My Ten Favorite Games Ever – Part 4

November 3, 2012 by 8 Comments

Continuing from Part 3, these are my personal ten favorite games ever.  Not the best games ever made, or even games I want to play again.  But the ten games I had the most fun playing the first time I played them.

Banjo-Kazooie

Age I was: 9

Last attempt at playing it: ten years later at age 19, when it was released on XBLA.

Would I ever play it again: No

Crash Bandicoot and Crash Bandicoot 2. Those were pretty much the definitive games of my formative years as a gamer.  Sure, there were lots of oddball games between those.   The original Rayman I enjoyed.  Bubsy 3D I did not.  At age 7, it was my first clue that not all games are created equal.  But while my experience playing a PlayStation kiosk lured me into asking Santa Claus for one for Christmas, I wasn’t quite to the point of tracking down every new release and having actual anticipation for upcoming titles.  And then I played Banjo-Kazooie at Toys R Us, and everything changed.

July 11, 1998.  My 9th birthday.  A brand new Nintendo 64, a controller that looked like a tumorous raptor-claw, and Banjo-Kazooie.  All mine.  How much did I love Banjo-Kazooie?  I didn’t even open the other game I got that day, Mario Kart 64, until a month later.  Banjo owned the rest of my summer.  I spent hours hunting down every music note, honeycomb, nook, cranny, and just being in awe of how much bigger this was than anything I had played before it.  This wasn’t a roped-off parade route, like Crash.  This was a full-fledged world that was alive and breathing, and it was mine to explore.

Banjo wasn’t the last game to wow me like that.  I had similar feelings the first time I explored Hyrule in Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or raced a Killer Whale in Sonic Adventure.  None of which I feel hold up today, but that first time through each will always hold a special place in my heart.  Platformers didn’t become special again for me until long after that.  Super Mario 64, which I played for the first time immediately after finishing Banjo-Kazooie, was hugely disappointing for me.  The world seemed less alive, less vibrant, and duller.  But that made sense.  It came out years before Banjo, and even Shigeru Miyamoto wasn’t totally satisfied with it.  He wanted to keep refining it, until Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi outright told him “it’s good enough, we need to get this into manufacturing!”

Nuts & Bolts was just alright for me. Some of my readers are shocked that I didn’t like it more on account of my childhood love for Banjo. I don’t get the logic of that at all. It’s like saying I like peanuts, and therefore I’ll like peanuts even if they’re fifteen years past the expiration date.

Mario 64 not “doing it for me” was perfectly logical.  So how come Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo-Tooie didn’t “do it for me” either?  Or for that matter, Super Mario Sunshine or Sly Cooper or countless other very good platformers?  Even after experiencing a couple “holy shit, this is amazing!” moments in Sonic Adventure (a game I concede is an atrocious piece of shit, but I was blinded at the time by the shiny new hardware) or my first time playing the Game Boy Advance ports of stuff I missed like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Yoshi’s Island, nothing ever quite approached that month spent playing Banjo-Kazooie.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Isn’t that how it should be?  Those moments of pure gaming nirvana, where you know you’re playing something uniquely special that makes you feel different than all other games do, shouldn’t those be rare?  For you it might have been Mario 3 or Chrono Trigger or Link to the Past.  For me, it was Banjo-Kazooie, and that’s just because of the generation gap.  If I had felt the same way after Tooie, or Mario 64, or Donkey Kong 64, or Blinx, or Vexx, or Billy Hatcher, then that original moment isn’t as special.  I enjoyed all the games I just listed, some very much so.   But only Banjo-Kazooie made me feel awesome in ways that defy description.  And I can’t get that feeling back from playing it again.  I tried not too long after I finished Banjo the first time.  I tried again when Banjo got a nifty HD port to Xbox Live Arcade.  It’s just not the same game for me anymore.  Like Shadow of the Colossus, I have nothing left to get from it.  At one point, I chalked it up to platformers not meaning as much to me as they did when I was a kid.  I still enjoyed them, but my gaming palate had grown and I liked other genres now.  I figured nothing would ever make me feel like Banjo-Kazooie did.  And then I played this..

Super Mario Galaxy

Age I was: 18

Last attempt at playing it: I never went back and played the original again, but the sequel was a glorified expansion pack and it hit when I was 21, so there you go.

Would I ever play it again: No

Mario doesn’t mean the same to me as he does to you.  That doesn’t mean I think Mario games are somehow inferior to your perception of them.  In general, they’re pretty fucking awesome.  But my childhood wasn’t spent counting down the days until the next game with Mario would hit the shelves.  That’s why I can’t get even remotely nostalgic about Super Mario 3, nor can I stand hearing people try to justify The Wizard.  Super Mario World wasn’t a benchmark title for me.  It was just the second game in the series to be ported to Game Boy Advance, and it was really fun.  Mario 64 was that game that let me down after Banzo-Kazooie, but I didn’t hate it or anything.  I just don’t think it’s a game that transcends time.  New Super Mario Bros. was that weird title that felt like the gaming equivalent of a bunch of frat boys trying to recreate their glory days and coming across as sadly quaint and pathetic.  I guess I’m really weird, because my favorite Mario up to this point had been Super Mario Advance.  You know, the remake of Super Mario 2.  The strange one that only became a Mario game because Shigeru Miyamoto went on the rag and decided he wanted humanity to suffer, making the real Mario 2 so brutally difficult that nobody could possibly like it.  Yea, I’m talking about the vegetable pulling one where NOBODY actually used Mario.  They either used Luigi or the Princess, and they probably warped past the ice world because that shit was fucking horrid.

I didn’t have low expectations for Super Mario Galaxy.  I thought it would be fun, just like Mario Sunshine had been, and that I would enjoy it for a couple of days, finish it, and think nothing of it.  So imagine my surprise when I totally melted as I played it.  It was awesome.  And it did what no game had done for me since Banjo: it turned me into a nine-year-old again, and kept me that way the whole play-through.  It was magical.  It really was.

The amazing levels, crazy gravity, fun objectives, and that sense that everything you were experiencing was something new and unique.  You’ve seen stuff like Mario Galaxy before.  It borrowed elements from previous games in the series liberally.  But they had never felt quite like this did.  It was utterly amazing.  The goals were always short and focused, so that they never grew tiresome, and worlds had just enough objectives to feel like they knew exactly how long it would all take to get boring and stopped just short of it.  There were plenty of surprises, legitimate challenges, and moments where you had to sit back and admit that this is as close to perfect as a game can get.  I don’t put Nintendo on a pedestal.  Quite frankly, I think they’re pretty overrated.  That’s mostly because they weren’t single-handedly responsible for my entire catalog of childhood memories like they were for so many gamers.  And while I don’t think the Wii is the abomination that so many hold it to be, it certainly won’t go down as one of my favorite systems ever.

But Mario Galaxy?  It will be special to me forever.

I’m really not a big fan of Yoshi. I don’t see what it adds to a game besides unneeded complexity and annoyance. It doesn’t help that my first encounter with him was Yoshi’s Story for the Nintendo 64. Even at 9 years old, the game was so pitifully easy that I actually spent hours staring at the box trying to figure out where the fine print that says “For Ages 2 – 4” was at.

But let’s not kid ourselves: When Mario Galaxy 2 hit, it was a very good game that simply couldn’t recreate the magic of the original.  The uniqueness had worn off, and the sense of wonder was gone.  It was more of the same.  Which is fine, because the original was so good.  But once the magic is gone, it’s gone.  That happens so much with me.  Even if a sequel is clearly the better game, the originals always stick with me more.  I really enjoyed Arkham City, but my memories of Arkham Asylum are much stronger.  I’ll reminisce about God of War before I think back to that great time I had with God of War III.  And these aren’t even the games that I hold to be the best.  It’s rare when I say a sequel actually is better enough that I’m certain to remember it first.  After discussing it with friends, only two games stuck out: Uncharted 2 and Pikmin 2 (though Assassin’s Creed III might win a spot).  Being 23 years old contributes to that somewhat, because I didn’t play most of the great franchises in chronological order.

I think why Mario Galaxy means so much to me is because it ended the cynic in me who felt that gaming would never get as good as it was when I was 9.  Obviously if playing Banjo-Kazooie on XBLA at age 19 couldn’t make me feel the same way that playing Banjo-Kazooie on Nintendo 64 at age 9 did, nothing would.  That was wrong, and I should have known better.  Of course I could feel that way again.  It just wouldn’t come from the same source.  It came from Mario Galaxy.  And you know what?  Some day I’ll feel that way again.  A game will come along that reverts me back to a smiling, giggling nine-year-old.  Do you know what else I know?  It won’t be Mario Galaxy.

Final part coming next with my two favorite games ever!

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My Ten Favorite Games Ever – Part 3

November 2, 2012 by 8 Comments

Continuing from Part 2, these are my personal ten favorite games ever. Not the best games ever made, or even games I want to play again. But the ten games I had the most fun playing the first time I played them.

Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare

Age I was: 20 and 21

Last attempt at playing it: Played through all the main content and DLC once. Would play some more if more DLC hit, which ain’t happening.

Would I ever play it again: No

I’ve enjoyed games like Grand Theft Auto and Saint’s Row, but the thing about them is, I’m not really all that interested in the life of criminal or a gang banger. Take CJ from San Andreas. Has there ever been a less sympathetic character that is the protagonist of a game? Hell, you can almost feel a little bad for Duke Nukem. With that much machismo and bravado, you know he has to have microscopic pecker. But CJ? What a douche. I think that’s why I disliked San Andreas so much. I kept waiting for a cut scene where he would realize he was a cancer on all those around him and cap himself. Trust me, I was a frequent user of Right, L2, Down, R1, Left, Left, R1, L1, L2, L1.

That’s what I loved about Red Dead Redemption. My buddy Cyril chastised me for short-handing it as “Grand Theft Auto 1910s” when its way more complex than that. But really, that’s sort of what it is. You know what? I find that setting more interesting. That doesn’t matter though. It’s the writing. It’s the fact that main characters John and Jack are complex but have a genuine sense of goodness about them. So when it comes time to take control of them and lead them through their outstanding adventure, the scenarios it puts them through feels like something they should be doing. Whereas the only thing I thought CJ or Vice City’s Tommy should be doing is stuffing their pants with large rocks and hurling themselves into the river.

By all rights, Red Dead Redemption should have been an unmitigated disaster. Six years to make. Over 800 people involved in its production. It went way over budget, suffered numerous delays, apparently was the source of bad working conditions and an unhappy staff, and all that for a sequel to a game that wasn’t really that good to begin with? How was this not another Duke Nukem Forever or Galleon? Even more puzzling, how on Earth did all that create one of the best games ever made? It’s mind-boggling.

Yea, it’s a bit rough around the edges at times, but Red Dead Redemption was really the first game of its kind from Rockstar that felt like it was actually made just for adults. I always thought the Grand Theft Auto games seemed more targeted towards what I call your inner-bastard. Sure, the storylines were “mature” in the sense that they involved swearing and committing crimes. Yet, the games were always cartoonish enough and so over-the-top that I always kind of figured the M rating came with a knowing “wink-wink” and a nod towards the kiddie set. And it worked. Twelve-year-old me wanted Grand Theft Auto III because my parents said no. On the other hand, Red Dead Redemption feels like something that twelve-year-old me wouldn’t, or more accurately couldn’t, appreciate.

And yes, I actually liked Undead Nightmare. While I still say I’m baffled as to why zombies are more popular with the nerd set than free blowjobs, I have to concede that Undead Nightmare is actually better than the main game. Intense as hell, lots of “holy shit” twists, and startling moments that complement an overall sense of dread. For all the unjustified hype surrounding each new Resident Evil release, has any horror title done better than Undead Nightmare over the last ten years? After playing it, all other DLC seems lackluster. The bar is now set so high that you need jet-powered pogo stick to reach it. Then again, this and Black Ops probably should be flogged just for setting off this new “every game needs to have zombies shoehorned into it somehow” trend. I’m officially done with games if they find their way into Reader Rabbit.

But let’s not kid ourselves: After a very good-sized adventure and five installments of DLC, I’m beyond burned out on Red Dead Redemption. Yea, I would certainly play more if they put it out, but I can’t say I’m still wanting more. I’m totally satisfied, and I have no expectations for what the future of this series holds. Like Final Fantasy VII, this felt like lightning in a bottle. What I would like to see is a totally different setting. I’m actually pretty pissed that Assassin’s Creed called dibs on the American Revolution. As much as I’m enjoying Assassin’s Creed III, I would so rather have Rockstar use that as the setting for the next Red Dead game. They could call it Red Dead Red Coats!

GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark

Age I was: 10 and 11.

Last attempt at playing it: at least ten years ago for GoldenEye, last year for Perfect Dark.

Would I ever play it again: Noooooooooooooo!

I can’t properly explain what GoldenEye and Perfect Dark have meant to my life (yes, life), so instead I’ll just tell you a story. I’m sure you all will be rolling your eyes as much as I’m wiping tears from mine.

I have autism. Kids can have a tough time growing up, but growing up like this was at times very isolating. I only went to school through first-grade, and was tutored at home after that. My only social interaction came in the form of a sort of support group that met in San Francisco, where kids all across the autism spectrum could interact and feel as normal as possible. This was mostly done with games and physical activities. Later, a Nintendo 64 with four controllers joined the fray. Then GoldenEye showed up and was hot for two days before the counselors declared it to be inappropriate and banned it. That lasted another couple of days before parents actually requested they let the kids play it, because it was causing such a positive amount of social interaction. Thank God Xbox Live didn’t exist back then, or it would have ended up in a firing barrel.

I was going to complain about how Wikipedia has the European box art instead of the American one, but hey, it actually looks way better than ours. Carry on.

I never actually touched it that whole time. I was firmly in the PlayStation camp at age eight, and only joined in when Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing made an appearance. But those moments were rare. It was all GoldenEye, all the time. It wasn’t until two years later that I finally got curious what all the fuss was about. So I started watching the other kids (ranging from ages ten to early twenties) play it. I did that for, oh, about three months. Never daring to actually play, or even try. By that point, I owned a Nintendo 64, but I never thought to buy it. I hadn’t even played any shooter before. With the exception of Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing, every game I owned was a platformer. Then, one day, I worked up the courage to play it with the group. Do I even need to go any further?

I guess I should, because to not do so fails to give GoldenEye the justice it deserves. It was something special. I had played Mario Kart with the group, and yea, great game. I owned it. Spent many hours with it as a kid. But Goldeneye. Wow. License to Kill mode. Proximity mines. The facility with automatics. Hours and hours, and full years spent with it and Perfect Dark. I miss that time. A lot.

But let’s not kid ourselves:I shed many tears sharing that with Brian and reminiscing about the skill levels of each dude I used to play against. But no matter what, those days are gone and I can’t get them back.It will never be the same. The Nintendo 64 originals are downright unplayable today. They’re glitchy, skippy, and Perfect Dark especially chugs at like two frames an hour if you have four players and eight sims going. Stuff you didn’t notice in 2000 when games didn’t play any better. But they do now and I can’t pretend they don’t.

They tried a sequel to Perfect Dark, and I’m still honestly not sure if it’s any good. The problem with it was it was so different from the original. Perfect Dark was awesome because it felt like GoldenEye. Perfect Dark Zero didn’t feel like GoldenEye at all, which is all anyone wanted. They’ve remade GoldenEye a few times since 1997, and it never feels right. It’s actually obnoxious, like someone doing a bad Sean Connery impression. Meanwhile, they brought out a spot-on Perfect Dark port with online play to Xbox Live Arcade. It still wasn’t the same. As much as I cling to Xbox Live today, GoldenEye and Perfect Dark made the leap from great to amazing because of Chris, Matt, Bradley James, OddScott, and Bo. Five guys out there know exactly who I’m talking about. If you guys still live in the Bay Area, send me an e-mail. I would love to play Halo 4 with you next week.

Continue to Part 4: Banzo-Marzooie Galaxy!

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My Ten Favorite Games Ever – Part 2

November 1, 2012 by 5 Comments

Continuing from Part 1, these are my personal ten favorite games ever.  Not the best games ever made, or even games I want to play again.  But the ten games I had the most fun playing the first time I played them.

Shadow of the Colossus

Age I was: 16

Last attempt at playing it: last year when it was re-released on PlayStation 3.  Shadow is one of the rare games that I’ve finished twice.  But there won’t be a third time.

Would I ever play it again: No

Between you and me, I never really liked Ico all that much.  Despite the massive amount of praise it got from pretty much everyone, I hated the combat and I detest escort missions in general.  A game that is all escorting, all the time was like being forced to listen to someone take a nail file to Gilbert Gottfried’s teeth.  So while the artwork was nice (I guess) and the puzzle design was alright (if you’re into that sort of thing), it did nothing for me.  As a result, Shadow of the Colossus was nowhere on my radar.  I had no faith in it.  Thought it would be a piece of shit.  And then I played the demo from the official PlayStation Magazine.  And I had to have it.  Like, right then.

There has never been anything quite like Shadow of the Colossus.  What made it work is how alone you feel in the world you’re in.  With no secondary enemies, treasures to find, caves to explore, fetch-quests, menus, and so on, and so on, everything is focused on intense, rewarding gameplay.  The storyline isn’t exactly deep, but you’re given just enough snippets of what’s going on to be curious exactly what you’re doing and why.  Despite the open-worldness of it, it felt like a dark ride at an amusement park.  You’re pushed from one goal to the next, feeling the exact emotion the developers want you to feel.  Fear from a lake monster.  Apprehension from a twenty-story tall behemoth.  Thrills as you soar through the air on a flying giant.  Even a true sense of loss when your horse seemingly dies.  Then again, I’m not sure they were trying to provoke “how the FUCK did it survive and limp all the way back here?” when it shows up during the final cut scene, which is what I was like.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Shadow of the Colossus is a one-and-done experience.  Yea, there’s a lot of hidden content, like lizards and fruits that increase your abilities.  And yea, they’re special weapons you get for beating the bosses a second time.  But the best parts about Shadow of the Colossus can only be experienced one time.  Those moments when you encounter a boss for the first time, or gaze in awe at a new area of the land to explore.  Once you’ve done that, there’s no turning back the clock.  Not even an HD upgrade of the game made playing through it a totally worthwhile use of my time last year.  I loved Shadow of the Colossus, but I can’t get anymore out of it.

XBLIG equivalent: Ha, right.  One game did try to recreate the whole “fight giant-sized enemies” schtick, Ogre’s Phantasm Sword Quest.  But that wasn’t even trying to be like Shadow of the Colossus.  It’s not an XBLIG, but the closest any game has come to reminding me of it was PlayStation Network hit Journey.  It wasn’t about the slaying of giants or the minimalistic presentation.  It was about the emotional focus.  A game that gives you the illusion of having freedom, but in reality pushes you from point A to point B while evoking specifically targeted reactions in the player.   Lots of games try to do that, but few are smart enough to keep it simple and aim for very specific nerves.

Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II

Age I was: 13 and 16

Last attempt at playing it: I’ve only played them once.

Would I ever play it again: No.  Well, define “again” since every single spinoff and sequel feels like the same fucking game, only increasingly less coherent.

I can’t really defend my love of Kingdom Hearts.  The story was absurd, the camera was unworkable, the characters as they originally stood all had the complexity of a straw, and it was fucking awesome.  It’s a real shame what has become of this series.  It reminds me of what happened to the Matrix series between the original flick and the two sequels, where the creators fell in love just a little bit too much with their own top-heavy mythology.  When it was just about Sora and Riku being separated from their home and their friend and being in a strange world surrounded by cartoon characters, I liked it.  Pitiful me totally melted when I saw a moogle.  “Oh gee, there’s a moogle, in this game that has Donald Duck and Goofy!  Tee hee!”  But as the sequels and spinoffs started adding evil organizations and Nobodys and all the stuff you see is real but maybe it’s not or maybe it’s a dream or maybe you’re remembering it wrong or you know what fuck it.  I wish I had played the original and then had myself hypnotized to get physically ill if I was ever tempted to play another game in the series.

Maybe I’m being hypocritical.  My inner anti-critic is saying “It’s Disney and it’s Square!  Come on, Cathy!  Of course it’s going to sound like raving insane fan-fiction!  Nothing at Disneyland makes sense either, but the rides are still fun!”  I chose to pair Shadow of the Colossus with Kingdom Hearts here because both feel like rides.  They give an artificial sense of being bigger than they really are, when they’re really drawing your attention to very specific things on a linear path that you have almost no control over.  Yet, it never feels like a fan service (see Smash Bros) or pretentious (see Epic Mickey) and remains charming.  At least the two main games do.  All the spinoffs can get in line to kiss my ass.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Even with all the options to change-up combat, with various combos and formations, the limited variety of enemies and ultra-repetitive nature of fights gets old quickly.  Both Kingdom Hearts and its sequel over-stayed their welcome by a good five to ten hours each.  Yes, too much of a good thing can and does happen.  I’m also increasingly uninterested in a possible third proper sequel.  That’s thanks in no small part to several spinoffs with titles that sound like badly translated Japanese.  358/2 Days?  Birth by Sleep??  Dream Drop Distance???  You made these incomprehensible pieces of shit instead  of #3 why?

XBLIG equivalent: Again, I really didn’t think this part out too much.  Seemed like a good idea when I came up with this feature.  Nothing really compares to it on XBLIG, so I’ll just end right here.  But, if you do want to try to make something like this yourself, remember to focus players attentions on very little while making them think there’s a lot more going on then there is.  It sounds absurd, but that’s exactly what Shadow of the Colossus and Kingdom Hearts both did, and did very well.

Continue to Part III: Cowboys and GoldenEye playing Aliens.

And yes I cheated: I’m counting Kingdom Hearts I & II as one game.  Just wait until the next chapter.  I do that twice!  So really this the top 13 games.  Why not?

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My Ten Favorite Games Ever – Part 1

November 1, 2012 by 9 Comments

Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of an Indie Gamer Chick review when, unfortunately, my epilepsy likes the game less than I do.  Such is the case with Demon House.  So while I recover, I figure I’ll answer one of the most common questions I get: “what’s your favorite game ever?” or “what is the best game ever is?”  I don’t think the latter question can accurately be answered, because it involves personal subjective opinions.  If the question being posed is “what’s the most important game ever?” that would be easier.  Pong, or Space Invaders, or Super Mario Bros. would probably rank near the top, with Crackdown 2 being at the very bottom.  That’s right, Crackdown 2 is less important to gaming than anything else in gaming history.  Developer Ruffian Games knew this, which is why they totally half-assed it.

This all seems so familiar. Wait, you didn’t just slap a number two on the original and call it a day, did you?

I don’t know what truly is the best game ever.  All I know is what games I’ve personally enjoyed the most.  And these aren’t necessarily games that I would ever want to play again.  Over half of them I really don’t.  They’re part of my past.  A very awesome, much-loved part of my past, but I’m not interested in trying to recreate the magic.   For me, every time I go back and play a childhood favorite, I cringe at how badly its aged.  While I might have a little fun, it almost never comes close to the sense of awe and joy that I once gained from it.  My most recent example: I dug up Blast Corps last week, one of my favorite Nintendo 64 games.  Stuff I never noticed as a kid, like a stuttering frame-rate and some spotty level design, made the game practically unplayable for me.  I’m spoiled by modern technology, and I can’t force myself to like something just because I liked it as a kid.

When LucasFilm got sold to Disney earlier this week, some extremely thick morons cried about how Disney now “owns their childhood!”  Um, no.  You own your childhood.  You also can’t get your childhood back.  It’s gone.  You either can enjoy your memories of it or you can stick your head in a paint shaker and hope the resulting damage reverts you back to your preteens.  Wait a second.  I know this is off topic but aren’t you Star Wars geeks who are now crying buckets over Disney owning your childhood the same dorks who keep complaining about how George Lucas has raped your childhood with countless re-releases or adding aliens to Indiana Jones?  It just goes to show, you can’t please fanboys.  I would say they need to be segregated away from the rest of the population, but they already self-impose that.

So these are the ten games I had the best time with during my original play of them.  And mind you, I’m 23-years-old and grew up with a PlayStation and Nintendo 64, not an Atari or an NES.  If it’s not on here, feel free to yell at me in the comments.  And just to make sure some of those haters who have told me to quit calling myself an XBLIG site because the 20 non-XBLIG reviews I’ve done somehow cancel out the 293 XBLIG reviews, I’ll talk about what games on my list are comparable to XBLIGs. These are in no particular order.

Final Fantasy VII

Age I was: 13

Last attempt at playing it: A couple of years ago.  Played it for about three hours, turned it off, didn’t miss anything.

Would I ever play it again: No

I started gaming when I was seven, but didn’t get into RPGs until a few years later.  That’s mostly because I wasn’t looking for in-depth storytelling.  I was looking to jump on the heads of living beings and not be sent to juvenile hall for it.  My first crack at one was boring dungeon-crawler Evolution on the Dreamcast, which my confused father got for me because he thought it was a Zelda game.  Gotta love parents.  It wasn’t until I got Skies of Arcadia off a clearance rack that I saw the potential of what an RPG can do.  I started to devour them in short order, hitting all the major titles I missed on the original PlayStation even as the new generation of consoles was starting to make an impact.  It all culminated with Final Fantasy VII.  I knew the hype on it, with a lot of people considering it the best game ever made.  I had played and enjoyed Final Fantasy VIII and IX already, and then was finally able to convince my daddy that nearly $100 for a used game would be a good investment.  By the way, I cringe greatly at that figure today.  Yea, it was awesome, but not $100 awesome.

It was 2002 when I played it for the first time.  I had just turned thirteen.  I had already played Final Fantasy X, and although I was pumped to see what all the fuss was about, I figured there was no way it could live up to expectations.  I was wrong.  Final Fantasy VII often left me shaking my head in disbelief.  No entry in the series, or indeed in any RPG, is so memorable in so many ways.  Characters, scenes, fights, twists, or just “holy shit, this is awesome” moments.  It didn’t change my life or anything.  I think by that point I had grasped that games could be fun and enjoyable.  It was just a damn good time.

But let’s not kid ourselves: I wouldn’t want to play it again.  Hell, if Square-Enix wanted to just cash a check guaranteed to be in the nine-figure range and made Final Fantasy VII-2, I wouldn’t be that interested.  Final Fantasy VII is one of those rare lightning-in-a-bottle games that I wish we all would agree can never happen again.  Like those who hold out hope that Capcom will bring back the magic of Resident Evil 4, we all just need to accept that Final Fantasy VII was a once in a lifetime event.  They’ve done four game spinoffs and a bunch of anime spinoffs of it, and nothing has come even remotely close to grasping what made it so special.  And, let’s face it, as a game it’s not that interesting anymore.  I prefer the combat in Costume Quest or the Paper Mario series to Final Fantasy VII.  And excellent storytelling is no-longer limited to just the RPG universe.  Stuff like L.A. Noire or Grand Theft Auto tell excellent stories in a more exciting, interactive environment.  If Final Fantasy VII had come out in 2012 instead of 1997, with the exact gameplay but modern audio-visuals, it would seem archaic.  Final Fantasy VII was amazing for its time, but its time has come and gone.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.

XBLIG equivalent: There really are no RPGs that can hope to match the scope of Final Fantasy VII, and nothing comes close to telling a story like it.  I probably should have thought this whole “XBLIG equivalent” thing out more.  I suppose you can start with Cthulhu Saves the World.  My advice to would-be developers who want to achieve something similar: don’t focus on being like Final Fantasy or any other game.  Focus on telling the best story you’re capable of telling.  In that sense, I guess All the Bad Parts wins out, because it told the best story on XBLIG.  Sadly, the best story married some of the worst gameplay.

NBA 2K1

Age I was: 11

Last attempt at playing it: Almost ten years ago.

Would I ever play it again: No

It might seem like an oddball choice, but NBA 2K1 was the first game I was ever addicted to.  As in, I probably played it six to eight hours a day, seven days a week, for months.  I attended my first basketball game when I was six years old.  The Warriors beat the Nuggets at home.  Latrell Sprewell had 30 points and was still a year away from trying to strangle his coach.  I was hooked.  Unfortunately, at the time I got into gaming, basketball games really weren’t that good.  The most fun I had with one was NBA Hangtime on the Nintendo 64, which was very entertaining, but not quite the simulation I was looking for.  The PlayStation had NBA Shootout, which was abysmal, and the Nintendo 64 had Kobe Bryant’s NBA Courtside, which was riddled with problems.  There was also NBA In the Zone, which I didn’t get.  As a shallow nine-year-old, I couldn’t get past the fact that the biggest star they could get for the cover was Glen Rice, a guy who is only remembered these days for porking Sarah Palin.

I had so little faith in NBA video games that I skipped the original NBA 2K on the Dreamcast.  I don’t remember why I was compelled to ask Santa Claus for NBA 2K1, but I did, and I’m glad I did.  It wasn’t perfect, but it actually felt like a real basketball game.  Not too real.  For you NBA fans, you’ll remember that my beloved Golden State Warriors had a miserable team during that era that finished dead-last in their division and conference.  A team that I personally guided to 82-0 records and multiple championships.  Of course, it helps that I traded scrubs for Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, and Allen Iverson.  Hey, don’t look at me like that.  It’s scientifically proven that you can’t have fun if your biggest stars are Antawn Jamison and Danny Fortson.

NBA 2K1, like Sega’s NFL 2K series, played like no other sports game before it.  It felt real.  It was real.  As real as any game was capable of being to that point.  But it doesn’t hold a special place in my heart for that reason.  No, the GM mode is what makes it stick with me.  It was my first ever encounter with a gaming time-sink.  Making absurd trades, micro-managing my budget, scouting college players, and trying to figure out the right balance of role players and superstars (try stacking a team with just superstars and you won’t even make the playoffs, a memo the Lakers seemed to have missed this year) completely owned me for nearly a year.  I played for well over 200 seasons and led my Warriors to only 8 championships.  By time NBA2K2 rolled around, I was burned out on video basketball and its barely made a dent in my life since.

But let’s not kid ourselves: I don’t want to play a decades old basketball game anymore.  I know there are some people out there who shun Madden in favor of Tecmo Bowl, and cling to 80s relics like Blades of Steel or Lakers vs. Celtics, but I can’t do it.  I can’t ignore all the advances in gaming just to kill time with a childhood favorite.  I don’t even know how advanced NBA games have gotten, and I’m not even that curious to know.  Part of that is I’m not into the NBA as much as I was as a kid.  It’s the same reason why I wouldn’t be as interested in a Power Rangers game today.  I loved that shit as a kid, and even put up with the atrocious Lightspeed Rescue game because I liked the source material.  Today?  I would rather chew glass.

XBLIG equivalent: Smooth Operators.  Hear me out on this.  There’s not a whole lot of licensed basketball simulators on XBLIG.  At last count, there’s none.  I pick Smooth Operators because NBA 2K1’s GM mode was my introduction to simulators.  Following it, I had love affairs with SimCity 3000, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims, and so on.  Smooth Operators is the best of its breed on XBLIG, and thus it gets the nod.  Of course, I probably would have discovered all those games without NBA 2K1, but I played it first, so it gets all the credit.

Continue to Part 2 with Giants and Disney.

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Halloween Scream

October 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

Halloween Scream is a text-based adventure where you play as a young man who inherits a haunted house. Yea, these things always end well. I’ve done text-based games before on here and they usually leave me wanting to lop off my wrists and replace my hands with sabres to stab myself with. But, every game I play starts off with a clean slate, so I plugged my nose and dove in. Then I forgot that being a text-based adventure, this would be a bit shallow and I brained myself on the cement bottom. Smooth, Cathy.

So many options, I don’t know what to do with myself.

There’s no play control to talk about, or graphics, or sound, or level design, or anything remotely resembling a game. That leaves me to just talk about the writing, which I have a major problem with. It’s the tone. It’s all over the place. The game sets a dark and somber mood, but then will randomly spit out lines or gags that break the atmosphere with more ease than NASA. For example, you’ll be examining the servant’s quarters and come across a magazine titled “Repressed Servants Monthly.” Huh, well that’s both not funny and grossly against the tone I thought they were going for here. There are lots of moments like that, but the overall story never goes the humor route. Then again, it doesn’t go the scary route, or the Halloween route either. I kind of figured a game named “Halloween Scream” would either be scary, be themed around Halloween activities, or both. Here you get a story involving vampires and it takes place on Halloween, but otherwise, nothing. What’s the scary thing? “They brought an awful, long forgotten genre back from the dead!! AHHHHHHHHH!”

Writing isn’t the only problem. The game has another consistency problem, this time involving back-tracking. Being an adventure game, you’ll occasionally pick up trinkets that you’ll need to use along the way. Sometimes, the game lets you pick up stuff that you have no idea what you’ll be using it for. Other times, the game will have a “wait, didn’t you see something like this earlier? Maybe you should go back and get it” moment. It’s saddest attempt at padding I’ve seen since I stuffed my bra with water balloons at age 12.

My maps were way better. Sure, they were practically illegible, but.. never mind.

Halloween Scream has its moments, like a couple of maze-sections that required me to draw my own maps. I wish the game had stuck to these, because the writing and exploration are dull, and the false-ending only aggravated me because at that point I was ready for the game to be over with. Shockingly, I didn’t outright hate Halloween Scream, but I didn’t like it either. What would be really cool is if someone could do a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark type of game along the lines of this. Something genuinely spooky, with morbid artwork and a haunting soundtrack. Otherwise, this genre remains dead. I’m not sure if that technically makes this a zombie game or not.

Halloween Scream was developed by Bandana Games

80 Microsoft Points forgot to fill the balloons with water in the making of this review. I told you it was sad.

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Hypotenuse

October 28, 2012 by 3 Comments

Hypotenuse is a geometry term meaning quack quack quack moooooooooooooo.  I lost all my readers four words into this review, so I might as well have fun.  But bringing math terms into a video game?  Not such a good idea.  Imagine if the recent apple of my eye Dishonored had been called “Spleen ÷ Sword = Corpse”.  I don’t think I could have gotten behind it.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I suppose the popularity of Geometry Wars proves me wrong.  Quick though, show of hands: how many people heard that name and pictured JFK calling up Khrushchev and yelling “A square has an area of sixteen square centimeters. What is the length of each of its sides?” into the phone?

Just me huh?

Awkward.

It almost looks like a Salvador Dalí painting, does it not?

By the way, the above paragraph was a total waste of time.  Hypotenuse is just a hack & slasher where waves of katana-brandishing baddies run at you and try to perform subtraction on your body, with the apparent hook being that everything is a rectangle.  Enemies run at you, swing at you or throw a ninja star.  The animation is smooth, the play control is good, and overall Hypotenuse is a well made game.

So why can’t I recommend it to you?  Because there’s just nothing to it.  Enemies run at you.  You kill them, and then more come at you.  I have no problems with games being repetitive if they’re fun.  Most golden age arcade games do only one thing over and over again until you die or get bored.  The difference is when the gameplay is so fun that you don’t notice it.  It’s not always clear what makes one game rise above the curse of repetition while others don’t.  I can’t tell you why I like Ms. Pac-Man but don’t give a shit about Lock ‘n’ Chase, or why I can lose myself in a game of Galaga but would rather be suffocated by Ralphie May’s ass than spend a minute playing Phoenix.  I guess in Hypotenuse’s case, it just never shakes the feeling of being a tech demo.  If this had been something thrown together to show off the hardware of, say, the original Xbox in 2001, maybe I would have walked away from it with fond memories of the slashy rectangle game.  But it’s not that.  It gets boring quickly, and has nothing to keep you going.  There’s no variety of enemies, no variety in combat, and no variety in weapons.  There’s only one play mode.  There’s no multiplayer.  There’s no hook at all.  Hell, the game’s entire point is to see how many dudes you can kill, but there’s no online or even local leaderboards to give you a reason to try.

No, this is not the same picture. When a game is this limited, so are the options for getting screens of it.

Hypotenuse is not terrible, but it’s not fun.  Again, all the props in the world to the developer for making a game that has few (if any) technical flaws.  Plus, he put in the option to turn off flashing effects, and I’m always sincerely grateful for that.  Games that offer less than Hypotenuse does have been amazing, and games that offer much more have been horrible.  It’s not about the amount of content, and it never has been.  It’s about the quality of that content and how much entertainment you get from it.  I can’t imagine anyone getting more out of the full copy than they do from the demo, and that’s why I say nay to purchasing Hypotenuse.  Perhaps a sequel with more options would go over well.  Maybe one where you fight rectangles AND circles.  Variety!

Hypotenuse was developed by Iamrece

80 Microsoft Points said the game should have thrown in trapezoids just to really flex its developmental chops in the making of this review.

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Lucky

October 25, 2012 by 4 Comments

Lucky comes to us from the developers of Bureau: Shattered Slipper.  That was an odd game that I wasn’t in love with, but enjoyed it enough to allow it to chum the bottom of the Leaderboard.  Well, they’re back with a game that exists outside of their Bureau series.  Here, you play as a stock broker who has a one night stand with a random chick.  The next morning, he wakes up and she predicts doom and gloom for him.  No, she didn’t secretly video tape the whole deal so that she can sell it to TMZ.  No, she doesn’t have a STD.  No, she wasn’t lying about being on the pill.  Her oddly specific prediction is that he will die while jogging less than an hour later of a brain aneurysm.   He shrugs it off, then immediately goes jogging.  Seems like it’s tempting the fates a little.  If someone came up to me and said “Cathy, you’ll die later today after getting mauled by an albino tiger” believe me, I’m cancelling that reservation to see Siegfried & Roy.

“What, you’ve never heard of hyper-super-syphilis? Well, you better Google it fast, because you’ve got it.”

Actually, the chick is your guide through the afterlife.  Thus, you begin a quest of personal self-discovery.  One that involves a lot of pointing, clicking, and being lectured on how rich people only got there by being lucky.  The moral message is pretty heavy-handed and often disagreeable, but the overall game isn’t so bad.  Think of it as a sweary, sexy After School Special with an utterly bullshit lesson to be learned.  Lucky can be finished in less than an hour and starting your average pull-cord lawnmower will provide you more difficulty.  But while the story is a bit on a the ultra-liberal side for my tastes and the dialog is clumsy, Lucky has charm about it.

I don’t really have a lot to say about Lucky.  There’s not a whole lot of objectives to it.  There’s only one real puzzle, and I’m not even sure how I solved it.  It involved lining up rows of numbers and hitting a button to spin them around.  I fumbled around with it for a bit and it seemed to have solved itself.  After that, you have to answer moral questions.  The first ones deal with how your father got his wealth.  Unless I missed a clue or something, it never actually tells you.  Don’t worry, the penalty for missing is watching a quick cut-scene of the dude dying, then you just go back to the choice.  Later, you’re placed in a giant maze to get further lectured on how lucky you are and how you’re not as smart as you think you are and OH FUCKING COME ON!  Look, I know that hating rich people is the flavor of the month, but not all rich people are evil, stupid, and lucky.  Some of them corrupt too!

♫ Dance Magic Dance Magic Dance Magic ♫

Anyway, after being punked out by a “spot the pattern” quiz that isn’t really a spot the pattern quiz, and being told to choose whether people with talent got rich via skill or luck, you’re freed from the afterlife and presumably go to heaven, which is full of self-loathing fat-cats and poor people, or so this game will have you believe.  So why did I like it?  Because it’s short, it’s silly, and I actually cared about how the story would play out.  That counts for something in my book.  I just wish we would leave politics out of gaming.  Gaming is my escape from politics.  My place where I don’t have to get hammered over the head by two groups of people talking about foreign policy, gun violence, the auto industry, and so forth.  Can’t a girl just mow down Russians while driving a stolen car and shooting hookers in peace?

I mean in a game.

Lucky was developed by Twist-EdGames

80 Microsoft Points told the lead character to go fuck himself, but wasn’t expecting THAT in the making of this review.

Lucky is Chick Approved.  Barely.  Check out the Leaderboard to see how many asses it’s sniffing. 

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Piz-ong

October 24, 2012 by 25 Comments

I’ve made a lot of friends since starting Indie Gamer Chick.  Like, a lot.  You probably can’t even grasp what a turnaround that is for my life.  Growing up as an awkward child with autism who still to this day can’t even hold eye-contact with my own parents, having so many people call me their friend is pretty fucking sweet.  It’s been life changing to say the least.  And funny enough, some of those friends I met by saying their game was rancid fecal matter on this very site.  It’s like one of those things you read about where someone meets their soul mate by mowing them down at an intersection, only not as fun and/or crunchy.

One of the cooler guys I can call my friend is Dave Voyles.  He’s a dude who I actually knew in a past life, when I was a poor sport on Dreamcast and would rage-quit games of NBA 2K1 on him (the Knicks cheated, I swear it).  When I showed up on the XBLIG scene, he made me feel welcome and got me involved with developers.  I then shit on his creation, the 2011 Summer Uprising, but he still put up with me.  Or at least he did after the car bomb he planted didn’t go off.  It turns out that make of car had an iron plate under the seat and nobody outside the factory knew about it.  So after determining that I’m unkillable and bad with continuity, he’s actually been a pretty good friend to me.  And so that’s why I’m going to talk about his game.

It’s called Piz-ong.  Not Pez-ong, sadly.  Pez is something I like.  Or at least I used to.  Not the dispensers.  God no.  I could never get the damn things loaded right, and there’s something disconcerting taking candy after it had been in Chewbacca’s mouth.  Actually, it doesn’t really come out of their mouth, does it?  It comes out of their neck.  That’s just sick.  It’s like they had some kind of tracheotomy performed by Willy Wonka.

Oompa Loompa Doopy Dool, Hello Kitty smoked too many Kools.

But the candy?  Oh that stuff was good.  Was being the key word.  For all I know, it still might be.  My problem is I can never find the fucking things, or at least the flavors I like.  The only packages I see is for stuff like the Cola flavored ones.  I drink a lot of cola.  That shit does NOT taste like cola.  It taste like motor oil filtered through the jock strap of someone with the clap.  All I want is Strawberry and Lemon.  Maybe I’ll settle for Cherry flavored, but that’s it.  I don’t want Strawberry-Vanilla, which tastes like the byproduct of some kind of industrial paint thinner.  I don’t want Orange, which always seems to be brittle.  I don’t want Grape, which has a disgusting aftertaste.  I sure as shit don’t want Raspberry, which some states now offer as an alternative to lethal injection.  What’s really a shame is they now offer a putrid Lemon-Raspberry mixture.  So wrong.  It would be like offering filet mignon that’s been seasoned with anthrax.

Sure, I could order it online.  But then I’m getting bled for shipping & handling.  Why should I have to deal with that?  Why can’t they just put the refill packs in stores and stop sticking those unholy flavors spawned from the hemorrhoidal ass of Satan himself in the package?  Look, I’ll even put up with Orange and Grape if I have to.  Just don’t fucking stick Raspberry, Cola, or any mutli-flavored combination in the package.  Nobody in their right mind can possibly want them.  If you actually do, go grab a vacuum cleaner and stick the hose up your ass.  With a little luck, it might just unclog your head from it.

What was I talking about?

This, you attention-span deficient bitch.

Oh yea, Dave’s Pong game.  It fucking sucks.  Not as bad as Cola-flavored Pez does, but then again, what does suck that bad?  If they mixed Hitler’s DNA with a dinosaur to create an army of Hitlersaurus Rexs, it wouldn’t suck as bad as Cola flavored Pez.  And by the way, Piz-ong isn’t a Hitlersaurus Rex.  It’s not even a TriStalintops.  It’s just a really bad idea.  A single-player only Pong game with no frills in 2012?  I believe my good buddy has gone raving mad.  It’s not that the game is broken or unplayable.  It’s just so bleh that I can’t believe he actually put it on the marketplace.  What’s really sad is that for the second straight review, the best part about a game is the cover art.  That’s like saying the best thing about Pez is the foil wrapper.  In the case of Raspberry flavored Pez, that’s actually true.

Piz-ong was developed by Dave Voyles

80 Microsoft Points can’t believe Armless Octopus has only been updated once over the last month because he was working on this piece of shit in the making of this review. 

Love ya, Dave.

Brian says I’m not allowed to sell out my principles and offer a Chick Seal of Approval to the first developer who buys me 5lbs of Pez off of Amazon.  It’s just as well.  Knowing my luck, it would probably be full of Raspberry and I would have to kill myself then.

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Arrow in the Knee

October 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

Let it be said that I can be shallow.  No matter how bad a game looks, I can be won over by cover art that warms my heart.  And nothing is quite as heart warming as the cover to Arrow in the Knee.

Oh stop crying. Serves you right for running in front of a dude shooting arrows trying to protect your ass!

Beautiful, isn’t it?  Of course, if you were actually encouraged to shoot those annoying bitches in the knee, the game would have been ten times better.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Arrow in the Knee is a wave shooter where you stand atop a castle, firing arrows at various baddies that charge you.  The hook is that if you hit one of the basic enemies in the knee, they join your side and help you defend your castle.  It’s an interesting concept, but failed by some sloppy execution.  I could never quite get the hang of the aiming, and would have offered up the soul of my first-born (which I never plan on having, but it’s the thought that counts) for a cross-hair.  Not offering one, even as a paid power-up in the game’s shop, seems like a gigantic oversight akin to a zookeeper leaving eucalyptus-flavored rat poison inside the Koala pen.

Knee in the Arrow really has the look of a bad XBLIG, but sometimes the really bad-looking stuff can surprise you.  I’ve been caught off guard by the quality of games like Don’t Feed the Trolls, The Cannon, and Asphalt Jungle 2 in the past, and Arrow seems like it should join them in the “surprisingly fun” camp.  It doesn’t, but it comes close.  There’s a wide variety of enemies, items to purchase, and arrows to fire.  So why didn’t I like it?  Well, part of it is those bad graphics, which contribute to the difficulty in aiming, but also make it hard to distinguish between what type of arrow you’re firing.  Some of the enemies get too spongy and attack too fast for you to reasonably defend yourself.  The Dragons, for example, knock out one floor of your castle every time they attack.  You’re supposed to use ice arrow to defend yourself, but their bullets move too fast and realistically you’ll only have one shot to actually hit the fireball.  Because the aiming never feels quite right, it’s sort of a crap shoot to actually hit it, leaving you better off unloading arrows directly into the dragon and hoping you survive the round and can hire guys to fix your castle.

I didn’t get a chance to play this four players. It probably takes the sting out significantly. Having said that, try convincing YOUR friends to play an Xbox Live Indie Game called “Arrow in the Knee” that looks like THAT over Borderlands 2. It’s harder than it sounds.

If Arrow in the Knee was more aim-friendly, it would at best be a tolerable little wave shooter that you would forget about as soon as you shut off the console.  Don’t get me wrong, there are things I like about it.  The whole “kneecap an enemy to get them on your side” bit works.  Well actually, you don’t even need to shoot them in the knee.  The foot seems to work just fine, and thank God for that, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had anyone switch teams for me.  But as a hook, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough.  As far as I could tell, only one type of baddie switches teams if you kneecap them.  It’s not enough.  The hook is a good hook!  So why limit it to the most basic type of enemy?  It’s really disappointing.  Imagine if the Wright Brothers stopped at “let’s just put one wing on this thing and see what happens!”  That’s what the developers of Arrow in the Knee did.  They also gave me the false hope that kneecapping people really does get them to switch teams.  My apologies to Miami Heat fans.  I was hoping to get LeBron to join the Warriors.

Arrow in the Knee was developed by Monday Night Games

80 Microsoft Points buried many hearts with wounded knees in the making of this review. 

I’ve never actually heard of the meme Arrow in the Knee.  And I played a LOT of Skyrim.  I need to pay more attention to these things.

 

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Divided

October 22, 2012 by 4 Comments

Being coordinated is not among my attributes, so being able to play games at all is something of a small miracle.  But some stuff is simply off-limits to me.  Dancing games, for example.  I once fell off the platform playing Dance Dance Revolution at a bowling alley and ended up with a small break in my ankle.  On the XBLIG side of things, I could barely get through NYAN-TECH, which asked gamers to perform finger-yoga while playing a platformer.  It’s something my brain is not wired for.  I didn’t think a game could get any more demanding than that, but having just played Divided, I stand corrected.

I could have sworn I did this puzzle last month when I played Gateways. Not sure which way was the least intuitive.

Divided is part puzzler, part platformer, and part road sobriety test from hell.  You play as a little blue blob of goo that has to get from point A to point B.  The hook is at times you have to split apart your goo and control each bit independently.  You move one with the left stick and jump it with the left bumper, while moving the other with the right stick and jumping with the right bumper.  It might as well ask me to jump rope while playing the piano, because I’m not capable of it.  I don’t know if it’s because of my autism or a natural lack of dexterity, but I have difficulty walking and breathing at the same time.

I can’t really fault Divided for my own personal hangups.  When I would play and have to move the right-stick blob, I would inevitably fuck it up and instinctively try to move using the left stick.  I couldn’t help it, even after hours I would do it again and again.  I was quite embarrassed.  Brian was laughing his ass off.  My dog walked out of the room and got into the garbage.  Probably not related, but it happened while I was playing Divided, so it seemed worth mentioning.

Where I can fault Divided is it’s just not a very well made game.  Ignoring the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly design, the controls are unresponsive.  Some areas of the game require precision platforming, but movement is loose, jumping feels lethargic, and the camera often doesn’t pull back far enough for you to get a clear picture of everything you’re required to do.  Those are three major issues that have nothing to do with my own inability to play the game.  On top of that, the level design is cruel, often requiring you to make timing-based precision jumps using two characters controlled by different sticks.  What kind of freak would be good at this game?  If you have the hand-eye coordination that Divided requires and you’re wasting it playing Divided instead of being a world champion athlete, you’re just a silly poop face.  Yes, I can be childish.

I didn’t make it very far in Divided. I suppose I could have practiced at it, but I would have hated myself for doing so.

Co-op doesn’t work so hot either, because all the control and camera problems I talked about earlier.  Sometimes the game wants you to make a jump, but requires one character to be too far away from the other.  Because of the camera, that often turns into a blind jump.  Otherwise, most of the problems come down to the controls being too fickle.  Using the chains for climbing especially, which caused a lot of slippage.  Ultimately, even if I had been capable of playing Divided the way it’s intended to be played, I don’t think I would have liked it.  Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Who knows, maybe I would be impressed if I saw someone who could maneuver both guys at the same time with total ease.  I probably would give the person a round of applause, and then smack them upside the head for not using their super powers to fight crime or something more productive.

Divided was developed by Angler Games

80 Microsoft Points stand united in Divided fail in the making of this review.  That sounded lot more clever in my head. 

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