Sigh. Another game by a really, really close friend. In this case, the developer is Jesse Chounard. I was originally reluctant to review his new title, Final Flight of the Perseus, because I just reviewed not one but TWO games by my good buddy Edward D. Geronimo. By the way, it must really suck to be Ed. People are constantly screaming his name when they jump off high places. Sorry. I forgot to use that joke in both the Sportsfriends and Turtle Tale review, and who knows when I’ll get another chance to. Anyway, I hated Turtle Tale and said as much, and thus I feel comfortable talking about Jesse’s game.
It’s a wave shooter set in space, and a fairly basic one. On consoles, this isn’t exactly my favorite genre. On phones? I actually enjoy them quite a bit. Especially the way shooting is handled in both this and Hypership: Out of Control (which Jesse handled the porting of to iOS). There’s no fire button. Your ship shoots automatically. It makes playing such an joy, because you can devote your attention entirely to dodging enemies and maneuvering into position. It’s an awesome system, one that I wish more games would adapt. A lot of mobile shooters would have benefited from not having to tap the screen to fire.
Gameplay is fairly minimalistic. There’s no items at all to collect. Instead, you earn money from each enemy you kill, which you spend on upgrades between each wave. Unfortunately, there’s only three: gun power, gun speed, and shields. You can replace the shields as you go along (well, most of the time. I actually stumbled upon a glitch that prevented me from buying them during my best run, which Jesse is going to patch out), but they get progressively more expensive. There’s a handful of bosses, and then levels start to loop after you clear the 28th. And that’s basically it.
Is it fun? Yes. As safe and shallow as it is, I was really surprised by how much it sucked me in. This is especially surprising given that the last game I played was also a safe and shallow game by a friend. And it was a platformer, a genre I typically like a lot more than space shooters. Some things are inexplicable I guess. It probably helps that there’s online leaderboards, and that the game is free. If you have no money on your iAccount, you could do a lot worse than wasting your time with Final Flight of the Perseus. You could be wasting your time with the Perseus’ other final flight, Wrath of the Titans. That movie fucking sucked.
At Indie Gamer Chick, we pay for every game we review. Even when we take a review copy because the game is not on the market yet and the only way to access it is by accepting a token, we still pay for the game when it is released. This feature has been extremely well received by both indie developers and gamers. I truly feel it’s one of the main reasons why this blog is so popular. It makes us stand out in a crowded field. When I offered to wave the policy for Miko and Indie Family Man, they turned it down. Why? Because it’s what makes this site unique.
However, now that so many indies are being released on multiple platforms, it’s becoming expensive to cover some games. The policy needs to be updated in a more reasonable way. So, if developers wants a review to include details on every platform a game is on, we’re going to start accepting review copies. We will still purchase the game on the platform the game costs the most on, or whatever platform we intend to primarily use for our play-through. For all other platforms, we’ll ask for review copies.
In the past, we only accepted review copies if it was the only way to access a game before it’s release, or if the game had online multiplayer. For online games, the review copy was given to a friend so that we would have someone to play against. That person had little to no feedback in the review. Under our new policy, we might need more than one code for some platforms.
Because of this new policy, we can introduce two new features to Indie Gamer Chick.
Multi-Platform Comparison: If we strongly prefer one version over another, a sidebar will be placed in the review that will explain why. It might be because one version runs smoother, or because we thought a particular system’s controller made a game play better. We’ll also compare the different online experiences. If there’s not a significant difference between the platforms, it will be noted during the wrap-up, under the game’s price-line.
Review Updates: As of this writing, IndieGamerChick.com has reviews for 524 games. 488 from me and 36 from members of Indie Gamer Team. Most of those games are now available on multiple platforms. If developers would like, we can update those reviews to include thoughts on the game on other platforms. We will need review copies for this. If you want us to update the old review, hit us up on Twitter: Indie Gamer Chick, Miko (we really need a name for her), and Indie Family Man. We won’t turn away any requests for a multi-platform update, and this will not count as a game’s Second Chance.
We’re coming up on the third anniversary of Indie Gamer Chick. We’ll be celebrating in multiple ways. We’ll be introducing Miko’s Leaderboard. I’ll be updating my Top 25 Xbox Live Indie Games of All-Time feature. I’ll be bringing in more writers. And finally, there will be another Indie Gamer Chick Bundle at Indie Royale. It’s been our pleasure to serve indie game developers and indie game fans with our no-holds-barred approached to reviewing, and we look forward to many more. Much love to the entire community, and thank you for your continued support. Game on!
Turtle Tales comes to us from Saturnine Games, the developers of Antipole. I loved Antipole. I put it in the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle (the second bundle coming in July). And, in the interest of full disclosure, I was pretty good friends with lead programmer Ed Geronimo. Was. Ed tragically died this morning. Someone seems to have bludgeoned him to death with a 3DS XL. Cops have no leads, except that he wrote “Cat..” in blood. So clearly the perp is a giant feline. Probably a Vita fan.
Don’t look at me like that. I’m totally innocent.
Well, before I kil…….. I mean before his accident (you know those 3DSs, they’re death traps), I had a chance to play his latest last game, Turtle Tale. It’s a decidedly old-school platformer/shooter where you play as a turtle with a squirt gun. Does it do any turtle-like things? Not at all. It doesn’t use it’s shell, act timid, eat pizza, or anything. Ed pointed out to me that Sonic doesn’t do anything resembling a hedgehog either. To which I say “hedgehogs are not turtles.” Anyway, using the squirt gun, you have to traverse a variety of levels fighting off a small handful of enemies. It looks like a kiddie game, and at first, that’s pretty much what it is.
And then it gets teeth.
You can’t game over in Turtle Tale, but the sheer douchery of enemy placement and level design will have you screaming in agony. When you take damage, the hero has a Castlevania-esque recoil that often will send you off the edge of a cliff. The recoil is a bit too dramatic, but in addition, you don’t “blink” from damage for very long. Not even long enough to jump out-of-the-way. You’ll often encounter two enemies that criss-cross in their walking patterns. You’ll hit one, bounce into the other, hit it, and continue bouncing until your life is drained or you get knocked off a platform and plunge to your death. This doesn’t just happen once or twice. Hell, the last few stages of the game are designed specifically with narrow ledges so that nearly every hit against you will drop you to your doom.
The little witch doctor guys are too damn spongy. Which I guess is fitting, considering that you’re shooting them with water.
And then there’s the birds. The god damned fucking birds. They typically start out of reach from your gun (which can only shoot straight in front of you. Apparently the turtle suffers from Mega Man Arthritis), and swoop down. The seagulls won’t wait for you to do the swooping, meaning if you stand around long enough, you’ll eventually get a clear shot. There’s also toucans, which seem to always appear in pairs and won’t start to drop down until you pass by. Those people listening to me as I played assumed the names of them were “mother” and “fucker” since that’s typically what I screamed out when encountering them. And finally, there’s parrots, which are basically clones of Cheap-Cheaps from Super Mario Bros. All of these enemies are hugely annoying, especially on the final stages where all the platforms are narrow, leading to insta-kills. I don’t know what Ed was thinking when he over did these. Seriously, Ed? Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near……….. a ledge?
I went back and forth on Turtle Tale. I didn’t like it at all at first. It’s bland, too easy, unambitious, and overly-simple. Most of those problems never resolve themselves. There’s no upgrades for your gun. There’s not a large variety of enemies. The level themes don’t really mean anything, besides a stage or two where you have deal with rising and sinking lava. There are no power-ups to collect. There’s only one boss fight and it’s unoriginal. There are 100 fruit in each stage, and collecting all of them opens a second quest, but if you’re like me, you’ll be anxious for the game to be over with by that point and a second quest won’t be in the cards. But really, Turtle Tale is so bare-bones that I honestly thought it was a game designed for very young children. So, before I made it far enough to realize the difficulty ramps up, I secured a copy for Indie Family Man to let his kids play. I also cashed in my pre-release copy on my neighbor’s 3DS. He’s seven years old, so I figured he was the right age for it. And he liked it! So did Paolo’s kids, though they chose to ignore the fruit as well.
The 3D effects impressed everyone else I showed them to. In all seriousness, while it doesn’t directly affect my epilepsy, it does give me headaches and motion sickness.
After one of the slowest starts for an indie I’ve encountered here, Turtle Tale does ramp up, and becomes more interesting as a result. But, it’s kind of too late by that point. Probably because Turtle Tale never strives to be unique. The levels are all so basic in design. The kind of levels you would see from a first-year game design student, and not one expected to make the honor roll. Probably the best part of Turtle Tale is the graphics. Although the characters are all fairly generic, it does make pretty good use of the 3D screen, at least from what little I could play with the feature turned on before my brain threatened to have a re-release party in my mouth with this morning’s breakfast as the guest of honor.
But seriously, what happened Ed? I mean, not that you can answer, what with your skull caved in and everything, but seriously. How do you go from making Antipole to this? Well, I guess the answer is he was also busy helping with the sublime Sportsfriends and various other projects. It didn’t leave a lot of room for creativity. The only way its memorable is how it lulls you in with its kiddie coat of paint and then utterly pulverizes you with some of the most unfair (yet still incredibly plain) level design on the 3DS. Maybe I placed too much faith on Ed because of his past accomplishments. I’ll admit, the whole losing my shit and embedding the neighbor kid’s 3DS in his skull was perhaps over-reacting a bit. I mean um………. crap, I guess that counts as a confession. Oh well, I’ll just pay the $50 fine and move along. My condolences to his family. Though really, this is kind of their fault. They should have told him the toucans were a dick move.
$2.99 said “see, I can review games by my best buddies and still be objective” in the making of this review. Ed’s corpse totally agrees.
A pre-release code for Turtle Tales was provided to Indie Gamer Chick earlier this week. At Indie Gamer Chick, all reviews are paid for in full by the writer. Turtle Tale was released today on the 3DS eShop and a full copy was purchased by Cathy. For more on this policy, consult our FAQ.
Today, I played a couple minimalist Wii U puzzlers that are sort of tough to review. There’s just not a whole lot to them. In Blok Drop U, you must eliminate blocks until you can drop the red target block onto a stable, not-deletable platform. Unlike most puzzlers, Blok Drop U makes no attempt to ease you into the mechanics. There’s no tutorial stages that the recently lobotomized would be embarrassed to play. The very first puzzle is an actual puzzle, and you’re left on your own to get the hang of the physics and objectives. In a way, it’s kind of refreshing. But, once you get a feel for the physics, the game loses its teeth quickly. After a few stages, Blok introduces things like saw blades and bouncy blocks. The curve to get the hang of these was relatively small and I finished all 30 puzzles offered here in about 90 minutes. More puzzles will arrive via free DLC, but for now, the pickings are Calista Flockhart slim.
The developers really should have come up with some kind of theme, ANY THEME, for Blok Drop U. Guide a toe fungus onto a nail. Drop the Pope into the Popemobile. Land Hitler’s brain into a Jar. Anything would have been better than nothing. Sadly, everyone wants a sweet, sweet taste of that Portal-style minimalism pie. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Portal has creatively bankrupted an entire generation.
I guess I enjoyed Blok Drop U, but I have a few nits to pick. At Indie Gamer Chick, I almost never talk about graphics. I’m very much a “gameplay is King” type of chick. But, I kind of have to talk about it here. Blok Drop U’s visuals are so dull that it becomes almost tiring. I certainly wasn’t bored by it, but I’m wired to enjoy puzzle games. I think the developers failed themselves as commercial artists here. These visuals almost feel like they’re giving up on attracting non-puzzle fans. Maybe that wasn’t their actual intent, but it feels that way. I know that minimalism is an established style, especially on the indie scene, but games are a visual medium and gamers are looking for stimuli. With the possible exception of the saw levels, Blok Drop U is about as stimulating as a warehouse full of straw.
Blok Drop U was developed by RCMADIAX ($1.99 said the developer is paying for the word “Block” in monthly installments in the making of this review)
My only other complaint is sometimes the physics seem to screw you over. Like having the target block fall straight down, without sloping, landing flush on a platform, and then rolling. I don’t know how it built the inertia to roll, but that screwed me over once or twice. But again, those are just pickled nits. Besides the short length and the lack of curve, Blok Drop U is a perfectly fine game. It’s also the cheapest game in the entire Wii U eShop at $1.99, and I do recommend it.
Oh, and to address the elephant in the room, YES, it’s on the wrong platform. It should be on 3DS. It just makes more sense as a portable game.
Speaking of which, Color Zen released this week on Wii U. It is coming to 3DS as well in June, which is really the only Nintendo platform it should be on. But hey, they don’t want to let all 47 Wii U owners down, and props to the guys at Cypronia for their consideration.
Like Blok Drop U, you’ve probably played games like this. There’s a colored frame around the playfield, and various colored shapes. Pushing matching shapes causes the entire screen (except whatever shapes are different colors) to become just that color. Keep doing this until there’s no more shapes left to match, at which point you win the round if the whole screen matches the color of the frame. Along the way, they throw in colors like white (which acts as a sort of wildcard) and black (which will eliminate an object instead of painting the screen with it). It’s a fairly simple game, and again, stuff like it has been done before. By the way, I hate it when I struggle to explain a relatively easy concept. Here, just look at the gameplay trailer.
Get it? Okay. You certainly get a lot of content for $4. There’s over 450 puzzles here, and there are different variations, like levels where some objects are mirrored and you move two at once. Overall, it’s a good package and worth the money.
But..
First off, and I know I say this almost every time I bring up the fucking thing, but the Wii U is the completely wrong platform for this game. Levels in Color Zen can be knocked out in a minute or two, making it perfect for portable gaming. In fact, there’s no point in having the television on at all since all the gameplay and action is done with the touch screen.
Side note: I’ve seen abstract art like this fetch thousands in the Bay Area. Perhaps the developers wasted their time with this silly indie game crap.
As far as the puzzles go, maybe it was just me, but I kind of found them to be easy. It’s simple process of elimination. Since the game tells you the final color you must activate, you just have to identify which object will get you that color and work backwards from there. It’s usually self-evident, and thus I bulldozed the majority of the puzzles, with only a small handful giving me pause. Then again, the game is called “Color Zen” so I’m not sure it was meant to be all that challenging. It’s also worth noting that a friend questioned how I could plow through it so easily when many stages left him positively stumped. As demonstrated by Gateways, Spy Leaks, Aesop’s Garden, and several other titles where I was the only critic that actually finished them, I’m just wired to be good at this genre. Your mileage may vary.
Color Zen was developed by Large Animal Games ($3.99 noted the game is free on iOS and Android but getting all the puzzles found in the Wii U version will still run you $3.99 in the making of this review)
I guess it’s nice that the Wii U is finally getting a decent assortment of games of different genres and prices. However, I’m still waiting for that defining game that can only be done using the Wii U’s unique hardware and controller. We were told that the Wii U was a unique experience that would contain all kinds of games that couldn’t be done anywhere else and it just plain hasn’t happened. I’m issuing a challenge to all indie developers with eyes on Wii U: you do it. Nintendo isn’t. Major third parties aren’t. Someone out there has to have an idea of how to justify this machine’s existence as something other than a cautionary tale for would be console manufactures.
“You better be a good game maker, or else your next console will be a Wii U!”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
Blok Drop U and Color Zen are Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
My nine-year-old crashed through the door one day excitedly demanding a piece of paper and pencil.
“Why do you need them?” asked my wife as she handed them over.
“SCIENCE!” And, off he went back outside writing down his observations.
I guess it doesn’t help that both my sons have been on a MythBuster’s binge on Netflix and have grown an incredible fascination with science. My eldest has been very interested in studying airplanes and flight, so when I heard about “Luna’s Wandering Stars”, it was the perfect opportunity to see what he thought of this educational game.
“Luna’s Wandering Stars” is a series of challenging physics puzzles staring our moon, “Luna.” Luna visits the nine planets* of the Solar System solving various physics puzzles. Each planet presents a unique set of challenges centered around a playable theme using Newtonian Physics. In the early levels, you launch Luna on various trajectories, much like “Angry Birds: Space.” In later levels, you are only given the ability to use thrusters to change your trajectory. And in another set of levels you can “change the gravitational constant of the universe”, with a flick of the mouse. And that is just for the starting planets! There are six more fun and interesting themes to discover.
To complete a level, you have to guide, launch, or boost Luna to collect asteroids. Once you collect enough asteroid mass, you pass the level. This can be easily accomplished, but the real challenge is collecting gold asteroids which unlock the other planets in the Solar System. To complicate matters, for every asteroid that is collected, Luna gains mass. This can affect the momentum and velocity of Luna in mid-flight, making it much more challenging than merely flinging birds in zero gravity.
*Kid’s today aren’t told the true story of Pluto, the missing planet
The presentation is top-quality with beautiful space backgrounds and epic music encouraging you to step up to the challenge. To counter the almost overblown feeling of awesomeness is an ironic self-awareness: the game’s instructions and narration is loaded with dripping sarcastic humor. There are also a lot of quotes from all over geek-culture. I have to admit that I had to research the Shakespeare quote, but I laughed out loud when I saw a “Community” reference. It was hard explaining to my nine-year-old what was so funny with the commentary at the completion of each level and even with the narrator’s jabs for making epic failures.
Some of the levels are pretty challenging, and after about 30 minutes of deep concentrated play, my nine-year-old had to take a break. I continued to play, and there were even a few levels I had to skip or had to accept a less than perfect solution just to move onto the next challenge. Mileage may vary, but I thought that this game was perfect for teens to adults in terms of challenge. However, one of the things I found missing was some sort of indicator that I had unlocked the next planet. An indicator for when the next planet unlocks is not only just for a good reference point, but for me it serves as a motivator to keep trying for more gold asteroids.
Even failing still looks spectacular.
Just when I had thought that I had discovered everything the game had to offer, I noticed another button on the Start Menu that I hadn’t clicked before. I clicked the “Custom” button. I was entirely oblivious to what that meant. I thought it was just an “options” screen, but it turned out to be a full-fledged level editor! Here, I could recreate and expand on levels that I liked in the original game itself. And then my jaw dropped even further when I learned that I could also upload my levels and download levels created by other people to try. In fact, someone had already made and uploaded a “shooting” arcade-style survival game starring Luna.
It made me wonder what else would be created if this game was given to a much larger audience, and I was very pleased to find out that “Luna’s Wandering Stars” is being featured at the Space Foundation Symposium later this week. I am certainly looking forward to seeing even more levels once more people start trying it out.
A week after our initial test run, my son was asking how gravity works. To help my son understand, I showed him a YouTube video of a professor using a spandex sheet to demonstrate what gravity fields look like. He watched as ball bearings made their little orbits on a warped surface representing “space-time.” Almost immediately, the lightbulbs in his head went off and he yelled, “That’s exactly like ‘Luna’s Wandering Stars’!” Suddenly, my nine-year-old son understood what the game was really all about: learning truths about science.
That’s what makes “Luna’s Wandering Stars” not just an excellent game with fun mechanics, a wicked sense of humor and a wide variety of levels and designs, but also a great educational experience.
$9.95 for not just a fun game, but for the lights going off in a curious child’s mind while learning about space and physics. It was worth infinitely more than the single CFL lightbulb I could get at the same price. (And less toxic for the environment!)
Luna’s Wandering Stars is Indie Gamer Team Approved.
Some people feel I review too many trivia games at Indie Gamer Chick. I don’t know how to respond to that. I guess I’m such a fan of You Don’t Know Jack that I keep looking for the next evolution in video game trivia. And you would think that would come from the indie scene, where irreverence and quirkiness are a way of life. But it hasn’t happened yet. Or at least I haven’t found it. Probably the most inspired entry in the genre I’ve found is Triviador on Facebook of all things, which mixes Trivial Pursuit with Risk. Not a wild idea or anything, but it’s a step in the right direction. Otherwise, your only options for stuff that tries to be a little more than a glorified pop-quiz are the Scene It series, and those aren’t exactly magnificent or anything. I’m more than a little surprised that indies seem to phone in the trivia genre. Maybe it’s good for getting your feet wet in game development, which is why nobody really takes risks with it.
Wait, there a tube other than YouTube?
By far the most unambitious title in the genre I’ve run across so far is That Trivia Game, which recently hit the PlayStation 4. I literally only have two positive things to say about it. First, I never stumbled upon a question where the correct answer was in fact not accurate. More than half the trivia games I’ve played on IGC have had that issue. Second, there’s full voice acting for all the questions, although the puns and barbs the host throws at you sound half-hearted and are never funny.
As for the actual game, there’s four rounds in That Trivia Game. In the first, you answer five questions from a subject of your (or one of the other players) choosing. Correct answers net you 250 points. You then are given one final question in that round, where you can wager as much as 750 points. In the second round, incorrect answers in the multiple choice disappear, and you get more points for answering before they do. In the third round, you simply get more points for answering quickly. The final round is almost identical to the Jack Attack round in any You Don’t Know Jack game. Answers to a question appear one at a time and you must buzz in when the correct one is on-screen. The first person to get it gets 1,000 points, while every incorrect answer costs you 1,500.
I guess for a $10 indie trivia game, I expect more. The play style is as basic as possible. There’s no online play, so unless you have extra controllers and people up for playing with you, you’re stuck with an utterly brain-dead AI opponent. Besides the occasional question based around a photograph or drawing, there’s nothing resembling personality or edginess to the trivia presented. And, the gameplay isn’t always right. Take the third round, where the points decrease at a steady rate. There’s nothing wrong with this style, except the countdown should ideally wait at least a second or so, long enough for you to read the question. It doesn’t, and thus unless you blindly stab at one of the answer buttons, it’s impossible to get the maximum point value out of it.
This is the only time you wager points. It’s at the end of the first round, and you can’t even bet the maximum amount of points (which at most can be 1,250). So very lame.
Most of all, the value sucks. $10 nets you the much more entertaining Scene It! on PlayStation 3, and you can nab You Don’t Know Jack on PS3 or Xbox almost anywhere for $15 or less. Or you can pay nothing and find hundreds of free trivia apps all over mobile phones, online, or on Facebook. This is one of those rare games where I have no choice but to factor in the price. Anything but free is too much for a game like this. And even if it were free, I’m not sure it’s worth the space. It’s just plain boring. You could dig up a corpse that was buried ten years ago and find bones less bare than those of That Trivia Game.
Always Sometimes Monsters (“ASM”) is a game about the choices we make in our everyday lives that have a profound impact on us in ways we don’t notice. Here, you’re chasing after the one who got away, and you have one month to raise funds by helping people around town, picking up odd jobs, and networking to get across the country to stop their wedding.
ASM offers the player an experience that will be almost entirely distinct to them. Depending on whom you talk to, when you talk to them, and what you ultimately decide to do about them, the game plays out differently. Almost every action has a consequence (good, bad, or something in-between) that affects the outcome of your journey. Will you help a little old lady clean her apartment or help a friend set up for his concert? Will you blackmail a doctor to save your friend’s girlfriend, who you hate with a passion?
In my playthrough, I worked at a tofu factory, wrote some articles, walked in on a couple having sex, and met the devs of the game as they sat in a cafe. Something nailed here is that I felt bad whenever I discovered that I could no longer help someone out, like I let them down (sorry people who lost their homes to a development project).
With a storyline that molds to whatever you make of it, Always Sometimes Monsters toys with your morality along your journey to the end in ways that make you go happy or wretch with disappointment at yourself. It’s fun! (Oh, and you can finish the game in three minutes if you want. You’ll see!)
What Worked: I have never experienced a game quite like this before, and it was very memorable. ASM pulls at the heartstrings and allows you an enormous amount of freedom while still keeping you within the confines of the story it tells. Oh, and thank you to the devs from the bottom of my heart for not giving us an incredibly small inventory.
What Didn’t Quite Work: The in-game time flow of time can be confusing. You don’t know exactly how long each event you’re doing is going to last, so you don’t know if you have time for things you want to do that day. The clock, which resides inside your inventory, can also be difficult to read as it has a meter that fills once you do something story-related. It wasn’t until I understood that I’m not going to be able to go back and help both Friend A and Friend B that I finally felt better about advancing. Unlike Harvest Moon, you can’t squeeze out a bit more time to both harvest and talk to townspeople. You only get to do one or the other, and then it’s the next day.
About the Game From the Devs: The game was largely inspired by a cross-country backpacking trek called Gamer Unplugged where ASM’s writer and co-creator, Justin Amirkhani, traveled around America meeting game developers in an effort to figure out what made them satisfied and happy with their craft.
There are a lot of Angry Bird clones in indie land. With the market so crowded, it’s tough to stand out. King Oddball tries to be different enough that people watching it will say “it’s like Angry Birds, but..” Laugh if you will, but that “but..” is pretty valuable to have in a crowded market. If you get saddled with just “like Angry Birds” and let it linger there like that, you get dismissed instantly. In the case of King Oddball, it’s “like Angry Birds, but.. you’re blowing up military vehicles with a giant stone pitching smaller stones at the vehicles using your swinging tongue.” You know, just like the Ottomans did.
I appreciate the utter insanity of King Oddball. It harkens back to the days when video games didn’t need to make a lick of sense. I also appreciate the value it offers. $7 nets you a pretty decent amount of levels plus a ton of specialized extra challenges. And calling this an Angry Birds clone is a tiny bit lazy on my part. The mechanics are totally different, with a bigger emphasis on timing and combos. You get three shots in each stage, and can earn extra ones if you kill three or more baddies, or if the rocks bounce back to the king. Well, except when they bounce back and randomly kill the king, in an apparent attempt at a quirky Easter Egg.
While we’re on that subject, another “Easter Egg” is sometimes the tongue will just randomly be smaller. It’s a rarity. It only happened to me once the entire time I was playing the PS4 version, but it was hugely infuriating when it happened. I actively wondered if I had the ability to adjust the tongue-size the entire time, and spent the next five minutes pressing every combination of buttons on the PS4 pad trying to recreate it, cussing a blue-streak the whole time. As it turns out, this is just a random occurrence, sort of the developers trolling the players. On one hand, I’m guessing my reaction is exactly what they were aiming for, and that’s admirable in an Andy Kaufman sort of way. On the other hand, it’s just plain fucking annoying. You can’t call something like that an Easter Egg. That would be like designing a car and saying one of the features is the airbag will randomly go off whenever you’re driving above 60MPH.
I genuinely had fun on with King Oddball, especially when I was carting it around on my PlayStation Vita. Games like this belong on portable platforms, where you’re free to kill anywhere between one minute to one hour or longer, quit at any time, and lose nothing. And, despite all the problems I’m about to bring up, I wanted to see King Oddball through to the end. Plus I fully intend to knock out some of the bonus challenges (stuff like clearing levels in a single shot, or using grenades instead of rocks) whenever I have time in need of murdering.
King Oddball has a lot of problems. It’s not a particularly difficult title. Most of the later stages I cleared out in under a minute or two. Maybe I had just gotten good at it, but the game fails to scale up enough. With the exception of when I was playing on Indie Gamer Chick TV (my suckiness on there I chalk up to performance anxiety), the longest it took me to finish any stage was about five minutes, for this one. It wasn’t unusual for me to string together ten or more stages that I cleared out on my first attempt, even late in the game. And then you get to the finale. It took me about a minute to finish the final stage, at which point a boss battle opens featuring a giant tank. I was actually amped up for this climatic moment. Fourteen seconds later, on my very first attempt, it was over and the credits were rolling. This is the equivalent of one of those finale fireworks on the Fourth of July being a dud. The look of disappointment on my face was later described as “heartbreaking, as if you had just learned of the existence of puppy cancer.”
This shows me playing the final stage I hadn’t cleared (under a minute to finish) and the boss fight (14 lousy seconds).
Maybe I just got lucky. There’s no real way of knowing. There’s no scoring system for the stages, like most games in this genre have. No three star ratings, or gold trinkets, no anything. They’re over and you move on. This of course means no online leaderboards, and thus no way of telling if I’m just fucking insanely awesome from all this indie gaming or if King Oddball really is too damn easy. Oh sure, you do quickly unlock a “diamond mine” that allows you to replay all the stages you’ve cleared, and where the special object is to beat the stages again without using your final rock. But this actually kind of ticked me off. I had already beaten many of the stages with two or fewer rocks remaining, and now you mean to tell me that didn’t count? Fuck that. Some of those incredible shots I made were so lucky that I could never hope to recreate them. Not even on accident. It seems like this diamond stuff should have been part of the main game itself.
The physics of the rocks, which are not uniformly round, often left me screaming in emotional agony.
So clearly King Oddball has a lot to dislike about it. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it’s also one of the most addictive experiences I’ve had at Indie Gamer Chick. That might just be on me, but sometimes I finish a game and then have to go back to do all the extracurricular stuff in it just to “get it out of my system.” King Oddball is the king of that in 2014 so far. Over the course of writing this review, I had to go back to, ahem, “check it against my notes” about five to six times. All the silly extra challenges are worth a look (except the Diamond crap). Hell, there’s even an entire second world. The way you unlock it is silly and a waste of time (why not just have it unlock when you beat the game?) but at least real effort was put into it, instead of it just being mirrored versions of the original stages. It’s an anomaly for sure: both ambitious and unambitious, King Oddball packs a ton of content, but it could have used more reasons to keep you interested. I can easily recommend it, but I can also see why it leaves many players feeling blue-balled.
In this latest installment from Frogdice, they take a tried-and-true puzzle concept and add to it by throwing in some magic and incorporating city management, which makes for a unique experience.
Building on the Bejeweled match-three (or more) system, your rune combinations send out a magical onslaught against invaders that slowly walk towards your castle walls as they try to destroy your defenses, thus ending the stage. Making a vertical match sends out a wave that attacks a spread of three lanes, whereas a horizontal match sends out a row of attacks that hits multiple targets in the same lane. Complete a series of waves of monsters, and you advance to the next stage until you reach a boss fight.
The boards that hold your runes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, each with its own challenges.
Not only is the game a puzzle game—it has some elements of city management as well. Between each stage, or battle, you are brought back to your town, which requires some administrative attention. While you’re off fighting, the citizenry either get themselves into trouble or quibble over disputes of various kinds and need your help in deciding what to do. Depending on the nature of your decisions over time, you may receive bonuses in the playfield.
The proud town of Mikoville.
The city also includes such areas as a farm, lumber mill, granary, and others to gather resources. You use these resources to build or research items that aid you while defending your towers such as explosives, weapons, and offensive and defensive magic. These items are key for the more difficult stages where there is wave after wave of attacking mobs, and there would be no way you could stop the sheer amount of monsters by using the runes of the puzzle alone. Using your spells to their maximum efficiency and saving them for just the right moment is fun and rewarding when you take out a number of foes in one blast.
While ReignMaker is a fun game, it isn’t without a few flaws. One of the issues I had was that when starting the game, you’re dropped into your mostly vacant city and told to build a few things. At this point you don’t truly understand why and say, “Okay, I guess I’ll build a farm. That sounds like a good thing. Lumber mill? Sure! I have money!” While there were some pop-ups describing some of the concepts to me, I didn’t feel like I actually understood the game without some trial and error on my part after playing a few rounds. That in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and once I did get it, it was an easy concept; however, I felt as though I fell into it and didn’t actually learn it.
I rule!
Some additional guidance on the benefits of using items would have been beneficial as well. I almost stopped playing the game out of frustration somewhere after the first boss because stages were getting too difficult. After a series of defeats, I turned off the game, only coming back hours later after telling myself, “There must be something I’m missing or forgetting.” Sure enough, I was right. With a bit more experimentation, I discovered that the frustration I felt was related to the fact that there were a number of situations in which there was no way I could make a match in the lane that a monster was using, and no amount of clearing runes was helping me. It turns out that I could craft a dagger that allowed me, as the player, to attack a particular monster. Later on, I figured out that some magic allows me to destroy a single rune which helps against tricky, out-of-the way monsters, and other magic helps me to restore the hit points of my castle.
These flaws, though, are minor. ReignMaker is a genuinely fun experience you shouldn’t miss if you are a fan of the genre. Frogdice has proven once again that they know how to make a well-crafted puzzle game.
$15 is all it costs to have your own kingdom these days. It’s a pretty good deal for a game to play on a reigny day. OH COME ON! That’s comedy gold! Hey, don’t walk away. Come back!
Move over Dark Souls. I’ve found something way more challenging than you could ever hope to be: finding three other people willing to play local-only, multiplayer-only indies with me. I swear to God, I think crossing the Sahara with a pair of honey badgers eating my legs off would be easier. Thankfully, my mutant superpower (that’s right, I’m a mutant. Don’t act surprised) is the ability to guilt anyone into doing anything for me. It’s way better than having metal claws. “Brian, I could really go for a hotdog from 7-11 right now.” “Oh for God’s sake, it’s 2:25 in the morning and you don’t even like 7-11’s hot..”
UNLEASH THE PUPPY DOG EYES
“.. did you say you wanted one or two? I’ll get two just to be safe.”
It’s fucking awesome. Sadly, my friends have acquired immunity to this, at least when it comes to playing indies. They always manage to find themselves busy, or sick, or in a traffic accident, or accidentally shooting their pinky toe off. Psssh, some friends.
Thankfully, Sportsfriends is a party game, where the minimum skill level doesn’t need to be quite as high. In fact, I think one of the best ways to tell how good a party game can be is by how accessible it is for people who would rather saw off their own tongue than spend their free time playing games. So I hit up my parents and a couple of my business partners. They said no. I unleashed the Puppy Dog Eyes. They asked if they should bring pizza.
Super Pole Riders, which was the surprise hit of the day.
The field was as follows.
Cathy: 24-years-old. Somewhat noted for being a bit of a gamer. Except when people disagree with her reviews, at which point she is clearly not a gamer and how can anyone not see that? SPECIAL QUIRK: eats M&Ms by shoving the whole pack into her cheeks and sucking the shell-juice through the gaps in her teeth.
Oscar: 64-years-old. Known to sire snarky game critics. Back in the early days of home consoles, when they were still considered a bit of a novelty, he would buy the new ones, play them once or twice, then never touch them again. Though he actually did buy a Vita, so if Sony is curious, that’s where one of the other eleven that sold went. SPECIAL QUIRK: is incapable of cooking food that isn’t so hot that it makes your shoes smoke.
Lynn: 44-years-old. Despite her daughter being obsessed with games, she never actually touched one herself until the Wii came out. Today, she actually plays a lot of iPhone games and has three-starred every level in every Angry Birds game. SPECIAL QUIRK: misspelled her own middle name for at least seven consecutive years.
A.J.: 65 years old. My Godfather. How often does he play games? He still refers to all consoles as “Ataris.” That should give you a clue. SPECIAL QUIRK: His kids carry the names R.J. and S.J. Because A.J. is a J.A.
Christian: 47-years-old. One of my business partners. He has a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox One. His cool as shit seven-year-old son Gabriel also has a 3DS, and ran through a few levels of Zelda: Four Swords with me. Christian occasionally shows up at my house just to help me play a two-player game I’m reviewing at Indie Gamer Chick when nobody else has time. Cool guy. SPECIAL QUIRK: Didn’t kill me when I replaced his business cards with ones identifying him as “Christian: Blood Angel.” (slang term for a shady angel investor)
Reggie: 39-years-old. Hates me calling him “the Regginator.” Has a PlayStation 3 that he uses for everything but gaming. Though he does have a decent assortment of games on his Galaxy tablet. SPECIAL QUIRK: He’s the only person that can get away with calling me Kitty Cat. I don’t even let Brian do it.
Why five other players? Well, because there’s a game in Sportsfriends that takes place not on the screen, but in your living room. Which is probably where your screen is, come to think about it, but work with me here. In this game, you and other players must brawl each-other in an attempt to cause your opponents to move their controllers too much. I had two thoughts. One: I should totally sue the developers for plagiarism, since wrestling over the television remote was clearly inspired by every TV viewing session in the Vice household.
“I want to watch American Idol!”
“No, we’re watching American Pickers!”
“Hey, put on American Bandstand!”
“For fuck’s sake A.J., how many times do we have to tell you, that show has been off the air for twenty-four years now and Dick Clark is dead!”
Punches are thrown. Teeth are lost. The cops are called. We ultimately always settle on some awful NBC comedy before we all go to our respective rooms to sulk. Sportsfriends turned THAT into a game and they owe me royalties on it.
Second, a full contact video game sounds fun if you’re young and spry. I might have the young thing going for me, but after a couple of neck and back surgeries, I’m anything but spry. So I decided that I would make them play the full contact video game and take bets on which pair would end up going the longest time without speaking to each other afterwards. Vegas had my parents as the odds-on favorites, but having worked with Reggie and A.J., I know they’ve brickwalled each-other over lesser things than a concussion and a broken wrist and slapped $20 on them.
Sadly, we never got a chance to play it. On PlayStation 3, “Joust” hints that the game is optimized for use with Move controllers. Four of them, to be precise. Teehee, give me a second.
GWHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I’m sorry, but you guys actually thought someone out there actually would own four of those ping-pong-ball on an off-brand Wiimote controllers? The same controllers that Target couldn’t clearance out at $5 with a game bundled with them because nobody would be caught dead holding them?
Thankfully, Sportsfriends is also on PS4. Except we don’t yet have four controllers for it either. We did go to Target to buy them, but they were sold out of all but one. Even after poaching the controller from the PS4 at our office, we were left with three. So I settled for trying to get the guys to use the decidedly less optimized PS3 controllers. I still wanted to see the boys fight to the death, but when I showed them a video of what they were about to partake in, they all refused. Reggie said “I dunno, Cathy. This seems like some kind of scam by Sony to cause broken controllers and drive accessory sales.” I asked the developer if that was true. He smiled and dismissively changed the subject. Okay, no he didn’t.
Oddly enough, Joust is the game on Sportsfriends that the majority of people have been hyped to play the most. It’s had a lot of good reports from various trade shows. Yet, I’ve encountered a lot of people who want to play it but can’t. And it’s almost never because of lack of enough controllers. It’s an issue of space. Playing it will typically require, at the very least, rearranging furniture. Even then, for many, there just isn’t enough clearance to play it without risk of injury or damage to property, especially if your friends are hyper competitive. To put how big a problem this is in perspective, even one of the game’s programmers doesn’t have enough room at his place to play it. If you live in an apartment, forget about it. But hell, I have a pretty dang big house and I question the feasibility of being able to pull it off. So, we skipped it.
Sportsfriends has three other games. First up is Barabariball. The best way to describe it is “Smash Bros. as a ball game.” Playing 1-on-1 or 2-on-2, players are on a platform, and there’s a ball. You must brawl with your opponents while trying to throw the ball off their side of the platform and into the water. You score a point when the ball fully sinks beneath the waves. You can do multiple jumps in a row, so if the ball winds up in the drink, you can dive in and save it. If you sink beneath the water, there’s a penalty you have to wait out before respawning. You can set the game to go by a time limit, a set number of points, or a combination of both.
Super Smash Bros. BrALL
I really enjoyed Barabariball, but I think I would have liked it a lot more if I had been playing with more skillful people. Sportsfriends positions itself as a party game, and the best party games are ones that can be enjoyed by anyone of any skill level. Chompy Chomp Chomp is the all-time champion in that regard. Barabariball can have the most complex strategies if you have the right people to play with. I had my parents and business partners, none of whom are regular gamers, so rounds quickly degenerated into wild button-mashing with about as much finesse as a three-toed sloth on roller blades. Of the three games I could play, Barabariball probably has the highest ceiling for enjoyment, but it’s also the toughest for non-gamers to enjoy. The team I was on won easily every single time, and I was even able to shut-out Daddy and Christian (the two most skilled players besides me) single-handedly while having nobody control my partner. If you have regular gamers to play with, this is probably the one you’ll spend the most time with. If not, you might actually want to skip this one.
Next up is Super Pole Riders. No, it’s not based on the Pole Riders event from Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. It’s another ball game. Here, each player has a pole that they must use to propel themselves into the air to smack a ball tethered to a line. Teams must swat at the ball until they’re able to score it in the opponent’s goal. On paper, this sounds like the most complicated game, and I figured my gang would struggle even more with this than they did with Barabariball. But actually, this was the big hit of Sportsfriends with my group. Everyone quickly got the hang of it, and pretty soon, while teaming with my mother, we found ourselves flinging each-other over the team of Reggie and A.J. using some pretty awesome double-team tactics. The guys quickly caught on and soon they were doing it too. We had some pretty dang competitive rounds. Mommy and me then watched as Daddy and Christian also quickly got the hang of it. A quick survey on Twitter confirmed that this is the favored game by the majority of Sportsfriends owners, which kind of surprised me. I figured it would be Barabariball. My theory is, you’ve seen games like it before. Super Pole Riders is a truly insane idea that you would have to be mad to come up with.
Also, they need to totally make it into a real sport.
Finally, there’s Hokra, which is the only game of the bunch that requires four players split into teams of two. It’s also the simplest of the bunch. From a top down view, each player is a square that must grab the ball and simply hold it in their scoring zone for as long as possible. The first team to fill up their scoring meter wins. I guess I’m the weirdo of the group, because I enjoyed Hokra the most of the three games. It’s so simple and so very fun. It feels like a game from the late 1970s that somehow went undiscovered until now. There’s no complex techniques to learn. You simply bump into other players to steal the ball. You tap X to dash when you don’t have the ball, and press X to pass when you do. It’s competitive video gaming boiled down to its most basic mechanics, then refined until perfect. Games of Hokra are super fast-paced, short-lived, and generally result in lots of smiles, laughter, and screaming at each-other.
Despite absolutely adoring Sportsfriends for its masterful craftsmanship, I do have a couple nits to pick. Like everyone else seems to have noted, there’s no online play. Sportsfriends is local only. After my first attempt at playing this last week with three random fuckwads who decided before we even started that they would hate it, I started a mini-riot on Twitter by complaining about the recent trend of multiplayer-focused games with no online components. Sportsfriends, Towerfall, and even the HD re-release of one of my favorite under-appreciated games from my childhood, Cel Damage. This touched off a lot of bitter responses from developers talking about the cost and ultra-high difficulty of optimizing games for online play. I’m not often talked down to by the indie community, but on this day, people were pretty condescending to me about it.
Seriously, couldn’t you see this as a real game? If this isn’t in the Olympics by 2028, I’ll be so disappointed.
We live in an era where consoles are built around online functions. Online multiplayer for a game that is multiplayer-only is absolutely expected by the majority of console owners. Especially on the PS4, a system that most people are having difficulty locating themselves, let alone know enough people who own one to bring controllers with them. If you want to throw the party yourself, three extra controllers will run you around $200 with sales tax on that platform. And no, no matter how fun it is, Sportsfriends (or any game for that matter) isn’t worth that by itself. I’m sorry guys, but we live in an era where everyone owns a cellphone and has the ability to talk with their voices to anyone they know at any time, yet they choose to send texts to each-other. The standards of social interaction have changed. It’s noble of you to try to create a game that unites people together like in the good old days. But if you can’t understand why people still complain about the lack of online play, you’re naive one, not me.
My only other complaint is I wish there had been more games. But that’s really not that big. Any of these three games by themselves would rank pretty high on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Combined? It’s a great package and a great value. There’s no A.I., so if you don’t have a means to get a local party together, don’t even consider a purchase. But all three games are incredibly fun, control smoothly, look neo-retrorific, and you’ll talk about your play session long after the party is over. On a personal note, everyone in my party has had a really tough time lately. We lost our dear friend and partner Kevin to cancer two weeks ago. This was the first time we’ve all been together just to hang out and have fun as a group since his passing. It was really cool. A great way to heal together. I usually try to end these review with a gag or a punchline. Instead, for Sportsfriends, I’ll say this: we all kept saying how much Kevin (who wasn’t a gamer by any means) would have loved to been there playing with us. He totally would have, and he would have been laughing and yelling with us. It was a really great time for all of us, and it wouldn’t have been as cool if I wasn’t doing this Indie Gamer Chick thing. I love you and miss you Kevin, and I totally would have knocked your ass into the water.
$14.99 said it doesn’t matter how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. And even that doesn’t make all that much difference in the making of this review.
An early access review code was provided to Indie Gamer Chick. Sportsfriends was then released before the publication of this review and a full copy was then purchased by Indie Gamer Chick.
Final Flight of the Perseus was developed by Third Party Ninjas. 
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