Indie Gamer Chick

Dead Pixels

You.  The dork reading this.  No, I’m not talking about someone else.  I’m talking to you.  For real.  This is not a joke.  I’m personally addressing you.  Do I have your attention?  Okay, good.  Now this is going to be a bit shocking to read, but I think you need to pay close attention.

You’re going to die.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, you’re not going to come out of it alive.  You’re not going to be the last human standing among your circle of friends.  There’s not going to be a tearful moment where your parents get zombified and you have to kill them.  You’re not going to lead a rag-tag group of survivors through the burning streets of whatever city you live in.  Not happening.  You’re going to be zombie chow.  You’re not even going to make it very long into the apocalypse.  If a film was made about the outbreak, you’re going to be one of the nameless dudes eaten in the opening scene while the real heroes get their shit together.

No, stop!  Do not reply to this review with a detailed explanation on what makes you different from everyone else reading this.  You’re not.  You’re dead meat.  Nothing you’ve done in life has given you the abilities you will need to survive a zombie apocalypse.  If the outbreak actually begins and you see a zombie, your last moments alive will be spent with tears streaming down your face and a puddle of piss collecting around your shoes.  Unless you’re a decorated combatant or police officer or fireman or someone with actual survival abilities, you’re fucking screwed.

Now, now, don’t be dejected big guy.  I’m going to be just as dead as you are.   But at least I’m self-aware of that.  If the zombie apocalypse ever begins, I’m only going to last as long as it takes for me to get the handgun I keep in my nightstand, load it, and fire it into my skull.  Actually, since in my hypothetical zombie scenario I picture my neighbors Carl and Mandy getting zombified by this point, I might walk over to their house and blow my brains out in front of them.  They always made the best apple pies on the 4th of July and letting the zombie-thems feast on my corpse is the least I can do to show them how much I appreciated it.

For the majority of you, this delusion that you actually could survive a zombie apocalypse comes from your experience playing video games.  Ha.  Yea, I’m sure playing Dead Island has really given you a leg up on the rest of humanity.  No offense, but zombie video games prepare you for surviving Armageddon about as much as playing Bingo prepares you for winning the lottery.  It’s just not reality, people.  So just play these for the fanciful digital distractions that they are.  If you want an actual crash course on surviving Dawn of the Dead: The Real Thing, join the army or something.

Okay, Dead Pixels.  It’s a side-scrolling retro game where you shoot zombies and NOT a documentary on how to survive the zombie apocalypse.  The first clue to that should be the fact that there are stores right in the middle of Zombiepalooza that have the nerve to charge you money for guns and ammo.  If I’m a shop owner and someone has actually survived long enough to make it to my store, I’m not going to ask them for money.  I’m going to toss them all the ammunition I have and hope like hell they take me with them as something other than bait.

In all seriousness, Dead Pixels is fucking awesome.  This is not only one of the best zombie games on the marketplace, but one of the best games period.  The potential for disaster was huge here.  When I saw the trailer for it, I told Brian “oh great, another samey zombie shooter.  Ooooh lookie, it has River City Ransom style graphics.  I’m sure that means it won’t be a total piece of shit.”  Which proves one thing: I suck at prophecy as much as Nostradamus did.

There’s still hope for the Mayans.

Dead Pixels does look like a really good 80s style Technos game, but instead of trying to look just like a title from that era and nothing more, it actually dolls up the presentation with modern effects like a Grindhouse-style grain filter and an awesome sound track.   The end result is a game that oozes with more style than most big-budget mainstream titles do.  I usually try to avoid praising presentation if I can, but here it really does deserve mention.  And if you hate the grain filters, you can turn them off.  It’s astonishing that a console title can be $1 and look this good.

Even more remarkable is how deep the gameplay is.  At its core, Dead Pixels is just a just a wave shooter.  A cluster of zombies come at you.  You kill them with a couple of shots, collect whatever coins they drop, and move on.  But where it really surprised me is the moments where you’re not fighting zombies.  There’s a very rich inventory and shop system where you buy and sell items looted from empty buildings (or any extra guns you don’t need) and stock up on ammo or various other goodies you need.   Unlike other games of this style, not only do you have a limited amount of bullets, but so do the shops that sell them to you.  Once they’re gone, they’re gone.  At first I thought this would negate the fun of the game, but instead it greatly adds to it.  It’s such a smart design, and it’s so well implemented.

Another design that I initially had penciled in as a dick move was getting weighed down by carrying too many items, leaving your dude moving at a snail’s pace.  Again, it sounded stupid, and I felt like an idiot when I started crawling along at a speed of about one centimeter per second thinking “well fuck, there’s gotta be a store somewhere around here that I can unload this shit at” and taking roughly an hour to get to the next one.  But you know what?  I realized that if that wasn’t in the game and there was nothing else to manage, it would get boring really quick.  So yet another high-risk design choice that paid off, and the game never did get boring.

And then I found co-op, and it was even better, in more ways than one.  Not only is co-op every bit as crazy fun as the single-player, but I discovered that Dead Pixels has randomly generated maps.  Granted, it doesn’t make a huge difference since most of the streets look the same, but the stores having different weapons at different prices does add a nice touch.  Also nice is the fact that you can purchase upgradable stats that actually result in a noticeable difference.  In lots of games, like Castle Crashers for example, your attributes tick up so gradually that you can’t even tell you’ve changed at all.  There’s none of that here.  When you buy an upgrade, you feel it’s power immediately.

It is nothing short of amazing that I could like this game as much as I did.  I hate upgradable stats in anything but RPGs or Metroidvanias.  I hate having limited ammo in wave shooters.  I hate games that punish you for wanting to collect as much stuff as possible.  Dead Pixels has all three of these.  Not only did the developer manage to work them into the game in a fun way, but it actually wouldn’t be anywhere near as entertaining without them.  Bravo, CSR Studios.

The co-op player looks like Elmer Fudd mixed with Michael Douglas’ character from Falling Down.

I do have to keep it real and so I have one complaint, but it’s a pretty significant one: the slowdown on the final stage.  No, I wasn’t weighed down with equipment.  Instead, the processor was weighed down with about a gillion zombies and I was using the flame thrower on them.  The framerate started chugging like it was last call.  Later, I played the game co-op and we really, really came close to making my Xbox explode.  So close that I’m sure two players using the right combination of weapons and having the right combination of enemies on-screen could likely cause a full-fledged system freeze.

And in some circumstances it might not be avoidable.  The last stage is one of those huge clusterfuck type of finales that games always throw at you in a half-assed attempt to feel climatic.  Only here, it actually did feel climatic.  I mean what else could they do?  It’s a fucking zombie game.  One thing that did feel a bit silly was the inclusion of a kind of, sort of last boss.  It was a zombie that looked like it was wearing the official football uniform of GLAAD.  It was dumb looking.  And it wasn’t hard to kill.  The military dudes who puked acid on me earlier in the game did more damage to me than the boss zombie did, which is none at all.  And why would there be a boss zombie?  It’s just as dumb as the Borg having a queen, but that’s a rant for another time.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised a few times on Indie Gamer Chick.  It’s funny how the two games at the top of my leaderboard (LaserCat and the soon-to-be-inducted Chester) were games that I had low expectations for.  Well now you can add a third title to that list, because Dead Pixels, much to the chagrin of the poor folks at BBG Games, is now slated for that #1 spot when the Leaderboard updates on October 1st.  If there’s any justice in this world, it will rise to the top of the sales charts and be one of those rare Xbox Live Indie Games to shatter the glass ceiling and make its way into mainstream gaming circles.  And I’m not just saying that because they’re promising DLC if it meets certain sales expectations.  Dead Pixels was an absolute blast from start to finish and the best value a single dollar has ever given me in gaming.

And I thought it was going to be shit.  Shows what I know.

Update: Dead Pixels has had content added to it.  You can read about it here.

Dead Pixels was developed by CSR Studios

80 Microsoft Points think Sony is going to sue CSR Studios because, as anyone who ever bought a PSP knows, they have the market cornered when it comes to dead pixels in the making of this review.

SEncounter

One of the biggest surprises I’ve had since becoming the Indie Gamer Chick is how small a presence first-person-shooters have on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace.  It’s kind of baffling to me because the Xbox360 is pretty much the all time leading nesting ground for the genre.

Sit down and shut up PC, nobody was talking to you.

Anyway, I’ve played exactly one FPS since starting this site, which was Send in Jimmy, a game that was so special that Michelle Bachmann is going to be running it in her anti-HPV Vaccine ads.  Just about everything that could be bad about it was.  It was slow and had more fogging than a Cheech & Chong concert.  And yet, I have to admit it did have a degree of charm.  It was like an inbred dog found at a rundown Mexican puppy farm, which you fall in love even knowing that it would piss all over the couches and eventually drown in its own water dish.  So yea, I did like it, even if there wasn’t really anything about it to like.  But hey, it was a buck, so what did I expect, right?

Well SEncounter was also a buck, and it was also a first person shooter, so obviously I’m ready to adopt my latest cross-eyed, over-sized-tongue-having mongrel and give it a good home.  You can just look at it and know it’s going to be awful.  It all starts with the name.  SEncounter doesn’t seem like a good title for a video game.  It looks like a fucking typo.  I was really excited because this was bound to be a really good bad game that I could enjoy in the same way I enjoy a Michael Bay movie.  But, as it turns out, no, it’s just totally incoherent shit, like.. well like a Michael Bay movie.

At first I thought it was going to be okay.  I mean the game had nice and clean graphics and a crisp framerate.  And then I encountered my first enemy.  Well, maybe “encounter” is too strong a word.  It was a little mobile satellite on-wheels thingie that started emptying bullets into me like I was Bonnie fucking Parker.  The only problem is it wasn’t even close to me!  It was way the fuck down there!  And why am I pointing my finger?  This is a written review.  My point is it wasn’t even close to me.  At first I couldn’t even see what was shooting at me.  There’s a little radar thingie that tells you what direction you’re being shot from, but it’s not all that helpful.  I thought the damn thing shooting at me was a piece of the scenery.  And then I noticed the muzzle flash, which was followed about two years later by me actually taking damage.  I felt like a total buffoon because here are bullets that are about as speedy as an octogenarian with a walker and oxygen tank and they’re still managing to kill me.

Being the expert at shooters that I am (stop snickering Bryce), I took aim and fired at the little roving satellite thingie.  Then I pitched a tent and took a naspki while I waited for my bullets to actually reach it.  Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  In reality, it only takes a few seconds for bullets to reach something that’s about 50 yards away.  Still, IT TAKES A FEW SECONDS FOR BULLETS TO REACH SOMETHING THAT’S 50 YARDS AWAY!  God damn, what a piece of shit game.

Having destroyed my first target, I decided to move on.  Only I was being shot at again.  This time, the dude was way-way-way-way the fuck away.  And it was an actual dude, not a machine.  So logically speaking, it shouldn’t have been able to fire as accurately as it did.  I mean this kind of accuracy in AI would make the producers of Far Cry hang their heads in shame.  And yet here is this dude in an entirely different county than I’m standing in, firing at me with a fucking assault rifle and still being dead-on-balls-accurate every fucking bullet.  Meanwhile, your character only has two weapons: an assault rifle thingie and a sniper rifle.  So I pull out the sniper rifle, take aim, and fire.  Without exaggeration, it took a full five seconds for the dude to die.  Was it my bullet or was it natural causes?  Only God knows.

So I go around the corner and I get shot at again. Only this time, it was a sniper in a tower and by time I figured out where he was at, I was worm food.  Upon respawning, I was easily able to dispatch him and other enemies.  Then I went through this barn thingie and got tagged and killed by a few other enemies.  I respawned back in the barn, only I had exactly as much life left as I had when I entered the barn, which was about enough to survive a fly vomiting on me but not much else.  Sure enough, I poked my head out of the barn and got shot.  At this point, I had run out of lives and game overed.

You have got to be kidding me.  A lives system?  As if the broken checkpoint system wasn’t enough, a lives system?  Fuck this game.

Upon returning to the main menu, I decided that I should recheck the control scheme to make sure I’m wasn’t forgetting to push the “make the game fun” button.  Sadly, there was no such button.  But, there was a “run” button.  Using it, your guy actually runs at what seems like a faster speed than the bullets in the game do.  With it, I decided to use a new strategy: ignore all the enemies and just leg it to the finish of each of the seven stages.  Sure, it was shameful beyond belief, and whatever cred I hadn’t already lost when I admitted I couldn’t throw a Dragon Punch was sure to be toast, but I thought it was a valid strategy.  I would just run for it, weaving back and forth like I was Mel Gibson behind the wheel of a car, which I theorized would mean the snail-like bullets would not hit me.  I know, dumbest way ever to play a FPS.

It worked.

Hell, I beat the game in about thirty minutes only firing when the game outright made me.  So what did I think of SEncounter?  Well I would suggest the main character can go ahead and swallow the end of his own gun but I want him to die of something other than old age.

SEncounter was developed by WSB Software

80 Microsoft Points on this day can honestly say they were faster than a speeding bullet in the making of this review.

Video courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp

I have a proposition for Microsoft.  It’s a bit radical but hear me out on this one.  I think every XNA subscription should come bundled with a dude named Gus.  Gus will just hang around when you are designing your games.  Now if it’s obvious the project is flawed from the beginning and the developer has no talent, Gus will simply alert the guys who have confused the job of reviewing games with kissing ass to break out the Chapstick.

However, if the designer has talent and is in the process of creating a fun title, Gus will stick around and continue to observe the development process.  And in the event the designer decides to include a feature that is so mind-numbingly stupid that it could potentially sink their game, Gus will empty a can of pepper spray on their face.  It’s my hypothesis that this will lead to a developer more carefully thinking through design choices.

I think this is a good plan, Microsoft.  You can save money by using the same guys who shoot people’s dogs when they use bad game quotes.  Oh, and just because the guy is billed as being named “Gus” doesn’t mean the guy actually has to be named Gus.  It’s a marketing thing, just like the “Geek Squad” is for Best Buy.  I have it on good authority that some of those guys are really more like dweebs than geeks.

Okay, end of insane rant, and on to the review.  I put a call out on Twitter for older releases that would be possible contenders for the Leaderboard here.  The always cool Chounard was swift to nominate Johnny Platform Saves Christmas.  This was quickly endorsed by multiple Twits, and thus it secured the spot in this review.  Well kinda.  As it turns out, JP Saves Christmas is a sequel.  For some reason, it just seems weird to me to review a game without having played the original, so I figured I should grab it and start there.

Thus, Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp.  It’s a puzzle-platformer where you play as this stick-figure-with-a-giant-green-head-thingie who has to navigate 55 single-room levels.  I guess calling these boards puzzles is a bit misleading.  They’re pretty much as puzzling as a light switch, so maybe this should just be called a platformer.  In order to clear most stages, you have to hop’n’bop all the baddies in a stage.  Other times, you just have to get to the door.  Along the way you’ll have to make use of a double jump and occasionally push blocks or wheels into place.

JP Biscuit Romp actually is pretty good, even though it has a couple glaring issues.  The first thing I should note is that the game’s difficulty has more curves than someone who has subjected themselves to reverse-liposuction.  Not that it ever gets particularly difficult, but there are times where one room will offer multiple baddies and clever layouts, and the next will be a straight forward “get to the goal” type of stage that can be beaten in seconds.  Actually, a lot of Xbox Live Indie Games tend to have issues with proper difficulty progression.  It’s further proof that Gus is a good idea.

But where Gus would really have had a good time is when the developers decided to include a lives system.  The fact that it even exists is a sin against gaming.  There’s no high scores and you achieve a “checkpoint” every five stages, so what purpose does it serve besides adding tedium to the experience?  It’s not really that big a deal but it does break the flow of the game and it’s really the only major flaw here, so I figured I should bring it up and someone should be washing their mouth out with Mace as a result.

Otherwise, Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp is a perfectly fine waste of an hour.  I had planned to do a double-review, much like I did with the Platformance games, but Biscuit Romp was good enough to talk about on its own.  It certainly gives me hope that the Christmas game will be a contender for the Leaderboard, especially since that’s the game that actually won last night’s nomination.  Then again, adding Christmas to anything rarely ends well.  Just look at the Ernest movies.  Or Judaism.

Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp was developed by Ishisoft Games

80 Microsoft Points noted that other things ruined by Christmas include drive-time radio, prime-time network programming, and diets in the making of this review.

HACOTAMA

Logic-puzzlers are one of those genres that, while not quite on the fringe of.. wait, I’ve done this already, right?  Well, HACOTAMA is a logic puzzler, but it’s more in the style of Sokoban, which you would know as Boxxle if you were into these types of games in the early 90s and had a Gameboy, or possibly Shove It! if you had a Genesis.  It’s one of those “push the blocks into the designated spots” games. But this one actually has a twist that is worthwhile: it’s a 3D game, one with some really cool gravity effects.  Of course, none of that really matters if you’re non campus mentis and your time is better spent playing the latest twin-stick shooter.

In HACOTAMA (don’t forget to scream the name when you say it) you play as your avatar and have to roll balls onto shiny little light thingies.  The hook here is that your avatar walks off a ledge, it just sticks to the ledge and the board rotates with you.  Also, instead of pushing the balls, sometimes you stand on top of them and “walk them” into the correct spots.  Your character progresses one square at a time and you can’t fall off the ball your standing on, so it actually plays smoother than I thought it would.  There are forty levels, many of which are breezy, tutorial-type stages.  A couple of the later stages offered some brief head-scratchery for me, but for the most part the solutions are obvious and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to go about it.

HACOTAMA looks really good, with bright and colorful graphics.  But there is a trade-off, because the frame-rate can get a bit choppy on some levels.  Fighting the camera is the biggest pain in the ass in this game.  There’s no free-camera option, so all manipulating is done with the bumper buttons, and it limits your visibility greatly.  This also can sometimes obscure exactly which block a shiny light thingie is hovering over.

I liked HACOTAMA, but I recognize that this genre isn’t for everyone.  The cute graphics might lure in some people who aren’t fans of logic-puzzlers, but they won’t stick around once the game’s difficulty ramps up.  No matter how much it’s dolled-up, it’s still pretty much just Sokoban.  If you’re a fan of that, you’ll like this.  If you don’t, you won’t.  I do appreciate the very unique take on the nearly thirty-year-old formula that is offered here and so I give this my personal thumbs up.  Of course, years of heavy gaming have mutilated my thumbs into gnarled, wretched, stump-like appendages from which small children should avert their eyes, less they be traumatized.  I guess it’s not all that good an endorsement.

HACOTAMA was developed by Heloli

240 Microsoft Points have their avatar decked out in a Princess Allura uniform that can form the Blazing Sword for the sake of fucking with the canon in the making of this review.

Happy

I’m a firm believer that a review should never take longer to write than the game I’m reviewing did to finish.  In that spirit, I have about seven minutes to write this piece on the game Happy.  Well actually it’s about 6 minutes and change now.  Fuck, I better stop wasting time.

Happy is a side scroller where you play as a snowman-looking thingie who has to get cupcakes or something.  It’s unquestionably a game designed for the kiddie set.  There’s no enemies or anything.  Just a few jumping sequences.  You move left and right and your dude rolls.  If you release the stick, he keeps rolling until something makes him stop.  You can also double jump.  That’s pretty much it.

I should point out that all the proceeds from this game go to T.A.G. Pet Rescue.  I’m sure it’s a fine charity and the dude who made this had his heart in the right place.  But I’m not in the charity promotion business.  I’m a critic.  And as a game, Happy really fucking sucks.  It’s just such a nothing of a game.  There’s no reason to really play it.  It’s horrible.

The best thing I can say about it is the graphics are nice in a coloring book sort of way.  Everything else is just a huge waste of hard-drive space.  The levels are dull and there’s almost no personality in this title.  The music would be kind of nice in county-fair sort of way, but it’s full of bad notes that sent shockwaves through my spinal column.  And although Happy tries for the kiddie crowd, it even seems to fail at that.

Recognizing that this game certainly wasn’t designed with a 22-year-old curmudgeon in mind, I let the kids of a family friend give this a go.  Two young whippersnappers, age 6 and 4, each gave it a complete play-through and they thought it was boring too. I think adults often fail to comprehend the things that entertain children.  I remember the kind of computer software my parents would bring me at that age, whether it was for educational reasons or otherwise, and it was rare that it was something that I found engaging.  Kids are more sophisticated than grown-ups realize.  The twenty minutes the two kids spent on Happy was anything but a happy time for them.  I had to make up for it by digging my Nintendo Wii out of storage and playing a couple of rounds of New Super Mario Bros. on it with them.  I asked them afterwards what they thought of Happy compared to New Super Mario Bros. and they said it was a total piece of SEVEN MINUTES IS UP!

Happy was developed by SOLLOMAN Games

80 Microsoft Points helped control the pet population in a way Bob Barker never quite envisioned in the making of this review.

All the Bad Parts

UPDATE: A mini Second Chance with the Chick is now included at the bottom of this review.

Excuse me for one second.

Cathy calmly steps outside, screams in frustration, and calmly returns to her desk.

There, much better.

Warning, there will be spoilers in this review. Here’s the first one: I don’t ultimately recommend buying All the Bad Parts. If you want to know why, you’ll have to read.

Now then, All the Bad Parts. So you play as this kid who finds himself in this bizarrely vacant school. You get scolded by your teacher and a fetch quest is kicked off. Along the way you have multiple encounters with a bully. Later, there are multiple versions of the same bully. Even later, the bully’s head is replaced with an alien-insect head-thingie. And then things start to get weird.

The first of four levels ends with you meeting your BFF, but then he starts to talk to you as if you’re on your death-bed, which for me was the “ohhhhh I get it” moment. So obviously the dude is in bad shape somewhere and we’re guiding him through some type of purgatory. In the second level, you meet your future wife after getting punked out by a bully. In the third level, you attend your best friend’s funeral. In the final stage, you relive your office career.

Despite having comic strip-like graphics and almost cheerful music, All The Bad Parts is very spooky and surreal. The highlight of this moodiness for me was a section in the third level where you literally start to descend into Hell. And I don’t mean that in a fire and brimstone kind of way, but in a very subtle, artistic way. With no warning, you transition from a bright and colorful church to a barren wasteland littered with coffins and shadow imps.

Without a tinge of hyperbole, this was the most unnerving and almost legitimately terrifying experience I’ve had playing any game over the last generation of consoles. The scene culminates in a meeting with a very polite fellow with a giant-sized vulture standing behind him. Like Dante, I was compelled to go on, but the game yanked me from this setting and asked me to return to the church. I was briefly disappointed, but then the hellish setting returns in very brief snippets during the final stage in the office building.

What really amazed me the most about the whole story was this was a compelling and terrifying game that came not from a big budget studio, but from the mind of one guy and a title that I paid a single dollar for. All the Bad Parts might not be a horror game in the traditional sense. In fact I’m sure there’s many out there who would say it’s not really a scary game at all. There’s no monsters to run from or startling “BOO!” type scares. But it gave me the heebie-jeebies. It’s all about atmosphere and the unknown. The not knowing what this guy did to deserve this really makes for an awesome hook to the storyline. Is he a bad guy? Is he a good guy? Is already a goner or is he going to pull through?

Unfortunately, I didn’t really get any of the answers to that. When I beat the final boss (the polite gentleman from earlier), my guy and him debated for a few seconds about whether he would want to do it over again. My guy wanted to, and the game ended when he woke up in the hospital, surrounded by his friends and family. Well fuck, that sure was a letdown.

Okay so the ending (or at least the one I got, more on that later) blew. But getting there is half the fun and in the case of All the Bad Parts I can say without hesitation that this was the best storyline I’ve seen on an Indie game. Any other title is at least a galaxy away, and comparing it to anything else would be ludicrous.

So naturally its paired with some of the very worst game play possible.

All the Bad Parts is a God damn fucking brawler.

No, seriously! The game I described above is a really horrible Final Fight or Double Dragon style beat ’em up. Between each moment of storyline progression, you traverse the halls of whatever facility you’re in and beat up whatever various demon thingies you cross paths with. You punch with B and kick with Y. You learn one or two combos along the way. Near the beginning of the game, you learn the B-B-Y combo. Two punches and then an uppercut that floors your opponents. Once you learn it, congratulations, you’re going to beat the game. Now you just have to wait about 200 minutes to get there.

The action is very stiff and clunky, while the hit detection could generously be described as “professional wrestling caliber.” There were multiple moments where I had baddies on both sides of me. I would be facing one, with the other not really very close to my back, and still damage the rear one. Sympathy pains, perhaps. You know those demons, they’re famous for their sensitivity.

The game play is everything the story is not. Your dude and the baddies are slow to react to everything. And the baddies are total damage sponges who take forever to kill. Every enemy encounter also results in invisible walls being put up. This works to your advantage. Once you pin an enemy up against the wall,  you can pretty much just juggle them until they finally die just by using that B-B-Y combo repeatedly like you’re Best Buy’s stock broker. Trust me, that joke will go over well at the office.

The action never really gets better. No matter how varied the abilities of the enemies get, you ultimately only have to land that one combo to do the juggling bit. Later in the game, you’ll hold down the block button while you wait for an enemy to throw a punch. If you get punched while holding block, the baddie gets stun-locked and you can begin the same old routine.

The combat is just not any fun at all. In fact, it’s really boring. This is a problem inherit to any brawler, but if you have a wide variety of fighting styles or the ability to play with friends, it takes the sting out.  Look at Castle Crashers. Sadly that’s not an option here. The first fight of the game is, more or less, the same as the last fight. It’s repetitive and it completely negates all the good stuff the storyline has to offer.

Hell, there’s even a useless lock-on feature that I actually felt made the combat harder. I fared much better when I just waited for all the present enemies to let their guard down and then start dialing in that combo. The collision detection is so damn off base that it’s easy to just flail your arms randomly in the air and take out whatever baddies happen to be around using just the power of whatever air you’re circulating at them. Maybe that’s it. He’s killing them by giving them a cold. There’s also no feeling of having any “oomph” behind your attacks. I get that the guy is established as being a bit of a pussy, but we’re still in a brawler, and the guy hits like a total sissy. When you play a good brawler, like Streets of Rage, it feels like you actually are punching people. Here, you’re just lightly poking dudes. The developer failed to make one single bit of the action feel rewarding. It’s just the same old shit from start to finish, and it killed the game.

But what really, really, really pisses me off is the fact that All the Bad Parts contains branching paths and multiple different endings. In many cases, this can be a fine way to give a game extended shelf life and reasons to play through it a second time without feeling like a total loser. Personally, I never got the whole “alternate ending” bit in video games. In DVDs, it works. You watch the movie, see the ending, and then go to the special features and call up the alternative ones. It would fucking suck to have to watch the whole movie again just to see the other endings, but that’s what you have to do in video games. And they can require anywhere from a couple of hours to a few weeks of playtime to finish. Without the ability to fast-forward through all the garbage, it can really be a chore to get there.

That’s especially the case in All the Bad Parts. The game play here is so mind-numbingly tedious that I barely finished the first time around. There is absolutely no way on this Earth that I would ever want to play through it again. It’s just not worth the time or effort, no matter how good the storyline is. So I’m really not happy with the results here. Disappointment doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about the ending, especially not knowing exactly what I could have done to change it. The game seemed awfully straight-forward and linear to me. I suppose there’s a few demons in the hell stage that I could have resisted clubbing, but otherwise I’m at a loss.

The dude behind this game, Ben Cook, has talent. Maybe not as a game designer, but as a writer. If you can somehow pair his skill to tell a story with an above-average game concept, the results should be mind-blowing. So if anyone out there thinks they have a winning game formula but need someone with the ability to craft an amazing narrative, he’s your guy. Even if it means shackling him and only speaking to him when you need advice, Hannibal Lecter style, do it.

When I was eleven, my parents told me we were going to a theater to watch an epic drama full of murder, suspense, and twists. What did we go to? The fucking opera. I remembered that while playing All the Bad Parts. As enticing as the plot might be, it’s told in the most frustratingly dull way possible. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a video game being opera-like. And no, I didn’t just bring up that story so that I could make a really bad “fat lady sings” joke to end this review.

Well okay, I did. But I guess it’s too obvious now so I’ll just leave it at that.

Update: Well, it’s now June of 2012, and I just replayed All the Bad Parts as an attempt at doing a Second Chance with the Chick. The game since been patched. Although the fighting is slightly less tedious, my opinion on All the Bad Parts has not changed at all. As spooky and unnerving as the story was, gameplay is all that matters to me, and All the Bad Parts does not deliver.

All the Bad Parts was developed by Ben Cook

80 Microsoft Points said Mr. Cook should novelize the plot and call it “All the Bad Parts: All the Good Parts” in the making of this review.

Blockt

Logic-puzzlers are one of those genres that, while not quite on the fringe of gaming, never really have titles that transcend personal preferences to become a bona fide hit.  They just sort of exist, not to excite or inspire but for the sake of existing.  If one is able to capture our attention, we appreciate it for what it is, but we don’t spread the word that we’ve played something remarkable.  Quite frankly, we haven’t.  And if the whole genre suddenly disappeared, I doubt too many people would even take notice.

So basically logic-puzzlers are to video games what Kevin Smith is to movies.

Blockt will seem familiar to some, especially PS3 owners.  It’s a different take of the “maneuver a cube to a goal” style of puzzlers that was recently seen in the Playstation Network title Cuboid.  The hook here is that when your starting block touches various other blocks scattered along the course, they stick together.  Also, unlike Cuboid, parts of your block can hang over the edge of the level.  In fact, sometimes that’s necessary towards solving it.  In later levels, optional yellow cubes are introduced that may or may not be part of the solution.  Even later, purple cubes are introduced that only stick to other purple cubes.  To clear each level, you must stick all necessary cubes together and then maneuver yourself onto the exit without any other blocks touching the floor.

After I finished the game, Brian asked me if I thought it was better than Cuboid.  The truth is, it’s neither better or worse.  It’s the same type of game, but done differently.  Logic-puzzlers are what they are.  As long as the ascetics don’t get in the way and the control scheme works,  there’s nothing left to say about them.  If you like this genre, you’ll like this game.  If you don’t, you won’t.  It’s that simple.

In the case of Blockt, the graphics are clean, the objective is clear, and the control scheme didn’t give me any problems.  I should note that the controls apparently have been problematic for others, but I didn’t experience any of that myself.  I did often adjust the camera from isometric to straight-forward, but that wasn’t because I had problems.  Sometimes it just offered a better way to plot out how I would go about solving a puzzle.

I will give Blockt some credit because it is a WAY better value than Cuboid.  It costs $3 on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Cuboid costs $10 on PSN, or $8 with a Playstation Plus membership.  Blockt also has more levels, 75 to be exact, compared to about 60 for the Cuboid.  So in terms of economics, Blockt is the clear winner.  Cuboid also has some stuff related to timing puzzles, whereas Blockt relies on just plain old brain power.

So I liked Blockt, because it gave me exactly what I expected of it: a few hours worth of brain teasers and nothing more.  For you enthusiasts of the genre, yes, it works.  Now feel free to purchase it.  Everyone else likely logged off IndieGamerChick when the first words of this review were “logic-puzzlers.”  Which is fine with me.  It frees me to say pretty much anything I want here.  I can say “Whipsy Flipsy Boo Ahh!” and nobody will be reading to think I’ve finally gone mental.   I can say I have a tiny crush on Katie Couric and Twitter won’t light up with discussions of whether or not I’m bisexual.  You know, it’s not bad writing stuff that I know nobody will read.  Now I know how Whatshisface feels.

Blockt was developed by Moltensoft

240 Microsoft Points didn’t say anyone in particular so if you think I’m talking about you it says more about you than me in the making of this review.  You know, my Microsoft Points say the weirdest shit. 

Rocks. In. Spaaace!

There’s not a whole lot to say about Rocks. In. Spaaace!  It’s a horizontal space-shooter, just without any shooting.  You steer a spaceship around flying meteors, asteroids, bigger asteroids, and comets.  Along the way you can boost with the right trigger and break with the left one.  You have a limited amount of booster fuel, but there’s so many pick-ups that it’s almost impossible to run out of.  There’s four levels of play and you can unlock extra ships that steer better or are faster.  That’s pretty much it.

I do have to say that of all the challenges I’ve received from developers, this was the easiest to do.  The whole thing took me about twenty minutes to play through.  So was it any good?  Not really.  Quite frankly it was really boring.  All you do is move up and down and dodge rocks.  Yippie.  Meanwhile, the graphics are really dark, so seeing the asteroids is a challenge on its own.  The developer helpfully has offered the option to turn up the brightness level, but it still doesn’t really help all that much.  On the stage with the large asteroids the entire backsides of them are obscured in darkness and you can’t always see if you’re flying into empty space or the ass end of 2060 Chiron.  The game also violates a personal pet-peeve of mine by offering local-only high scores.  Overall, Rocks. In. Spaaace! is pretty dull, but I can still say with total honesty that it’s more entertaining than Deep Impact.

Rocks. in. Spaaace! was developed by RZ Games

80 Microsoft Points were a little too young to appreciate the Muppet Show reference in the making of this review.

Chain Crusher

Chain Crusher received a Second Chance with the Chick.  Click here to read it.

Chain Crusher is the second game I’ve played as the Indie Gamer Chick that cost the almost-certain-to-be-fatal-towards-sales 400 Microsoft Points.  The first was Antipole, a game that I’m obviously fond of, as evidenced by its placement on my top 10 list.  But where Antipole was a deep and rewarding action game, Chain Crusher is a very retro-flavored arcade space shooter.  The price point was startling to me, but maybe the game play justified it.  And maybe I’m next in line to be a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills.

Chain Crusher is all about the high score.  There’s no levels in the traditional sense.  Instead, enemies come at you in small waves.  Every twenty waves, you have to fight a boss that looks more like a bubble-level that you use in construction.  The gimmick here is that when you shoot an enemy, it explodes with a small blast radius that also blows up any other enemies that pass by it.  Using this, you try to build up combos and achieve a high score.

A really interesting design choice was the decision to make the waves come out randomly.  Unlike some shooters, the enemies don’t come out in recognizable patterns.  I don’t necessarily believe this is a good thing, because it often renders a really great combo as being done completely by chance, with skill not factoring in at all.  While I did have fun trying to beat my previous high combo, no strategy I took seemed to be as effective as blind luck.  On one hand, this would level the play field.  On the other hand, since there’s no online leader boards there is no play field to begin with.

Randomness aside, the game design is fairly sound.  Enemies really aren’t there to provide you with a challenge.  I played about a dozen rounds of Chain Crusher and never once died because of an active enemy.  Instead, the ship’s recoil proved to be my chief adversary.  Whenever you fire the gun, your ship backs up slightly.  If you touch the back of the screen, you die.  Any enemy ships you miss also get glued to the back wall, and if you touch them, you also die.  Sometimes you can use the bosses to help clear the debris off the back wall, but for the most part it’s best to try to take out as many enemies as you can.

I actually have to break my personal rule for Indie Gamer Chick that states the only criteria in recommending a game is whether or not I had fun.  I did have fun playing Chain Crusher.  But at $5 I can’t say it’s worth the cost.  There’s only one game play mode and it doesn’t provide a lot of meat on it’s bones.  The game play can be engaging, but the randomness of it negates any skill you acquire through it.  Saying you’re skilled at Chain Crusher is as silly as saying you’re a skilled Bingo player.

Most damning of all is this is a game that centers around high scores but offers no online leader boards at all.  This is absolutely inexcusable, especially when they’re charging you $5.  I don’t even think I could have been easier on this at 240MSP.  Chain Crusher feels like a mini-game, and at just over 15MBs it has the weight of one as well.  Why oh why did they give this the price tag they did?  At 80MSP, this would have gotten a very hearty recommendation from me and maybe even been a contender for the Top-10.  Instead, I have to regretfully encourage players to spend their points elsewhere.  You can do so much more with 400 Microsoft Points, including getting full-fledged Arcade titles with all the bells and whistles.  I know my reviews are usually a lot more carefree and jokey, but I just couldn’t get in the mood when talking about Chain Crusher.  I did have fun with it, but not 400MSP fun.  It’s a crying shame that because of this horrible pricing choice it will be left collecting virtual dust.

Chain Crusher was developed by Mindware

400 Microsoft Points are likely the only 400 Microsoft Points ever used to purchase this game in the making of this review.

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Redd: The Lost Temple

I have a confession to make: in the fan vote for 2011 Indie Games Summer Uprising, I voted for Redd: The Lost Temple.  I mean, it looked fun.  Really, it did.  From the moment I started Indie Gamer Chick, it seemed like the game I would enjoy the most.  It’s style was reminiscent of the dungeons in Zelda games, plus it had a little dude in an Indiana Jones hat, and who doesn’t love Indy?

“My bad” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

One of my personal rules at Indie Gamer Chick is to at least make a good faith effort to finish a game.  In the case of Redd, it was so god damn boring, tedious, repetitive, poorly designed, frustrating, and slow that I gave up.  Mind you, I gave up after five hours, most of which was spent walking around in circles.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Redd is a top-down adventure game where you play as some explorer dude named Redd.  There’s a story here but the bad design got in the way right off the bat, as the text in the opening narration was too small to read even on a 60 inch television screen from a distance of about five-and-a-half-feet away.  I don’t even put up with games that make me lean forward when that’s entire point of the thing and there’s a peripheral included that monitors your leaningness.   Why the hell should I be forced to lean closer to my screen?  Even better is that Redd includes honest-to-God voice acting in every section BUT this part.  So before the game even begins, I’m in a bad mood because of it.  How peachy.

This was the only boss I actually made it to. And it's a UFO thingie. The fuck?

Once the action begins, things don’t work out much better.  Your primary weapon is dynamite, so to proceed through the game you have to blow up various debris, enemies, and jars with it.  It’s kind of like Bomberman, only suckier.  At the start, you can only store four bombs at a time.  They refill automatically but it’s a slow process that allows you time to take a shower, brush your teeth, or maybe even sneak in a nap.  This is a pretty bizarre design choice, since your ability to explore is limited by your ability to use bombs.  As a result, the action grinds to a complete halt.

Early in the game, a shop opens up that allows you to either carry more bombs or gain the ability to refill your current stock faster.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t really afford anything in it.  Then I found out a fun trick: collect all the coins in the immediate rooms, and then kill myself.  I had about ten lives, and you get free ones all the time.  This proved effective and I settled on the quicker bomb refill.  If I really wanted, I could have grinded it out and bought more stuff, but I was running out of patience and I moved on.  I figured I would later find my way back to it anyway.  Much like every other expectation I had regarding Redd, I was wrong again here.

Exploration in this game just plain fucking sucks.  In most rooms you have a very limited visibility of only a few inches surrounding your character.  This makes falling into pits a common hazard.  Every few feet you run into a new pit.  And if that’s not enough, the ground often crumbles under your feet and you fall to your death.  You know, I’ve never actually played E.T. for the Atari 2600, but I can now sympathize with everyone who did.  Pits here, pits there, pits everywhere.  Almost none of them visible.  Hell, sometimes you encounter rooms full of oil slicks that are practically indistinguishable from pits.  Sometimes the oil slicks send you into pits.  So traumatizing was dealing with the pits in this game that I no longer have a crush on Brad Pitt, or will ever use Pit in Super Smash Bros. Brawl again.  Damn you, Redd!

It doesn’t help that the graphics are so saturated with the color red that it makes the entire experience feel more like playing a long-lost Virtual Boy game.  As a result, every room looks the same.  The map provided isn’t very useful, and thus I ended up running around in circles like I was training for the Olympics.  There’s nothing that points you in the right direction to go.  Sometimes I suspect I was in a section of the game I wasn’t meant to be in.  This one time, I walked past some poison gas.. oh  yea, there’s poison gas, I’ll get to that in a bit.. and into a room.  Because I used a fairy to survive the gas, returning to the previous room was not an option.  I walked into the room on the left and found that it was inaccessible due to the presence of more gas.  Fair enough.  I walked to the room to the right, which was full of oil slicks and pits.  Noticing a barrier that requires a button press, I hit the button and the room immediately filled up with invisible gas, leading to my fairly instantaneous death.  I then respawned in the same room and immediately died again from the gas.  And then again.  By the third spawn I was smart enough to hold down left and exit the room before dying.  On the plus side, I did find a more efficiant gas for use at San Quentin’s death row.  In your face, hydrogen cyanide!

Anyway, as you might have figured out, I was pretty much stuck.  The only options were to detonate some jars and hope like hell one of them would spawn a fairy.  Whenever all available jars were used up, I had to commit suicide.  My stockpile of lives quickly dwindled and I game-overed.  At this point, I respawned at the previous save point I used, which happened to be the room where this mess started in the first place.  Thankfully, I knew not to attempt to use a fairy to go up past the gas and into the trap.  But suddenly I realized that I had respawned, pretty much consequence free, and could continue on this mind-numbingly horrible journey.  It begs the question of why there’s even a life system in the first place?  I guess to prevent moments like the one above, but still, a more stream-lined quest would have been a better choice.

Ah yes, and the poison gas.  Well, it’s everywhere.  It kills you in about a nano-second if you’re exposed to it.  There’s an “air meter” that drains when you touch it, but it drains really fast.  That’s fine, I can get it.  Don’t breath the green air.  Don’t feed your dog chocolate.  Don’t cross the streams.  These are all easy instructions and I’m very much capable of following them.  Except in Redd, where you can’t always tell if your dude is on the same level as the gas.  You’ll try to walk through a door where it looks like maybe, kind of, sort of, the gas is beneath you and you’ll have safe passage.  And it works.  Then, later on, you’ll encounter a similar situation, only this time you’re on the same plane as the gas and you begin to die as soon as you start to move towards the door.  As for my example above, there’s more than one spot where I was able to trap myself in an inescapable situation because of that damn gas.  Yes, perhaps the presence of the gas was meant to alert me that I wasn’t supposed to venture that far yet.  Still, I was able to get past it using a fairy, and if I can be that dumb to get myself stuck, others can be too.  How much fun do you think those people are having?  About as much as I had, I reckon.  Which would be ZERO fun.  I’ve been to funerals that are more entertaining.

No, I didn’t finish Redd.  I put five hours into it and I could not bare another second more.  After two-and-a-half hours, I quit on the default difficulty setting, which happens to be “hard.”  Playing the game on normal, I honestly didn’t notice that much of a difference.  I guess that’s why it’s called a difficulty setting and not a level-of-fun setting.  Having put in the same amount of time on normal, I still couldn’t navigate this God awful game.  Between the samey rooms, red-bleached graphics, slow play mechanics, and absolutely unfair level design, I just gave up.  Brian actually asked me to quit earlier, for my own sanity.  I refused, citing “integrity” among other things.  However, Redd was so bad that I could safely say “fuck integrity” and not feel too bad about.  I guess this technically makes Redd the worst game in the Uprising.  No matter how bad Raventhorne was, at least I finished it.

In five hours of play time, I could honestly not think of one single nice thing to say about any aspect of it’s design.  Redd is like someone took various aspects of games considered “good” and Frankensteined them together in a way that would be considered a crime against nature.  Here is a game that got it’s start as a Minesweeper clone and somewhere along the way became an exploration-based dungeon crawler and somehow managed to be even more coma-inducing than if they had stuck with the Minesweeper crap.  I feel they should get some kind of medal for that.  As a conclusion to the 2011 Indie Games Summer Uprising, I guess it’s a fitting choice.  Redd: The Lost Temple is a game that sure as hell looked good, but looks are as far as you get.  I feel the guys behind this event took a window-shopping approach when choosing which games would be promoted, and I fell into the same trap when I voted for this.  Yes, I did vote for it despite being completely uneducated on how bad it potentially was.  What can I say, I’m the typical American voter.

Redd: The Lost Temple was developed by Blazing Forge Games

240 Microsoft Points said “Well, if you move past the endless pits, horrible graphics, slow game play, and overall shoddiness, it’s not a bad game” in the making of this review. 

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