money-bag opens up a sort of bonus section where you run really fast collecting coins.  It fits the wild west motif, because you could presumably be a bandit robbing a bank train.  Granted, a poorly run bank train that left all its money up on the roof.  Must be from Wells Fargo.

But how does the money bag thing fit in with the Halloween theme?  You mean to tell me that they couldn’t even bother to re-skin all the items?  That’s laziness on a scale that would make the Teamsters union blush with shame.  Show of hands, who here could think of a better object to use as a power-up in a Halloween themed video game in about two seconds?  Let’s see, you in Arkansas, I see you’re saying “Jack-O-Lantern.”  See that, Bedroom Studio guys?  A guy in fucking Arkansas could come up with something better.  And you know what those guys do with their cousins.  Shameful that you couldn’t come up with that.

So that’s Avatar Rail Panic and it’s inbred spinoff.  I can’t really say either game is a complete waste of time, but without online leaderboards, there’s no reason to keep playing.  You can give the demo a try if you wish, and thank your lucky stars that you never told anyone you would never ever play demos, because you’ll likely have as much fun as I did and save two bucks in the process.  Avatar Rail Panic is not horrible, but it’s not compelling enough to warrant a purchase.  Oh, and why the fuck is it called Avatar Rail Panic?   You’re not really running on rails.  You’re running on the thing that’s running on the rails.  Hey, it’s a big difference.  Have you ever tried to actually run on a rail?  I did, and as a result, somewhere in Palo Alto there’s a handrail that I technically had intercourse with, and a bloody imprint of my face about four feet below it.

Avatar Rail Panic and ARP Halloween Edition were developed by Bedroom Studio Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points apiece gave birth to a baby handrail, befuddling doctors nation-wide in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

Glow Arcade Racer

Glow Arcade Racer looks good.  The screenshots and gameplay trailer are likely enough to get anyone excited over it.  I imagined it would be sort of like one of those old school top-down racers like Super Sprint, only with futuristic trappings and lots of power-ups.  How could it possibly go wrong?

Well, you should never judge a book by its cover.  Or a game by its screenshots.  Glow Arcade Racer is fucking horrible.  I’ll start with the controls.  The entire game handles like you’re steering a gas-powered puck across a giant Tron-themed air hockey table.  Fundamental stuff like knowing which way your car is pointed become obscured, leading to weird situations where you’ll go off a jump and by time you land, you’re pointing the other direction while completely unsure how you ended up there.  I felt like an old-timer behind the wheel of a real car, only without the fun of plowing through a farmer’s market.

Ignore the Siren call of this screen shot. The actual game is an uncontrollable nightmare.

Control is a big issue, but it’s the little things that contributed to my firm dislike of Glow Arcade Racer.  For instance, on some levels there’s slowdown.  Not a lot, but the transition from smooth scrolling to a stuttering frame rate is akin to having Ice Capades break out in the middle of the Superbowl.  Meanwhile, the camera is operated by a child that was repeatedly dropped on its head.  It zooms  in and out, always at the least appropriate times in a way guaranteed to fuck you over.  You can zoom out the camera, but it leaves everything microscopic, which only compounds the problem of not knowing which way your car is aimed.  The zoomed out camera also crippled four-player local multiplayer.  They did try to alleviate the controlling issues by offering a control scheme called “simple” where both movement and gas are mapped to the left stick.  It doesn’t work at all, which makes me question if the wording was meant as a kind insult.  As in “forgive us for that control scheme.  That was Jeffery’s idea, and he’s.. well.. simple.”

The AI is kind of bitch too.  There doesn’t seem to be any rubber-banding present here, because on the very first course I was able to lap the 4th place driver.  But when the computer controlled racers get weapons, they fire them with unreasonably perfect accuracy, usually destroying you only a nanosecond before you cross the finish line.  The only way to unlock courses is to finish in first place.  By the second course, I could lead the race for every lap and, just a second away from the goal, I would get hit by a projectile and get knocked back to last.  This happened every time over the course of six straight races, mind you.  And once I actually did clear the level, this type of bullshit continued on every new track that followed.

To the game’s credit, the course designs are imaginative and inviting, and the graphics really are very attractive.  But Glow Arcade Racer is plagued with design problems and some horrible technical issues that keep the brakes fully applied.  Here’s a fun one: I’m driving next to a wall.  An enemy crashes into me and pushes me through the wall.  This happened more than once on the second course in the game.  There was no way for me to return to the track except to drive backwards, which causes you to disintegrate and respawn on the course.  The walls were so problematic that I briefly rejoiced once they were taken away after I reached the set of tracks called “Drift.”  As it turns out, the game is even worse without them.  The courses in Drift seem to be designed in a way that no reasonable person could manage to keep their car on track.  I would end up accidentally cutting far enough out that my car would auto-respawn back on course.  I had already rage quit once after the last-second miracle shots I mentioned earlier.  The quit that happened during Drift was one of disgust.

It was also a permanent one.  I’m not going back to Glow Arcade Racer.  The hour I put into it was total agony.  The horrible controls, crack shot AI, and sometimes quite frankly unfair course design left me more angry than entertained.  It’s such a shame, because it really does look spectacular.  It’s the Megan Fox of XBLIGs.  It looks hot, but if you get too close you realize that it’s.. well.. simple.

Glow Arcade Racer was developed by Polar Blue Games

80 Microsoft Points said “it’s like R.C. Pro-Am if you dropped acid” in the making of this review.  I think my Microsoft Points have a problem.

Please donate to Extra Life, a promotional event that shows gaming geeks have heart, and help make a difference in the lives of the next generation of gamers. 

Merball Tournament

Fantasy sports: why don’t more developers do this kind of thing?  When I was a kid and I saw the first Harry Potter movie, I couldn’t wait for a Quidditch video game.  And then one came out and it sucked on a cock-flavored jellybean and nobody has breathed word of a better version since.  Sigh.  It also closed the door to other potential fairy tale inspired games, like Centaur Equestrian or Pixie Badminton.

Merball Tournament kind of reminded me of the Halo variation Grifball, only without the axes, swords, explosions, and fun.  You control a team of mermaids who race another team of mermaids through a maze to find a ball and bring it to the other team’s starting base.  If you’re holding the ball, there’s no way to defend yourself from having it stolen.  If someone on the other team gets close to you, they can just take it, at which point you’re left standing still, unable to move, as if your character is saying “bitch, what the fuck?”

Good for you, bitch. What do you want? A fucking medal?

Without any form of defense, you’re left to just leg it, or flipper it or whatever the fuck you call the tail of a mermaid.  Merball Tournament does provide a useful map and radar, but in a way it kind of kills what should be the theoretical thrill of the game.  It’s the Doom principle, where the excitement comes from turning a corner only to run smack-dab into a cluster of enemies.  Merball is a game that’s set in a maze, yet everyone on both teams plus the location of the ball is clearly labeled.  The mazes aren’t randomly generated, so once you have one committed to memory, you should easily be able to figure out the best routes where you will never run into the opposing team.

Of course, any design choice I can complain about is irrelevant if the game is still fun.  Merball could have been, if the controls worked.  They don’t.  I had a sneaking suspicion the play control might be problematic when the trailer sent to me by the developer featured the character repeatedly swimming into walls.  I know I usually save the trailer for the very end of a review, but here I simply have to let you view it now.  Have a look.

It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?  The funny thing is, I handled the controls a lot better than this guy did.  Not significantly so, but I was able to avoid braining myself on the walls for the most part.  Still, your mermaid handles like the sea she lives in is the dumping ground of choice for unsold Jim Beam.  Maneuvering her up and down was also fairly difficult.  I spent most of the time clinging to the ceiling like I had just guzzled down a bottle of Willy Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink.  Later stages have multi-leveled mazes.  Swimming upwards is no problem in these, but swimming down is unresponsive and feels kind of sticky.  Meanwhile, the AI is absolutely fucking brain-dead.  In a dozen or so rounds of Merball, only once did one of my teammates actually steal the ball from the other team.  Most of the time I saw them they were busy swimming into walls.

Overall, Merball Tournament feels like an unfinished prototype.  Perhaps the groundwork for something of merit is here, but the game is so far away from what it needs to be that I can’t in my right mind recommend it to anyone in its present state.  Conceptually, there’s nothing at all wrong with a game about a bunch of passive aggressive mermaids playing the most pussified form of Rugby the world has ever seen.  It just needs a lot of fine tuning.  I also hate to bring back this old chestnut but this was a game that could have really benefited from online multiplayer.  Considering how bad everything turned out here, maybe it’s absence is a blessing in disguise.  Regardless, Merball lacks the polish to be a worthwhile purchase and as far as I’m concerned it can go ahead and dissolve into sea-foam.  Yea, that’s how the Little Mermaid is supposed to end.  Up yours, Disney!

Merball Tournament was developed by Tarh Ik

80 Microsoft Points are up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun in the making of this review.

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SteamSunk

SteamSunk is a twin-stick shooter, only without the second stick actually firing.  Instead, it aims while you hold the right trigger to fire, which increases the potential for hand cramping about ten fold.  Otherwise, this is a typical TwickS (a word I just invented), with the twist being the maritime setting.  Enemies come at you in waves and you fire on them, watch them crash into the water, grab items, and then shoot some more.  Every five waves a boss will appear, bringing a hoard of baddies with him.  Items are your typical assortment of TwickS standbys, like a flame thrower, rocket launcher, and machine gun.  If this doesn’t sound exciting, my apologies, but I can’t really spruce up the description of something this generic.

So what sets this apart from your average XBLIG TwickS?  Well, badness for one thing.  It’s pretty hard to screw up a twin-stick shooter, so it’s almost admirable how many ways SteamSunk pulls it off.  The absolute biggest issue is slowdown.  When multiple baddies are on-screen at once, the frame rate starts to sputter like a bird just flew into its intake.  This is especially a problem when the later bosses show up.  They tend to bring dozens of enemies with them, all of them clustered together in a way to make your processor wave a flag of surrender.  By around wave twenty, things are chugging so hard that I went from full life to instant death in a matter of moments because I could not keep up due to the skippiness.

There’s a few small problems that also contribute to the downfall of this.  The items aren’t always helpful, especially the rocket launcher.  It’s slow and clunky and every single time I picked it up I gave myself a nice, hearty cussing for being so stupid.  There’s also a super-duper weapon, called the “SuperMortar” that’s almost totally worthless.  When you use it, the game pauses and you line up where you want the bombs from it to drop.  The only thing is, once you use it there’s a delay before it actually begins to drop, and the enemies are usually long gone by time it starts to fall.  I’m sure the intent is to drop the SuperMortar where you think the enemies will be once the move kicks in, but in the later stages the bosses move quickly and randomly enough that it’s not always possible to guess.  So all it’s good for is to bog down the frame rate even more, like it needs your help with that.

Meanwhile, the controls are less than smooth and the enemies are really fickle about where you can shoot them.  The bosses often camp outside of the water and if they die there, you can’t grab the items they drop.  The graphics are boring, the map is dull, and there’s no online leaderboards.  I can’t think of a single reason why you would want to own this one.  The Xbox Live Indie Game scene is full of dozens of games that do the same exact thing, only better.  And why the fuck doesn’t the right stick shoot?  At no point when you’re aiming the gun will you also not want to also be shooting.  Sorry fans, but I can’t resist the easy pun, so here it goes: SteamSunk really SteamStunk.

SteamSunk was developed by Snape

80 Microsoft Points lost out on the Defense of the Dark Arts position in the making of this review.  Damn that Potter!

Hurley, whom I hear swabs the decks one Q-Tip at a time, also covered this for Gear-Fish. 

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Escape The Car

You’ve played this one before.  Trust me.  You might have forgotten about it, but it will all come back just as soon you boot up the demo.  Escape The Car by Afro Ninja has been around as a free internet game for years now.  It’s a point-and-click title where you find various items in a car, use them on various objects, maybe combine them, and try to exit the vehicle.  Well now for $1, you can play the exact same game on your Xbox.  What a, um, deal or something.

Afro Ninja did modernize the graphics, added a smooth music track, and included five meaningless achievements,  but the actual game part is completely unchanged.  The items, the layout of the car, and the solutions all remain from the free game.  There’s no added second quest (besides the option to play the same game with the original graphics), no differences in puzzles, or really any incentive to play this version over the one you can play for free right now.  So why would pay $1 for it?  Hopefully when they bring the rest of the “Escape Series” to XBLIG, they change things up somewhat, because otherwise no dollars will play “Escape the Wallet” to purchase them.

Escape the Car was developed by Afro Ninja

80 Microsoft Points just saved you $1 by giving you this link in the making of this review.

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I couldn’t find a trailer, but trust me, you don’t need it.  Just go play the free game.  It’s fun.