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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chester received a Second Chance with the Chick. The game has changed a lot. Read the updated review.
Update: Chester is now only 80 Microsoft Points.
I’m coming to the end of the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising. Thank God. To recap, of the eight games chosen by developers, 2 were pretty good (Cute Things Dying Violently and Take Arms) one was just okay (Doom & Destiny) and one was pretty ho-hum but had potential as a multiplayer game (SpeedRunner HD). The other four were so bad they almost defy classification. I hear that my reviews are not going over so well with some developers on the App Hub. I don’t really know how to respond to this, so instead here’s some music for you.
Do you want to know what it takes to please me? Don’t make a shitty game. Need an example of that? There are ten games on the right that make up my leader board, the ten best Xbox Live Indie Games I’ve played since starting IndieGamerChick. Do you want a more specific example? How about Chester, the title currently slated to take over that leaderboard on October 1st as the new #1 game on it. Yea, sorry for the spoiler there. I suppose Rocks in Spaaace! could derail its chances so make sure to check back at the end of the month.
Chester is a 2-D platformer that tries so damn hard to not be generic that you have to tip your hat to it. This is mostly due to the inspired graphics style. Or should I say styles. There’s many different ones, ranging from the default hand-drawn look that makes Chester feel like it’s a Nicktoons game to sketchbooks to Gameboys, etc, etc. It’s as if the developer couldn’t decide on which specific direction to take the game, so instead of choosing one he just said “fuck it” and included all of them. Every stage has a default theme, with extra themes being hidden throughout the quest. At any time you can use the bumpers to switch between themes. As of this writing, the themes don’t have any direct effect on game play, but future updates will include hidden areas that are exclusive to one particular graphics style.
The game play is a tad more traditional. Playing as Chester, you run, jump, double jump, and wall jump your way through three worlds, each with a different amount of levels totaling about twenty all together. The level designs tend to be straight forward, with paths branching only when you’re near a hidden object that unlocks an extra graphic skins or pieces to a rocketship. I haven’t quite gotten all of them, but I plan on going back through the game once the next patch hits that will provide a fourth world and a boss battle. Meanwhile, you collect stamps throughout the adventure which unlocks ten other characters for you to use, each with unique abilities. That said, the first dude you unlock is all you really need, and I was easily able to complete the game just using him. The other nine guys (hell, ten if you count the original dude) I never bothered using, which relegates them to “Princess in Super Mario Bros. 2” status as being there just for show.
Things are not always perfect. The jumping is a bit stiff. The auto-wall-jump that was just patched in, has a bit of a learning curve to it. I’m not sure why they added it, but it’s hardly a deal breaker. From a design perspective, sometimes the graphics put style ahead of playability, making it difficult to tell what’s a hop-onable ledge and what’s in the background. This is also true of the bodies of water that you can swim in and bubbles that you need to hop across. Switching to different skins did help, but it’s still not always clear. Finally, sometimes the level design is really fucked up, especially a level where the end goal is right next to the starting area. I asked the designer about this and he said that his girlfriend designed the level. Well this set back the women’s lib movement by about fifty years, so thanks a lot.
In a way, I feel like I shouldn’t have liked Chester as much as I did. To be absolutely content while playing it almost defies explanation. It’s neither innovative nor original. And yet, it’s undeniably charming and loaded with spectacular design choices. I hate to go back to the graphics, because I’ve never been about how a game looks, but my hand is sort of being forced here.
I remember hearing more than one mentally malnourished nitwit tell me that Raventhorne was worth it’s price on its graphics alone. Which is silly, because no matter how good Raventhorne looked, it only looked good for an Xbox Live Indie Game. Compared to 99.9% of all the games released over the seventh generation of consoles, Raventhorne looks like total shit. The animation leaves a lot of be desired, backgrounds constantly repeat, enemy designs are laughably bad, and it just really stinks of a cheaply designed game. Again, it looks good for an Indie game. But that’s not exactly worth the brownie points to the general public that XNA insiders seem to think.
By comparison, Chester‘s stylized graphics look good, period. Whereas Raventhorne, if placed alongside Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade releases, would look low-rent and out-of-place, Chester would actually blend in really well. In fact, there were many times where I turned to Brian and said “this should be an Xbox Live Arcade release.” It would fit in perfectly alongside art-house titles like Limbo, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, or Braid. Even with decidedly old-school game play, it has a modern style with mass-market appeal. I can’t think of a higher praise for it.
The first release of Chester was apparently riddled with bugs. I guess I somehow missed most of them, but they’ve been patched out so that’s no longer an issue. I do have to say that if I was running events like the Uprising, I would try to make sure games were more complete and less glitchy. Some in the community feel that pushing games regardless of merit or polish is all that should matter. I can’t see things from their point of view, at least without some kind of paint thinner and lots of huffing. Pushing glitchy games seems to me like a good way to sour people on Xbox Live Indie Games. That’s just sanity and reason talking there though, so pay no heed.
Chester is not the most original game I’ve played since starting Indie Game Chick. It’s not even the best looking game. It’s certainly not the most complete game. But it is the best game I’ve played yet. I spent two play-throughs and four hours with it, and I enjoyed every single minute of it. With new levels to be added over the coming months, I’m certain to continue going back to it. It’s funny to me that I got multiple warnings from developers and play testers who told me that Chester either “sucked” or “was a total loss.” Some later told me that they figured “well, you hate everything else, so I figured you would really hate Chester.” Of course, I don’t hate everything. All that I care about is how much fun I have with a game. No Indie game has entertained me more. That is why I approve so much of it, why I give it my highest recommendation, and why it’s slated to take over the #1 spot on the Indie Gamer Chick Top-10. It almost made slogging through some of the really bad Uprising games worth it. Well, almost. Okay, it did. Ugh, I feel so dirty now. Oh well, thank God it’s over and.. wait, what? One more? Well son of bitch.
I haven’t had a ton of experience with online Xbox Live Indie Games. In fact, the only game I was able to find anyone to play against was Creed Arena, and that wasn’t exactly the most inspiring play session. So I admit I was a bit on the worried side when Take Arms reared its head. It’s also part of the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising, which so far hasn’t exactly been brimming with quality, sort of like Netflix lately.
Take Arms is a 2-D online shooter, sort of like what Counter-Strike would have been like if the SNES had online play back in 1994. And yes, I’ve heard of XBAND, which, from what I hear, really didn’t work all that well. Anyway, 16-Bit Counter-Strike. Where was I?
It’s not unusual for me to skip multiplayer when reviewing a game. In this case, I skipped the single player. Along with my boyfriend’s roommate Bryce, we played on Xbox Live. We jumped in and I immediately got a feel for the control scheme. Well, most of it. It works pretty much like any third or first person shooter, only from a 2D perspective. The ability to jump down off of platforms was discovered by Bryce, which was a bit embarrassing for me, but we had a good time learning the ropes.
After about five minutes, it became clear that one-on-one was not going to cut the mustard. After putting out a call on Twitter, I was able to corral the full lineup of eight players, although for the most part we had to deal with seven. We moved into team matches, and one of the first major flaws in the game came to light: the inability to choose teams. Among the players was Nathan Graves of Gear Fish and Dcon from Dcon’s Xbox Indie Reviews. I wanted to team with them and call ourselves “The Only Xbox Live Indie Game Reviewers Who Don’t Give Ten-Thumbs Up To Every Single Game We Play Like That Episode Of The Simpsons Where Homer Becomes A Food Critic.” Sadly, because choosing sides is not allowed, team TOXLIGRWDGTTUTESGWPLTEOTSWHBAFC was not to be.
Either way, we started with a random team-death match and things were immediately fast paced and very fun. Upon spawning, you choose which of three character classes you want to be. You can be the Striker, who moves swiftly and has a sniper rifle. There’s the Destroyer, who moves slower but seems to have more armor, or the Grunt if you’re an indecisive douchenozzle. Since it became apparent that accuracy in shooting was not going to be my specialty in Take Arms, I chose the Destroyer and focused on scoring beatdowns. This strategy proved effective, and I admit that I had a blast running around, never firing my gun but beating people down with the butt of it, like a very confused pacifist.
Unfortunately, barely a minute of action went by where someone wasn’t screwed over by a glitch. Most of this had to do with networking issues. Bullets would pass right through people. Grenades would explode right under people’s feet and do nothing. Beatdowns sometimes proved impossible to score, leading to two people swinging at each other for nearly minute like they’re trying to recreate some kind of Waltz.
From a design perspective, there’s a few things that are off. I think the inclusion of sandbags and various other chest-high objects are wasteful. I played in multiple matches and nobody besides the snipers made use of these. This game lends itself more to running and gunning, not ducking and patience. And also, I was called a cunt on more than one occasion for my use of spawn killing in team matches. Sorry losers, but it’s just how I’m wired. I’m like an animal that’s preprogrammed with a nesting instinct and the desire to eat my own young, only I have a bad sense of where home is.
Ultimately, the only thing that matters on recommending a game at IndieGamerChick.com is whether or not I had fun playing it. And you know what? I did have fun. I had a lot of fun. Everyone I played with did. Hell, I had so much fun that this review got delayed twice because I needed to, ahem, “playtest it some more.” Yea, that’s the ticket. And even with all the glitches, it’s one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had playing an Xbox Live Indie Game. When eight players are running for flags or dropping from higher platforms onto a passerby like they’re Batman, Take Arms is brilliant, and pie-in-the-eye of all those lazy bastards who say online multiplayer doesn’t make a difference in how enjoyable a game is. Oh I would say it makes a big difference.
Developer Discord Games has laid the groundwork for something with the potential to be extraordinary. It’s not quite there yet, but Discord is continuing to patch things and I’ll be keeping a close eye on the progress. I don’t think one Second Chance with the Chick will be enough, because Take Arms has more issues than National Geographic. Oh darn, you mean I have to play more Take Arms? Gee, that’s um, a crying shame or something. *tee-hee*
240 Microsoft Points say “better being a talentless cunt than a lame ass newb who keeps getting beat down and tea-bagged by a talentless cunt” in the making of this review.
A review copy of Take Arms was provided by Discord 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 feedback in this article. For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.
I really suck at music games. Yea, I likely should have mentioned that before slamming Sequencein a review last month, but I just have no rhythm. Like everything else that’s wrong with my life, I attribute this to my Cuban genetics. My DNA is coded for three things: tobacco use, the ability to make boats out of some of the flimsiest shit available, and my ass inevitably doubling in size somewhere around age 35 if my mother is any indication. Nowhere in there is the ability to keep a beat. I’ve brought up my theory that Cubans are inferior at music to people before and it’s usually followed by me saying “No, he’s Mexican. No, she’s Puerto Rican. No, that dude isn’t even Hispanic..”
So I’m likely not the best person to review Shield the Beat, a music game where you control the shield of a spaceship that absorbs enemy fire to the beat of generic songs. Using the left analog stick, you rotate the shield around the ship trying to hit as many bullets as possible. For a greater challenge, you can play a mode where two different colored bullets are shot. In this one, you use the left stick to suck up white bullets and the right stick to suck up red ones. You also have to absorb missiles, occasionally by using the trigger buttons which offer a full-ship shield for about a nano-second. There’s also a multiplayer mode which I didn’t get to, but I doubt it would have made that much a difference. Besides, I really don’t want anyone else to see how bad I am at these things. Likely some post-traumatic stress thing from when I slipped off the platform of a Dance Dance Revolution coin-op back when I was fifteen and suffered a hair-line fracture of my ankle. That’s true, sadly. Now you can see why I go under a pseudonym here. Between that story and my admission that I can’t throw a Dragon Punch in Street Fighter II, I’m swiftly losing my gamer cred.
Honestly, I thought Shield the Beat was okay. It has a few things that could be tweaked, like maybe moving the action closer to the camera. Even on a sixty-inch television screen it can be a bit difficult to see whether or not you’re really about to catch a bullet with the shield, or what angle the bullet is coming from. This is especially problematic when the enemy ships start firing spirals at you while the background makes a sudden shift out of nowhere. I also hate to say it, but the game should have been 80MSP. It feels more like a mini-game and it’s 240MSP price tag kind of stings a little.
The music is hit and miss, but that’s par for the course from anything in this genre. Hell, even when playing stuff from really good bands like Beatles Rock Band or Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, I’m often left saying “Jesus, these guys really put out a lot of mediocre shit over the years.” Shield the Beat has no recognizable songs of course, but that’s fine. What’s here is generic but never really offensive or awful. It sounds like the kind of stuff you hear when you’re put on hold by Microsoft while trying to find out what you do with your freshly bricked Xbox. Overall, the guys at Detour Games might be on to something here, and with the right adjustments this could actually be one of the better engines for a rhythm game to come along in a while.
Of course, that doesn’t mean as much now as it did a couple of years ago. The music game fad seems to be on its last legs. Walk down the aisle of any Toys ‘R Us and you’ll see cobwebs and tumble weeds next to complete sets of Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour with 90%-off clearance stickers on them that STILL won’t sell. Which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that people realized these things are just glorified games of Simon with the notes rarely having anything to do with the actual music playing. Or the fact that the instruments are so brittle that they break if you sneeze on them. Or the fact that most of the songs on the discs these days are crap and they nickle-and-dime you for the good stuff via DLC. Seriously, raise your hand if you’re absolutely loving the entire collapse of this genre.
240 Microsoft Points are actually likely of Colombian descent, but they’re even less musically inclined so that doesn’t really help all that much in the making of this review.
Now that the Summer Indie Uprising games will be hitting the market, I’m sure this list will look VERY DIFFERENT next month.
A regular Nostradamus am I. You know, I totally see why some people would accuse me of being a troll, but Christ, look what I’ve had to work with this month. The 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising was about as successful as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 (which is to say, not at all) but if nothing else I hope my reviews of it provided my readers with some entertainment. Meanwhile, I learned an exciting lesson: never get excited about anything. You would think I would have learned my lesson after the Star Wars prequel trilogy, but no.
I also learned that many people (mostly crybaby developers) think the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace is populated entirely by four-year-old girls selling lemonade for two-bits a Dixie Cup. Goodness me, I had no clue! I was under the impression that these were commercial products by a group of gaming enthusiasts who hoped to get a taste of what it’s like to produce a video game, along with all the pitfalls and perils that come with it. I guess I was mistaken.
Well I promise I’ll straighten up and play along like the mother hens who have been telling you every game that is even the slightest bit visually stimulating is an instant classic and worthy of money out of the pocket of some poor schmuck on minimum wage with a limited budget for games. Ten thumbs up and gold stars for everyone!
Ha, as if. You guys want to make products that cost real people real cash? Well man up, because your work deserves a critical look. As a consumer I don’t give a flying fuck whether you have experience or talent or whatever else you seem to lack (at this point, “thick skin” seems to come to mind). If you put a shit product on the market, I will call you out on it. And I also don’t care if that hurts your feelings. You are not children selling lemonade on the corner, so stop acting like it.
Now then, I do have the Top 10 list to get to. We had a few changes, but actually things at the top of the leaderboard have pretty much stayed the same. Let’s take a look.
The first (and so far only game, although Grand Theft Froot is in line) to receive a Second Chance with the Chick, I fell in love with the Cannon’s wacky humor and surprisingly deep action.
So apparently I was in error when I said this was a clone of Space Invaders Extreme. Instead, it’s a sequel to a clone of Space Invaders. Whatever. This game still kicks mucho ass. Sadly, epilepsy will prevent me from playing Xona’s Score Rush, which I hear is quite good as well.
Andromium gets off to a slow start, but once things ramp up you’ll find one of the most unusual and clever space shooters to come around in a long time.
The winner of the 2011 Dream-Build-Play contest is certainly a worthy champion. Awesome puzzle design and some truly quirky characters make this an absolute must buy for any fans of the genre.
Despite some issues with slowdown (that some players claim don’t exist, while others have told me they experienced the same thing) I really dug the hell out of Antipole. I played the Nintendo DSi version as well, and it’s also a winner.
I actually think TIC: Part 1 should have won Dream-Build-Play, but hopefully out-ranking the winner on my list is a small (and significantly less lucrative) consolation prize. Probably not.
I expect no Xbox Live Indie Game will ever be perfect, but LaserCat is as close as one has come yet. I think the trivia questions were part of some kind of minimum-badness requirement for the platform.
So that’s it for another month. Thank you to all my readers for making this month just as fun for me as it was last month. Month month month month month. I love that word. Thanks to all you crybabies out there for strengthening my resolve. Thanks to Brian for returning home to me. And thanks to all you developers who have thanked me for being as straight forward as I am. It’s good too see that most developers aren’t thin-skinned pussies. It makes the whiners that much more hilarious.
Happy was developed by SOLLOMAN Games
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