MULLETMAN

October 28, 2013 by 1 Comment

MULLETMAN (has to be written in all caps, like it’s being screamed), is the latest title from Total Commitment Games.  My only previous experience with them was briefly playing their Escape from Robot Doom, a very good-looking 3D title that I had to quit playing after around ten minutes because it wasn’t compatible with my epilepsy.  But, from what little I did play of it, I honestly thought it had the worst play control of any 3D game I’ve ever played.  Like someone played Bubsy 3D and tried to emulate it, only they made it worse.  I’m not exaggerating.  It’s one of those games where, if I had been able to put more time in it, might have been a contender for the worst game I’ve ever played.

MULLETMAN is not quite that bad, but it is one of the worst games I’ve played in 2013.  Like Escape From Robot Doom, it comes down to terrible play control.  Essentially a run-and-gun platformer, MULLETMAN stars a very close Mega Man lookalike, which is what attracted me to the game in the first place.  Having played the truly amazing Vintage Hero just a few months ago, a game I consider to be, as of this writing, the best XBLIG ever made, I figure that games inspired by the Blue Bomber might generally be of higher quality.  But beyond having a similar character design, including a blatant copy of Mega Man’s iconic jumping posture, MULLETMAN is nothing like Capcom’s franchise.  There’s only one type of enemy, along with various traps and timed-jumping areas.  Good character models are really the only positive thing to say about the graphics.  They’re not bad or anything, but it’s very bland and drab.  Certainly not something that gets you excited to be playing it.  Atompshere matters.  If you don’t believe that, go live on the moon.

For some reason, the main character's arms flail up and down, like he's trying to fan his armpit BO at enemies.

For some reason, the main character’s arms flail up and down, like he’s trying to fan his armpit BO at enemies.

Where MULLETMAN really falls apart is the jumping physics.  Apparently by design, a game centered around running and jumping requires you to stop moving before attempting to jump.  This is a mind-boggling choice.  As a result, I often slipped off ledges while attempting to maneuver from platform to platform.  When you go to jump and you don’t stop moving, your character does a silly little bunny hop thing.  Mind you, because the controls are slightly unresponsive, sometimes you will stop moving and hit the jump, only to not jump.  Responsive controls are an absolute must for any platformer.  If you can’t get those right, the game should not be released.  MULLETMAN feels like the child of one of those parents that shoves their kids out the door at the stroke of midnight on their 18th birthday.  Ready or not, you’re out of here.

The controls don’t exactly lend themselves to the level design, either.  Many sections are single-block platforms that fire missiles vertically after you land on them.  These sections require tight jumping controls and fast movement physics, neither of which MULLETMAN possesses.  The jumping is slow and floaty, reminiscent of the Bubble Man sections of Mega Man 2.  It worked there, in stages designed around avoiding spiky walls.  Here, damage is almost inevitable.  The game is generous in the sense that you have infinite lives and checkpoints are liberally scattered around, but it never helps ease the frustration brought on by the terrible control.  On top of all that, the game has problems with choppy, stuttering frame-rate on occasion.  The developer was puzzled by this one, though every player I’ve spoken with has had issues with it.  Splazer Production’s gameplay footage shows it a few times.  For me, it was frequent, nearly every time I jumped with any other moving object on-screen.

You can see the choppiness early on in the vid. It seems to hit different, but consistently, among most players. By buddy Kyle, whose Extra Life charity events you should totally check out, also had issues with MULLETMAN.

Even without the problems, I don’t think MULLETMAN has a particularly high ceiling in terms of potential.  It only took me thirty minutes to complete the game.  At least I think I did.  I ended up in a jail cell with “The End” written above it.  If not for the bad controls, bland graphics, unfair level design, floaty physics, and technical issues, I’m not sure MULLETMAN would have been much better than mediocre.  Though I must say, the developer seems to have something resembling talent.  Escape from Robot Doom, horrible as it was, at least looked really good.  Very few XBLIGs look like they could pass as honest-to-goodness professional games, and it did.  And MULLETMAN would catch on just by being a Mega Man lookalike, if it could spread by word-of-mouth, which it simply can’t in the state it’s in.  Both games were ruined by poor control, which tells me that Total Commitment Games needs to bring someone in that can handle that aspect.  As it stands, their games are good for little more than causing players to invent entirely new swear words.  MULLETMAN controls are Fruckenrchist and the game is Arserunoff.

I know the feeling, buddy. If I had to play ten more minutes of MULLETMAN, I would have handed my boyfriend some nails and a mallet myself.

I know the feeling, buddy. If I had to play ten more minutes of MULLETMAN, I would have handed my boyfriend some nails and a mallet myself.

MULLETMAN was developed by Total Commitment Games

$1 said “watch, Fruckenchist is probably German for “Dazzling to the Senses” or something in the making of this review.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Walking Dead: Chapters 2 – 5 and 400 Days DLC

October 22, 2013 by 2 Comments

There will be so many spoilers here that it will cause a national spoiler shortage, causing an epidemic of cars lifting off the ground as they accelerate. Do not read under any circumstance if you don’t want the rest of Walking Dead to be spoiled. 

I begrudgingly give the entire Walking Dead: Season One game (sans the horrible DLC, called 400 Days because “70 Dull Minutes” was frowned upon by marketing) my Seal of Approval. My rule is, if I enjoy an experience with a game more than I don’t, it gets the Seal, and that certainly applies to Walking Dead. Having said that, I would like to paraphrase the great Bill Simmons and ask the following publications to shove their own heads up their own asses.

USA Today

Wired

Complex

GamesRadar

The Official Xbox Magazine (granted, Xbox didn’t have Journey in 2012, but still..)

I’m only asking because you already shoved your head up your ass once and I want to see you do it again. Thanks Bill.

All these publications and many more declared Walking Dead to be 2012’s Game of the Year. This is apparently part of a larger conspiracy by Human-Emu hybrids to rid video games of actual gameplay. Plus, Walking Dead was riddled with technical problems, at least on PlayStation 3. Often, making a decision would result in the game freezing up while it loaded the next dialog tree. The audio would play but the image would be locked. Then the animation would be out of synch with the audio until it caught up. This happened quite a lot, and it broke the immersion. When a game is 98% story and 2% actual gameplay, immersion is all you have. If you don’t have that, you don’t have shit, and Walking Dead often didn’t have shit.

All the screenshots on Sony's site are of the DLC, so you're stuck with those. Trust me, looking at the pictures is way better than experiencing the agony that is the DLC.

All the screenshots on Sony’s site are of the DLC, so you’re stuck with those. Trust me, looking at the pictures is way better than experiencing the agony that is the DLC.

Beyond that, the only real game play complaints I have are minor, which is what happens when a game isn’t really a game in the strictest sense. The button mashing stuff has got to go, or Telltale has to include a free visit to a carpal tunnel specialist or a controller with autofire with every purchase. Whichever is cheaper. And finally, if a stage requires a lot of backtracking with nothing between point A and point B that you haven’t seen, I wouldn’t be bothered too much with some kind of auto-get-there option. In one scene, you’re trying to raid a medicine cabinet. In order to do this, you have to get the combination to the safe. You’re going to get it by watching a video tape of a doctor performing an abortion. Ooooh, edgy and mature. But the problem is, the doctor is a zombie now, and one that was already beaten to a bloody pulp. He’s far away from where you’re at, and it’s fucking boring to get there. Yea, we should be able to skip to him. Really, Walking Dead doesn’t need as much actual walking, yet there’s a lot of it present. And it’s especially annoying because the walking animation isn’t exactly life-like. When you get pinned up against an invisible wall, it’s almost like a reverse-moonwalk. Which.. yea I guess that’s actually known as just walking, but it looks really weird.

But nobody cares because the story is a cut above your average video game, so let’s talk about that.

Yes, I enjoyed the writing in Walking Dead. I mean, when it wasn’t awful. The battery bit in chapter one was so very bad. It’s almost obnoxious when the game gets self-depreciating about how bad it was in chapters two and three. If they were going to acknowledge it, they could have come up with a better way of doing it than making fun of it, especially since the game is almost entirely devoid of humor. I don’t know how. Perhaps they could have done something really heavy-handed, like an elaborate back story involving Carley’s baby brother choking to death on a Duracell when she was supposed to be babysitting him but instead she was listening to the radio.

But otherwise, wow. There were times when my jaw dropped. There were times when I shook my head in disbelief. I even teared up at the end when I had Clem cap Lee before he turned into a zombie. Though I was kind of puzzled as to why they didn’t have Lee tell Clem he loved her, or even give the option for it. Some people have argued with me that it didn’t need to be said. Fuck that, says I. Some things need to be said. And the dynamic between Lee and Clem was one of the most moving I’ve ever experienced between two characters in a game-like experience. I kind of wanted to hear one or the other say it.

Once I soaked in the end credits and the final scene where Clem strolled through Ico land before spotting him and Yorda up on the hill (hey, that’s what it looked like), I sat back to ponder what I had just done. It’s been a year since I played chapter one. I hated chapter two (yes yes, I know that’s everyone’s favorite chapter. I guess you guys like your stories predictable and your twists visible by Stevie Fucking Wonder) and figured I was done with the series. Then I was left wanting more by Wolf Among Us, and having no other alternative, I decided to finish Walking Dead. Although I’m very glad I did, it was shortly after I finished the game that I realized what a load of bullshit it is.

Dude's arm looks like a cross between severe sunburn and leprosy from Hell.

Dude’s arm looks like a cross between severe sunburn and leprosy from Hell.

The whole moral choice thing is a farce. If I had real choice in the outcome of the game, I would have shot Kenny, used his wife as zombie bait, and eaten Duck the first time I encountered them. I actually DID try to kill Duck in the first chapter by letting the zombie at the farm eat him, but it didn’t take. Oh no. I had to wait two more chapters to achieve that, and I wasn’t directly involved in his demise. I mean, I got to shoot him, but he was dying anyway and it took the zest out of it. Even more sadly, Kenny had the nerve to keep on living instead of owning up to his failure as a father, husband, and Tony Clifton look-alike and killing himself like any honorable person would do in the same situation. Again, if I had any actual control over the game, I would have murdered him at the start of chapter 3, when it was just us alone in the city, when nobody would have known. Because who has time to deal with a brain-dead redneck whose short temper endangers the entire group in the middle of the Apocalypse? I would have been totally justified, damn it.

Other than my Kenny and clan hatred, I generally played the game straight, keeping Lee as a good man looking for redemption. I put up with Larry’s bullshit, tried to be the level-headed one in every conversation, and stayed out of any argument I figured I couldn’t win. Maybe this is why I found Lee so boring. Also, it turned out that most players did exactly what I did. Over the course of the five chapters, there are twenty-five decisions you can make (five per chapter) that are ranked against the choices of every other player in the world. Of those twenty-five, I went against the majority exactly twice: once when I tried to kill Duck and once when I left Lilly on the side of the road. Then you realize that not one single decision you make ultimately matters because the game will still end one of two ways: with Clem alone and you dead or Clem alone and you as a zombie. To put in perspective how inconsequential your choices are, I was as shitty as humanly possible to Kenny. I shouted him down in every argument. I made every choice possible that I hoped would result in either his death or the death in someone in his family. If it had given me the option to call his wife a ho at one point I would have taken it. BUT, when the time came to convince members of the group that were still alive to follow me as I tried to rescue Clem, it took a single fucking line of dialog chosen correctly to convince him to come along. And I only did it because I figured he was more likely to get eaten with me than without.

I haven’t checked, but I’m not even sure it’s possible to have Kenny not follow you. I mean, he’s vital to a later sequence where he saves a character he was previously butt hurt against. There’s no way that sequence gets cut, I’m guessing. Then he’s all self-sacrificial and the zombies get to finish him instead of me. I watched in horror while this happened. “Oh my God. After all that hard work, the zombies killed Kenny. You bastards.”

And finally, I hated the whole sequence in the hotel room where you have to face the consequences of the choices you made. I mean, I was pretty fucking cool for the most part, so this sequence made no sense. I didn’t steal the dude’s food, yet the guy was extremely bent at me over it. A lot of people raved to me about this spot, but the problem is, the whole sequence only really would have fit in if you played the game like a dickhead, which myself and most of the players apparently did not. Maybe Telltale just assumed every fan of Walking Dead was an asshole and would play accordingly. They didn’t, and thus the big finale made about as much sense as a blood-solvent tampon.

I only complain loudly about those parts because I generally enjoyed everything else Walking Dead had to offer. At least in terms of story. Or until I downloaded the bonus chapter, 400 Days. Here you get micro-sized back stories for the characters that Season Two will center around. So boring were all these twats, with one exception, that any interest I had in season two dropped down to around nil. Two boring pot heads in a car. One boring black kid getting picked up by an obnoxious redneck. A bunch of boring people in a diner. A boring former drug addict teasing a fling with a boring old rich dude and his boring wife. The only person mildly interesting was the convict who escapes from custody.. as the outbreak.. hey wait a second.

"Hey, you guys ever get the feeling that you'll soon end up as the guardian to a little girl with creepy yellow eyes? Because I totally have that going right now."

“Hey, you guys ever get a feeling that you’ll soon end up as the guardian to a little girl with creepy yellow eyes? Because I totally have that going right now.”

Not that it matters. Season Two will sweep Game of the Year awards from people who haven’t played a game since Zaxxon was a thing and get critical acclaim as long as Clem and her creepy yellow eyes looks all adorable as she brandishes a gun and shoots the occasional human. God damn it, yes, I liked the Walking Dead. But its success is a bad thing for games. It represents such a titanic step backwards in game play. Remember game play? When you had actual control over your character and you did things and things mattered and it felt interactive instead of like you’re just taking inventory on shit to do while you wait for the next cut-scene to unfold? You know, the reason why you spend hundreds, or possibly thousands, of dollars towards equipment just to play the fucking things? Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us might be an evolution of sorts in story telling, but games should do a lot more than what Walking Dead does. It’s okay to enjoy it. It’s okay if it becomes a best seller. But let’s not let gaming devolve into a series of interactive novels. That would be a downgrade. Not to mention it would make Madden really fucking weird.

Walking Dead logoThe Walking Dead was developed by Telltale Games

IGC_Approved$19.99 (season pass) and $4.99 (400 Days) noted that there actually was a horrible interactive novel type of Madden already called NFL Head Coach that was the worst thing of all time in the making of this review. Plus it had Bill Cowher on the cover. Shudder.

The Walking Dead is Chick Approved, but not Leaderboard Eligible (non-indie). And if I had fucking waited until today I would have saved $2.45 on the DLC. (head-desk) Oh and you can get the whole season for $2.99 right now if you have PlayStation Plus. 

I swear, I’m back to XBLIG next.

Filed under PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Live Arcade Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Dungeon of Elements

October 21, 2013 by 3 Comments

Dungeon of Elements came across my desk early last week and I thought to myself, “A puzzle game? All right. I’ll play this real quick and have a review out by tomorrow.” Yeah… nope! That wasn’t going to happen. There is much more depth than a few short play-throughs can give you.

This looks familiar and that’s totally alright with me.

Main gameplay is heavily inspired by Dr. Mario. Drop multi-colored pills onto baddies, line things up, baddies are dead. The formula is very familiar and one that most puzzle game fans will be able to jump into right away. I think the game even goes one step further and improves on Dr. Mario a bit as you don’t need to line up pills in a straight line; just connect three like-colored pills in some sort of linked pattern and you’ll kill the baddies. Additionally, not only do you get to kill monsters, you also collect items that you can either equip or use in the game’s crafting system.

As you progress through the story (yes, a story!), you will encounter boss fights to mix things up a bit. For example, one of the first bosses was a giant rat whose rat army would quickly refill the stage as I cleared it out. Another boss was an orc king with an army of orcs that would slowly march toward the top of the screen. Occasionally he’d summon another orc exactly where my pill was falling, causing mayhem as the pill did not go where I had planned. This definitely added some excitement and was a nice change from the level grind. It also gave me a reason to invent more swear words and derogatory slang against orcs which I’m always excited about.

I have a water rod to dowse my fire armor if I get too hot.

I have a water rod to dowse my fire armor if I get too hot.

I mentioned earlier that you can pick up weaponry and armor; these are used to cast special attacks onto the playing field or slow down the fall of the pills. For example, the sweet bo staff skill I have at the moment is an AOE effect that blows up anything in a small area. This is particularly useful when monsters are effectively hiding behind objects on the playfield. Boots temporarily slow the fall of the pills to give you a moment to think about where you want to place them. Admittedly, one could also pause the game because it doesn’t black out the screen when paused, but that’s cheating, and you’d never do that, would you?

Crafting in the game is how you gather better gear and items. It’s an extremely simple system of THING 1 plus THING 2 equals ???. I really hoped you could do stupid things like Dagger + Shortsword = Shortdaggersword, but alas, no such luck; the game makes you do reasonable, logical things like element + weapon = useful thing. Crafting takes a little bit of time to get into because it also requires money that you really don’t have much of at the start. It’s a fun little thing to do during the downtime between rounds, and once you are able to make items, you can sell things you craft for more money than you put into them. Even better, the game actually keeps track of combinations you’ve tried so you don’t have to worry about failed repeats.

I try crafting something that's kind of logical-ish.

I try crafting something that’s kind of logical-ish.

Although there are a few things about the game that are shortcomings, I honestly do not think they take much away from the overall experience. It’s hard to describe without playing it for yourself, but when rotating the pills, they don’t always rotate as they “feel” like they should. As veterans of Dr. Mario will understand, the pills have a predictable way of rotating. The only time this potentially gets in the way is when you’re trying to expertly place a pill into a tight spot, heh heh, and it winds up doing something other than expected.

Item drops were a tad confusing at first because there were so many pieces of gear that had the same stats. I later figured out that there isn’t much of a difference between the items and that their main use is as crafting fodder, but this isn’t obvious for new players.

I wasn’t too keen on linking your Twitter account to the game in order to increase how much loot drops. I don’t like apps posting for me automatically. Thankfully there are some posting options such as “no more than once every 15 minutes” or “only post boss kills,” but it feels both a clever way to get some free advertising and an annoying way to get some free advertising. It’s probably not a bad idea, but irks me. I felt that enough loot dropped for me without linking my account.

Finally, there is one song that plays during the first few stages that is so repetitive, it drove me up the wall. I had to turn the music off and pull up Spotify until I reached a new area. Other than that one song, though, the music is pretty good.

This game is fun and I’m definitely going back to finish it up to try to open up hard mode.

A puzzle game that’s NOT on a mobile device that I’m coming back for? This doesn’t happen much anymore. If you like puzzle games, this one is worth your time.

doelogo

Dungeon of Elements was developed by Frogdice Games.

IGTlogo-01For $10 you, too, can relive the days when your dad wouldn’t let you play Mario 3 because he was addicted to some puzzle game starring Mario, a person I highly doubt has a medical degree.

Filed under PC Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Wolf Among Us – Episode 1: Faith

October 18, 2013 by 2 Comments

I had no familiarity with the source material The Wolf Among Us is based on. I like comic books, but I’m not into comic books. At least not anymore. It’s something I grew out of around age twelve, and back then, my parents certainly wouldn’t have let me read anything with this mature of subject matter. Not that they were prudes. Far from it. They wanted to make sure that I grew up with a good moral compass and not, say, rely on absurd allegories centered around farting and inappropriate sexual innuendos just to make it through a simple game critique. Well, mission accomplished there, parental units.

The Wolf Among Us is based on Fables, which in this case refers to a series of comic books and not a series of over-hyped and mediocre adventure games for Xbox. Within about five seconds, I fell in love with the concept. For those unfamiliar with it, think of it as a cross between ABC’s Once Upon a Time and Roger Rabbit, with strong emphasis on the latter. Then take that cross and douse it with the absolutely seediest, darkest aspects of society. That’s the world Wolf Among Us is set in. The idea is fairy tale characters are all real and all live in New York City, just trying to get by. Now, if you’re a human based fairy tale, great. But if you’re not, you have to buy a magic spell known as a Glamor to disguise yourself so that you blend in with society. If you don’t, or if you can’t pass as a human with or without the Glamor, you get sent to a place called “the Farm” in upstate New York that all the fairy tales bitch about like it’s a prison.

I swear, this isn't what it looks like.

I swear, this isn’t what it looks like.

Having played a lot of Telltale’s licensed fair, I figured I had a good idea what to expect from The Wolf Among Us: a good but vastly overrated by the general gaming populace adventure yarn where the main character is the only likable person in the group. I was wrong. The Wolf Among Us is easily Telltale’s best game yet. The only game they made where I am genuinely on the edge of my seat waiting for the next chapter. I certainly couldn’t say that about the Walking Dead. One of the problems with the video game community is you can’t just think something is alright without having people threaten to tar and feather you. I liked Walking Dead, but good lord were those games so not as good as everyone else says they are. People raved about the writing like it was some kind of transcendent moment in-game history. This is the same game where one of the sections centered around a main character who couldn’t figure out why a radio without batteries or any power source at all wouldn’t work. At that very moment it forfeited the right to ever claim to have good writing. But, Walking Dead is trendy right now and anything that is connected to the property would be better received than a pile of blow-job dispensing diamonds that you could then trade in for further blow jobs.

Right away, the characters of Wolf Among Us were far more interesting than the sleeping pill that was Lee or the utterly annoying Clementine. Here the main character is Bigby, other wise known as the Big Bad Mother Fuckin’ Wolf. He’s repented from his evil ways and is now acting as the sheriff of Fabletown.  he only problem is, all the other fairy tales are skeptical of his conversion and openly don’t trust him. The noir-like atmosphere is also very jarring, but exhilarating in its political incorrectness. The characters chain smoke, drink to excess, swear like sailors, engage in prostitution, beat women, and probably spit on little old ladies as they cross the street. Unlike the schizophrenic Walking Dead, the writing is consistently sharp throughout the first chapter. There’s a few technical hang-ups relating to the dialog-tree structure. I don’t know why after asking the Magic Mirror to view characters, backing out of the scene causes Bigby to say “never mind, I don’t want to see anyone” after he just watched scenes play out for three fucking characters. Stuff like that is definitely breaks the immersion, but not in a deal breaker sort of way.

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall? Who's the coolest critic of all." "Cathy Vice is the one, the Indie Gamer Chick. If you send her a shitty game she'll rip off your dick." Actual dialog from the game. True story. Okay, no, but it should be.

“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall? Who’s the coolest critic of all?” “Cathy Vice is who you seek, the Indie Gamer Chick. If you send her a shitty game, she’ll rip off your dick.” Actual dialog from the game. True story. Okay, no, but it should be.

I found Bigby to be fascinating. Yea, it was annoying that he has the same video game tough guy voice that every fucking gruff male game character has. But, considering this guy goes through cigarettes like some people go through breath mints, I guess it makes sense. I also like how, upon completing the chapter, i found out that most of the players across the world made the same choices I did. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who played Bigby as a nice guy that was genuinely looking for redemption. Yea, I admit, I lost my cool with Mr. Toad and started bitch slapping the ever-loving shit out of him. What can I say? I regret that I never got to bitch slap the shit out of Carley for the whole battery and radio thing in Walking Dead that I will never, ever get over.

There isn’t a single character in this game whose motivations aren’t interesting. The murder-mystery plot is very well handled, and the character study of Bigby is just about the best example of a character study I’ve seen in a game in a long time. To put it in perspective, I’ve been playing games since I was seven years old. I’ve never once played a game based on a licensed property where I wanted to go out and get the licensed property. I did here. I ordered a few of Fables trade-paperbacks right before I started with this review. Oh, I’m not going to read them right away. I want to finish the game series first. But if there’s anything that is a testament to how strong the story of Wolf Among Us is, I dropped $50 getting the first five volumes off of Amazon. That’s over double what the games will ultimately cost. I think that’s an endorsement.

The quick-time event brawls are still clunky as shit.

The quick-time event brawls are still clunky as shit.

Which is not to say the actual gameplay is perfect. This being a Telltale Game on a console, there are all sorts of technical hiccups. At one point, you’re given two leads to the murder, and you have to choose which location you’ll go to first. Three mother fucking times I tried to select to go investigate a prince’s house and three times the game froze solid. The fourth time I instead selected to go investigate Mr. Toad’s house, and it didn’t freeze. Of course, I didn’t fucking want to go there first, but that was the hand the game dealt me. Also, Telltale’s signature unfair quick-time events that involve lining up a cursor and hitting a trigger button still annoy me to no end, but this time I didn’t care because I just wanted to get to more of the plot. The final scene as the chapter ended made me sit up in my chair and blurt out “HOLY FUCK!!” Do you know how many games have ever done that to me? Not one ever.

So that’s Wolf Among Us. Among the best games I’ve played in 2013. I can’t wait for the remaining chapters. I guess this is proof that Telltale can do better than fan services like Walking Dead, Back to the Future, or Monkey Island. Granted, as a licensed property, this is a fan service as well. Probably one that fans of Fables have been waiting a long time for. Well, at least they got a satisfactory one. Meanwhile, I can only cross my fingers and hope like hell that Telltale gets the license to do Veronica Mars next. If they don’t, well, I can’t be held responsible for my actions.

Wolf LogoThe Wolf Among Us was developed by Telltale Games

IGC_Approved$4.99 (ultimately $20 for the subscription cost) are everything a big bad wolf could want in the making of this review.

I swear to Christ, if any of you spoil the plot from the comics on here and I will fucking go stab happy on you. Oh, and Wolf Among Us is Chick-Approved but not leaderboard eligible.

Filed under PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Live Arcade Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Poker Night 2

October 17, 2013 by 6 Comments

Poker Night 2 is free with a PlayStation Plus subscription right now, presumably to drum up interest in Telltale’s latest offering, the Wolfing Dead. The concept is basically a normal game of cards, only you’re listening to the inane banter of four B-list-at-best pop culture characters. Yea yea, I know everyone and their mother just loves Army of Darkness and Ash Williams and would take a knife to my throat for besmirching the name of this iconic character. Meh, whatever. It must be a generational thing, because I don’t particularly find the character all that interesting. I suspected that having him outside of the fantastic settings of his movies would show a character that’s quite dull. Poker Night 2 proves me right. He’s just sort of there, like a catch-phrase spewing cartoon character. Then again, the writing is pretty boring. Maybe this is why they didn’t get Bruce Campbell to do the voice, though they found a very convincing sound-alike.

Speaking of which, I joked on Twitter about that, making a crack about the lack of Bruce and how he “couldn’t cost more than my lawn guy.” He got the joke and wise-cracked back at me. Some of his fans, on the other hand, so did not get the joke and swept in to protect him. Hell, they were doing that before he wise-cracked back. And I’m not talking about people who follow me. I’m talking people who refresh the search results for Bruce Campbell every ten seconds. I don’t have a joke to go along with that. I just found it to be fucking creepy.

Calling this a line-up of B-listers is probably being a bit generous.

Calling this a line-up of B-listers is probably being a bit generous.

Anyway, along for the ride is Brock from Venture Bros. (never watched it), Claptrap from Borderlands, and Sam from Sam & Max. Well, there’s an all-star lineup if there ever was one. Rounding out the field is GLaDOS from Portal as the dealer, and man, is she slumming it here. The inherit problem with Poker Night 2 is what I already said about Ash: these characters work in their own settings, but out of them, they’re just boring. They have nothing in common, and nothing really interesting to talk about. Part of that is the writing is uninspired, but mostly it’s because you just can’t throw five random characters together and expect chemistry. It really feels like something that was rushed through production, with the characters included drawn out of a hat instead of carefully selected to mesh well. I get that it’s hip to be random, but randomness on its own isn’t funny. It’s just random. And then you get to the actual gameplay and find that it’s even worse.

I’ve been a PlayStation Plus subscriber since day one, and I’ve never played a freebie on that service as utterly broken as Poker Night 2 is. This shit is borderline unplayable, with frequent technical hiccups. The game saves between each hand, and if you move along to the next hand before the game finishes saving, the animation and dialog skip like a broken record. I counted the amount of times this happened over a full game: fourteen fucking times. That is absolutely inexcusable. Beyond that, sometimes the soundtrack gets ahead of the animation, or behind it. Like, a full minute ahead or behind it. Even Godzilla movies have better dubbing. Or, you’ll just have the game sometimes freeze for anywhere from 15 second to over a minute. Mind you, none of these problems are one-off things. They’re unavoidable and happen constantly through-out. I can’t speak for whether or not the XBLA version has these glitches. I’m told the PC port doesn’t, but that’s no comfort to PSN owners.

This mostly seems to be caused by the game saving between each and every hand. I’m not sure what it’s saving, exactly.  It sure isn’t done to prevent dialog from repeating. Over the course of a single tournament, Claptrap and GLaDOS repeated the same joke about “the cut of your jib” four times. Wasn’t funny the first time. Got progressively more irritating with every echo. Which is not to say Poker Night 2 is never funny. It’s just too often random chit-chat with no set-ups or punchlines. Any genuine laughs (and some are to be had) certainly aren’t worth slogging through the glitches to get through.

I like how they snuck a picture of GLaDOS into every promotional picture. "Portal is still popular, right? Please love us!" Really, if they needed a Portal reference, wouldn't Cave Johnson have been a better fit?

I like how they snuck GLaDOS into every promotional picture. “Portal is still popular, right? Please love us!” Really, if they needed a Portal reference, wouldn’t Cave Johnson have been a better fit? They could have dropped Ash from the game and saved on licensing rights, because his character didn’t have a single decent line of dialog.

Ignoring all of that, the actual game of poker is mediocre at best. There are only two options: no limit Hold-Em or no-limit Omaha. Poker Night 2 is single-player only, and the AI is utterly fucking brain-dead. There’s supposed to be a sophisticated system of tells and bluffing that you can manipulate by plying the characters with alcohol. BUT, what’s the fucking point with the way the AI plays? Get this: ClapTrap and Sam are the only two left in a hand. ClapTrap goes all-in. Sam does his bluff-routine, then calls the all-in. Then he lays down a 3-5-suited, before the flop. I shit you not. This happened frequently through-out the multiple tournaments I played in. Bluffing doesn’t work when you have nothing in your hand and the only player left has already bet everything he has. I swear to Christ, you find smarter players at 3AM playing free tables on PokerStars.

Maybe Poker Night 2 isn’t as bad on PC. I don’t know. I do know that Poker Night 2 might be a contender for the worst game ever to hit PlayStation Network. It’s glitchy, it’s slow, the AI is useless, and the writing comes across like a cross between terrible fan-fiction and awkward checkout-counter conversations. Telltale is capable of incredible things.  Wolf Among Us (next up for review) is fantastic. But, if five minutes with Wolf Among Us was enough to make me a believer in their potential, two hours with Poker Night 2 is an ominous warning that these guys are more than capable of totally phoning it in. If the aim of putting this worthless piece of shit of a game as a freebie was to get players excited for Wolf, Telltale and Sony couldn’t have done worse if they had hired someone to knock on each subscriber’s door and shoot their dogs.

Poker Night 2Poker Night 2 was developed by Telltale Games

Available for free right now with a PlayStation Plus (normally priced $9.99).

Filed under PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Live Arcade Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Triviador

October 16, 2013 by 6 Comments

Update 2: Triviador’s problems are fixed and the game’s Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval has been reinstated. Don’t fuck it up again, guys.

Update: Triviador updated in November, leaving its Beta stage of development. Unfortunately, the update has wrecked the game, causing numerous problems with disconnects for all players regardless of operating system or web browser.  For this reason, I have to strip Triviador of the Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval at this time. The problem has been ongoing for weeks. The developers are not active in Social media and I can’t see any acknowledgement of problems. If the game is fixed, I’ll reinstate the Seal of Approval. For more details, read this follow-up notice. The review below is no longer accurate.

Triviador is a Facebook-based trivia game that seems to be permanently locked in a beta-stage. I discovered it Friday night while talking with DefunctGames.com owner Cyril Lachel about which board games could transition to Facebook the best. You would think stuff like Scattergories would be a perfect fit amongst the types of social-oriented, quick-and-simple to play fair you see on Facebook. You would be wrong. Hell, Facebook doesn’t even have a board game category. It does have Word & Trivia, which mostly contains knock-offs of Scrabble and its cousins. You’ll also find a lot of stuff based on game shows, though the Facebook versions are often so divorced from the play mechanics of the show that they’re unrecognizable. As if they’ve seen one episode of the show, years earlier, while under general anesthesia, and tried to create their own version based on that limited knowledge.

Owned.

Owned.

So tracking down classic board games and game shows on Facebook was a bit of a bust, but then I found Triviador. Think of it as Risk meets Trivial Pursuit. At the start of the game, three players are randomly assigned a spot on the map for their castle to go. You then play four rounds to determine how many troops you get and where they start on the map. These rounds are played similar to the fastest finger questions from who Wants to be a Millionaire, only every answer is a number. After these four rounds play out, another three rounds of battles take place. One at a time, players choose a space adjacent to a space they occupy. A duel takes place featuring a multiple choice question, with the winning player taking over the space. If both answer correctly, it goes to another fastest finger question. If this is a draw as well, the first person to enter in the answer gets the space. During a final fourth round of duels, players can choose any space on the board. This is significant, because if you take over an opponent’s castle, they’re out of the game and you get all their points. It also sort of defeats the point of the first couple rounds, doesn’t it?

Castles require three “hits” to take over. I found the best strategy to be putting up a perimeter around my base and playing a defensive-oriented game, then taking over on points during the last round. For the most part, this served me well. The only time I really lost a game is when I was slow on the draw. Or when I didn’t read the questions right. Or when the game decided to troll me with an endless parade of questions related to operas or Broadway musicals. No, I don’t fucking know what year Frank Lloyd Wright was born, nor was I even remotely in the ballpark. Wasn’t that the guy who made The Sims? No? Shut up, Cathy? Okay.

Like I said earlier, Triviador is technically in beta right now, and has been for around two years. I didn’t really come across any glitches or issues, besides the whole “pick any space you want to attack, essentially nullifying the previous three rounds” bullshit. Mostly though, I marveled at just how dumb some people were. Get this: if you knock someone’s castle over, you occupy the space it stood on, which is now worth 1,000 points. If you lose a space, you lose that amount of points and the person taking it over gets them. So, let’s say we’re down to the very last question of the very last round. We’ll say the score is 3,000 to 2,000, with me in the lead. Now, you can go for my castle, which still has a full three hit-points left on it, or you can go for the space worth 1,000 points, of which you only need to beat me once. What do you do? Well, if you’re 90% of the mouth-breathers I played against, you go for the castle, giving me three chances to keep my lead instead of one all-or-nothing final question. But hell, sometimes the game could be tied and the person would still go for the castle, instead of any other piece on the board. Now, mind you, if I win the duel (instead of having us both miss the question), I get 100 points, which means I win. Meanwhile, a player who is out of contention to win has a man on the field who is worth enough points for my opponent to win the game, but he gets totally ignored.

Triviador 2

I don’t know why that bugs me, but it does. I can forgive someone not knowing what the chemical symbol for Tin is or what year Phantom of the Opera debuted on Broadway. Quite frankly, I didn’t know them either. But the vast majority of players I encounter on Triviador didn’t have the slightest bit of common sense when it came to strategy. But, it was totally worth it for those nail-biting match-ups that the game sometimes produced. Heck, I even lost a couple and I’m still utterly addicted to Triviador. If you want to know where I’ve been over the last week, there’s your answer.  I also never had to put a single dime into Triviador to binge-play it. You get five games at a time, with reloads coming pretty quickly. As you start to level up more, you’ll run out of the five freebie games quickly, but you practically trip over “bonus adventures” (I currently have a stockpile of 8 built up), and there’s multiple versions of the game that you can switch between on the off-chance that you completely run out of games but still want to keep going. Triviador is the first really good Trivia game on Facebook and worth your time. Hell, it’s worth it just to laugh at those people who think Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for assassinating President Kennedy.

Triviador LogoTriviador was developed by THX Games

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

 

Filed under PC Reviews Tagged with , , , , ,

Poker Date

October 10, 2013 by 1 Comment

Poker Date combines a Royal Deck variation of five-card stud poker with the tired and true XBLIG staples of anime boobies and inept programming.  The result is one of the most hilariously awful games I’ve ever played.  First off, Royal Decks are constructed using everything 9 through Ace out of two decks.  Poker Date only uses one deck worth of cards.  Granted, this is simply a heads-up match, but still, it limits the amount of hands to work with.  Second, when the AI folds a hand, it pronounces it “I foiled.”

I foiled.

I swear to fucking God.

I.  F-O-I-L-E-D!

Maybe Sabrina thought she was at a fencing tournament.

Maybe Sabrina thought she was at a fencing tournament.

Now I’m certainly not one to cast stones at speech impediments.  I have enough trouble pronouncing my own name.  But seriously, you can’t say “fold” correctly?  Good God.  This totally trumps Capcom’s use of Sally from accounting in the all time horrible and lazy voice acting department.  And if any other aspect of this game had been remotely competent, “I foiled” could have become the next big gaming meme.  But, nobody’s going to stick around long enough for that.

The biggest problem is actually how damn smart the AI is.  Without fail, if I was dealt a good hand, the AI would foiled on the spot.  Unless it knew that it had me.  And by knew, I mean it could then change four cards in its hand while I’m holding a two pair, aces and tens.  It then wins with a full house or a flush.  This isn’t luck, we’re talking.  Every single time the AI chucked four cards or more, it won.  The only explanation is the AI could see what cards it would get, or which ones I would get.  But, most of the time, whenever I got anything remotely nice, it foiled immediately.  Fucking clairvoyants aren’t this good.

For some reason, none of the marketplace shots actually show any cards.

For some reason, none of the marketplace shots actually show any cards.

Oddly enough, after changing out cards, the AI almost never foiled.  I actually counted it out over the course of 100 hands that went to the second round of betting.  The AI never once foiled, and won 87 out of 100 hands.  What the fuck?  Which is not to say the AI doesn’t bluff.  During the first round, I took to raising every chance I had, because when I did this, out of 38 opportunities, the AI foiled 25 times.  So after a couple of hours of play, I settled into a rut where neither me nor the AI would gain enough ground to actually win.  Betting is slow and limited and you certainly can’t put all your chips in play.  Finally, I realized I was playing the single worst video poker game ever made and foileded myself.  Poker Date is pretty much the worst thing to happen to the game since Darvin Moon.

xboxboxartPoker Date was developed by Mikirius

$1 said “Poker? I barely know her” in the making of this review.

 

 

 

 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , ,

X S.E.E.D

October 6, 2013 by 2 Comments

Remember that scene in the movie “Big”? No, not the one with the giant keyboard. Nor the one where a 12-year-old-in-Tom-Hanks’-body knocks boots with a businesswoman and makes me wonder if the “I swear he was 30 last week” excuse would hold up in court for her. No, I’m talking about the scene where he’s sitting at a meeting with a bunch of suits, discussing a Transformers line, and just blurts out what the 12 year-old in him is thinking in that innocent kid sort of way. The “I don’t get it” line stuck with me more than anything else in that movie because it reminds me that, hey, kids have some awesome ideas, and many of those aren’t held back by the restrictions or reasoning that many of us adults place on what we think.  Which brings us to this short conversation about one of the more innovative takes on the side-scrolling shooter I’ve seen, X S.E.E.D.:

PUT THIS KID ON THE PAYROLL.

PUT THIS KID ON THE PAYROLL.

So, just in case that didn’t sink in. The only reason we got an original idea on XBLIG among the sea of sub-par voxel miners, first-person zombie shooters, one-button platformers, and puzzle games used as vehicles for displaying morally-bankrupt pictures of undressed anime teens is because someone listened to their kid. It’s the sort of “hey you got peanut butter on my chocolate” genius that keeps gamers digging through the XBLIG marketplace for innovation like this regardless of how much fly-infested sewage they have to wade through in the process.

And what is this original idea, you ask? Well, X S.E.E.D. is an old-school run-and-gun platformer, like Contra, but instead of using the normal arsenal of machine guns and grenade launchers you summon crazy-ass mutant plants that do things like shoot fire in various directions, act as a force-field, or spring up a platform for you to stand on. Summoning these plants is your character’s only defense, as he cannot harm anything himself and will die in only one hit. So essentially you’re constantly putting out temporary turrets and shields in an effort to both mount a forward-moving offense and put up a defense that will keep your goofy-looking scientist hero from dying. There’s a plot about plants taking over the island and you being the only scientist that can save everyone and blah blah blah. If you’ve ever played a game like Contra for the plot, I’m sure there’s a support group somewhere for that. What you expect out of a game like X S.E.E.D. is running and gunning (of sorts), and that’s what you’ll get.

xseedscreen

“This is not what I wanted you to feed me, Seymour.”

On the downside, when you innovate, you usually don’t get everything right the first time. And this is no exception. For just about everything X S.E.E.D. gets right, it misses on something else. For example, the pixel art is vibrant and well-animated in the most retro of ways, but the music and effects are forgettable at best. I went through entire stages without even noticing the music. Another miss is on the weapon selection. You’re given a large amount of plant types over the course of the game, which is nice, but with no way to rearrange them and with some of them being completely useless inventory padding there’s a bit of difficulty getting to the right one quickly via cycling through with LB and RB. And while the old school difficulty, unforgiving with only three lives and no continues, is necessary for such a short game and forces a nice balance between the risk of dying and the reward of more points and the better of two endings, there’s no reason for a death to stick you all the way back at the beginning of the stage. This last one didn’t really make me too angry until the later stages of the game where dying at a boss battle resulted in a solid 30 seconds of little more than holding right. The worst flaw of X S.E.E.D., however, is how slow the pace gets near the end when you try to play it safe with the shield vines. You’ll find yourself inching forward and tossing out barrier after barrier out of fear, and it’s made even worse with the knowledge that the enemy plants really don’t have much they can do about it. Even the bosses only have one attack that will ignore these, and those attacks always have the same pattern throughout that boss battle. It sucks a bit of the “run” out of the “run and gun” genre in which I’d throw this game.

But even with all the little quirks and flaws, X S.E.E.D. ended up being exactly the type of game I wanted right at that moment. It’s straight old-school, it’s speed run friendly with an in-game clock, it’s short enough that the limited lives and lack of continues don’t make me feel too frustrated and helpless, it controls well, and most importantly it’s fun and innovative. The only thing I’d ask for on the XBLIG version, a high score board, is present on the free-with-option-to-donate Ouya version, but without it I’d still say that X S.E.E.D. is worth both your time and the paltry dollar that it costs.

xseedbox

IGTlogo-01

X S.E.E.D. was developed by Wide Pixel Games.

$1 wants to believe that Little Shop of Horrors is the prequel to this game in the making of this review.

X S.E.E.D. has earned has been awarded the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval by Shin Hogosha. Leaderboards for Indie Game Team are coming soon.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Star Runner

October 5, 2013 by 4 Comments

Have you ever thought you should dig out your old Game Boy and relive some old memories? Have you ever given thought to the idea that garage door openers and their one-button controls should also be able to play video games? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then do I have the game for you: Star Runner.

Their light-hearted advertisement.

Their light-hearted advertisement.

Unfortunately, Star Runner made me realize that there is a definite knack to recreating the Game Boy experience and that the guys at Revolvus do not have it. On the Game Boy you had a directional pad and two buttons to work with to create some fantastic experiences such as Wario Land, Link’s Awakening, and Kirby’s Dream Land. The creators of this game boiled what made the Game Boy great down to something between Tiger Electronics games and playing with a rock.

At the start this game had everything going for it to me: The devs seemed to have a sense of humor in their ad, it was $1, it had a female character, and she had pigtails. (Shut up, it doesn’t take much.) From the description of the game, things sounded like they were going to be great: You run from zombies, you run with parkour ninjas, and you collect pizzas from pizza delivery robots while jumping between planes that are flying in a very unsafe formation. I learned that last bit while attending a school known for its flight program. Hey, how do you know if a student is in aviation? They’ll tell you. (Go UND!)

The game itself is just flat out boring. There is only one thing you can do and that’s jump–jump over obstacles, jump over walls, and jump off the heads of other people. You’d think that with jumping being the only thing you’re able to do in the game, it would be very well refined. Nope. The hit detection when you land on an NPC, something vital to the first third of the game, is so horrible that you will constantly miss and wind up dead very quickly. It’s infuriating when, time after time, you feel as though you should have landed a jump yet wind up as zombie chow.

I tried this game three different times, and every attempt ended in a rage-quit, each caused by frustration at the jumping. My final and most ragey rage-quit happened during the ninja portion of the game. You follow a number of ninjas as they parkour their way over rooftops, timing your jumps with theirs to reach the end of each level. At first this was going better than the zombie area, and I thought that perhaps there was some enjoyment to be found in this title. That feeling faded instantly when I reached a section of the level that was completely obstructed from view, yet I was expected to avoid some obstacle. There was absolutely no way that I could discern when to jump to avoid a death caused by being unable to see my character. At that point it’s not even giving the player a chance, so I turned it off with a huff and promptly deleted the game.

I take it back. Even playing with a rock is more fun than playing this game. At least with a rock you could chuck it at some snobby aviation students.

xboxboxartStar Runner was developed by Revolvus.

At $1, you could buy batteries for your Tiger Electronics game at a discount store.

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , ,

Cooties: Patient Zero and The Heckler

October 4, 2013 by 5 Comments

Sigh.  A few months ago, the much lambasted Silver Dollar Games released their long-awaited, DREAM-BUILD-PLAY winning title One Finger Death Punch onto the market.  Despite being well received by pretty much everyone who played it, it bombed hugely.  And now Silver Dollar is back to throwing out hastily produced mini-games in short order.  This is depressing.   It would be like if Ron Jeremy quit adult films to star in a Martin Scorsese crime epic, winning the critical acclaim and the respect of his peers while sweeping the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, but the film bombed so it’s back to having bimbos suck him off to make his gas payment.  That’s what this feels like.

I’ve always said that talent is something that can’t be taught.  It’s something you inherently have.   You can improve upon it.  You can nurture it.  But you can’t create it from nothing.  I assure you all, a team that had no talent could not have come up with One Finger Death Punch.  Some people get lucky, but nobody could get that lucky.  Silver Dollar probably wishes they did have that kind of luck.  They’re heartbroken by OFDP’s performance.  I am too, and I barely got to play the game.  Everyone has their theories on why, with the most common explanation being karmic justice.  Look, I get that Silver Dollar is not the most beloved developer, but regardless of your feelings for them, OFDP under-performing is nobody’s victory, and shame of you if you feel that way.

My theory is still that the box art looked too generic, like a bad Last Airbender rip-off.  Allow me to elaborate.  Look at it.

One Finger Death Punch

It’s really good-looking.  Very professional.  A cut above your typical XBLIG release in terms of quality.  But, still kind of generic.  It looks like any other game.  And the art isn’t really representative of the quirky gameplay involving stick-figures pummeling each-other to death.  You would never guess that beautiful box art is connected to this game.

One Finger Death Punch 2

See what I mean?

More over, the box art doesn’t stick out.  Here’s a screenshot of One Finger Death Punch sitting alongside other games released around the same time.

SD2

It blends in.  Gets easily lost in the shuffle.  The box art is good, but it doesn’t do that perfect siren song that lures potential buyers in, even to get a quick sneak peek.  Really, it looks like it could be just any other game.  Now compare it to Learn to Eat, SD’s first post-OFDP rush-job that immediately was a bigger hit despite taking about 1% of the effort OFDP did to create.

SD1

Say what you will about it being lazy or rushed out, but you can’t say it blends in. It sticks out.  People would want to see what that game is.  It’s unfortunate that Silver Dollar wasn’t able to carry that over to their big, award-winning, mega-hyped title.  I truly in my heart of hearts believe that is what cost it sales.

And now, SD is having a sulk and releasing unplayable shit back into the marketplace.  Again, depressing is the word that springs to mind.  I bought two of them.  First up was Cooties: Patient Zero.  It’s a text-based adventure featuring still images instead of static anime screens like a typical game in this genre does on XBLIG.  Here, you’re a loser with touching issues.  Your billionaire father gives you an ultimatum: get laid or get cut off from your inheritance.  Wait, didn’t Chris O’Donnell already make a movie about this?

Look, at the risk of getting quoted (again) in SD’s satirical “Awards” tab they include in games that contains all the hatred and anger they’ve generated from the community, this game really sucks.  And I’m not just saying that because it’s an SD game.  There are dozens of games exactly like this on XBLIG by a variety of developers, and all of them have the same problems.  Firstly, when presented with a multiple choice question for which path you’re taking, it’s impossible to determine which answer is the bad one that will get you killed and which one is the good answer that moves the story along.  In Cooties, three wrong guesses leads to you “getting Cooties” and starting over.  And, by wrong guess, I mean the girl you’re courting physically touches you on the hand.  No, really.

The concept is the guy you're playing has can't stand any female contact. The voice actor playing him seemed miscast. The dude had a deeper voice, sort of like a bad Solid Snake knock-off, instead of a shrill, squeaky, geeky voice that would have been a better fit. But when you rush games out the door like you have a 30 minute delivery or-your-money-back guarantee, I guess casting isn't something you give a lot of thought to.

The concept is the guy you’re playing as can’t stand any female contact. The voice actor playing him seemed miscast. The dude had a deeper voice, sort of like a bad Solid Snake knock-off, instead of a shrill, squeaky, geeky voice that would have been a better fit. But when you rush games out the door like you have a 30 minute delivery or-your-money-back guarantee, I guess casting isn’t something you give a lot of thought to.

So at one point in the game, you end up in a restaurant.  The girl requests that you hand her a menu.  If you do so, you take a hit point because the girl touches you.  Later, she asks to have the salt passed to her.  Doing this does NOT result in a hit point.  Okay, how the fuck does passing a menu (which is typically a large piece of laminated paper) result in any physical contact, but passing a salt shaker, which is, you know, the size a fucking salt shaker, not result in some skin-on-skin contact?  And that’s exactly what I’m talking about.  It’s so random and so illogical that nobody can possibly guess what the correct answer is supposed to be.  All these games have this problem.  I’ve played over ten on XBLIG and not one was exempt.

Cooties: Patient Zero was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said "check points alone might have led to the game getting a very mild recommendation in the making of this review)

Cooties: Patient Zero was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said “checkpoints alone might have led to the game getting a very mild recommendation in the making of this review)

This leads to a bigger problem: no check points.  When you die, you have to start over again.  Only the opening scenes seem to be skippable.  Once you’re past those, you have to sit through the same dialog again and again until you get things right.  There’s no on-screen text here.  All the dialog in Cooties is done via voice acting from two performers that sound so bored that you can practically hear them doze off a few times.  The only thing that ever breaks up the dialog is the occasional quick-time button mashing event.  Ultimately, Cooties is just plain boring, and there is no bigger sin a game can commit.  Yea, it’s also dumb, but endearingly so.  I wanted to see how the story played out, but not so much that I would sit through endless replays of the same dialog until I hit the exact logic-string the developers used.  Beyond that, Cooties is confusing as to what you’re trying to accomplish.  The game encourages you to shack up with a girl, but discourages you from making any contact with them. It seems like a story that had no editing done before it was made.  Given the breakneck speed SD has been putting games out, I’m guessing that is the case.  They’re hardly alone in doing this, but unlike most developers that do, they’ve proven they know how to make really, really good games.  That’s why people like me get frustrated with them.

Every time you heckle, the meter fills up a little bit. If you fill it up all the way, the dude has a nervous breakdown and the game is over. It's so badly done.

Every time you heckle, the meter fills up a little bit. If you fill it up all the way, the dude has a nervous breakdown and the game is over. It’s so badly done.

So then I tried The Heckler, and it turned out to be even worse.  The idea is, a dude is on stage reading poetry and you press A to heckle him.  If you do so too much, you game over.  And that’s really it.  The poetry is hilariously pretentious and the concept of heckling someone vomiting it is solid, but there’s almost no play mechanics here.  I kind of wish there had been.  I was so mesmerized by the over-the-top dialog that I did a play-through without pushing anything, laughing my ass off at it.  But the actual game of heckling but not heckling too much, is dull.  What really sucks is that Silver Dollar provably knows how to make a game with minimalist gameplay be fun, exciting, and engaging.  I certainly wouldn’t expect it from every game of theirs, but they’ve put out three games since September 11, none of which really serve to entertain. They’ve been accused of trolling the marketplace in the past, and stuff like this just fuels that.  Why live down to that?  And why deflect everything with “we’re just having fun” or “we have no experience”.  Which, by the way, that’s tough to use when you’ve made nearly a hundred games and won prize money based on how much potential one had.

The Heckler was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said the game really needed some kind of "throw rotten fruit" mechanic in the making of this review)

The Heckler was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said the game really needed some kind of “throw rotten fruit” mechanic in the making of this review)

Silver Dollar has a reputation of not being open to criticism, and I’m fairly certain they hate my guts, but I do want to offer them this: I never say anything I don’t mean.  If I say you have talent, I would hope that means something.  I’ve reviewed over 400 games since 2011, and I’ve seen what games by people who truly have no talent look like.  You guys don’t fall into that category.  I know it must have been demoralizing to have a game you poured your heart and souls into not be well received on a commercial basis.  But you have something many out there only wish they could have: talent.  People aren’t pissed at you because you’re dumping out games in short order.  If the games were fun, nobody would care.  These games are boring, and that’s what bothers people.  One Finger Death Punch wasn’t a very complex game.  It featured minimalist play mechanics, and it was spectacular.  You guys have an eye for that play style, and this was hardly the only game of yours that was well received.  I’m not saying you should stress yourselves to death like you did with OFDP.  You need to find a healthy balance between having fun and making decent games.  Cooties and Heckler were boring.  That’s what pisses people off.  It feels like you’re not trying.  Be honest with yourselves: you’re really not.  With your amount of talent, the sky is the limit for you.  OFDP didn’t bomb because you tried too hard.  It was just shitty luck.  Don’t let that spoil your talent.  You don’t owe it to us.  You owe it to yourselves.  You can do better.

Though I admit, it does suck that OFDP bombed.  Hell, you would have been better off spending your DREAM-BUILD-PLAY prize money on hiring Patrick Stewart to do the poetry for The Heckler.  That.. that would have been fucking awesome.

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