Indie Gamer Chick

Flight Adventure 2

And now for something completely different.  When I started Indie Gamer Chick, I figured I would be playing all kinds of genres that I wasn’t entirely familiar with.  Instead, I’ve mostly been dealing with platformers and space shooters.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the Indie scene hasn’t exactly been the beacon of new experiences I thought it would be.  And then along came Flight Adventure 2.

Granted, flight sims are nothing new to gaming, but I never really got into them.  My father was hugely into Microsoft Flight Simulator, which he would often talk me into trying.  I would usually last about five minutes before boredom set in.  I did fair a little bit better with Pilotwings 64 as a kid, and later Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. series, although that’s a true simulation of flight in the same way Splinter Cell is a simulation of espionage.  But I never aspired to be a pilot and I didn’t figure games like this would figure into my life at any point.

When I spotted Flight Adventure 2 on the marketplace, I knew I had to give it a shot.  I mean, it looked damn good, and it was licensed by Boeing.  A licensed Xbox Live Indie Game?  Get the fuck out!  And then I was contacted by the developers of it, who assured me that online play was a major component of their game and provided me with a code to give to someone on my friend’s list, which my BFF Brian eagerly snatched up.  This not being the type of thing I’m into, I figured I would monkey around for an hour, maybe do a race or two, and then type up the most entertaining review of an Xbox Live Indie Game flight simulator you’ve ever seen.

Now, six hours of playtime later, I’m barely able to get through typing this without wanting to go back and play it some more.  Fancy that.

I usually try to get unbranded screenshots but this was the best I could do. My apologies.

Flight Adventure 2 isn’t heavy on options.  There’s only one airplane for you to fly, a P-51 Mustang, and you can’t customize it in any way.  There’s also only one map at your disposal, albeit an insanely huge one that contains multiple different routes for races.  I don’t know how much more or less complex this is than your typical flight sim, but the controls are complicated and you have lots of stuff to pay attention to once you’ve taken off.  So the game isn’t exactly easy to use, but neither is an actual airplane so I guess that’s the point.

If I could think of one word to describe Flight Adventure 2, it would be “relaxing.”  This is a no-pressure game experience.  Once you’ve taken to the friendly skies, cruising around at your leisure is very tranquil.  It helps that the developers focused on eliminating things that would take me out of the experience.  The draw distance is insane, to the point where there is absolutely no pop-up or fogging that would destroy the immersion created.  Meanwhile, you still have to manage things like your pitch and roll, adjusting your flaps and maintaining your speed.  If you go too fast, your plane can break apart, as mine often did.  You can change this in the options menu, which is handy if you plan on doing various stunts with your plane, but why bother?  I actually felt somewhat accomplished when I was able to do a loopty-loop in my Mustang without showering the Earth with broken airplane and body parts.

When you get bored with aimless flying, you can enter a race mode using Xbox Live or via system-linking.  You choose one of six courses where you must fly between what looks like miniature nuclear cooling towers.  I also had fun with this mode, but I should note that in my personal opinion, the towers aren’t spread apart far enough, and I would often clear a gate by crashing straight into it.  Brian said I was just being a crybaby and they were perfectly spread apart.  So basically Brian is an asshole and I’m right about this, because I felt it was just too hard to get between the damn checkpoints.

Then again, I really sucked at this game.  Even after several hours of playtime, I had been unable to land my plane successfully.  Brian tried to walk me through it, but our efforts were fruitless.  About five hours in, I was finally able to land my plane.  Kinda.  I broke off the wheels, but by God my character would have survived if he existed, and that’s okay with me.  I also semi-successfully landed on a hill once, but when it comes to collision-detection the game doesn’t seem to factor in speed.  I held the breaks and gently eased my way down the hill, going maybe a few feet per a minute.  At the bottom of the hill, I lightly tapped a tree with a force equivalent to having a fly land on you.  At this point, both my wings flew off at roughly the speed of light and my cockpit exploded.  I theorized that my pilot was in fact Hans Moleman.

I have to also break my rule that says people who received the free code get no feedback in this review, but I have to do so for a very important reason.  Whenever we were doing races, my friends Brian, Bryce, and Cameron had to bank hard to reach a checkpoint, and they would occasionally accidentally click the left stick, which brings up the map.  This happened often enough that it seems like it might be a problem for other players.  That or all three of them were just thick.  Brian?  Maybe.  Bryce for sure.  I don’t know Cameron all that well though, and the fact that it happened to him too suggests to me that maybe they shouldn’t have mapped the map to the left clicker.  For the record, it never once happened to me, but most of the time I was too busy crashing into trees to be worried about how steep I was banking.

I felt like Indiana Jones. "Fly? Yes. Land? No!"

And since I’m giving someone else feedback in my review, I might as well go in for a penny, in for a pound and also note that Brian thought the absence of fuel was weird.  I’ll admit that a game that takes itself so seriously with realism and accuracy ignoring such a key component of aviation was bizarre, but I was actually glad that I had one less thing to worry about.  Between adjusting my flaps, my thrust, and various other words that sound naughty if taken out of context, worrying about having enough gas in the tank would have been too much for me to handle.

Overall though, I really liked Flight Adventure 2.  It’s one of the few Xbox Live Indie Games that I can safely say I’ll keep playing long after I’ve finished reviewing it.  Despite its complexity, the game offers a leisurely experience that’s high in production value and low in cost.  Hell, I managed to write 1,100 words thus far without whining about how they didn’t include dog fighting in it.  My primitive brain is wired for combat, not for adjusting trim on an ancient airplane.  A flying game without shooting?  Total hogwash, or so I thought.  It should have been impossible for me to have enjoyed Flight Adventure 2, but I did.  I guess I enjoyed it because it made me feel like I was Amelia Earhart.  And by that I mean I was an unskilled pilot with a tendency to crash but, damn, what a ride!

Flight Adventure 2 was developed by CAVOK Games (website outdated)

240 Microsoft Points spent more time in trees than Tarzan in the making of this review.

A review copy of Flight Adventure 2 was provided by CAVOK Games to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  That person had no limited feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here. 

Nate, whom I hear went to the John F. Kennedy Jr. School for Flying, also reviewed this at Gear Fish.  I would like to note that I experienced none of the online issues that he did.

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. 

Avatar Trivia Online

Avatar Trivia Online is no longer for sale.  Instead, it’s been replaced with Avatar Trivia Party.  See that review here. 

Um, let’s see.  Hmmmm.  I’ll take Xbox Live Indie Games.

The question is: what is the latest release by Red Crest Studios, the guys behind the #9 game on the Indie Gamer Chick All-Time Top 10 list, Andromium?

Andromium 2: Andromiumer?

Sorry, no.  The correct answer is Avatar Trivia Online.  Please select a new category.

Ah crap.  Okay, let’s see, how about..

Actually no, you don’t get to choose categories.  We just throw random questions at you.  The next question is, how many players does Avatar Trivia Online support?

Um, zero?

Wow, you are kind of dumb.  The correct answer is 16.

Boy, that’s a lot of players!

Indeed it is.  Next question: in a trivia video game, what is the most efficient way to be able to answer questions?

Well that would be mapping an answer to each of the four face buttons.

Danny, Tin, and Hipster are all legally retarded.

That is correct!  Next question: how are the questions answered in Avatar Trivia Online?

Um, the efficient way?

Oh sorry, you have way too much faith here.  The correct answer is you have to clumsily scroll through a list of the answers.

No way.  They couldn’t have missed something that obvious.

They could have and they did.  Now, would you like to know your score?

Well, I’ve missed a lot of questions already so probably not.

That’s good, because in Avatar Trivia Online, no score is kept.  At all.

…

…

…

…

You’re joking, right?

Nope.

So it’s a trivia game that doesn’t keep score?  It doesn’t even tell you how many questions you yourself have answered correctly?

That is correct.

Why on Earth would anyone want to play that?  If it doesn’t keep score, and it doesn’t offer any different modes of play besides “answer this trivia question”, what does the game offer that couldn’t be accomplished by just randomly asking questions on a message board, or on Twitter or something?

Oh, well, um, being the host and everything, I wasn’t expecting to be asked questions myself.  I suppose for those things you don’t have to pay $1 to have meaningless social trivia.  I guess that’s actually not a good thing, is it?

No.  No it’s not.

Oh oh oh oh oh, wait, I know.  In those things, you don’t get to use your Xbox Avatar!  That’s a big deal!

Dude, I’m so over my avatar.  I see it every time I boot up my Xbox.  And in this type of game, where you don’t even have direct control over it, the only reason for it to even exist is because there’s a lot of especially thick casual gamers out there who make a big deal of seeing a cartoon version of themselves.  It screams “empty cash grab.”

Well, I suppose you’re right.  It also doesn’t help that Avatar Trivia Online isn’t tailored for playing with your friends.  You’re placed in a random room and have to invite them into the game with you midway through a question.  Of course, since the game doesn’t keep score, it’s not like they’re going to miss out on points or anything.

This doesn’t sound like a very good game.  The whole point of online games is they are supposed to be competitive.  Well it’s hard to have a competition if nobody keeps score.  I’m actually not bothered by questions frequently repeating, because that happens in all trivia games besides maybe the recent You Don’t Know Jack.  Still, I think gamers should likely pass on this one.

Kairi, that is correct!  Congratulations, you’ve won the game!

Really?  Oh my God!  This is the greatest moment of my life!  What did I win?

I dunno.  Since there’s really no way to “win” Avatar Trivia Online, I don’t know what kind of prize to give you here.  How about inner peace?

Inner peace?  How am I supposed to shop with that?

Avatar Trivia Online was developed by Red Crest Studios

80 Microsoft Points took Anal Bum Cover for 400 please Alex in the making of this review.

A review copy of Avatar Trivia Online was provided by Red Crest Studios to IndieGamerChick.com in this review.  The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer.  That person had no feedback in this article.  For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here. 

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. 

I couldn’t find a video or trailer for this game.  Check back later and I’ll edit one in if it goes up.

Dark Delve

I hate doing this review.  You know why?  Because I liked Dark Delve.  I don’t have a lot of bad things to say about it.  And when that happens, my reviews are usually boring.  Oh, there are some exceptions.  I really liked Wizorb, and the poor guys at Tribute Games ended up catching my wrath simply because it was years of pent-up Arkanoid frustration being dumped on them.  In the case of Dark Delve, I really don’t have any axes to grind with its style or its genre.  I’m pretty much fucked with this review as a result.

Dark Delve is a dungeon crawler where you take control of a group of up to four people and search a dungeon for treasure and items, fighting enemies and trying to save the world or some such bullshit.  Although the game is fairly linear, you get a lot of customization options.  For added difficulty, you can go in with only one character.  Being the coward that I am, I decided to go in with four chicks.  Thus I created the “Me Quadruplets.”  Fuck Me, Blow Me, Eat Me, and Lick Me.  Yep, I’m that immature.

Exploration in Dark Delve is done from a first person perspective.  You walk around, searching for hidden rooms and occasionally encountering enemies.  The strange thing is the graphics in the dungeon are really, really well done, but all the characters are downright laughable.  These two contrasting visual styles kind of threw me out of the immersion I was initially feeling when I began the game.  The dungeon is so well designed and drawn that it has a foreboding creepiness to it.  And then there are the characters and enemies that look like they were drawn in KidPix by a 6-year-old.

From left to right: Sleepy Knight, Gollum, Accusatory Ghost Thingie, and Bald Pregnant Alien Britney Spears

Combat is typical turn-based stuff, all driven by menus.  You do have a fairly wide option of attacks to choose from, and there’s a skill-upgrade system that adds more.  I will say that the game sure seems to allow your guys to miss their attacks a lot.  I can’t recall an RPG where your characters strike out as much as it happens in Dark Delve.  Even against low-level creatures, I went full rounds where my characters would whiff every time I went to hit them.  It got so annoying early on that I started over and switched the difficulty to easy.  It didn’t help at all.  And I don’t think its tied to the stamina system because it would happen with the first encounter after I spent a night in the inn to recharge all my stats.  Then again, it might just be that I’m the most unlucky RPG player ever, which was previously established in my review of Sequence.

Aside from the combat and crudely drawn characters, the game itself is quite engaging.  The dungeon is large and offers lots of interesting surprises.  I wasn’t in love with the stamina aspect, where you have limited amount of time to wander through the dungeon before you have to retreat to the exit and rest at an inn.  In essence, it’s punishment for wanting to explore the game, and that’s a horrible idea.  It never really added a sense of tension, which is what I think the developer was aiming for.  It just took away from the fun and gave nothing back.  So boo on that.

Funny enough, the main campaign was the low point of Dark Delve.  The storyline is clichéd, there’s too much backtracking involved, and too many items to juggle.  It’s still good, but it’s lacking a sense of restraint that continuously held it back.  I was about to write the whole game off as “good but in need of someone to filter out the bad ideas, of which there were many.”  And then I discovered the extra challenges.  The game has three of them.  All of them are separate quests with characters already created for you and a more clearly defined mission.  There’s no town to retreat to every time your stamina runs low, and the dungeons were all much more clever in design.  By the end of the main campaign, I was fatigued by a quest that had run out of fun long before it had run out of game.  The extra challenges not only renewed my interest in the game, but I was actually disappointed when I ran out of them.  As a general rule of thumb, any game that leaves you wanting more is usually worth it.

Likely not the most exciting screenshot of the dungeon. Choose your pictures more carefully, developers.

I haven’t reviewed a ton of RPGs since I founded Indie Gamer Chick, but Dark Delve is the best one thus far.  The dungeon exploration really is quite wonderful, even when it gets pissy at you for doing it too much.  Honestly, the main quest is such a colossal waste of time that I would play it only long enough to get a feel for the style.  Once you got it, drop the campaign like a hot rock and head to the challenge modes.  This is what the entire game should have been.  Even better, the developer is promising more, via DLC.  At 80MSP, Dark Delve is one of the better deals in terms of content out there, and it’s only going to get better.  Some really iffy design choices might have cost this a shot at the IndieGamerChick.com leaderboard, but it’s still a contender.

I think the stamina thing is part of the whole minimum shittiness quota for Xbox Live Indie Games.  I’m telling you guys, it’s a conspiracy.  Hear me out on this one.  Originally, Indie games were called “Community” games.  Community implies a large group of people, despite the fact that most of these games are made by one person.  Thus the Community thing to me says that it’s part of the New World Order, the secretive society that controls the world.  But the use of “community” was too obvious and so the slick devils behind this conspiracy changed it to “Indie Games.”  Now, I believe that “Indie” is in reality I.N.D.I.E., an acronym for “Illuminati’s New Dystopian Integrated Entertainment” which aims to slowly eradicate fun from this Earth, one small step at a time.  First video games, and then the world.  WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Dark Delve was developed by Checkmark Games

80 Microsoft Points think Kairi is off her meds again in the making of this review.

Hurley, whom I hear likes to sunbathe at night, also covered Dark Delve for Gear Fish.

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. 

Kobold’s Quest

Update: Kolbold’s Quest is now 80 Microsoft Points.  It makes my overall opinion of it lean slightly more positive.  With three willing friends, it might be worth a purchase.

There’s nothing more boring than listening to people drone on and on about how adorable their children are.  Maybe after having the little parasite live inside you for nine months you grow attached to it, but to me and most of the world it’s just a little machine that turns food into shit and vomit.  Oh yes, that’s so adorable.  And then they want to show you pictures and talk about how they just cut their first teeth.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking “so you’re excited that your soulless shit’n’puke machine now has a permanent weapon inside it’s mouth?”  It makes me thankful that I long ago learned the value of a good old-fashioned coat hanger.

Naturally my, ahem, dislike for babies should lead to me loving a game where they are killed and eaten by a monster thingie.  Unfortunately, Kobold’s Quest is mired in some pretty horrible design choices that slow down its progress to a greater degree than fetal alcohol syndrome.

Kobold’s Quest is a local-only multiplayer platformer where you have to kidnap a baby and return it to the start of each level.  You’re armed only with a single attack button and the ability to jump.  When you throw more than one player into the mix, you can jump off of each other to reach higher platforms.  In a way, it’s kind of like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, only more sterile and with less things to do.

Kobold’s Quest is flawed right from the get-go.  Despite being a platformer, the focus seems to be on stealth-based gameplay.  You can confront human enemies with an attack button, but their attacks are almost always faster and get the job done in one shot.  Thus you’re encouraged to be a sneak, waiting until they’re walking away from you before progressing forward.  As a result, the game just plain isn’t any fun.  The level design is always Dullsville and even if it’s populated by three other players, having to wait for enemies to walk away before you can inch forward kind of sucks.

It also doesn’t help that the collision detection is way off the mark.  Often you can stand on a completely different platform from an enemy and still get diced up when they swing their weapon at you.  If the enemy was using an 80 inch sword that would embarrass Cloud Strife, that would be fine.  But when it’s a little old lady brandishing a meat cleaver and you’re several feet above her on an entirely different staircase, it gets a bit annoying.  You also barely jump high enough to leap over baddies, and they can easily kill you midair.  There’s no radar so you can’t see where enemies are located, and some of them move very fast and wield some pretty huge swords, leading to tons of cheap deaths.  Plus, there are crows.  Crows are supposed to be creepy things associated with death and evilness.  Why are they so hell-bent on helping the humans save their babies?  Fuck if I know.

Despite the focus on multiplayer, Kobold’s Quest works better as a single player experience.  With three other players, things get too crowded, it slows the pace down even further, and the whole “race to be the one who feeds the baby to the monster” feels way out-of-place given that the enemies are still around and you have stand still and wait for them to go away.  Only now you can’t even attack them because you’re holding the baby.  So it’s a race where you are still expected to be slow.  It’s a really boneheaded design choice, but at this point I’m used to those.

When you’re by yourself, the game works better.  The guys I suckered into playing this with me were quickly losing their patience with the boring levels and cheap enemies.  When I was all alone, I kind of had a bit more fun.  Not enough to recommend Kobold’s Quest.  God no.  It’s a boring, poorly designed mess of a game, but the controls work and the theme really strikes a chord with me since I’m all in favor of mandatory abortions.

This cutscene is the reason why Kobold's Quest cost two dollars more than it should.

I think my biggest gripe is that they charged three bucks for this game.  Granted, their hands were forced because it comes in at a whopping 150MB and thus they had no choice but to charge 240MSP.  But why did it cost that much?  The graphics are nothing special, except for some really elaborate (and well done) cut scenes and tons of well done and often hilarious voice acting.  The question is, are those features worth an extra two bucks?  Not by a long shot.  And it always kind of irks me when a developer spends so much time dolling up the presentation in a way that contributes nothing to the game play, when they should have spent that time focusing on improving level design or making sure the collision detection actually worked.  Don’t get me wrong, somewhere in here is a great game, but SuckerFree Games took the entirely wrong approach when deciding what Kobold’s Quest would be, and as a result it’s about as appealing as Afterbirth flavored Pepsi.

Kobold’s Quest was developed by SuckerFree Games

240 Microsoft Points said Pepsi Afterbirth likely would still taste better than Red Bull in the making of this review.

Nate, whom I hear shaves his own butt every spring, also reviewed this over at Gear Fish. 

Sherbet Thieves

Update: Sherbet Thieves received a Second Chance with the Chick.  Chick here for my continued thoughts on it.

I was bound to get challenged on a twin-stick shooter at some point, and it finally happened in the form of Sherbet Thieves.  There seems to be an undercurrent of bitterness towards these games among the Xbox Live Indie Game community.   If I hate on a game, fanboys and cheerleaders (not the developers mind you) usually fire back with “I suppose you would rather play yet another twin-stick shooter!”  Which is hilarious to me because twin-stick shooters have been on the receiving end of more digital blowjobs among the community than pretty much anything else.

Maybe this is the perfect genre to get your feet wet with.  Maybe they take relatively little skill to put together.  I don’t give a shit what the reason is, because they’re around and I finally have to deal with one.  In Sherbet Thieves, enemies appear and you have to run around and shoot them.  The gimmick here is that there’s multiple suns scattered throughout the stage and you have to guard from enemies that include, and I swear I’m not making this up, “space hippies” that seem to be riding giant bongs that fire smoke rings at you.  Combine this with a spacey-acting farmer dude and I think I can see what the developer is trying to advocate here.

Either way, the game is perfectly competent, if not very exciting.  There’s fourteen stages which should take you about 45 minutes to get through.  You can purchase guns between stages and carry two into a level.  The ordering of the guns seemed kind of baffling.  The most expensive one is almost useless, while the second to last gun, which shoots bullets that bounce off the walls, was way overpowered and easily the best weapon in the game.  It only took me about three levels to save up to get it, and once I had it I had no reason to use any other gun, so the store thing is kind of a pointless distraction.

But, as I said, the game is functional and the gimmick of defending the suns from the enemies does work.  It’s sort of like Defender, because enemies will try to carry the suns to a U.F.O. and you have to keep track of all of them while running and shooting.  If you lose all of them, it’s game over.  You’re given gravity bombs that can suck the Suns towards them, so I went with the strategy of using the bombs right off the bat and centralizing the location of my suns.  Most of the time, it worked.  But then I would get to levels where there was one U.F.O. in the center of the map and suns all around it.  These levels had much more tension to them.  I don’t think the developer went as far as he could have in designing the levels, because the gimmick does lend itself to more creative options than he utilized.

I did enjoy my time with Sherbet Thieves, but it’s nothing special and I’ll likely forget about it as soon as I get done typing this review up.  Bang Zero Bang had a good idea going with this, but its potential is left unrealized.  With some more development time to add levels built around immediate danger, it could have been a real contender.  Sherbet Thieves is without question a game that could have used some more THC.  I mean TLC.  Sigh.

Sherbet Thieves was developed by Bang Zero Bang

80 Microsoft Points declared that winners don’t do drugs in the making of this review.

Hurley, whom I’m told has toenails made of cottage cheese, also covered this over at Gear-Fish. 

Convict Minigames

Wow.  I am rarely stunned by a game’s poor quality, but Convict Minigames has left me nearly speechless.  I saw the trailer for it a while back and shuttered at the thought of getting challenged on it.  So naturally I was challenged a few days ago.  Now the people at Convict Interactive are very nice and friendly people.  But this is about two things: quality of games and MONEY.  Real money that real people will spend.  And I can’t take into account how nice someone is when it comes time to review a game.  If I did, almost nothing I review would get slammed.  Developers tend to be nice.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here.  Convict Minigames is by far, BY FAR, the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve played.  Cycloid is not even close.  As if that’s not bad enough, Convict Interactive had the unmitigated gull to charge $3 for this failed abortion of a title.  Of the five games presented here, four of them are completely and utterly useless as video games, which are, you know, things designed to entertain people.  The final one actually had good ideas, but the execution is so far off the mark that I don’t think it’s possible to offer it any praise.  Let’s take a look at each game one by one.

Cave In controls the best of the five, but it's still not any good.

Bop!

Bob is an alleged fighter where you pick one of three characters and try to defeat your opponent by repeatedly hoping on their head.  The controls are sluggish, the computer AI too smart, and the graphics are ugly.

High Hopes

The developers boasted that this game was made in 48 hours, as if that’s a point in its favor.  I could jab my eyeballs repeatedly with a shard of glass for 48 hours but that doesn’t mean doing so is a good idea.  This is one of those “climb high” titles.  You jump repeatedly up a beanstalk.  The same type of game has been done better for cheaper multiple times on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace.  Your $3 here buys you more sluggish controls, unfair random-level design, and piles and piles or boredom.

Jurassic Bar

You choose one of four barely mobile dinosaurs and then swat away at barely mobile cavemen.  The characters are badly animated and the controls are even more sluggish than any of the previous two games.  By the way, this is yet another 48 hour special.  While I concede that there’s a degree of difficulty in making a game in such a time frame, I could give two shits less about it.  I want to play a fun game, not a bag of digital vomit that happened to be semi-coherent within a two-day period.

Cave In

An auto-scrolling platformer where you have to jump from stone to stone, trying to avoid various pits and spikes.  Of the five games, this one might have been the best if any effort was done to give it a purpose.  You can play it with four players, which I suppose would make things interesting, but once you complete the run towards the gold-shitting monolith thingie, nothing happens.  You can’t collect the gold or anything.  Even better, there’s no “congratulations on making it!” screen.  Instead, the ceiling collapses, killing you, which was the only way they could think of to bring you back to the title screen.  This one actually controls the best of the five, but it’s still useless.

Triangle Man

The highlight of the set, which is kind of like saying getting a morphine drip is the highlight of getting stabbed through the chest with a rusty samurai sword, Triangle Man is a punishment platformer mixed with some puzzle elements.  You play as a triangle thingie that has to run around, collect all the coins in a stage, and get to the door.  It actually works, albeit barely so.  Your dude moves too fast, jumping is too floaty, and the parameters for collision detection are too undefined to actually enjoy it.

Triangle Man has a couple good ideas that are ruined by horrible play control.

Now if the guys at Convict Interactive had tossed the other four games in the garbage where they belong and focused on refining Triangle Man, and then released it at a more reasonable price of 80MSP, it would have been easy to recommend.  I especially liked the later stages where you control as many as four dudes at the same time and have to keep an eye on all of them while trying to navigate four completely separate sections of  a room simultaneously.  This is what the entire game should have been about.  It’s an original and worthwhile gimmick for a game.  But nope, the use of this doesn’t come into play until much later on, and by time it started I had already started researching what would be the most peaceful way to kill myself using an Xbox controller.

Regardless of potential, Triangle Man is still a crap game, and anyone who tells you otherwise was merely suckered into believing it after slogging through the first four shitty games in this collection.  Thus you have five games at or very near the bottom tier of XBLIG titles, all packaged together, and all for triple the price of some really great games.  It’s absolutely shameful.  Convict Minigames sounds like a pretty accurate name, because playing it feels like punishment.  Upon completion of Triangle Man, I felt like I had finally finished serving my time and was ready to rejoin society.  Sure, I’ve now got a teardrop tattoo and I’m missing my black cherry, but I’m free!

Update: Minutes before this went up, Convict Interactive told me that they were unaware that they could charge $1 for the game, on the grounds that they believed it was too large.  Convict Minigames is 36.20 MB.  A simple Google search for “Xbox Live Indie Game Pricing” brought up the Wikipedia page for Xbox Live Indie Games, which states, quote:

“Games larger than 50 MB must be priced at least 240 Microsoft Points.”

Now this policy has been in place for quite a while, so it’s not like they can claim that it was just dropped on them out of nowhere.  If you can’t even bother to do 30 seconds worth of research on the marketplace that you’re putting your product on, you don’t deserve to earn any money off it.  They didn’t deserve that anyway on the grounds that their game is a festering piece of shit, but still, you guys couldn’t even do a Google search?  Disgraceful.  And just so I’m perfectly clear, even at $1 this game is simply not worth it.  It’s terrible at any price.  Maybe Triangle Man would be okay if it was FREE, but it’s not.  Do not pay any money for this game.  Put a $1 aside and give it to one of those bell-ringing Santa thingies at Christmas.  Buy a small order of fries from McDonalds.  Do anything but spend it on this.

Convict Minigames was developed by Convict Interactive

240 Microsoft Points were victims of a genocide against entertainment in the making of this review.

Hurley over at Gear-Fish also covered this turd.

Falling Blocks

I really, really wanted to like Falling Blocks.  It’s one of those “climb as high as you can get” games, but with a twist: it’s a first-person platformer.  You can choose between trying to climb as high as you can get for local-only point leaderboards, or in a mode where every block you touch gets painted.  Being the fan of creativity that I am, I anxiously plunged into this one.  Unfortunately, the intriguing concept was failed by some very poor execution, leaving Falling Blocks as a barely playable disaster of a game.

The idea is, jump from block to block, using power-ups to remove any that get in the way or warp to a spot that’s out of reach, all while trying to avoid being crushed as the blocks continuously fall.  Sounds fine in theory.  And then the problems start piling up.  First and perhaps the biggest of all: the falling blocks don’t cast shadows on the playfield.  This is a humongous oversight on the developer’s part.  Without them, the warning that you’re in danger of being squashed is minimal.  There is a caution sign if you’re directly under a falling one, but the problem is you’re on the move, hoping from block to block, and sometimes you move into the path of one that is right above you.  The caution sign might as well say “oh, see, now you’re going to be squished.”  You can look up I suppose, but when you’re under a time constraint, having to constantly move the camera up and down is going to eat up precious seconds.

Another major problem is you can’t actually see anything about your own character.  No feet, no shadow, or nothing to give you any sense of perspective.  This makes platforming particularly hard.  I’ve never really been a big fan of first-person platforming, with only the Halo series and Metroid Prime really being close to perfect.  Since accurate jumping often requires you to be as close to the edge of a block as possible, you’ll find yourself falling as often as successfully jumping.  Your character also moves at a breakneck speed and there’s no true analog controls here, so slipping off the block your standing on is an all to common occurrence.  To the game’s credit, the jumping does feel right, without being floaty or too light.  There’s also a double-jump, but I think it’s an unnecessary design choice.  Just having a default higher jump makes a lot more sense, especially since I only needed the normal jump 1 out of every 10 times.

Falling Blocks really was a good idea, but the finished product is a disaster.  It really pisses me off because I actually want to play a game like this.  And because the jumping actually does work, it proves that the developer is capable of much better than what was presented to me here.  Of any bad game that I’ve played as the Chick, this is the one I want to give a second chance to the most.  I think if the developer added in shadows, it would make a huge difference.  As it stands, Falling Blocks is a slow-paced, directionless, depth perception-lacking mess, sort of like my mom behind the wheel of a car.

Falling Blocks was developed by Multimac

80 Microsoft Points are raining blocks, hallelujah in the making of this review.

Falling Blocks was also covered by my friends at Gear-Fish, so have a look.

Thanks to Indies.onPause.org for the video.

Antipole (Second Chance with the Chick)

UPDATE: Antipole is now 80 Microsoft Points.

Hey, remember my review for Antipole?  Remember how I said it had slowdown?  They patched it.  It doesn’t anymore.  It’s now even more awesome.  You should buy it.

Still no explanation why the protagonist looks like Michael Jackson ran into a "Fur Is Murder" rally.

On a side note, I played the Nintendo DSiWare version as well.  It’s the same game, but it’s portable.  It’s also quite awesome.  I would rather play a game like this on a television screen, so the XBLIG version is the one to get.  It’s 400 Microsoft Points, and that can be a bit of a tough sell.  But if you’re looking for a truly unique platformer, this is the way to go.  It’s better than either of the Bionic Commando remakes that hit the scene, and hell, I actually liked it more than Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or Hard Corps: Uprising.  It’s not as polished as a big studio release, but it’s better designed than most, and for that reason it deserves your dollars.  Original games like Antipole remind me of why I started Indie Gamer Chick in the first place.  And now I look forward to the sequel to this game that will be set on a Grand-Prix circuit.  AntiPole Position is coming soon.

Antipole was developed by Saturnine Games

400 Microsoft Points noted that the last line was a joke in the making of this review. 

Wizorb

Wizorb has several things going for it. First, it has style to spare. It’s one of those rare retro games on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace that tries to look like an NES game and actually succeeds without in some way pulling back the curtain so that you can see we’re still on the Xbox 360. Second, it has an honest to God gaming pedigree, having been designed by Jonathan Lavigne, who worked on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World game. And third, just look at this fucking promotional art by Michael James Brennan.

Wow. Who wouldn’t want to buy a game with flyers that look like that? That’s some sexy ass promotional art there. Of course, all the credentials, artwork, and prettiness can’t mask the fact that Wizorb is still a brick breaker. There’s really only so much you can do with that genre. Shatter on the Playstation Network stretched the limits of it, but otherwise this style of game hasn’t changed all that much since Arkanoid back in 1986. Still, for all the muck I’m about to rake up about Wizorb, it’s likely the best Breakout tribute on the Xbox 360. Not just for an Indie game, but the Xbox 360 in general. Are we clear on that? Good. Now watch me go all Lizzie Borden on this thing.

Wizorb does look good. Really good. And it looks like it tries to do new stuff with the Arkanoid formula. But it really doesn’t. A lot of people are throwing around terms like “it’s Arkanoid mixed with an RPG” or “it’s a whole new take on brick breakers.” It’s not. At all. It’s not an RPG in the slightest bit, nor is it innovative at all. It’s the same fucking game that has been around for twenty-five years now in a different coat of paint. It’s like saying painting a Pinto red makes it a Ferrari.

Staring at this picture is only slightly less interactive than actually playing in the village is.

Let’s talk about the RPG elements. Along the game’s 48 stages you can get cash that you can use to buy items, or alternatively give to the town’s citizens to help them rebuild their houses. That’s the entirety of the RPG experience. There’s no exploration, exposition, or any decision-making that has any consequence other than “give your money away, get a free life.” But it does have a shopping element, which is different from any Arkanoid clone. That doesn’t make it an RPG though, and if it does than perhaps you’ll like such other titles from the genre like Forza or Mario Party.

The whole town thing is completely underutilized. You give the townsfolk money to rebuild their houses that some evildoer thingie destroyed instead of telling them to get up off their asses and go find a job to pay for their own fucking repairs. See, this is always what happens when the democrats get the White House. If you give them a so-called “donation” you’ll come back to the town later and see that all the buildings that you donated for are fixed up and you can walk around inside them.  But what can you do in them? Not a God damned thing. They’re just there for decoration. Even if you see a treasure chest inside one, you can’t open it. There’s nothing more interactive about it than “go in building, leave building.” So what your hard-earned money got you was essentially parsley on a dinner plate and some arbitrary bonus item, like a free life or a key that you can use in a level to open up a door for a shop or bonus room. Big fucking whoop there. I figured something good would happen if I opened up most of the town stuff. Instead, I felt like a total idiot later on when I found out I could buy some crown-thingie for $10,000 and I didn’t have the money because I was busy acting like the chairman of Habitat for Humanity. I don’t know what it does, but I’m guessing I would have enjoyed wearing it a whole lot more than I would have enjoyed having some idiot I never met get to sleep under a roof while I’m off fighting monsters by way of ricocheting a ball off my wand.

So Wizorb really is an Arkanoid-like and NOTHING ELSE! How does it fare as what it is? Not bad. There’s a paddle. There’s a ball. There’s bricks. Hit the ball with a paddle and break some bricks. You’ve played this game under different names a zillion times before, and they’re all the same thing. And that includes all inherit flaws, chief of which is what I like to call “Last Mother Fucking Brick Syndrome.” You know what I’m talking about. You clear out a whole level and all that’s left is one god damned brick that you can’t seem to kill no matter how carefully you try to. It just stays there, taunting you like a raven perched on a chamber door, leaving you swearing that you’ll play this genre of gaming nevermore.

Wizorb does try to help this, or at least it gives off the appearance of trying to do so, sort of like a Good Samaritan who saves you from a mugger only to run over your puppy with a steamroller afterwards. You get magic spells to help. Using the A button you can shoot a fireball at blocks or enemies, and this works fine. Or at least it does until you encounter a level where the breakable bricks are behind indestructible walls, at which point you might as well use it to light your own farts on fire. The alternative is using the B button to change the direction that the ball is going. It does help, but all this stuff drains your magic, and later in the game it’s hard to get it. Making a few volleys in a row without breaking anything gives you 10% of your magic back, but it won’t be much help. There’s also two power spells that can be used if you press the button at the same time the ball hits the paddle. The A button power shot turns the ball into a comet that instantly destroys any breakable bricks that it touches. Sounds awesome, but in reality it lasts for about one second and then the ball returns to normal. It doesn’t even make it to the ceiling before it wears off. Fuck that noise. The B button power shot gives you control over the ball and allows you to steer it any direction you want. Again, it sounds good, but you only have about two seconds to get it where you want it to go, and usually it’s not helpful with Last Mother Fucking Brick Syndrome. Both these spells are almost totally useless and take too much magic to use. So fuck them.

There was an effective method towards combating LMFB Syndrome: suicide. If you have enough magic and you lose a ball, instead of just launching off the paddle with your next life, you can place the ball anywhere you want on the play field that isn’t occupied by an enemy or a brick and let it go. So the lesson we can take away from Wizorb is that if things get tough in life, kill yourself and everything will sort itself out.

Wizorb has cruel level design, useless “RPG” stuff peppered in it, and some fun “what the fuck moments” like the fourth boss that I killed in less than five seconds when my ball somehow got pinned to it. Also, the guys behind this were just a little too married to the concept of making an NES game. The game has two-button controls. The triggers, bumpers, and Y button go completely unused, while the X button is used to adjust the speed of the paddle if you use the D-pad like a bitch. They could have used the other buttons to create more spells and really dial-up on the action. But no, they ran with the whole NES concept. Which doesn’t explain why the game has online leaderboards, but I like those so I’ll forgive it. At the end of the day, like any brick breaker, LMFB Syndrome swiftly turns fun into tedium and frustration. During the later stages, if the developer had been within stabbing distance of me he would have been on the receiving end of more pricks than the ticket booth at Yankee Stadium.

If you go into Wizorb with the right mindset, that you’re playing a really fancy NES version of an unreleased Arkanoid sequel, you’ll enjoy it. I did. I actually feel bad that the guys at Tribute Games just so happened to be on the receiving end of this extended rant when, in reality, the first competent Arkanoid game I came across on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace was doomed to get it. Wizorb is actually really good, if you’re into this sort of game. If you’re not, it’s not going to cause some kind of epiphany and convert you. Breakout has been around for thirty-five years now, and Arkanoid for twenty-five years. If, after twenty-five years, you can still enjoy playing a new version of the same tired game that offers absolutely nothing in the way of innovation, you’ve already spent your 240 Microsoft Points on this and you’re only reading this review hoping that I will reaffirm your taste in games. For everyone else, I’ll pose you this question: did you like Arkanoid? No? Don’t buy this. Yes? Go play the Arkanoid you already own. Don’t already own one? Well than, I guess you can feel free to buy this one. Just one more question: how did they get electricity and an internet connection in the cave that you’re living in?

Wizorb was developed by Tribute Games

240 Microsoft Points fired the guy who made bricks that can be shattered by a ball the size of a marble in the making of this review.

Wizorb is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.