Indie Gamer Chick

Star Ninja

It’s easy to explain the appeal in Angry Birds, the first true gaming hit for phones and tablets. It’s got colorful graphics and an “anyone can learn it” playability factor. 250,000,000 downloads later and everyone and their creepy uncle is looking to ape its style and have a hit on their own. Most of these knockoffs completely miss the point and play about as good as three-day left-over, unrefrigerated pizza tastes. Which is to say, not very good.

Eric Cosky and his Bounding Box Games studio did what anyone with a lick of sense would do: piggybacked on a the physics-puzzle-aiming genre that Angry Birds popularized. There’s only one difference between them and everyone else: they made a better game.

In Star Ninja you’re a stationary ninja who must throw shurikens at pirates. You have a limited number of shots to knock out all the pirates on the stage. Any star you throw will bounce off the walls at high speeds until it runs out of steam, hits an explosive barrel, or gets stuck in a box. Personally, I wasn’t aware that ninja stars were made of high-density rubber. Video games: fun AND educational.

There are fifty single-screen levels that can be played in four different game modes. I played through “focus mode” which is just your basic “kill all the pirates in X amount of shots” stuff. In each level you have to carefully study the layout and figure out the best angles to throw your stars at. Sometimes it’s easier to simply throw a star directly at a pirate, while other times you’ll want to drop a box or an anchor on their head. I had lots of chuckles when a pirate would stand by all smug only to have a tiny box lightly graze their head, killing them. I can also appreciate any game where I can say the sentence “I’m juggling a pirate corpse” to my boyfriend in a totally deadpan manner and mean it. Even if he did look at me like it was time to call the nice guys with the white coats and nets.

One of the things that I felt ultimately ruined the experience of Angry Birds is the constant addition of new birds, some of whom were as worthless as an editor’s choice award from Gamespot is. There’s none of that crap in Star Ninja. What you see is what you get for all fifty levels. And that’s perfectly fine with me. It took me around two hours to finish the fifty levels, and at no point was I in danger of falling asleep and drowning in my bowl of Fruit Loops that lay in front of me. In fact, I had quite a good time. By time I was done with Focus Mode I really felt no need to play through the game in its three alternative modes, which include being able to use unlimited stars or a campaign mode where points carry over. These might have been a little overkill, but if you’re the type to truly get madly addicted to a game they’ll come in handy. There’s also global leader boards, six of which are occupied by a totally insanely cool niche game critic.

Oh yea, these will TOTALLY last forever.

I do have a couple of complaints. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which boxes are ones stars will bounce off of and which ones the stars will stick in. That can get mildly annoying, like having a fly buzz-bomb you while you try to type a review. But it’s easy enough to just start the room over again so it might not have been worth mentioning at all. Sorry. And also the game can be seemingly fickle about how much force a box requires to kill a pirate. On an unrelated note, you would think guys that survive the brutal discipline and scurvy associated with being a pirate wouldn’t be phased by having a box fall on their toe. Well, I guess it might be ingrown or something. That would hurt a lot. Carry on.

Everyone wants to make the next Angry Birds. Star Ninja is a better Angry Birds. It’s got its own charm, personality, style, and it never gets boring. It’s one of the better games on the indie marketplace and it well worth your 80 Microsoft Points.bIt also finally, once and for all, answered the age-old question of pirates or ninjas. The answer is clearly ninjas. Now let’s move on to the more pressing question: dinosaurs or Batman?

Star Ninja was developed by Bounding Box Games

80 Microsoft Points said dinosaurs because look what they did to the rich, well equipped guy in Jurassic Park in the making of this review.

UPDATE: Star Ninja is now FREE for Windows Phone 7. If you’re an especially cheap bastard and 80 MSP is too much for you, you have no excuse now. Well besides not owning a piece of shit Window Phone. Um, never mind, here’s the link. 

Lair of the Evildoer

I’ve always wondered about the evolution of becoming an evil criminal mastermind.  In order to be  profitable, you need to start early in life.  Get encouragement from your evil parents (it helps if they have evil names like Adolf or Ethel), go to an evil college (I’m thinking Dartmouth), get an evil degree (something like Marine Biology), set up shop in an evil city (anyplace in Florida will do), hire evil henchmen (usually found on Craigslist), come up with an evil scheme (phone hacking seems in these days), get an evil lair (and the prices on those are simply outrageous these days)…

Fuck, if it was me I would barely have enough motivation left after all that to be mischievous, let alone evil.

So I can sympathize with the villain from Lair of the Evildoer.  He goes through all the trouble of becoming evil, getting a lair, and coming up with a scheme and I foiled the whole thing in about three hours.  And to rub salt the wounds, I had a great time doing it.

Lair of the Evildoer is a top-down shooter where you play as some kind of mutant egg-man thingy out to exterminate all the zombies created in this evil office building, complete with evil wood paneling and blue shag carpet.  There’s twenty randomly-generated levels full of assorted baddies.  There’s a mind-blowing twenty-five weapons that can be picked up along the way, with each weapon type having variable stats similar to Diablo or Borderlands.

You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, a set up that works fairly well.  I did die several times while playing Evildoer, which my boyfriend felt might have had something to do with choosing the wrong experience upgrades.  Early on I poured all my level-up points into dexterity, which increases your aiming accuracy.  Once I had a 100% rating in that, I spent most of my points on health upgrading.  Then came the enemies who could only be killed using melee attacks.  With practically no points spent on that, fights with them resembled something out of a MMORPG , with each of us taking turns to thwap each-other until one of us wasn’t thwaping anymore.  But even when I started to accumulate points in melee strength the battles still dragged like a dog with worms and it constantly broke up the flow of the game.  This is one of my only design complaints.

The graphics are of the “looks like it was done on MS Paint” variety.  Clearly in the top-tier of such games, but they have that look none the less.  The sound effects are a bit lacking as well, but the music is cool and trippy.  The whole experience reminded me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which was a childhood favorite of mine.  Some people had the raw nerve to call Dead Rising the spiritual modern equivalent to ZAMN.  Such people are mentally ill.  Lair of the Evildoer is as close to Zombies Ate My Neighbors as any game in the last decade has come, and it’s nearly as good.  It’s incredibly imaginative, humorous, and well designed.  And, without wishing to spoil anything, the final boss fight will go down in the annals of gaming as one of the most epic this side of Ocarina of Time.  Make sure you have a bathroom break beforehand.

As for me, being a true top-of-the-heap evildoer is too much work.  I’ll just do my part by continuing to invest in Google.

Lair of the Evildoer was developed by Going Loud Studios

80 Microsoft Points didn’t really think Dartmouth is evil in the making of this review.  Now Yale on the other hand...

The Cannon

UPDATE: This title recieved a Second Chance with the Chick.  Read it for IndieGamerChick.com’s definitive review of The Cannon.

Any of you developers out there looking for definitive proof that the peer-review system of Xbox Live Indie Games doesn’t work, the proof you’ve wanted has finally arrived.  Just point to The Cannon, a game that I couldn’t review because it crashed almost immediately both times I attempted to play it.   And I truly mean crashed, as I couldn’t even use the guide button and had to hold the power button on my Xbox to reboot.  Both times I tried to play the campaign mode and it crashed on the first level, once when I died and once when I beat the first wave of baddies.  I guess the tutorial was nice though.  Not 80 Microsoft Points nice, but nice.  Sort of like a shot of lidocaine before the catheter is inserted.

The Cannon was developed by Elemental Focus

80 Microsoft Points reenacted the 1844 USS Princeton incident (Google it) in the making of this review.

UPDATE: I’m told a fix is in the works and they’ll get back to me.

Tourist Trap

Point-and-click adventure games were staple of PC gaming for over a decade.  Although many hardcore gamers mourned their passing, I couldn’t have possibly cared less.  I always found them to be as dull as a rusty butter knife.  Then again I was around ten-years-old when they died out.  By time I was old enough to appreciate them, I didn’t see the big deal.  The appeal of stuff like Myst, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, or even the beloved Grim Fandango were just completely lost on me.  Sure, the writing was occasionally well above the standard of most games, but getting there meant having to slog through the laziest style of game design this side of Tic-Tac-Toe.  You find objects, click them against other objects, and hope something happens.  How can anybody be shocked that this genre didn’t last?

Well now it’s 2011 and these games are having a mild resurgence.  Mostly this is in the form of hidden object games like Mystery Case Files.  Others rely on text-heavy, logic puzzle based design such as the  mildly enjoyable Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis.  Even if Watson creeped me the fuck out.  And I really, really enjoyed the Professor Layton series on the Nintendo DS.  But I still mostly don’t get these games.  They seem to cater to people who want to “play” a “game” with as minimal game as possible but find the Metal Gear Solid series too involved.

Now that I have my own gaming blog with a handful of loyal readers, I feel obligated to try genres I never particularly cared for.  Thus when I saw Tourist Trap hit the marketplace yesterday I knew I would have to plug my nose and dive in.  It’s a typical item fetching click-a-thon where you’re trapped in a wacky museum.  There you learn about how the moon was colonized and some guy fought a dragon and other loony bullshit.  The museum is haunted by the ghost of a Jackalope who drove the founder of the museum to suicide with insults.

The story is as squirrely as they get.  As for the gameplay, it’s exactly what you would expect.  Pick something up, rub it on something else, rinse and repeat.  Early on you have to take a quiz, so pay close attention to the crazy shit that’s said.  Some of you might require alcohol to make it through this part, and that’s okay.  Late in the game, you catch fire and can die unless you find the right thing to use on yourself to put out the flame.  After that, you light some torches and that’s it.  I tried to light the torches using myself but apparently the game frowns on that.  The whole experience took me about 45 minutes, which is likely the length of its development time as well.

The graphics would fit in with the Nintendo 64, with flat textures and, in my opinion, a poor choice in color schemes.   The shinning design choice here was using public domain songs from the 1930s.  The song choices do give the game a foreboding vibe to it.  But that’s all for naught, as there were no spooky scare moments.  I actually expected to see the Jackalope stalking me, but he never appears unless you make a correct choice with your items.  This was a lost opportunity.  Overall, I didn’t care very much for Tourist Trap but I wasn’t this game’s target audience in the first place.  Having said that, if you’re one of those weirdos who actually likes this type of game then I’m sure you’ll find this too short and shallow, like the deep end of Danny DeVito’s swimming pool.

Tourist Trap was developed by Domain of the Infinite

80 Microsoft Points rubbed themselves against a tube of toothpaste to create liquid nitrogen for a jetpack in the making of this review.

SPOILER WARNING Tourist Trap game solution: Since posting this last week, one of the most popular Google searches that is leading people here is an explanation how to beat this piece of shit.  First off, my condolences to the many Microsoft points lost to this game.

Since the specific question that is searched the most is how to put yourself out when you catch fire, I’ll let you in on that.  But first, you have to promise to read at least two other reviews here and fall madly in love with my wit, grace, humor, and most of all, humility.  Oh, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

Deal?  Good.

When you catch fire, quickly make your way to the display shelf by the cash register.  Once there, grab the syrup from it, open your inventory, and choose to use it on yourself.  That’s it, problem solved.  After this all that’s left is to light the six torches that surround the building.  If you’ve made it this far you should know which items is needed to do that.  By the way, if you actually needed help with this game I must say you are a certified retard.

Bird Assassin

I started Indie Gamer Chick with the enthusiastic encouragement of my kinda-sorta boyfriend, Brian. And Brian has really gotten into my new hobby. In fact, he’s acted as my unofficial chief gaming scout. While I concentrate on reviewing new games that just hit the market, Brian cruises Youtube looking for trailers of older stuff that I missed before I discovered Xbox Live Indie Games. I can always tell when he’s found something because he tells me “check this one out, it looks like something you would like.” And when he picks a game like Bird Assassin, I’m not sure what that says about me.

In Bird Assassin, you play as a redneck who’s wheelchair-bound father gets capped gangland-style by an evil ostrich. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence out. You decide to get revenge on the birds and grab your Pa’s hunting rifle. You make your way through nine stages, shooting anything that moves, which is convenient because everything that moves is a bird. Along the way there’s some light platforming and a few traps to jump over. It’s very minimalist and basic, but shockingly it’s a lot of fun too.

Along the nine missions, you’ll earn money that you can use for gun upgrades, bullet upgrades, and armor. Once I saw how quickly I was earning money on the fourth stage, I just replayed it until I have enough dough to purchase the mini-gun. At this point the game was effectively over. Using this, along with the laser sight for the gun, I turned into a one girl poultry holocaust.

It’s not a particularly challenging game. I played on normal difficulty and finished it in roughly a half-hour. But I really enjoyed playing it. It’s the perfect length to not get boring and the humor really is well done, if a bit cringe-worthy. The graphics are distinctive and memorable. The sound effects are good, with really over-the-top hillbilly accents providing some laughs. My only complaint is extremely minor: the default control scheme has your gun firing automatically. You can change this in the options, and make sure you do so. Oh, and you face the same boss three times. That was a kind of weak.

Bird Assassin isn’t a deep gaming experience, but sometimes you don’t need that. Sometimes you just need to unwind with a quick, immature blood-and-guts game. Sometimes you just need to have a couple quick laughs. Sometimes you just really need to piss off PETA.

Bird Assassin was developed by Social Loner Studios

80 Microsoft Points avoided making a Duck Hunt joke in the making of this review. 

Bird Assassin is also available for PC on Desura for $1.99.  This version is unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The XBLIG version is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Lootfest

3D Dot Game Heroes was a fucking awesome game.  A loving tribute to the classic 2D entries in the Legend of Zelda series with some new conventions like level upgrading and swords the size of the screen.

On the flip side, Lootfest is a clunky, broken, unfinished piece of shit vomited out by a group of gamers who have about as much shame as a pick-pocket at the Special Olympics.  The only positive thing I can say about it is the graphics do their job, IE, they look like they were lifted right out of the 3D Dot Game Heroes alpha build.  Everything else is unrealized and unfinished.

In Lootfest, you play as a swordsman who must slay three boss monsters.  The world’s map is randomly generated so on the off-off-off-off-off chance you actually find something of value here, you can play it as many times as you want and will have a different map to get bored with every time.  There’s a small handful of enemies types that you can kill with your sword.  They drop money, which you use to buy a bow necessary to defeat bosses.  There’s also sword upgrades and shields.  I found once I had the level 3 sword, which takes about five minutes to get the gold for, everything that followed was a cakewalk.

Since the game is entirely focused on combat, with none of those pesky puzzles or dungeons to explore like a real game, you would hope they at least got that right.  Not so much.  With only a small handful of enemies to deal with, you’ve pretty much seen the whole game after only two minutes.  There are three bosses, but the first two more or less look alike and all of them are defeated in the same way.  Your sword feels a bit on the clunky side, thanks to collision detection being a bit off.  This applies to enemy projectiles too, as sometimes I would dodge a fireball and it would register me being shot anyway.

Finding the three dungeons is actually done in a novel manner.  You purchase a hawk from a store and then release it.  It flies in the direction of the next boss and you have to follow it.  This idea worked, but with everything else being a miserable failure it’s like your child showing you his report card full of Fs with one B in the middle for P.E.  I completed the whole game in about 45 minutes so it’s really short too.

Lootfest is truly a tragedy because they DID have something going here.  While playing the game, I repeatedly told my boyfriend “I think I might recommend this one.”  By game’s end, I realized that doing so would be a sin against gaming.  Lootfest is an unfinished mess.  Enemies get stuck in walls.  Enemies can walk through walls.  The sound effects are straight out of the Atari 2600, and you can literally see that they had plans for stuff but never got around to it.  Upon completion of the game, a sequel is promised.  “See you at Lootfest 2.” 

Um, no you won’t.  You couldn’t bother to debug the game the first time around before you kicked it out onto the marketplace.  Why should I or anyone give you a second chance?  The indie market reminds me of one of those families where the parents count down the days until their kids turn 18 so they can unceremoniously boot them out of the household whether they’re ready for it or not.  Designing video games requires patience.  You can’t just put something out there for sale as soon as you have a playable build working.  Yea, I’m sure it’s exciting to have something that resembles a game that you created all on your own, or in this case thoroughly plagiarized from someone else.  But it doesn’t mean you have to lose focus and put it out there for consumers to get cheated by while you begin work on a sequel.  Stay focused, damn it!  It makes me think every subscription to XNA should come with a free bottle of Ritalin.

Lootfest was developed by Gamefarm

80 Microsoft Points were left unfinished in the

Ninja360°

Ninja360° is a mix between Bomb Jack (a 1984 coin-op created by Tecmo that predates my birth by five years) and the Japanese television series Ninja Warrior.  Lots of games on the indie market place offer high-end difficulty in the realm of platforming, but few of those titles succeed in being fun.  Ninja360° does.

Ninja360° is contains 99 levels, each of which should take on average of twenty seconds to complete.  Many of them take substantially less.  In fact, many will be finished in under five seconds.  To complete a stage, you have to collect all the coins in it.  To do so, you jump, wall jump, and glide from platform to platform in very ninja-like fashion.

The defining gimmick of the game is that anytime you walk on a curved platform, the entire level rotates.  Some have compared this to Super Mario Galaxy, but I find that to incorrect.  In Mario Galaxy, you remain fixed to whatever platform you are on, with gravity adapting to whatever angle you’re walking on.  In Ninja360°, the level changes angles but the gravity always remains pushing from top to bottom.  Thus you can’t walk upside down on platforms and you’ll fall to your death in many situations.  Having said all that, the gimmick works and adds a small puzzle-twist to the experience.

The controls are smooth, if at times a touch on the sensitive side.  My biggest gripe with the game is the medal system.  Ninja360° is designed with speed runs in mind.  Every stage has gold, silver, and bronze time goals.  Obtaining the bronze medals sometimes can prove to be a light challenge but very possible.  Silver medals usually require more advanced techniques and different route planning.  Meanwhile, Gold Medals might as well be stored in Shangri-La because they are fucking impossible to get and might even be a thing of myth.

This is, I feel, an example of a developer who got too good at their own game and lost sight of reality.  This happens quite a lot in the indie marketplace, and I’ve even discussed this with some developers who feel the same way.  In some games, like A Hard Game Without Zombies, the insane difficulty curve crippled whatever fun could be had out of it.  Here, the ability to unlock the next stages only collecting the lowest-level medals takes a lot of the sting out.  The guys at Doerai Games included videos of their speed runs that you can watch upon completing the level, to learn how it’s done, but I found these to be not always so useful.  The truth is, getting gold medals requires a degree of absolute flawlessness that almost nobody will try to achieve.  To get there you would practically have to dedicate your entire life for several months to Ninja360°.  I would think Ninja Warrior training might be healthier.

For a while I felt I was in danger of getting bored, but once I gave up on pursuit of perfection I actually had a really good time playing Ninja360°.  It’s fast paced, challenging, handles well, and is shockingly loaded in content for an 80MSP title.  Sure, it’s a less acrobatic version of N, but I feel this is actually the better game and it’s priced to move.  Besides, who doesn’t love ninjas?  Besides the Shredder I mean.  Oh Victor Ortega.  And that pony-tailed dude from 3-Ninjas.  And Rita Repulsa.  Basically anybody evil.  I bet Rupert Murdoch really hates ninjas.

Ninja360° was developed by DoeraiGames

80 Microsoft Points quoted an obscure reference to American Ninja in the making of this review. 

Ace of Dynamites

Ace of Dynamites sat so inconspicuously on the marketplace that I nearly missed it.  The screen shots looked drab and the blurb read like something slurred out by an adolescent who just found the key to the liquor cabinet, but maybe it was trying to camp it up intentionally.  Who am I to prejudge something?  That would be awfully rude of me.  My face would be so red when the game turned out to be the biggest thing to hit the indie scene since I Made a Game With Zombies in It!

As it turns out, prejudice is sometimes a good thing.  Ace of Dynamites is so awful they might have to invent a new form of science just to study it.  It’s a puzzle game in the very loosest sense of the term.  I could explain in detail the play mechanics but doing so will result in my boredom induced headache returning, so I’ll try to sum them up as cleanly as possible.

You control a head.  You try to find a door.  There are many doors.  Collect three diamonds per a room.  Or not, if you wish.  I don’t care and neither does the game.  There’s skulls along the ground.  Don’t touch them.  There’s skulls chasing you.  Run away.  There’s boxes.  Push them around.  There’s dynamite boxes.  Blow them up.  Stand next to them and detonate?  Go ahead, it won’t hurt you.  Oh screw it, my headache came back anyway.

Fairy Engine LLC cut every corner possible developing this poop sandwich.  The graphics are ugly, flat, unanimated, and cheap looking.  What few sound effects there are annoy my eardrums worse then having an earwig burrow into them.  There’s no music, but given how bad everything else turned out that’s likely a blessing.  The menus are either stock or look enough like it to embarrass.  And then there’s the play control, if you can call it that.  Lining up your character to push boxes is the biggest challenge in the game.  Well, next to walking through an opening in a wall, or across a bridge.  The lack of setting parameters for movement means you’ll die more by walking into stationary skulls then anything else.  The face thingy glides around like it has tunnel vision.  It’s lazy and sloppy, maybe even a little insulting.

There’s only twenty levels, along with a few tutorial levels that serve to teach you how bad the game is.  Each stage has three degrees of difficulty.  The easiest setting would be useful to determine which kids should be riding the short bus to school.  The other two offer some extra baddies chasing you around, but you can’t play on those settings until you beat the game on Spectacular Retard mode.  Following that, you’ll be looking for something else to do that will be a welcome alternative to playing Ace of Dynamites some more.  Dig out that pesky ingrown toenail with a rusty monkey wrench.  Anything.

Playing Ace of Dynamites will be the worst thing to happen to you this week.  Even if your brand new puppy dies from choking to death on a winning lottery ticket, you would still be ahead on points.  It’s so bad I think it could make my personal short list of worst video games I’ve ever played.  The only redeeming value I could think of was somehow weaponizing it for use in the War on Terror.  Maybe not that either.  I’m sure the Geneva Convention would object.

Ace of Dynamites was developed by Fairy Engine LLC

80 Microsoft Points felt bad for Frederic My in the making of this review.

Explosive Gas

Explosive Gas is both the name of the latest game I played on XBLIG and the end result of eating an entire El Grande meal at Taco Bell by yourself.  The latter is clearly the more healthy option here.  It’s a shameless rip-off of Bomberman minus decent play control, charm, or fun.  It supports custom map creation, a feature that would be awesome if the game didn’t blow like a vacuum cleaner designed by a dyslexic.

I attempted to play online and was relieved that there was nobody playing, thus giving me an excuse to end the review after about ten of the most godawful matches imaginable against the worst possible AI since the Speak & Spell.  Why does this game even exist?  You can pay $1 for this low-grade knock-off and hate yourself or you can pay $10 for the significantly better real deal Bomberman Live.  You might even find some actual opponents in it.  If you own an Xbox 360 and an Xbox Live account, you can certainly afford it.  Leave this kind of broken, generic bullshit for those poor kids on skid row who are currently playing Mario the Hedgehog on their Gamestation 360.

Explosive Gas was developed by Flathead Games

80 Microsoft Points lit their farts on fire in the making of this review. 

Block the Laser

Limiting myself to Xbox Live Indie Games might not been the smartest move. One of my favorite genres is puzzle games but they fit in on consoles about as well as my kindergarten crayon drawings would have at the Musée du Louvre. Today’s square peg going into my round hole.. you heard me.. is Block the Laser. It’s a logic based puzzler where you play as a small robot trying to walk out the exit of fifty different rooms. Along the way, you’ll have to avoid lasers, hit buttons, and position mirrors.  It sounds very dry, but it’s actually a lot of fun.

The concept works well. It plays like a 2-D version of the mirror puzzles from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Only here, objects cannot be moved, only manipulated. The learning curve is near-flawless, with each new element being slowly introduced throughout the opening fifteen levels at just the right intervals. The challenge doesn’t really gather steam until you’re thirty levels in, at which point you’ll be well served to stand back and study the layout before making any moves. The average gamer can expect about two to three hours of playtime here and the final puzzles are difficult but not overwhelming.

The only flaw is the control design. First off, I recommend using the D-Pad, preferably the silver one with the more traditional pad if you have that as an option. If not, it’s marked down to $50 now and is worth every penny. Even then, it might at some times not help much. You move the robot one square at a time, but the spaces he can move aren’t always clearly defined and sometimes it will result in death. I also had slight issues with manipulating the mirrors, thinking they would rotate one way and instead accidentally pushing them in the wrong direction and getting my robotic flaps zapped off.

I really did enjoy Block the Laser. Two minor design flaws can’t change the fact that this is a clever and original puzzler that I never got bored with. Thus, it should come as no surprise that I advise gamers to completely and utterly avoid buying this XBLIG title. I firmly stand by opinion that games like this belong on portable devices. The guys behind Block the Laser seem to agree with that because it’s also available in the iTunes store at the same price point as it’s Xbox cousin. And that’s the one to get. It’s $1 and it works. Which by my count puts it $99,999,999,999 ahead of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative program.

Block the Laser was developed by John D’India and Joseph Christman

80 Microsoft Points had fricken laser beams attached to their foreheads in the making of this review.