You’re a ball. You try to shove other balls into a pit. Marble Masters: The Pit isn’t completely original. I played a similar minigame in the original Mario Party. Plus I vaguely recall there was something kind of sort of like it on Wii Fit. But this is the first full game centered around the idea, and I had my doubts as to whether they could stretch it out for 50 levels. Things started easy enough. There were a few holes in the ground and balls located conveniently next to them. “Okay, well this won’t hold my interest too long.”
I have to say, it looks quite dull in screenshots. But give it a chance. It’s a pretty fun, fast-paced hour-and-a-half.
Then the balls came to life. Well, “life” being relative, as the AI in Marble Masters is clinically brain-dead. The enemy balls will roll at you in a straight line, even if there’s a pit between you and them. They have no survival instinct at all. The developer might as well have dressed them up like they were zombie balls. Hell, that probably would have been worth at least an extra 500 downloads. Still, it was something unexpected. There’s no way that could extend the shelf life though. Oh wait, now there’s no pits, and instead you have to get the balls to break against spikes. Oh wait again, now the spikes are chasing you like the balls were. Well I’ll be damned, they did stretch it out to fifty levels without feeling padded. Call me William Kemmler because I’m genuinely shocked.
Marble Masters is one of those rare instances of a game pacing itself perfectly. There’s enough twists to hold a player’s attention for the maximum two hours it would take to complete. It’s not without some huge flaws though. The difficulty curve tends to spike up and down. Even late in the game, there were levels that took me twenty or more tries to finish, which were immediately followed with stages that I completed without any fuss on my first attempt. So the difficulty is inconsistent, but not as much as the gravity. The physics engine in the game is all sorts of fucked up. Sometimes it feels entirely too heavy. Sometimes it feels like you’re doing battle on the surface of the moon. This leads to some nifty glitches, like the times I collided with an enemy and we both slowly floated up and out of the map. Maybe the balls passed away and they went up to heaven. My dog Spot can relate.
A lot of the gravity problems came in levels with the arrows, which are wind-tunnel like things that push you around.
Of course, the glitches worked to my advantage as much as they screwed me over. They’re never so prevalent that you’ll rely on them to complete stages. They’re happy accidents when they work for you, and swear-generating events when they cause you to unfairly die. Then again, maybe I’m focusing on physics stability a little too much. It reality, the gravity reached insane weirdness maybe 10% of the time. It never feels completely right, but you learn to live with it. Best of all, right as the game seems like it might be ready to run out of ideas, it ends. I’ve seen a lot of games that don’t have that kind of restraint. So yea, I really enjoyed Marble Masters: The Pit. It’s an original idea executed relatively well. The gravity sucks, but gravity seems to have it in for me anyway, always making me trip and shit. No, it’s not my fault. It’s gravity’s. Look at it, just existing there, smug force of nature, thinking it’s holding the world together. Who needs it? Well I dontja;utiqjgqghakl;nag
80 Microsoft Points look forward to such sequels as Marble Masters: Bell Tower, Marble Masters: The Armory, and Marble Masters: Shang Tsung’s Throne Room in the making of this review.
Marble Masters: The Pit is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick: Leaderboard, now sponsored by Smooth Operators: Call Center Chaos. If you combined the two, it would be called Marble Operators, which sounds a little pornographic. I bet Team Shuriken is working on it.
Oh, and I don’t actually have a dog named Spot. Her name is Cherry, and she’s upset that she gets no love at this blog. Hopefully this shout-out is enough to get her to stop pissing in my shoes while I sleep.
I figured it’s time for another kick at the PlayStation Mobile can. While my previous efforts to didn’t turn up any original games that I could point to and say “see, PlayStation Mobile is off to a decent start”, I figure it’s worth a second look. At least it would be, if games weren’t priced like this.
Or like this.
Or this.
Okay. Just to be clear, you guys want people to actually buy your games, right? And you also realize that you’re on PlayStation Vita, where a PlayStation Plus subscription can net you AAA games for free? Or where standard discounts can get you some really great games for around that price? Hell, you’re also competing directly with Android phones, where you can get some of the best games of this generation for $0.99 or less. You should make some effort to be competitive. You already have no demos, making your games high-risk to consumers. Why make them so out-of-bounds high risk that nobody in their right mind would take a chance on them? I would gladly fork over $3 for what looks like an FMV fishing game, because that sort of quirky weird shit is right up my ally. $5? That would be a tough sell for actual fans of FMV fishing games, which is a large and robust fanbase to alienate.
So instead, I grabbed Castle Invasion for a measly 49 cents. And I definitely got what I paid for. Simple concept: shoot dudes before they reach the castle wall. Gallery shooters like this are a bit relicy (that’s a word as of right now), but I figure there’s all kinds of neat twists developers can slap on them. Not here. Dudes run at you, and you shoot them. Stronger dudes run at you. You shoot them. Faster dudes run at you. You shoot them. Sometimes you use arrows, sometimes you use spears that can penetrate multiple enemies, but otherwise it’s the same shit over and over again and it’s boring. Not only that, but it had a tendency to crash. Spring for the extra penny and sink your money in a gumball. The flavor will last about 90 seconds, which makes that a longer-term investment than Castle Invasion.
Castle Invasion. The most excited thing since buttered toast. Which I don’t find to be particularly exciting.
Up next was Life of Pixel ($1.99), which has been patched. I played it last month, and found the graphics to be authentic, but the control was sketchy and the level design focused a little too much on leap-of-faith gameplay. That’s mostly fixed now. Controls are silky smooth, double jumping never failed, the frame-rate never dropped, and some of those leaps-of-faith are now a thing of memory. Some. There were a few sections of the game where you simply have to leap blindly and hope for the best. Some call this “trial and error.” Bullshit. The “trial” part suggests you have a fighting chance. Blind luck is not a fighting chance. It’s fucking blind luck, and there’s still a lot of it in Life of Pixel. I call this “gotcha gameplay.” And I’m sick of it. It pops up too much on the indie scene. Yea, I know games used to be like this, but that doesn’t mean they still have to be. And I’ve got a solution.
I’ve arranged for every indie development kit, across all platforms, to come bundled with a man named Roberto. Now, Roberto will pretty much stay out of your way. Just leave some bread and something to drink out for him, but otherwise you shouldn’t notice him. Unless you start to put “GOTCHA!” moments into your game. Unavoidable deaths, blind leaps, hidden traps that are impossible to see or avoid, etc. When you attempt this, Roberto will come out of hiding, place a pot on your head, and bang the pot sixteen times with a five-pound, stainless-steel soup ladle. After this, he’ll remove the pot, look you in your now vacant, concussed eyes, and scream “GOTCHA!” Then he’ll slink back into the shadows and allow you to undo the mess you just made of your game. I think this idea is a good one.
I fucking HATED HATED HATED this level of Life of Pixel, which featured more blind jumps than LensCrafter’s annual hurdles race.
Despite Life of Pixel being my inspiration for the Roberto Policy, I have to say that the game is vastly improved. By that, I mean it’s playable, and hey, even a little fun. They even included a soundtrack that, gasp, somewhat matches the classic gaming eras that were the inspiration in the first place. I mean, it was downright boneheaded to not include such soundtracks in the first place, but I’ll let it slide. I did just give the team at Super Icon multiple instances of brain damage by testing the Roberto Policy on them. They deserve a break. They also deserve an Indie Gamer Chick Seal of Approval. They took a shitty, broken game and made it fun. That’s a sign of a developer with true talent, and I salute them for it.
Roberto, pot their head one last time. Just out of principle for making me eat my words.
Finally, Super Skull Smash GO! It’s a retro-style puzzle-platformer that was priced at $3.29 last week, but it’s down to $2.79 this week. Is that a good price for it? Hmmmmm not really. I can get better games on my iPhone or on XBLIG that offer more play value at half the price. Is it a bad game? Not at all. You play as a dude who has to hop on skeletons, grab their skulls, and smash them against a giant, golden cross. Glad to see Yale’s fraternal initiation turn into a full-fledged video game.
I would call the graphics fossilized, but considering Super Skull Smash GO! stars a bunch of skeletons, I’m guessing that was the point.
Despite the primitive graphics, Super Skull Smash GO! is a fairly clever puzzler that keeps throwing new twists in until the end. Having said that, the collision detection is too sensitive, and the jumping physics are a little heavy. By far the biggest thing I had to struggle with was jumping through narrow corridors and repeatedly fucking up because the spot you can jump from or to is so small and unforgiving. Plus, lining up a skull to throw at just the right height can also be troublesome. The game seems to have issues with following parameters. I’m not going to be too hard on it for that. I can relate. I have the ankle monitor to prove it.
I still recommend it, because it’s a fun little game with puzzle design unlike anything I’ve ever played. And hey, I’ve now found two original PlayStation Mobile games that are priced to afford and worth your time to play. It’s a step in the right direction. I do wish developers would be smarter about how they market their games. That overhead airplane fighter game thing above, Blue Skies. For all I know, it might be a good game. It looks like it’s based on some classic games that a lot of people would be interested in. You know, the type of games you can routinely buy on platforms like PSN, XBLA, and Virtual Console for under $7? This is one of those “what were they thinking?” moments. Without the benefit of demos (and hell, most PSM games don’t even bother with trailers on YouTube), all PSM games are a risk to consumers. How many people will take a $7 for one game risk when the same $7 can net them multiple games, some of which they’re bound to like. I got two pretty decent games in Super Skull Smash GO! and Life of Pixel for $5.28. That’s $1.71 less than the risk of buying Blue Skies and hating it. Fuck that. That kind of money buys a lot of gumballs.
Super Skull Smash GO! and Life of Pixel are Chick Approved
As word hit that XNA was being faded out, non-developer me was curious where else the community that I’ve downright fallen for with would turn to next to create the games I both love and loath. And the community has responded. First, the guys at MonoGame hit me up with a semi-well-received, semi-controversial editorial touting their platform as the next big thing. While a direct response to that from the mad bastard behind FortressCraft is still coming, industry veteran-turned-indie Scott Tykoski wanted his chance to sing the praises of Unity. As always, I understand almost none of this. But Scott’s a gifted writer and not prone to panic, so you should give him a read.
As the death knell rings for XNA and my Xbox Indie pals pay their respects on twitter, a question hangs in the air – “Where do we go next?”
And by we I mean the group of developers that got excited at XNA as an inexpensive multi-platform solution. We bet YEARS of development energy on a system that looked so promising, yet let us down in so many ways.
“Where do we go next, now that XNA is dead?”
We also have to deal with the “gold-rush” mentality that has come along with the mobile gaming boom. Indie/Hobbyist game developers are everywhere, and worse, most of them are making very similar games (take hit game, change the theme, rinse, repeat), intensifying player dissatisfaction with titles that don’t push any significant boundaries.
“Where do we go next, now that the world is oversaturated in unsatisfying games?”
And heres another challenge to overcome: our industry is undergoing HUGE, seemingly random marketplace shifts. Phones streaming games to tvs. Consoles putting games on the backburner to focus on movies and television.
“Where do we go next when there are so many platforms and nothing is certain?”
The honest answer? We go away. We give up and we move on.
Goodbye, friends.
UH…WE’RE NOT REALLY SCREWED, RIGHT?
No, sorry, I’m kidding…we’re totally fine. 🙂
Actually, being in the Indie gaming scene has never been more exciting – even with app stores overflowing with crappy titles (we’ve fought that battle before, right XBLIG guys?). You see, every studio – from the one-man operations to the largest gaming conglomerates – is facing the exact same conundrum: “What platforms do we focus or development energy on?”
This universal need for multi-platform tools means we now live in an ecosystem ripe with ‘Make Once – Play Everywhere’ solutions. Unreal for the big spenders. Adobe Air for the Flash experts. Gamemaker Studio, GameSalad, Stencyl, & Construct for folks unfamiliar with code. And of course the mega-versatile MonoGame for anyone fully invested in XNA (Rest In Peace, sweet prince).
But while all these solutions have their disadvantages, be it price or flexibility, one toolset has them beat on all counts: UNITY.
What once was a fun little tool for prototyping, Unity (now at v4.0) has matured to the point where you can make some pretty amazing games, like the beautiful Kentucky Route Zero or the 4x Epic Endless Space.
Kentucky Route Zero
With Unity, developers can now rest assured that core engine systems are covered and they can focus on the most important task: DESIGNING A GREAT GAME!
But first..
THE BASICS OF UNITY
At its core, Unity is a 3d game engine where the developer can script using C# or go straight into scene creation using the fully featured editor, which feels a lot like using 3DMax or Maya (where you move game objects around in 3S space). While it may seem daunting at first, the toolset gives a great entry point for either artists or developers to start working on their game.
While the amazing editor would be reason alone to use Unity, the real selling point is the admirable cut of its cross-platform jib (ie: it can export games for every friggin’ platform). Titles for PC, XBox360, Wii, Web, Android, and iOS have all been made and released using the Unity, proving itself on multiple devices many times over.
It should also be noted that you can make a Ouya game RIGHT NOW using Unity. That’s pretty amazing cross-platform support, if I do say so myself. Which I do. Obviously.
SO MUCH 3D GOODNESS
While modeling, texturing, and animation have to be done in a traditional 3D program (3DMax, Maya, Blender, etc), Unity does all the heavy lifting when it comes to importing and rendering those assets. Lighting, post processing, shadows, and animation are all available out of the box.
I remember trying to get a distance blur effect hooked up for battles in Galactic Civilizations II but it was a huge pain and never happened. In Unity.. it’s as simple as dragging a effect script onto the camera object. Most effects are drag-and-drop ready…it’s simple to the point of sickening.
And lets talk for a bit about asset pipelines. The amount of raw data that goes into defining meshes, bones, UVs, and animations is staggering, and have given rise to third-party frameworks that manage this deluge of data. The fact that Unity makes the asset import and management process a two click process is a testament to the overall ease-of-use the editor provides.
THE JOYS OF C#
Anyone familiar with XNA is also familiar with the beautiful C# coding language. I won’t pimp that here, but Unity uses it, and it’s awesome.
Coding is as simple as writing your code, making a few public variables to use as dials, then attaching that script to your game objects. Those variables can then be tweaked in the editor, so writing modular code is buttery smooth.
The editor also has its own scripting API, so you can easily extend the editing tools as necessary.
THE ASSET STORE
Another notch on Unity’s belt comes in the ‘Asset Store’, where you can buy or sell anything game related.
Lets say you want a ‘Plants vs Zombies’ look to your game and need to animate several of 2D characters. You can go into a separate 3D program, rig and bind 2D planes, export the data, then use a 3D animation object to render your characters. OR you can purchase SmoothMoves, an in-editor 2D animation solution for 75$.
It’s the best 75 bucks you’ll ever spend, I assure you.
Chances are, if you need a game-related subsystem, someone already has a solution available on the asset store: just purchase, plug, and play!
NOW FOR THE BAD NEWS
Instead of a proper point-counterpoint, I decided to bottle up ALL the negative stuff to dump on you at the end. I know…I’m an a-hole.
First and foremost, the cost. Good news here is that a free version can be used by most Indies. Once you start making more than $100,000 a year, however, it’s time to go PRO, which will cost you $1500. Exporting features come in the form of add-ons, so exporting to iOS from the free version will run you $400, from PRO it’ll cost $1500.
Unfortunately, all the R&D testing I did was with a PRO version with a PRO iOS exporter, so some of my exuberance may come from using a super-slick $3000 version. You can dig around in the Unity Store to get some charts comparing features of the different versions.
Also, debugging was a bit more painful than in XNA and traditional IDEs. My testing of the tool was mostly on the art side, however, with a full-time developer testing out the coding front, so my pains could have simply been lack of experience. My fear is that you’ll be spending more time with print statements and less time with breakpoints.
Another issue, for those of us that love our retro graphics,the 3D environment can make 2D game creation tricky. It’s doable, but definitely less intuitive than making a proper 3D game.
The biggest drawback to Unity – as with any third-party engine – is the lack of control you have on the last 10%. You’ll always encounter areas where you want the engine to do something that’s just not possible (for one reason or another). While the main 90% will be smooth sailing, compromising on the last 10% of your vision may be too steep a price.
UNITY & MAKING GAMES WORTH PLAYING
So I started this editorial with that stupid ‘we should give up’ gag. It was mostly for fun, but there’s a legitimate feeling of helplessness that comes when your platform of choice is discontinued. There were too many crunch weeks spent on games using XNA to shrug it off as a necessary loss.
And while it sucks to see an amazing framework put to pasture, we are now drowning in possible alternatives. Alternatives that not only allow you target multiple platforms, but that alleviate the burden of creating the subsystems that your game will depend upon.
It’s for the sake of quality gameplay that I fully endorse Unity, and really any 3rd party engine. The overwhelming majority of your audience could care less about the underlying engine.. all they want is a new experience, something that’s not ‘Angry Birds with Zombies’.
Creativityon the Indie sceneis a talkbest leftfor another time , but always remember: originality is your key competitive advantage over the AAA studios. Use it! The less time you’re making engine systems that never excite the player, the more time you can devote to making original gameplay systems that will excite yourself, the player, and perhaps even our entire industry.
Procrastinating Squirrel put up a fight when I first downloaded it. From the moment I booted it up, the game started skipping like a DVD that got into a fight with a belt sander. Thus it was rendered completely unplayable. I made a video so that others could feel my pain.
After publishing the original piece, I got word from a few players that they didn’t have problems. Curious, I switched consoles, then switched which storage device I was saving my progress to. While it didn’t run perfectly, the experience was vastly improved and thus I could write a full and proper review. Of course, in a way I already did that. Procrastinating Squirrel is essentially Miner Dig Deep, only not as deep. Miner Dig Shallow perhaps? Miner Dig Less Deep? Miner Scratch the Surface?
Oak Nuts. It’s what you call crazy people that live in Oakland.
How about Toddlers Dig Deep? Because this stripped down version of one of my former Top-10 XBLIGs is pretty much that. Miner Dig Deep, sans strategy or most dangers. Fewer upgrades. Fewer things to mine. The boulders are still there and can still cause you to scream curse words you forgot you knew, but that’s the only thing that can kill you. There’s no need to worry about digging too many tunnels that could cave in, because the game is presented from a top-down view. That’s the one advantage Squirrel has over Miner: you can mine in any direction. Every other aspect is less than what is already offered in Miner Dig Deep. There’s no positive outlook on that. People who haven’t played Miner would be better served skipping this and playing that. People who have played Miner can only find Squirrel to be an inferior, watered-down clone. I kept waiting for the game to present some kind of hook to change things up, and finished it still waiting. While I still was practically hypnotized by the prospect of digging up new materials, those moments are few and far between. It even ends significantly faster than Miner Dig Deep. Miner Dig Deep left me wanting more. Procrastinating Squirrel left me disappointed, and recommending it would be nuts.
Thirty minutes staring at the screen and that’s the best pun I could figure to go out on. I knew I should have written this sooner, instead of waiting for the Oscars to end. That’s what I get for procrastinating.
I suck at space shooters. I’ve spent the last two years establishing this fact on this very blog. While I try to claim neutrality towards all genres, that’s obviously a bit of a stretch. Some I like more than others, with shmups typically being “the others.” I’ve just never been able to get into them. Which kind of sucks for the hard-working XBLIG community, because even ones that earn near universal praise (like Aeternum) don’t do anything for me. It seems like the best they can hope for out of me is “I wouldn’t rather be dead than play this.”
Am I the only one who thinks that bullet hell screens always look like those abstract painting made by just splattering a blank canvas with paint?
On that note, I wouldn’t rather be dead than play Pester. Congratulations to the team at Flump Studios for doing as good as you could do with this genre in relationship to me. I was able to get through the full hour Brian forces me to play these games (“out of fairness” he says, the goody two-shoes prick) without wondering if I’ll be locked up in the nuthouse for choosing to hurl myself through a plate-glass window to get out of it. And, while I wasn’t like wowed by the experience or anything, I wasn’t bored. It’s nothing new though. You’re a ship. There are enemies. Enemies fire a whole lot of bullets at you, and you fire a whole lot of bullets back. I’ve always kind of wondered about the economics of bullet hells. Presumably if enemies are firing plasma rounds at you with projectiles the size of small ships, that stuff has got to cost money. You would think they would fire a little more accurately. Conserve ammo, instead of seeing you, going crazy, and firing bullets in every direction including behind them. Or hell, since we’re dealing futuristic space warfare, you would think an enemy force that can employ thousands of ships to take out one single rinky-dinky little adversary could figure out how to do weapons that instantaneously destroy whatever they’re targeting the moment the fire button is pressed without giving them a chance to dodge out-of-the-way. What kind of morons do they have running these evil empires?
Anyway, it’s basic space shooter shit with some neat graphic filters added, and not a whole lot more. I played for a while and realized quickly that I was every bit as shitty at playing Pester as I am at every other game of this godforsaken genre. But the screen wasn’t so spammed with bullets that it was demoralizing or anything. Then something funny happened. At one point, I turned to Brian and said “honestly, I’m not having a blast or anything, but there’s nothing really wrong with this one.” Within ten seconds of me saying this, the game decided to give me stuff to complain about. I’m not saying this for comic effect. This really happened. First, I was fighting a boss that throws giant swords at you and died. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is when I blinked back into existence, the game spawned one of the sword bullets into the same space I respawned into and insta-killed me. The sword wasn’t there at that moment. It just appeared. A bizarre glitch I’m guessing, but it’s so weird that it happened right after I told my boyfriend I had nothing to complain about. As if the game heard me and said “nothing to complain about? Bitch, I’ll give you something to complain about.”
And Pester kept being a shithead to me after that. I played three straight rounds where the game never once spawned an upgrade for my ship’s guns. It spawned plenty of speed-ups and bombs, but no gun upgrades. It was fucking strange, because they had been plentiful before. Not that it really mattered. Gun upgrades or not, I still made it about the same length as I always did, which was between wave 7 and wave 10. Yea, I really suck at this shit. So I booted up Tempus mode, where lives are replaced by time. When you shoot enemies, instead of them dropping coins, they drop clocks that add one second to a timer. When you die, you lose ten seconds. The game goes until you run out of time. Okay, fine. Question: where the fuck is the timer? I couldn’t see it. Otherwise, it’s the same game with the same enemy layouts. You can also adjust the difficulty, and add extra challenges if you’re a masochist, like controlling two ships at once. I didn’t try it myself. I barely have the coordination to tie my shoelaces without breaking my neck in the process. I don’t need a game to tell me I’m an embarrassment to humanity. I already know it.
A spaceship that fires globs of space jizz on you. Sure. Why not?
Really, Pester isn’t bad or anything. And the sword bit I mentioned above was a one-off thing. I guess I kind of, sort of recommend it. A little bit. I’m not sure if that’s because I genuinely enjoyed it based on merit, or if I genuinely enjoyed it because Brian got such amusement out of my pitiful lack of shmup talent. Either way, I had something vaguely resembling a good time playing it, and had the sense to turn it off before I got bored. Having said that, it’s not an ambitious title. This shit has been done before and Pester offers nothing new. Nothing. At best, it shows competence in making a functioning, mildly entertaining game that closely resembles about a thousand other games. I’m not against playing them, but I want to see a different angle on them. There’s got to be a wealth of unexplored twists for bullet hells. I mean come on, you guys are indie developers. You’re supposed to buck the norm. Be weird for the sake of being weird. Dance to the beat of a different drummer. When games like this fill out the cliché checklist with such determination, it’s kind of sad. Not as sad as watching me play games like this must be, but still pretty sad.
Ascent of the Kings comes from the developer of Quiet, Please!, the 2D platforming/point-and-click mash-up I played last April. The fingerprints of the developer are all over this one too. Same art style, same silliness, and same bite-sized game length. It took me just over thirty-minutes to beat Quiet, Please! For Ascent of Kings, which is a Metroidvania type of platformer, it took me about twenty minutes to become king and another twenty-five minutes to find all 12 hidden shrines. So, forty-five minutes total of gameplay. At this pace, Nostatic Software’s next game might stretch to a full hour. Not that it needs to. I’ve enjoyed games that lasted as little as ten minutes. It’s crazy how spending 600 days immersed in the indie gaming scene alters your perception on how long a game should be. I’m fairly certain I’m now in a state of mind where I could approve a game that lasts one minute, as long as it’s the best damn one minute I’ve had since I lost my virginity.
A Boy and his Blob?
So the idea is, the king has died, and in order to determine the new king, all possible suitors (which seems to consist of four brothers that live in a small cottage, still better than what England faces sometime in the next twenty years) have to hop around on platforms and reach a small shrine that bestows upon that person the power to rule. The father of these kids, apparently a bit of a dick, only gives each of the older brothers one special tool that can help them reach the summit and become king. But their hearts don’t seem quite into it. They pull such bullshit excuses as “ouch, sprained my wrist” or “twisted my ankle” like they’re trying to get out of jury duty. The youngest brother, aka you, collects their tools, allowing him to double jump, climb vines, and fire slingshots. You know, the kind of tools found in a real world monarchy litmus test. Psssssh, diplomacy? Economics? Fuck that shit. That’s for democracies.
As a game, what can I say? It’s alright. The movement physics are a bit loose and the double-jump sometimes didn’t seem to work. Level design is very basic, no frills, no surprises. There’s one section that features a timed jumping puzzle, and I hate that if I get to the top and screw up, I have to wait any amount of time before hitting the button to start over. But, the game is so brief that you can’t really get bored with it, and it ends long before any amount of frustration over the various control foibles can settle in. I guess what I’m trying to say is I had a decent enough time playing Ascent of Kings to say it’s worth a buck. It’s not the most enthusiastic recommendation, but hey, it’s not the most ambitious game! One hand washes the other!
Where have I been the last two days? Well, I’ve been working, hanging out with Brian, going to church (that’s right, Indie Gamer Chick goes to church), and while I’m doing all that, I’ve been utterly hooked on an iPhone title named Infectonator. Day and night for the last 48 hours. And it’s all Brian’s fault. He bugged me for a while, saying “I found this game on my phone that’s really fun and pretty addictive and I think if you liked that OMG-Zombies!, you’ll really like this.” Spot on he was, although on reflection, he might have been looking for a way to get a break from me. If so, another point for him, the crafty bastard. Infectonator is an utterly addictive time sink, sort of like OMG-Zombies! on steroids.
And it’s free.
Really, this scene could have been done without the zombies. Make a game called “Black Friday” and instead of unleashing a virus, you throw the year’s hot Christmas item into a crowd of people. Would probably have a bigger body count too.
Oh sure, the game offers you a chance to pay cash in lieu of grinding, but I never found it necessary. I didn’t really play it totally non-stop. In truth, I put about six hours and change into Infectonator this weekend, but it felt longer. In a good way. The concept here is the opposite of OMG-Zombies! Instead of trying to exterminate the undead, you’re trying to create them, and wipe out humanity in the process. In the beginning, you’re given a single dose of a virus. Tapping the screen, you place the virus near humans, causing them to turn into zombies. They run around and kill humans, who may or may not turn into zombies. Every time you kill a person, you get coins that you can spend on upgrades, new zombie classes (that’s classes of zombies, not classes on zombies, but I think I’m onto something there if you’re short on game ideas), or special powers. Unlike some games like this, even the smallest upgrades feel like they make progress, which makes the gameplay very rewarding. An average game will take you about two hours to play-through.
I can sum up how potently addictive Infectonator is by saying that I played through it four times. Do you know how many games I’ve ever played through four times before this? None. Never once. Nor have I ever played through a game even three times. At most, I’ll play through a game once on one difficulty and once on a harder difficulty, then move on to something else. For whatever reason, I had trouble putting down Infectonator. A second play-through became a third. Then I realized I still hadn’t played the game with the super power-ups, so I saved up my cash in the third play-through and rolled it over to the fourth, immediately bought the super power-ups, and then beat the game a fourth time. I will admit, by this point, I wasn’t really having fun.
The first time around? Sublime. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face (or the time-sink-induced drool from my mouth) with a jackhammer and dynamite. The second time around, I was waiting for “harder” mode to be, you know, harder, and it never came. But I was still having a good time. The third time around, I was just playing to save money to see how over-powered the super power-ups were. The fourth time, I was shaking my head at how easy the game was now that my virus spreader was passing through people and walls. Not only that, but I had so much money saved up (over $500,000) that I was also fully able to upgrade the amount of directions the virus spread in and beef up my zombies to the point that they were practically indestructible. I’ve always said I enjoy abusing leveling up systems, but I think I took it to a new extreme here and consequently ruined a game I had been having a damn good time with. I’m ashamed of myself, I really am.
This scene is begging to be made into a movie. Just don’t fuck it up by making the star Jack Black or Will Ferrell.
My only other complaints are the typical ones associated with iPhone games. Infectonator crashed every single time that I tried to “report” my score. The way they implemented Game Center support is among the worst I’ve ever seen on an iPhone title. Infectonator also bogged down several times. Never once did I have a problem on my first play through, but each subsequent game had slow-down issues. Plus I seriously question whether “hard” mode actually was hard, considering that I beat the game with fewer upgrades on my third play-through then I did the first time. I also found the endless mode to be quite dull. Of course, all these complaints are slightly muted by the fact that Infectonator is free. Free is a good price. Considering how horrible the values for Infectonator’s micro-transactions are ($9.99 nets you 100,000 gold coins, which isn’t enough for even one of those super power-ups that only works in one play-through), I wonder why they didn’t just slap a $0.99 price tag on their game? Maybe indie gaming really is a race to the bottom. If that’s the case, the guys behind this game strapped anvils to their backs and flung themselves down the Mariana Trench. No word on whether they waved to James Cameron on the way down. Or maybe they turned him into a zombie while they were at it.
I still enthusiastically recommend Infectonator. It’s free on iOS and Android. Are you one of those troglodytes that doesn’t have a phone? Well then you can play it for free online too. If I ranked non-XBLIGs on my Leaderboard, Infectonator would be somewhere near the top. It’s a glorious little time sink that does what any good time sink does: ruin your fucking life.
Probably the biggest misconception about me as a gamer is that I’m anti-retro or anti-old games. I’m not. I’m simply of the opinion that some games age better than others. I wouldn’t want to play Space Invaders or Pac-Man as they existed back in the day. I’m perfectly fine with modern remakes of them, like Space Invaders Extreme or Pac-Man Championship Edition. On the other hand, some of those older games have aged pretty gracefully. Centipede is one such game. In fact, it’s one of the few golden age coin-ops that I feel blends in perfectly with the current generation. Its twitchy, fast-paced gameplay lends itself perfectly to ten minute portable sessions. It released recently on the Vita’s Home Arcade platform, and I snagged it for $1.49 in preparation for today’s review. That’s about what I would have spent to last 15 minutes on the coin-op if I had been alive in 1983. Did I mention I really suck at it?
Centipede on PlayStation Home Arcade (Vita)
So what do I think of Home Arcade? Um, hmmmm.. you know, in the four years its been around, I never have really used PlayStation Home too much. I would rather just be able to launch games straight off my Vita’s dashboard without having to open Home Arcade. The interface is clunky and half the time I’ll be stabbing the ever-loving shit out of the “your games” button and nothing happens. Having said that, the prices are pretty good ($1.49 each) and it has the advantage of being portable and on the coolest gaming gizmo in years. I don’t even have Home installed on my PS3, and I don’t plan on it, but you don’t need it to use Home Arcade. I can’t speak for the rest of the games (get back to me the next time an Asteroids clone hits XBLIG) but Centipede controls well. I guess you can’t ask for more. Which is a good thing, because what you get is a bare-bones port of the arcade original. They could have thrown in ports of the Atari home versions, but hey, it’s called making a lazy dollar.
I picked up Centipede on Vita because I wanted to compare it to Bad Caterpillar, a new Xbox Live Indie Game from Kris Steele. I like Kris, but the dude fucking aggravates me to no end. His games always have something glaringly off about them. Volchaos would have been fun if the movement physics weren’t so damn loose. The same goes for Hypership: Out of Control on XBLIG. If a gnat so much as farts in the direction of the analog stick, it sends your ship flying. In a game that involves lining up your character to shoot smaller targets, precision control is kind of needed. Hypership is actually sublime on iPhone, and very addictive. Of course, that has the advantage of having drag-the-ship touch controls for extra-accurate firing. His track record of acceptable controls on XBLIG is about as good as THQ’s record with bankruptcy avoidance. Considering that Bad Caterpillar looked really close to Centipede, a game which requires precision movement so much that the arcade original used a trackball, I braced for the worst.
Bad Caterpillar on Xbox Live Indie Games.
As it turns out, my worries were misplaced. Bad Caterpillar handles pretty well. Not perfect. No joystick-based Centipede can possibly be perfect. But, I can honestly say that it plays better than any other version of Centipede I played today. That’s a lot of versions. For the sake of comparison, I also bought Centipede & Millipede, a 2-for-1 Xbox Live Arcade port of the arcade games. Movement for these is too loose to be acceptable. I’ve always had a difficult time in Centipede lining up shots correctly, especially when the last segments of the Centipede are near the bottom of the screen. That’s not a huge problem in Bad Caterpillar. It’s a fucking chore in the XBLA arcade ports. If it was any looser, it would hang out on dimly-lit street corners and be considered a bio-hazard.
The “evolved” version of Centipede & Millipede on Xbox Live Arcade.
The biggest disappointment with the XBLA ports (besides the awful controls) is how the “modern” versions are really just the same old Centipede with some new (re: 15 year-old) special effects added. On the flip side, Bad Caterpillar looks old, but it features some nifty new ideas such as power-ups and bombs. Should probably clear this up: by new, I meant “new for Centipede.” My problem here is that they don’t get spit out often enough. I played full games where the item drops were nothing but points. The game should go nuts with them. I mean, I can already play a Centipede-like game that doesn’t offer power-ups. It’s called Centipede.
Centipede Origins on iPhone.
I guess I should bring up that I also played the iOS update, called Centipede Origins. It’s a micro-transaction oriented shooter that tries to controls like Kris Steele’s Hypership does on iPhone. But I found the drag-the-shooter controls to be too glitchy, with the cursor being unable to keep up with my finger, even as I dragged it slowly across the screen. Only played it for like five minutes, would never want to play it again. I also dug around and found my copy of Centipede for the Sega Dreamcast, but decided against spending any time digging around for the actual machine to play it on. Honestly, I’m all Centipeded out. So what are my thoughts? Well, the Vita version is a worthy use of money for a solid portable version of a masterpiece. The iOS version is just about the worst thing to happen to iPhone since Siri. The XBLA ports of Centipede & Millipede come across like quick, effortless cash-ins and should be avoided like the clap. Finally, the XBLIG update Bad Caterpillar is actually a decent game with a few problems. The moths are unfair, there’s no online leaderboards, and the heavy metal soundtrack is so out-of-place. It would be like going to Ozzfest to listen to country music. But I do recommend it, because it’s the best (and cheapest) version of Centipede you’ll get on your Xbox. Kind of sad that an XBLIG port made by a guy I consider to be a bit of a twat completely slays the official versions of Centipede. Just kidding, Kris.
Dynasty of Dusk is a JRPG made by three college students. It’s an early contender for Worst Game of 2013. When a game is putridity bad, it usually is because the developer bit off more than he could chew. That’s not entirely the case here. Dynasty of Dusk is so stripped down and minimalistic that it’s shocking there’s enough here to be classified as rancid. But what really startled me is this very much comes across like one of those “getting your feet wet” type of games. Those usually are bad, but not THIS bad. I actively looked for something, anything, I could praise, and came up empty-handed. Now I know how Amanda Bynes’ agent feels.
I’ll start with the story, which apparently revolves around an evil king kidnapping spirit animals to try to gain immortality so that he can rule the world forever. I’m not sure why you would want to rule a world that has like ten people living in it. Despite what Tears for Fears would have you believe, I have no interest in this world at all. The writing could not possibly be any more bland. It’s so boring that a big screen adaption would star Kristen Stewart and end up making like $300,000,000 at the box office. Okay, bad analogy.
My point is, the only thing a throwback, turn-based RPG can possibly do to grab attention these days is have an absurd story hook and/or snappy writing. Without those, you probably shouldn’t bother. Yea, I know games like this used to be this badly written and completely lack characterization, but RPGs aren’t exactly like platformers. A story is all they have. Without that, you’re just playing a glorified menu simulator. Being just like the old school games doesn’t work in RPGs because retro charm doesn’t translate to them. It wasn’t the retro graphics that made people like Breath of Death, Cthulhu Saves the World, or Doom & Destiny. It was the writing and the characters. The retro graphics were just good set dressing to take the piss out of the classics. That’s why they worked.
I try not to pick on bad graphics too often, but let’s face it, Dynasty of Dusk looks awful. But it’s the music that’s really bad. Even Gitmo won’t use it for Enhanced Interrogation.
Ignoring the story (you know, sort of like the developers did), Dynasty of Dusk is a complete mess. Right off the bat, I want to gripe about how fucking unresponsive the controls are. Far and away, the least responsive of any game I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s the menus. Not necessarily the ones you use during fights, but sometimes they’re stubborn too. I’m talking about the between fights menus. The ones you go through by, you know, just pausing the fucking game. You have to navigate them using the bumpers and the triggers. I swear to Christ, at best the game recognized a button press once every five times. I would be trying to scroll through the various characters to check and upgrade their stats, but the game couldn’t keep up with such simple actions as pressing the bumper once, indicating that I wished to move to the next menu. It was like having an argument with a hard-of-hearing geriatric.
“Okay, now I wish to see the Warrior’s stats.”
“HUH?”
“I said I wish to see the Warrior’s stats.”
“WHAT?”
“The Warrior’s stats!”
“You need to speak up, child!”
“FUCKING HELL, LET ME SEE THE WARRIOR’S STATS RIGHT NOW YOU GOD DAMN BROKEN DOWN PIECE OF SHIT!”
“The Warrior’s stats?”
“YES!!”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
And this goes on and on. It got to the point that I physically got out of my chair to check and see if something was blocking my controller’s signal. Nope. I checked my controller’s battery. Full charge. I switched packs anyway. Didn’t help. I changed what controller I was using. Still no good. Hell, maybe some other signal in the house is causing interference. Not that either. I got more exercise trying to fix Dynasty of Dusk than I have from three years worth of Kinect ownership. As it turns out, the game is just an utterly broken piece of shit.
And it gets worse once you’re actually playing the fucking thing, as opposed to arguing with menus like you’re the star of Bravo’s newest reality show, The Spreadsheet Whisperer. I’ve always enjoyed abusing level-up systems in games. Indie Games are often prone to this. Pour all your upgrades into one stat, throw the game completely off-balance, then spend the next couple hours mowing down enemies like they’re dandelions and you’re the world’s most efficiently built weed-whacker. Crazy as this sounds, I usually have a better time when I can do this. It gives me a chance to feel all smug, wondering how the developers never saw the potential for someone to do this. Well actually, I do know why. It’s because they have a specific logic in mind when they build the game, and operate under the assumption people will play their game exactly the way they would. They won’t. It’s like those competitions they have where people have to create the most elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines that only serve to make toast, and I’m the one person who says “fuck it” and shows up to the party with a loaf of bread and a flame thrower.
Yea, it’s as boring as it looks.
Here’s how abusive you can be towards Dynasty of Dusk. The game starts with you quickly acquiring the four different attack forms, Warrior, Archer, and.. you know what? Fuck it, you don’t need to hear any more. The archer has a nifty move called “pierce” and that’s all you will need for the rest of the game. It does massive damage and goes through every enemy. Battles consisted of me selecting the archer, selecting pierce, and winning in one shot, two tops. I poured all my upgrades into letting me level up faster, and then spent the next five minutes grinding, because you can force battles with a simple press (or multiple presses, fucking piece of shit game) of the X button. In the span of five minutes, I took my archer from level 1 to level 20. I’m not joking. Before I was even out of the opening caves of the game, the main dude had leveled several times and my archer was a level 20. Later, when I found enemies that paid off even better, I did it more and got him up to level 30 within just a two or three minutes.
And you know what? For once, I didn’t feel that satisfied about it. I felt downright horrible, like one of those assholes that kicks over sand castles for jollies having a sudden, sharp attack of conscience. I vowed to play the game on the straight-and-narrow from here on out. Sadly, not too long after this, the game crashed and kept crashing. Because saving is the most clunky of all the clunky menus, I didn’t give it too much attention and subsequently lost all my progress. Not that it matters, because there was no potential that anything was going to come along and save it, but I still felt bad. Yea, Dynasty of Dusk is among the worst games I’ve ever played in my life, but I did kick over their sand castle and I want to apologize for that. Sincerely. Stick with it guys. Build another sand castle, and I promise I won’t kick it over. I’ll just let the tide come in and wash it away.
Dynasty of Dusk was developed by Tropic Tundra Games. Hey, wait a second. You guys are from Wisconsin. How do you even know what a Tropic is? The rest of the country has gone to great lengths to keep you cheese-eaters in the dark about them.
80 Microsoft Points would have been more interested in a game called “Dysentery of Dusk” in the making of this review.
XNA, which my non-developer readers will note is the development framework of Xbox Live Indie Games, is being put out to pasture. It’s not quite dead yet. Put it this way: the family has been notified and doctors are starting to determine what organs are viable for transplant, but the plug is not completely pulled yet. Although I’m confident indies will exist in a similar (but hopefully better) form on the next generation Xbox, creating games for the platform will be a much different experience. I’ve been seeking out possible XBLIG alternatives. MonoGame isn’t necessarily what I had in mind, but the more I read and heard about it, the more I saw the potential in what they offer.
I should probably preface this editorial by noting that I have absolutely no clue what any of this means. Like traveling in a country with Romance Languages, I’m at best picking out an odd word here or there, but otherwise it’s all Greek to me. Which is weird because Greek is not a Romance Language and doesn’t fit into the metaphor at all.
Marble Masters: The Pit was developed by Polyart
Marble Masters: The Pit is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick: Leaderboard, now sponsored by Smooth Operators: Call Center Chaos. If you combined the two, it would be called Marble Operators, which sounds a little pornographic. I bet Team Shuriken is working on it.
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