In November 2008, the same month Xbox Live Community Games launched, I organized a geek dinner. I wanted to make sure there was some real geekery involved, so two days before the dinner I downloaded Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. Until that weekend I had never developed a game.
This is not to say I never thought about it. I have been reading about game development since the early 90’s. My favorite topic is implementation of artificial intelligence. By 2008 I had read at least 10 books on game programming and installed the DirectX SDK on three separate occasions. Generally the process was install DirectX, follow some basic tutorials, see the effort required to make an actual game, loose interest.
XNA was different. In two days I went from knowing nothing to having a fully working Atari 2600 Combat clone. I went to the geek dinner with more than just some example code, I had a working game. I never got to share much code though. Some people brought kids and the kids wanted to play the game non-stop. They fully enjoyed this crude little game and got too loud shouting exclamations of fun for the other patrons. A game that I made! Granted I stole 100% of the gameplay but seeing the kids faces I was hooked. This is the drug that makes indie game developers, aka people willing to starve making something that will make them no money.
Around this time I remember looking at the games in Xbox Live Community Games (now Xbox Live Indie Games). There was some weird junk like In The Pit (a game with no graphics) and sin(Surfing) (more tech demo than game). There was also fun games like Weapon of Choice (Contra inspired shooter) and Blow (artistic physics puzzle game by yes, that David Flook). It was a bizarre freak show of gaming that welcomed everyone to join it. That has always been best thing about XBLIG, anyone can share their game. To paraphrase the mis-attributed Voltaire quote, “I think your game is shit, but I’ll defend to the death your right to publish it.”
It would be a year before I could focus on game development again. I had just launched CodeStock, and had CodeStock 2009 to plan. I wasn’t completely passive however, in the between time I talked Dylan Wolf into forming FuncWorks with me. Dylan is by far one of the best programmers I’ve known (also, not found of me linking that post). We work well together, never clashing on egos. Probably because he accommodates my ego and I don’t notice. Shorty there after, acknowledging we need a graphic artist, we add my then girlfriend now wife Cicelie.
As CodeStock 2009 wrapped, we focused on game development (after a brief attempt at a t-shirt site for Cicelie). With the experience of hosting the Chainsaw Buffett podcast I launched the Feel the Func podcast. This turned out to be the smartest thing I did, though it was just a side project at the time. I also did a really dumb thing, common among new game developers. I made a teaser video for a game that four years later still is nowhere near done.
It doesn’t look like much, but as a developer I had created a model, animated that model (which is why the walk cycle sucks), rendered it in game, moved it with a controller, and blended the animation with user input (turning the torso). I wish I had a video of Cicelie’s model moving (the mech screenshot at the end) because she did a much better job than I.
In the next few months we began to realize the size of scope required for ROCS. My oldest daughter wanted a game she had been playing at school for her birthday called Rumis. I suggested we pause on ROCS and create a game based on Rumis called IncaBlocks. I also decided I was not under enough stress and signed a publishing contract for my first (and only) eBook the XNA 3D Primer. Both were completed in the next three months.
I learned a lot in those three months. First, I have no desire to be an author even though I enjoy writing. Second, I suck at game design.
IncaBlocks flopped, and flopped hard. Not even a dead cat bounce. The best thing I can say about IncaBlocks is it wasn’t ROCS. If I had taken my dream game and killed it with the mistakes I made on IncaBlocks I don’t think I could have recovered. I had little emotional investment in IncaBlocks and it was easy to do a cold, clinical autopsy. Final verdict? The game is not fun and there is no awareness of XBLIG even within the Xbox community.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the first problem, but I had an idea on the second and GameMarx was born. The idea was to create an XBLIG review site that treated indies as AAA games were treated. This mean not just reviews and news, but also podcasts and videos plus a database of games. Websites and podcasts I knew, but I had a lot to learn about video production. One of these days I’ll dig out the very first episode of “The Show” that was scrapped and reshot, but man is it rough.
Reviews were serious business at GameMarx. We create a set of standards and guidelines and followed it religiously. The biggest rules we didn’t write down: the price of a game is never a factor, avoid the “angry reviewer” style, and a review is the personal view of the author, nothing more. These rules required a lot of time and effort from a reviewer, but we still ended up writing a combined 99 reviews in the year we spent on written reviews.
There were only a handful of video reviews done. I wish we had done more of these, but they took a lot of time to edit (I still need to finish editing Dylan’s video review of Aesop’s Garden). Instead we created a segment on The Show to talk about new releases and recent reviews while playing the games. This concept lead to GameMarx Trials where we played a game’s trial mode site unseen. Far from a review (each episode starts off with “this is not a review” title card) these were much easier to produce quickly and get out while the games were still on the new release list.
As GameMarx grew it became clear that XBLIG websites had the same problem as the games – no awareness. We were far from the only site covering XBLIG, and I decided to build a website of websites that would link us all together (webrings for those old like me). I contacted all the sites I knew of, got permission, and also contacted Nick Gravelyn and Andy Dunn (aka the ZMan) about taking over the domain XboxIndies. The site keeps a database of XBLIG, sales and chart performance, and also aggregates news and reviews from the participating sites. We even made a small API for mobile app developers (check out XBLIG Companion).
None of these articles got much mainstream attention. So in 2011 when the XBLIG section was again buried, I took my growing video editing skills and created a video using Major Nelson’s own words against him. This is GameMarx most popular non-boob video to date:
Didn’t make the cut, but there was a bit for the video where I tried to voice search for “Cthulhu Saves the World” and “Zeboyd Games” with no success. (If you want to know the most viewed video including boobs you’ll have to find it yourself.)
At the end of 2011 we decided to step away from covering the games. The site was growing, but it was clear to us the effort required was going to mean that’s all we did. In 2011 we played every game released on XBLIG so before hanging it up we did the GameMarx 2011 XBLIG Game Awards.
What made it easy to leave was XboxIndies had a steady flow of content from other sites, and Indie Gamer Chick was here to stay. While Cathy has a different style, and is dead wrong about review scores (no I’m not), she is getting attention for XBLIG developers and games. I’m also 37 and she’s still in high school I think with the I-don’t-have-three-daughters kind of free time I don’t. This means not only can she review many more games, but also has time to put together a project like the Indie Royale Indie Gamer Chick Bundle.
Leaving the review world meant we had a bunch of game codes we no longer had a right to use. So we created the GameMarx Indie Mega-Pack Giveaway to unload the extra codes (with permission of course). Several XBLIG developers contributed more codes and we ended up over 50 games to giveaway. Voice actress Rina-chan lent her talents to the promo video. We also ran a survey of the entries and collected some data on what gamers think about XBLIGs.
Getting back to development was a wonderful feeling. I took an idea I had for a game called Captain Dubstep and made a goal of submitting it to Dream Build Play 2012. At this point most of us XNA developers admitted XNA was dead from Microsoft’s point of view, so I created a site called “XNA’s Last Dance” and extended an invite to XNA developers to add their blogs and commit to entering what was the last Dream Build Play competition for XNA. This site wasn’t a success in terms of traffic, but it had a since of community behind it and I’ll probably bring over the idea of the site into GameMarx later this year.
What happened to Captain Dubstep? Well, the game wasn’t fun but we did manage to make the deadline. We did a whole postmortem at GMX 2012 if you care about the gritty details, but let’s just say we had no scope defined so it was a train wreck of direction changes.
I looked at the screenshots and was like “What is he talking about? It doesn’t look bad at all!” Then I watched the trailer, and was like “um, this looks like the worst thing ever created by man. Way worse than Ouya.”
I wish I could say the rest of 2012 was as productive. We did launch a few open source XNA based projects including XTiled and XSpriter. Most of the time though we spent in limbo, not sure of where to go after XNA. We changed the podcast to “mike only” and tried our hands at Let’s Play videos. I thought exploiting my daughters by making them play NES games on camera would be internet gold, but creating a viral video is harder than it looks. It also has become clear that making Let’s Play videos takes more time than anything else we’ve done, and would kill any time for game dev.
In May of 2013 I participated in the Ludum Dare, and in a weekend created the game Quest. For the first time I used Unity and I loved it (after a brief period of projecting my old XNA girlfriend on it). Unity is not like XNA in that you will do more scripting than programming, but once you get the hang of the IDE you can be much faster. The asset store is also a huge plus for a Unity developer – tons of art is a few bucks away.
Ludum Dare has a since of community I haven’t felt since the “good ol’e days” of XNA. If you’re a game developer, go now and mark your calendar for the next completion date. There are three full competitions a year and mini-LD competitions just about every month. I cannot recommend this more.
So what’s next for GameMarx and the FuncWorks crew? I’ve had plenty of time to think on this while recovering from having all teeth extracted due to extended radiotherapy I received ten years ago (fun FuncWorks fact: both Dylan and I are cancer survivors). The podcast will return shortly and will stay developer focused (probably with more Unity talk). If the content is useful to other developers I cannot say but hosting it has forced me to study deeper into game design that I would have on my own.
I want to continue Let’s Plays, but with a focus on Indies. The indier the better. I’d like to get to a point where I can regularly cover indies in GreenLight or Kickstater. Yes, that means betas and prototypes. I have no interest in the review side of things, I’ll leave that to Cathy and her growing staff (besides, she isn’t a fan of Kickstarter so I won’t have to worry about her page views crushing mine). This doesn’t mean I will play anything, I’m only going to play a game if I find it interesting at some level. And this doesn’t mean only positive comments – sending me your baby’s prototype means I can comment on how ugly it is even if it’s really smart. Also it has been eating paint chips so you might wanna check on that.
I’m still kicking around game ideas for FuncWorks. I want to get out another game or two in Unity before attempting anything like ROCS.
What about Microsoft? Well Unity means I won’t be making any XBLIGs for the Xbox360. The Xbox One? Who knows, even Microsoft can’t figure out what the Xbox One will be for Indies and with no plans for Indies at launch I see no reason to make any plans myself. If they get their act together and create a viable program I’ll look into it. Keep in mind while they announced/reversed their self publishing stance this week the XBLIG dashboard was frozen. Microsoft has yet to put indies on an equal playing field with publisher backed games in any of their stores. Call me jaded, but I just spent the last five years waiting for them to deliver on the promise of “democratize game distribution” and will need to see proof before believing this time is real.
Last, a big thank you to the fans and community who have shared in our journey. I’m still surprised and smile every time someone sends us an email!
I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming. I thought Mega Man 9 was alright. I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so. I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid. And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider. I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing. I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.
With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well. Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about. With platformers, it gets especially difficult. Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it. And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice. Vintage Hero doesn’t have that. It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy. Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.
Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.
Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play. Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms. The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man. It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets. His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s. When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man. Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret. If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.
But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there. Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles. Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system. As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out. Of course, it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title. There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush. Is it too short? Perhaps. It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be. If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate. Me? I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.
Vintage Hero isn’t flawless. I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own. I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses. It all felt a bit generic. The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal. It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody. Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged. Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design. Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen. But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.
You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out. And it does. It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more. Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own. Its gameplay is fine-tuned. Its levels inspired. It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did. But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy. By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed. Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review. Pure, unbridled love of gaming did. And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.
(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)
80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review. Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff. It was all about the color swapping.
Back in April, as the gaming landscape was preparing for a next-gen level shakeup, I was only thinking about one thing: XBLIG is almost done. I mean, there would be indies on Xbox One of course, but the community that I’ve come to know and love would change. It might be better. It might be worse. But it would certainly not be the same. I’ve thought about how my previous reviews would lose their relevance once those games were no longer available. I’ve thought about the types of games the hundreds of developers I’ve come to know and befriend will create in the future. Change is scary. I’ve spent two years trying to be the best (if not, the loudest) advocate for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Tough Sell
Has my blog actually done anything? Maybe, but not as much as I would have liked. Some developers have credited positive reviews from me for causing a brief sales spike, but nothing significant. On the flip side, I’ve had developers of games I absolutely cremated credit me with a bump in demo downloads.
LaserCat
But then I get down to the sad truth of the matter. There are games on my Leaderboard that have sold under 1,000 copies. Hell, there are games on it that have sold under 500 copies. There are games on XBLIG where I am literally the only person that bought it. I’ve played amazing games that sold so poorly that the developers became demoralized and quit. Being Indie Gamer Chick has been the privilege of my life, but sometimes the tales of woe from developers can be downright heartbreaking.
With the sun setting on this generation, I wanted to try to make one last big push for Xbox Live Indie Games. The community has come together in the past and done their best to promote the platform. There has been three promotions called the Indie Games Uprising that tried to showcase the best new XBLIGs. Unfortunately, the quality of those games was a mixed bag of some genuine gems to go with some unpolished, unfinished turds. The last Uprising was particularly devastating. Microsoft didn’t promote it until long after it had already ended, and when they finally did, the main game featured was Sententia. A well-meaning title that was almost universally recognized as being one of the most abysmal games the platform had seen. To have a game of its quality be the focus of an event designed to promote the best of XBLIGs only served to cement the unfair reputation XBLIG has of being nothing but low quality games that aren’t worth the average one dollar price tag.
I believed the reputation myself before I stated my blog. From the time XBLIG launched until the time that I started Indie Gamer Chick, I bought two games for it. Breath of Death VII was the first. I Made a Game with Zombies in It was the second. I enjoyed both, but attempts at finding more titles of their quality didn’t seem worth the effort. Mostly, I found a lot of demos of stuff that felt like they were developed over the course of a week, devoid of passion, and aimed at entertaining nobody. When I finally started my blog, it didn’t take me too long to find out that there are some really good games on the platform. But the sheer number of awful games drowns out the good.
Beyond that, XBLIG also got a reputation of being nothing but clones of popular games, particularly Minecraft. I’ve played the two most famous of those, Castleminer Z and FortressCraft. I didn’t like them, but I wasn’t really interested in Minecraft either. After playing them, I will say that they are quality games, if you’re into that sort of thing. But there are also a lot of similar games on the platform that weren’t as well produced as those two. At the same time, people would say things like “the top two Minecraft clones weren’t as good as Minecraft was.” Well, of course not (though I’ve heard from some Minecraft fans that actually prefer the XBLIG clones). But their popularity was directly tied to the fact that Minecraft wasn’t available on Xbox. Unfortunately, having clones top the sales charts unfairly painted the platform to look like it was only good for clones. Or if not clones, games featuring Avatars. Regardless of the quality of those games (admittedly, most games centered around Avatars are horrid, but not all of them), most regular gamers don’t like Avatars to begin with, and that turned them off the platform. Then you have non-gaming apps such as Rumble Massage, which is actually the #29 best-selling XBLIG of all-time as of this writing. When there are thousands of titles on the platform and an app that turns your controller into a vibrating dildo has sold better than 99.999% of them, people are just not going to associate that platform with quality video games.
Smooth Operators
So that is the handicap that myself, along with dozens of other advocates of XBLIG, have dealt with. I certainly wasn’t the first critic to focus on XBLIG. I’m just the most successful. But that success is only in comparison to other sites with an XBLIG focus. Your average moderately popular indie gaming site does multiples of what I do on my best day. It’s just plain hard to get gamers excited about good titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. It carries too much baggage. It’s also hard to get someone to take another look at something they’ve long since dismissed. That’s just human nature. In the case of XBLIG, most of what was wrong with it before is still problematic today, so anyone glancing would be likely to assume that nothing has changed. And they’re right, because nothing really has changed. That’s because there were very good games on the service all along. You just had to look closely to find them.
I had two ideas for trying to get a new audience exposed to XBLIG before the new consoles launched. The first was to do a bundle of PC ports for XBLIG. The problem with that was the odds on being able to get one off the ground were probably slim. Even good XBLIGs are a tough sell because of the stigma the brand carries. The other option was to do a massive giveaway of the best XBLIGs over the course of a single day. Well, you know how it played out.
Surprise! We Like Your Idea!
I sent an email off to the guys at Indie Royale sheepishly explaining my idea for a bundle centered around Xbox Live Indie Games. I couldn’t pitch them on the merits of sales potential, because there is no denying that the whole idea was a long shot at best. Thus, I did exactly what I advise people not to do when seeking investments from venture capitalists, or crowd funding, or angel investors: I pitched to them from the heart. I explained to them how the XBLIG/XNA community “adopted” me and what they’ve meant to my life. I was frank about why XBLIG’s reputation was fair, but the fogging effect it created caused the majority of gamers to miss out on some of the best indies of this generation. Finally, I basically said that these developers deserve a break, and that exposure on Indie Royale would not just benefit those with games in the bundle, but could open up the doors for greater recognition for the hundreds of talented developers whose games have sat unloved on XBLIG.
Little Racers STREET
Graeme, one of the main guys at Indie Royale, did respond to me. Which is awesome considering that I’m ultimately small potatoes on the indie scene. Not only did he respond, but I had caught his interest. We discussed the types of games I would include, and how we could set this apart from other bundles. Then, things went quiet for a while. So quiet that I was sure I got the blow off. So, I turned my attention to my alternative plan: a huge giveaway of the best PC ports for XBLIG. The idea was, the developers would have their games free for one day only: July 1, for Indie Gamer Chick’s Second Anniversary. After lining up over a dozen top-notch games, many of which I had planned to include in the bundle (plus other games that would be discounted), I thought I had organized a pretty good little event.
Then I heard back from Graeme. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was officially on. I just had to round up the games.
I changed my underwear and started contacting developers.
Rounding up Games
Your typical bundle usually has five games. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle has eight. The reason for that is simple: I wanted gamers to get the best value for their money as possible. Many of these games sell for between $1 to $3 on Xbox Live right now, not to mention that some would have been featured on previous bundles. But most importantly, I wanted people to see that there is a huge variety of very good games on the platform that they had been missing out on.
If I could have, I would have included every single developer who wanted in. But that wasn’t an option. I’ve made tons of friends who develop XBLIGs since starting my site. I wish I could have included those I was closest with. But the concept of the bundle was that it was supposed to represent the tippy-top of XBLIG quality. After coming up with several variations, I ultimately decided to go off my leaderboard and pick the first eight games that were available in sequential order.
For those new to Indie Gamer Chick, the Leaderboard is a concept I adapted from BBC’s automotive show Top Gear. The idea I had was I would rank every game that I enjoyed in the exact order I would prefer to play them. The method is actually very simple. Whenever a new game receives my Seal of Approval, I start at the bottom of my list and ask myself if I would rather play the new game or the old one. If it’s the new one I prefer, I go up to the next game on the list. I do this until I reach an old game that I prefer over the new one. The new game is then placed below that title on the board. It’s been a fun idea that works really well. It’s interactive. My readers get to debate placement. It also gives developers something to aim for. Just having it made the selection process for this bundle pretty easy. Or so I thought.
Right off the bat, the #3 game on my site, We Are Cubes, was eliminated. It has no PC port, and there wasn’t enough time to get one up and running. The #2 ranked game, Gateways, was not available because the developer already had plans to be in an upcoming bundle. #9, Bleed, was only recently listed on Steam and the timing wasn’t right, but I have no doubt they’ll be in a future bundle. Games like Miner Dig Deep (#11) and Star Ninja (#13) also have no PC ports, while Cthulhu Saves the World (#12) has been in more bundles than I can count. That was cool, because everything in my Top-25 I would proudly stand by as the cream of the XBLIG crop.
But this was a bundle that was about the XBLIGs. So I considered putting some games that were well received by everyone but me in the bundle, with Apple Jack being the game that I felt would probably be the most well received. The problem there was Apple Jack isn’t out on PC yet. It will be soon, and for fans of punishers, you’ll probably like it a hell of a lot more than I did. I thought about including the most popular game on XBLIG that I’m incapable of playing due to my epilepsy: Score Rush by Xona Games. That wasn’t an option because they already had a bundle planned out. Finally, I almost went completely nepotism corrupt and including Aeternum by Brooks Bishop, who is one of my better friends I’ve made through Indie Gamer Chick, not to mention the man who designed my mascot. But that just plain wouldn’t have been right. His game was well received by fans of Bullet Hells, but I absolutely hated it. I get along with bullet hells about as well as I imagine Michael Vick will get along with Cerberus.
So my lineup was set. And then I lost Escape Goat. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong. He wanted in, but he had already committed to other bundles and deals and had to pull out. This was pretty devastating, because Escape Goat is the #1 ranked game on the Leaderboard. I consider it to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made, and I’ve reviewed nearly 400 of them. I also lost Chompy Chomp Chomp, the #5 game on my board, which I consider to be the best party game of this entire gaming generation, indie or otherwise. I was counting on its inclusion because pure party games are quite rare in these kind of bundles, and I wanted it to set this bundle apart from the rest. The developers at Utopian World of Sandwiches were besides themselves when they had to drop out. They wanted in, but a miscommunication forced them out. That sucks. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking about it. Chompy Chomp Chomp is a game that didn’t sell extremely well on XBLIG, but it’s worth your time. Gather up your friends, because you’ll never have a better party for $1, I promise you.
So I went back to the list. Again, many games were just not options based on being too recently featured in other bundles. Penny Arcade Part 3 was out. DLC Quest was out. A couple of my favorite puzzlers, Pixel Blocked! and Aesop’s Garden had no PC ports. Thankfully, the vastly overlooked SpyLeaks was available. Finally, I went to Orbitron, one of my personal favorite games on XBLIG that, I admit, got a mixed-reception elsewhere. Though to be frank, I’m disappointed that ArcadeCraft, which was created by Orbitron developers Firebase Industries, had no PC port. This is thanks to its use of avatars as characters. Yea, ArcadeCraft ranks two spots below Orbitron on the Leaderboard, but there’s no questioning that is has a larger appeal. Seriously guys, get cracking on that PC port. No XBLIG screams “this would be a PC megahit” quite like ArcadeCraft does.
Orbitron: Revolution
The eight games confirmed for real, I had one last thing to do. I really did want to include as many developers as I could, but the problem was, the more games, the smaller the piece of the pie each would get. Indie Royale had never had a bundle with eight separate developers. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle isn’t the largest in terms of total games, but it is the largest in terms of total developers. It also complicates things more from legal and logistical points of view. But I really wanted everyone who had earned my Seal of Approval and genuinely wanted in to have a shot at being in. The only way to do that was to ask if they wanted to simply donate their games to the bundle. A shit deal for them perhaps, but it was all I could do.
Guess what? As always, the XBLIG community stepped up, and I had volunteers. That mystery game? I’m not even sure what it is, but it will come from one of those games, and it will be a game off my Leaderboard. Incredible. Those who did step up are artists. They also have future projects that are coming very soon to both XBLIG and to PC, and they wanted to show that they’re here, they have talent, and you can trust that they can make good games.
Naming Your Bundle of Joy
When I started Indie Gamer Chick, it was totally on a whim. My boyfriend (along with my parents, coworkers, and the ghost of Jacob Marley) all said I needed a hobby. We were going through my Xbox hard drive and stumbled upon Breath of Death VII and I Made a Game With Zombies, the two XBLIGs I owned before starting my blog. Brian, like many gamers, had honestly never heard of XBLIGs. I had previously considered doing a movie related blog, but Brian suggested that I should do XBLIG reviews instead, since gaming was basically all I did with my free time. The name came about after just a couple of minutes of brain storming. I’m a fan of online movie reviews from sources like Red Letter Media and That Guy with the Glasses. TGWTG included the Nostalgia Chick, whose reviews I had come to enjoy quite a bit. So I thought, hey, Indie Gamer Chick. Done and done.
The name is good and catchy, but I didn’t stop to think about the negative aspects of it. Namely, the whole GURL GAMER thing. Besides the very rare joke, I’ve never played up the girl card here. It takes about five minutes worth of reading my blog to see that I’m not playing the “I’m quirky because I’m a girl and I play games” tit-shaking stereotype. So while the name might land curiosity seekers, I would hope my writing and coverage of games that don’t typically get a lot of attention would be the draw of my site. And for the most part, it is. In two years, the amount of times someone ripped me for having “Chick” in my site’s name was minimum. It was a non-factor, and I’m proud of that.
Chester
And then I attached a teaser to the bundle at the end of my review for Penny Arcade 4, and the response was overwhelmingly negative, but in silly ways. Maybe a bit mean-spirited, but mostly the jokes you would expect. Menstruation jokes. Boob jokes. Jokes about casual games that girls play, or games starring girls. That didn’t bother me so much. I mean, if I can’t take that shit (and obviously some people can’t, hence some recent controversies) I should crawl under my bed and never come out because that’s just how people talk. It’s dumb. It’s juvenile. But I’m a critic who liberally uses dick and fart jokes, so I can’t say anything against low brow humor.
The problem is, for the name of a gaming blog, Indie Gamer Chick is perfect. For the name of a bundle? I’ll admit, it’s not so perfect. First off, people unfamiliar with my site (which includes the whole world, give or take a couple thousand people) have no point of reference to why the bundle was called that. None of the games feature girls as the protagonist. Thus, the bundle might seem like Indie Royale was marketing directly to girls in a way that could be considered sexist. This at a time when gender-related tensions in gaming are at an all-time high. Granted, their site and their press release make it clear who Indie Gamer Chick is (raises hand) and that I hand-selected the games. Which is fine, if everyone reads it. They didn’t. The name “Indie Gamer Chick Bundle” appeared on Twitter and across message boards and people lost their shit over it. For most of those people, their anger/outrage was defused when they found out the context of the name. Others moved on to being pissed that my blog had the name “Chick” in it. The rule I guess being that girls that play games are not allowed to say they are girls. I’m not sure if the rule applies to other forms of entertainment. I’ll ask Lady Gaga is she gets shit for her stage name.
The second part is the whole girl gamer thing carries with it the jokes that are such layups that even Kwame Brown couldn’t blow it. “It’s Indie Gamer Chick so of course Bleed will be in the bundle.” Not only does that not bother me, but I laughed. I mean, they’re easy jokes for a reason. Because more than one person thinks of it. Not clever, but hey, funny. And there was no actual malice behind them. Yea, there were a few douchey comments, but the internet has a few douchey people. You know what? The internet is not made up mostly of assholes and misogynists. I know this because I spent two years working with the XBLIG community, which is made up almost entirely of men and they treated me amazing. By the way: making a random girl gamer joke doesn’t make a guy a misogynist or an asshole. Not every joke has malice behind it, and those with malice only seem more represented because they never.. shut.. up!
Should the bundle have been called something else? Maybe. My friend Matt played the devil’s advocate role as we tossed around the merits and detriments of having the bundle carry my name. He floated the idea that calling it the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle would take the attention away from the XBLIG concept. He wasn’t totally wrong about that. Of course, there was no name available that could hammer home that this was an XBLIG themed bundle. Legally, we couldn’t even call it the Xbox Live Indie Game Bundle. The alternative name considered was the XNA Showcase Bundle. XNA is the free gaming development tool set provided by Microsoft upon which all XBLIGs (and some spectacular Xbox Live Arcade games such as Bastion) were built with. XNA was recently discontinued by Microsoft, so having that name for the bundle as a final tribute made sense. Better sense than my friend George Clingerman, who got XNA tattooed on his arm. Though I believe he was merely pining to be Peter Moore’s heir at Microsoft when he did that. Probably while drunk.
Of course, XNA doesn’t mean a whole lot to people outside the development community. And, unlike indies, which will have some future on Xbox as a platform, XNA is done. People will still continue to use it to create PC games, and tools such as MonoGame could potentially lead to some games for next-gen platforms being started on XNA. But it won’t ever again be a major factor in indie development.
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was the name to go with. I know it works at catching attention. If I had to go back to July of 2011, the day I started the site, would I have called it something else? Perhaps CathyPlaysIndies.com or something like that? Again, maybe. If I had known I would eventually end up doing one of these bundles, I probably would have come up with something less controversial. I mean, who knew? I figured nobody would read me. But, I’m not ashamed of the name. I’m proud that Indie Gamer Chick has caught on. I’m proud that I am Indie Gamer Chick. I never thought I would catch on enough to be the recipient of backlash.
And it’s not just me, but the guys at Indie Royale who are getting it. Again, they’ve done everything they could to make it clear that the bundle was handpicked by me, but the name is all most people see, and they find the name sexist. I’m getting a small minority of gamers upset by being yet another female gamer who has to call attention to her gender. That was never my intention. I just thought the name sounded cool. It had a ring to it. Now the name is getting me labeled as an anti-feminist. It’s true that I don’t give a flying fuck about feminism. It’s 2013, and despite the best efforts of some politicians, I don’t feel like a second class citizen, nor have I ever. And yet, based purely on gender, I’m supposed to automatically side on every single point made by professional feminists like Anita Sarkeesian. Isn’t the whole idea that I must side with a professional feminist actually sexist in and of itself? So yea, I do regret that the name in the sense that it brings the gender debate (and all accompanying jokes) onto the table. It’s totally fair, because it’s the name I chose.
SpyLeaks
I’ve always thought what most set me apart from other bloggers and critics was my age and inexperience. I was about two weeks away from turning 22 when I started Indie Gamer Chick. I didn’t grow up with an Atari 2600 or an NES or even the 16-bit platforms. My first console was the original PlayStation. My average reader tends to be about ten years older than me. It’s having that totally different perspective that sets me apart. This is the first time I’ve really talked about the gender issue, but I sort of have to. Would I have gotten it regardless if I had named my blog Random Game Crap, which was seriously what I almost called it? Probably a little, but not as much. Thankfully, some of the people who were like “what the fuck is an Indie Gamer Chick” took the time to read my blog and realize that I’m not a stereotype.
And, of course, my review style sets me apart. I’m certainly not the only critic who is known for being harsh. It’s just that indies are typically spared from scorn. I admit. I knew almost nothing about the indie scene before starting Indie Gamer Chick. I had played indie games, mostly through promotions like Xbox’s Summer of Arcade, or various random PSN releases. But, when I went to check on reviews for Xbox Live Indie Games, there were slim pickings. And what little reviews I could find seemed like they were written by cheerleaders. Absolutely nothing negative discussed about the game. Just praise and positivity, as if the developer were a delicate flower who would wilt and die if anything resembling constructive feedback was spoken. Yea, fuck that. If I was going to do this thing, I would just say exactly what I thought. And that’s what I did.
It’s exactly what quality developers want. I mean, they want to get positive reviews, but they want to earn them. They’re meaningless if they’re handed out like candy to trick-or-treaters. Indie developers desire to improve, and the only way they can do that is through honest feedback. And honest feedback is something they couldn’t count on from friends or family or fellow developers. They should have been able to count on it from critics, but the critics failed to actually criticize anything. When the XBLIG community finally discovered my blog, they were briefly mortified by my review style. But community leaders embraced me and my style. Now, developers use my reviews to help them improve. They aspire to be better. To be what they use as a guidepost for improvement is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever accomplished. It’s especially touching because they’re the ones with the real talent. I’m just someone who plays games. But they treat me special, and that feels amazing.
Let’s Do Launch
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle launched yesterday. The response across message boards was generally negative, I admit. But, aside from a handful of people who just plain loath the idea of my name, most of the feedback is centered around game selection. It’s not that the games are bad. The consensus seems to be that these are good games. It’s that there’s too many repeats from previous bundles, or that only one of the games (Dead Pixels) has Steam keys as an option. These criticisms are absolutely fair and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
Centering a bundle around XBLIGs doesn’t exactly give one the widest range of game selection. There are a lot of solid titles, but stuff I felt worked as a proper showcase for the platform that was available and not completely over-bundled limited my choices. Do I regret not getting Escape Goat? Sure. Am I ashamed that my bundle instead has SpyLeaks? Absolutely not. It’s a wonderful game. I wouldn’t have settled for a selection that wasn’t representative of the best of what XBLIG has to offer. I’m proud that I got to present these eight games to a community that might have overlooked them.
I do admit, not having Steam be an option for seven out of the eight games does suck. Not having Mac as an option for any of the games sucks too. Part of that is that games developed on XNA are tougher to transition to Mac, not to mention costly. You have to remember, with the exception of Dead Pixels (which would qualify as a modest hit), none of these titles were best sellers, and getting the games on Mac could very well have been cost prohibitive. As far as Steam, it again comes down to these games not having the biggest following, and the Greenlight process being slow. Four of the games are going through Greenlight now, and if you enjoyed playing them, give them your vote please. They’ve earned it.
Antipole
So who was this bundle aimed at? I really wanted this to reach gamers who ignored XBLIG, or long since dismissed it. I wanted to show that this is what XBLIG was capable of. One gentlemen offered the following feedback: “I haven’t heard of any of these games.” He meant that as a negative. I was thinking “wait, if you’ve never heard of them, isn’t this exactly the kind of bundle you should be looking at Indie Royale for?” Most XBLIGs have no name recognition. That doesn’t mean they have no value to you as a gamer. If ever there was a platform that should have thrived on sleeper hits, it would be Xbox Live Indie Games.
I think the bundle is probably being better received in terms of sales than people expected from an XBLIG-themed bundle selected by a nobody critic. Is it going to break sales records? Probably not. But is it succeeding at exposing a new group of gamers to XBLIG? Thankfully, the answer to that is yes. People are using my Leaderboard to discover some great games that flew under the radar. That a wonderful market full of hidden gems was right there on their Xbox all along. Even if it only creates a handful of new XBLIG fans, it’s still totally worth it.
It’s ironic that Microsoft announced their plans for self-publishing on Xbox One the same day that my bundle launched. The same bundle I wanted to use to create new fans for my beloved XBLIG. The term “better late than never” comes to mind. That applies to new customers for XBLIG as well. And even for those who think the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle stinks, I hope you will at least tip your hat to this development community, because they will factor into your future in gaming. With their amount of talent, crossing paths with them will be unavoidable. If you have an Xbox and you haven’t checked out the indie channel in quite some time, if not ever, I truly hope you fire it up. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. It’s not perfect, and many of its games downright suck. But the good stuff? The really good stuff? It’s there, and when you find it, it will make your day.
Hey, you! The indie game connoisseur reading this. You’ve been missing out, and you don’t even know it. I was missing out too, until I became Indie Gamer Chick. You see, there’s a platform on the Xbox Live Marketplace called Xbox Live Indie Games. XBLIG should be cherished as a landmark in gaming history, because it represents the first self-publishing platform on a major game console. Instead, XBLIG has a reputation of being full of less-than-quality games. It’s not an entirely unearned reputation. But XBLIG isn’t just about avatar games and Minecraft clones and text-adventures featuring anime boobs so impractically large that the Surgeon General would declare them cancerous. Since November of 2008, XBLIG has played host to some of the most creative and innovative game developers on the indie scene. In fact, if you’re a regular patron of Indie Royale, you’ve already encountered many developers and games that got their start on XBLIG.
And that’s why I’m here today, to present you with eight PC ports of the best Xbox Live Indie Games ever made. Two years ago, I started reviewing XBLIGs at my blog, Indie Gamer Chick. This community has been amazing to me, and I owe them a debt that I can never pay back. I’m not always nice to their games, but this community has shown a commitment to creativity and a desire to improve. They are indie gaming’s future superstars. As the sun sets on this current generation, and the community goes their separate ways, this is one last chance to show that they were here and they were important to the indie scene. This is what you’ve been missing out on. These are my boys. I’m Indie Gamer Chick, and this is my bundle.
And for those of you who are curious why (insert name of well-known XBLIG) isn’t part of this bundle, it probably comes down to two words that I’ve come to hate: scheduling conflict. I’m now more fearful of those words than I am of my doctor telling me I have 24 hours to live. He would have to work in scheduling conflict for it to register with me. “Cathy, I know you have plans tomorrow, but they’re causing a scheduling conflict. With the coroner.”
What are you waiting for? Go get it. Like, right now. It’s live at IndieRoyale.com!
Let’s get something straight here: you’re not going to survive an actual zombie apocalypse. You will die. Quickly. It will be embarrassing, quite frankly. And no, playing Dead Rising or Dead Island or Walking Dead or any other game with “Dead” in the title hasn’t given you a leg up on the rest of humanity. Dead Pixels won’t help you, either. But at least when the zombies are chowing down on your spine, you can remember the good times you had playing one of the most clever survival-oriented zombie shooters to hit the indie scene in a long while. You have to properly manage equipment, take advantage of a robust shopping system, and conserve ammunition as you take on thousands of brainless, slobbering ghouls. I’m talking about zombies, not Justin Bieber fans.
Take an old-school 2D platformer, dress it up in John Kricfalusi-like visuals, and then stick so much stuff to collect in it that your family will hold an intervention if you attempt to get it all. That’s Chester, and it’s one of the best pure-platformers of the decade. As you play, you’ll gather different characters and graphic skins that alter the way the game is played. You’ll have to mix and match backgrounds with characters that Chester is a game with style that creates substance, like a guy in a meth lab wearing an Armani suit. Although this is preferable and much more legal.
There are a lot of games out there that let you walk on the ceiling and do all kinds of wacky gravity effects, but Antipole stuck out to me. A clever, twitchy platformer starring, and let’s be frank about this, a guy who looks like Michael Jackson wearing Carmen Sandiego’s trench-coat. With well designed levels and the aforementioned gravity mechanic that you can use to clear gaps or drop enemies into a pool of spikes, I think you’ll really enjoy Antipole’s fast-paced breed of platforming.
Imagine a Metroidvania starring a radioactive feline with no method of attack that must save his girlfriend by retrieving keys obtained by answering trivia questions. Did you imagine it? LIAR! You did not! Nobody in their right mind would envision such a silly concept. Well, the guys at MonsterJail games are not in a right state of mind, and thank God for that. LaserCat isn’t particularly challenging, but it’s just a fun, enjoyable little old-school romp. Besides, radioactive cats are cool. Anyone who disagrees with that is provably wrong. Especially dogs.
Smooth Operators is a call-center simulation game. NO, STOP! Do not bail on this bundle and head over to Humble or Indie Gala. It doesn’t sound like a winning concept, but Smooth Operators can and will take over your life, and you’ll love every moment of it. You have to secure clients, staff a building, get the right equipment.. and everyone has already closed the description and gone off to check out what other games are in this bundle. Well, joke’s on them. They won’t be able to resist the temptation of trying Smooth Operators. Once they do, there’s no escape. It’s a time sink of the most potently fun variety. Protip: if you want to unlock all the items, type IndieGamerChick in the cheat menu. That’s right, I’m a cheat code. Highlight of my life.
Little Racers STREET (which you will accidentally call Little Street Racers, it’s unavoidable) combines RPG-style upgrading with online twelve-player action. You don’t have to be deeply into racers to enjoy what STREET has to offer. I’m certainly not. But the wide variety of tracks, cars, upgrades, and camera options kept me playing and experimenting for days. The mix of old-school arcade racing with modern design sensibilities works. Also, if you have a loved one and you want to see how far you can push them before they stop talking to you, there’s no better way to find out where that line is by intentionally crashing into them when you’re losing a race. In the case of my boyfriend, it was four times. After the fifth time, he didn’t speak to me for a week. And it was totally worth it.
SpyLeaks has a lot in common with the NES puzzle series Adventure of Lolo. But, like the best tributes to classic gaming franchises, SpyLeaks improves upon the original concept and comes up with ideas of its own. Here, an element of stealth is added to the Lolo formula, along with timed gauntlets that are among the most inventive puzzles I’ve come across in my gaming lifetime. There’s also a little bit of space-shooter mixed in, if for no other reason, to assure the minimum quota of aloofness a true indie requires. But the puzzles take center stage, and the puzzles in SpyLeaks are so smart that they’re getting an honorary doctorate from MIT. It’s also a lot of fun too, and fun is all that matters.
Imagine the arcade classic Defender if they remade it the same way Namco did for Pac-Man with Pac-Man Championship Edition. That’s basically what Orbitron does, and it does it very well. A fast paced shooter based around achieving high scores within a tight time limit. Developer Firebase Industries seems to have classic gaming on the mind. They went on to create XBLIG sleeper hit ArcadeCraft, either proving there’s still a market for golden age of gaming nostalgia, or that you can shoehorn “Craft” into any game and make it sell ten times as much as it would otherwise. Maybe Indie Royale should consider calling this the BundleCraft Bundle.. of Craft.
If I pulled out a gun and shot myself right now, then reincarnated, I’m pretty sure I would be running in my new body faster than I would as my Xbox Avatar if I just stayed alive and kept trying at Avatar Physics: Running. Based on the popular (and free, and slightly less impossible) flash-based game QWOP, Running is a simple 100 meter dash, only you have to manually work the legs of your avatar to get there. Of course, doing so is complicated in a way that makes the Impossible Game look like a preschool admission test. After over thirty minutes of playing, the furthest I had made it was a little over two meters past the starting line. Mostly, my character just stiffened up and fell down, like she had simultaneously suffered a stroke while catching a glimpse of Medusa. Take a look at this video from my amigo Splazer Productions.
Splazer did better than I did. Hell, I typically ran further backwards than I did forwards. The only value Avatar Physics: Running has is bemusement at your own failures. This is obviously meant to be the primary draw of the game, as evidenced by the one and only marketplace picture featuring an avatar that has cocked things up about as bad as you can. The problem is, laughing at how hard this game is only lasts about, oh, two minutes. After that, it’s just frustration and tedium. I’m certain someone out there can finish the full 100 meters. I’m also certain someone out there knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. It doesn’t make him any less dead.
Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance. The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other. The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw). You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today. I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen. I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today. Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.
Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness. It looks ugly. There’s no multiplayer. The AI is brain-dead. The gameplay is boring. The upgrades are dull. The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag. All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with. You’re on one side of a screen. Your AI opponent is on the other. You shoot until one of you is dead. Then you upgrade your ship and do it again. The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit. Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship. After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller. So I did. Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved). At which point, it instakilled me again. Grumble.
This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.
Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games. But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare. The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint. The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see. The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot. That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing. Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare. Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care. I don’t know what else to say. Boring. Bad. Overpriced. You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser. And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.
240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review. I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.
Dark Quest is based on the early 90s cult board game hit HeroQuest. I’ve never played the game, but after asking around on Twitter, I had a few fans of it confirm that it’s a very close facsimile of the real thing. If that’s what you’ve been looking for over the last twenty years, this review is irrelevant to you. Go get it. This review is for those who missed out on it when it was played using cheap plastic characters, dice, and cardboard.
In the interest of professionalism, I looked up the original rules to the game. And by that, I mean I watched a four-minute long video by the Angry Video Game Nerd that kind of, sort of explained the rules. I thought “ugh, looks complicated. Well, at least I’ll be able to learn how the game plays in the tutorial they no doubt took the time to meticulously craft.” Which again proves that the whole Cuban women having clairvoyance thing is hogwash. There is no tutorial for Dark Quest. You’re thrown into the first dungeon immediately, which offers things that are sort of pointers, but not really. Fighting enemies, discovering hidden traps, and using various weapons are mechanics the player is left to discover on their own. I suppose if you’re familiar with HeroQuest, this might not be so bad. For people like me, it’s clear that we’re unwelcome guests at the Dark Quest party.
Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.
After somehow stumbling through the first dungeon and picking up a couple secondary characters, I shamefully succumbed to boredom and ignorance in the second level. Here, you have to find hidden jewels, insert them into statues to activate a door, and then fight roughly five million skeletons, give or take. The problem here was my previously established “worst random luck in gaming” status was confirmed about ten fold. I would swing at the skeletons with my barbarian and miss. Then my dwarf and miss. Then my wizard and miss. Or, if I didn’t miss, something would pop up that said “CHEAT DEATH” which I think is basically a fancy way of saying “missed.” Then, the room full of skeletons would attack. Funny enough, they would also miss more often than hit, no matter which of the characters they attacked. But, they had numbers on me, and slowly I would drain away until I was reduced to a pile of bones. I either was killed by the skeletons or I died of boredom. Not sure which.
I tried this level a few times. There is a small instruction card, which noted that the dwarf was the best defender. So, on my second attempt, when I would enter a room that I knew was filled with baddies, I would lead with him. Which made sense, since he has the largest movement. Now, here’s where it gets weird: the dwarf, the guy with the alleged best defense, was the character that the enemies missed the least. It was un-fucking-canny. I’m not blaming the developers for me being unlucky, but I would ask them “are you sure this guy has extra points of defense?” What am I missing here? Besides 3 out of 4 of my attempts at attacks? To make matters worse, every once in a while the dungeon master would spit out a random effect, which includes such things as “lose some gold” or “lose your turn.” What did he hit most often? “Lose one health.” Of course that’s what he did. Meanwhile, I was getting my will to go on sapped by the game’s snail-like pace and unintuitive control scheme. After giving that second dungeon a fourth go and dying in the same fucking room, I’d had enough. Yep, I couldn’t even complete the second stage. Shame on me, I suck as a gamer, yada yada yada.
You know what? In this case, I don’t think it was just me. I’ve heard from at least one other player that they were the victim of missing far too often when they went to attack. Or sometimes a character can be next to an enemy and they can spend multiple turns swinging at each other and missing every time. Each stage has a time limit in the form of a limited number of turns the player can take. I never came close to the limit, but the sheer number of turns that a battle can drag out could be problematic in later levels. Maybe.
Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!
I know I’m not who this game was made for, and that’s fine with me. It looks good. It sounds good. I know HeroQuest fans are satisfied with it. Although they’re a little puzzled by the lack of dice. However, non-fans will find a slow, newb-hating dungeon crawler in board-game form that is about as exciting a watching paint dry. On top of that, I also think fans of HeroQuest will find things to be disappointed in it. There’s no multiplayer. Granted, eliminating a player controlling the enemies is probably a logical and reasonable thing to hand off to the AI. But, not having the option for four players to take control of the heroes is kind of silly, especially since board games such as this are built entirely around social interaction. I guess you could hypothetically just pass the controller off to other players after making your move. It’s not really convenient, but hey, it’s a chance to play a moderately popular game twenty years after it dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, it wasn’t popular enough to last more than a couple of years on store shelves. And you would think fans of the game would still own the corporeal board and game pieces. Okay, so I have no fucking clue at all why this game exists, since it takes almost no advantage of things that can only be done in the realm of video games. H.i.v.e. demonstrated they can at least be used to ease people into learning a new game, but Dark Quest doesn’t even do that. Nor does it have online support. This was a weird one to review. A really well produced homage to some vintage thing that I’d never heard of. I can’t recommend it to non-fans of the thing it’s based on, but even fans might find little to get excited about. Don’t get me wrong: there’s an audience for Dark Quest. Twitter already confirmed that for me. What I’m saying is, if you want to properly pay tribute to a classic gaming property, here’s a thought: use some of this space-age technology we have these days and make the original concept better. Otherwise, it’s less a tribute and more like grave robbery.
80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind some kind of version of Don’t Break the Ice for Wii U, but only if it involves using the touch screen and an actual mallet in the making of this review.
Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick. It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined. This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows. And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers. Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions. I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.
This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off. The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck. But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions. The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here. The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them. Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it. The other two are looking for profits. And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.
For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.
There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs. His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it. Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio. Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one. If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible. This is rubbing people the wrong way.
Guys, come on. This is clearly a satire. And I’m not joking about that either. I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here. This was obviously a joke. And, in a way, it might be brilliant. I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick. Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character. Jaded. Bitter. Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit. The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with. It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.
As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys. You can’t be that thick. It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community. The kind that nobody really should take seriously. I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it. The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting. It’s uncanny. And it’s also clearly parody. The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog. They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game. Get it? This was spot on. Perhaps too deadpan though. There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die. They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.
Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it. I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes. No, really. There are multiple endings of course. I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls. This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game. Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me. Yea, go figure. I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it. My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.
After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.
The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present. When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog. You have to start from the beginning. Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason. The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls. Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game! You know what? I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought. I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have. It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.
240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review. You know what? It’s an RPG that actually looks good!
You can file Monkey Poo Flinger.. again, no really.. under novelty games. It has no real value as a game. On my most generous day, I would call its gameplay mediocre. On a less than generous day, I would probably just flip the bird and make fart noises with my mouth. But seriously, you don’t buy a game called Monkey Poo Flinger expecting the next Spec Ops – The Line. You get it because monkeys are hilarious, poo is hilarious, and monkeys throwing poo is the greatest comedy goldmine of all time.
BUT, if your game is going to be themed around a monkey throwing poo at people, it has to at least look good. Covering some gawking human with feces should be a visually satisfying experience. That’s not the case here. The graphics look crude, so any successful shot doesn’t have any zing to it. I mean, you just absolutely plastered some asshole in the face with a handful of shit. When I do that to Brian, it’s the highlight of my day. Here, it’s just hollow. I mean, look at it.
It looks horrible. It’s actually not as bad as it appears from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still not fun. Monkey Poo Flinger is a pretty basic gallery shooter. Press the right trigger to shoot. Targets walk in front of you and you shoot them. Sometimes there are barriers between you and then. Sometimes they throw stuff back. Sometimes the game forgets to take its brain pills and takes away your ability to shoot altogether in a level that is, I shit you not, themed around being constipated. Not that I’m offended. I’ve played games where you have to feed cows prune juice to give them diarrhea and games where you use yellow snowballs as weapons. Do you know what all those games have in common? The novelty wore thin pretty fast, and you’re left with a game that was average at best (Conker) or pretty terrible (South Park 64). The novelty is a non-factor in Monkey Poo Flinger because the graphics just don’t do the concept justice. Thus, it’s boring right from the get-go.
I’ll say this: I thought I would be playing something utterly broken, and that’s not the case. There’s a real game here. It’s just not fun at all. There’s other problems too, like projectiles (especially from the seagulls) being too hard to see, or the targets not being large enough. Probably the best thing about the game is the dialog, which is like saying the best part about getting hypothermia is you get a souvenir blanket. The between-the-levels banter offers, at best, a smirk and a shake of the head. But you have to play a dull as dirt game to get those meager crumbs of entertainment. So I can’t really recommend Monkey Poo Flinger. I also have to ask a couple of questions that really ought to be addressed: where the hell is that monkey getting all that shit from? Does his anus contain a fucking zip-drive? And why does the zoo leave this monkey in such a high foot-trafficked area? I think a better concept would have been a mad monkey won’t stop throwing shit at people and we have to stop it, with the ultimate goal of dropping it off at the state department so that we can send it to North Korea as a, ahem, diplomatic gift.
UPDATE: The unauthorized version of Magnetized was pulled from the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace today.
I had planned to do a review of Magnetized on Xbox Live Indie Games. But, as it turns out, there’s some shenanigans going on with that. People want me to say something about it for some reason, so here it is: not cool.
In a nutshell, a Taiwanese developer named Rocky Hong created a very fun browser game called Magnetized. It appears a German developer put out an unauthorized port on XBLIG and also on Android, not for free but to make money, using the same name, graphics style, same levels, same physics, and very similar art assets. This is not an example of a clone. This is plagiarism.
The authentic logo by Rocky Hong is on the left. The unauthorized XBLIG port on the right. Mind you, Mr. Hong had plans to bring out more commercial ports of his game.
I do highly recommend the free browser-based version of Magnetized, which you can play right here. This isn’t a victimless act. Free or not, the developer makes money off ad-support from the sites that host it, and had apps for mobile devices planned.
I’m really pissed off this happened because XBLIG is my community, and shit like this makes them look bad. XBLIG is perhaps too unregulated, which is part of the price for having the first self-publishing platform in console gaming history. But writers and gamers shouldn’t say this is yet another example of why Xbox Live Indie Games are bad for gaming. The story of XBLIG to me is one of inspiration. Of perseverance and creativity, with some of the most humble developers you could ever hope to encounter. Don’t paint them in the same brush as the scum behind this fiasco. This community is a small handful of bad apples among hundreds of hard-working class-acts. Their games deserve your consideration.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to write a review about a game where you fling monkey shit at pedestrians.
Also, please don’t confuse this with Magnetic by Nature, two very different games.
Update – Indie Gamer Guy’s statement.
So, it seems we have a bit of controversy here in indie video game land: some unscrupulous XBLIG developer stole an idea from a flash game on Kongregate and ported it to XBLIG without even changing the name or title graphic. What silly, stupid bastards! That takes some big fucking brass balls, let me tell you.
Anyway, Cathy asked me to take a look at the flash (i.e. true) version of Magnetized that was developed by Rocky Hong. I must say is it a cool, little time waster that defines the term, “easy to learn but difficult to master.” This game would have been a sensation in the halcyon days of the Atari 2600 or the Intellivision for sure. Basically, you have a cube hurtling down a corridor with a powerful magnet posted somewhere along the corridor. It’s your task to use the magnet(with a simple click of your mouse) to coax the cube down the corridor, which will vary in length, width and curvature as the levels progress. There are also magnets of varying strengths and abilities as the levels progress, as well. I played until level 42 and I killed/smashed about 280 cubes, which took me about 20-25 minutes. As I said, it’s a neat little game that constantly has you saying, “Alright, just one more level…and then I’m done!”
Magnetized certainly deserves a look…and proper credit of course.
In November 2008, the same month Xbox Live Community Games launched, I organized a geek dinner. I wanted to make sure there was some real geekery involved, so two days before the dinner I downloaded Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. Until that weekend I had never developed a game.
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