Last week I announced a contest. Twas a fine contest, and many hearty laughs were had. The object? Come up with a name for this game.
Dozens of people submitted over a hundred possible names. The judges mostly were in agreement. Only one judge held out, and that would be Alan, just because he has to be different, which is why he’s British. I hear it’s just a phase, and next he’ll be Irish or Scottish or Icelandic or something. Ryan, Tim, Dave, and game creator Andreas all fell for one particular name so much they declared it the winner today and then proceeded to change the wording of it around. But, it was the clear favorite (and also would have been my choice if I had been a judge), and so it gives me great pleasure to announce that the winner is:
You’ve won 1600 Microsoft Points, a free copy of the game, and your name in the credits. And what will it be called? Why, it will be titled Smooth Operators – Call Center Chaos. Mr. DudeFather actually had the ordering of that in reverse. He called it Call Center Chaos – Smooth Operators, but the judges liked it the other way around. Andreas also wanted the Americanized version of the word “Center.” Which is weird, because I thought Europeans were supposed to be super clingy to their spelling quirks (Alan throws his tea at me every time I spell “color” as “colour”), but I guess he wants to be more commercial.
We’re not done yet, because I was given two bonus copies of the game to give out. Well, actually I was given one and Brian was given one. Brian has selected Build-A-Corp by @sparkcloud87. I’m not sure why, other than Brian’s eternal quest to remain somewhat boring. No offense Sparky, but I thought the name was dull, but Brian liked how it summed the game up. Personally, I preferred Case of the Mondays by @GaTechGrad, so I give my free copy to him. Yea, it’s just a runner-up prize, which is like being rewarded for being the least sucky of all those that suck, but it’s a free game, so suck on, suckers!
Congratulations to DudeFather, the winner. If you guys want to see more contests like this here, stay tuned.
Smooth Operators – Call Center Chaos is estimated to arrive in September. I do like the name, even though it sounds like something that would star Quagmire.
When I hear the term “Point & Click Adventure” it typically stimulates in me the same response as the term “Urinary Tract Infection.” And when I hear the term “Hip-Hop” it usually causes my own stomach to digest and barf itself up. So a game that purports to combine hip-hop culture with point & click adventures ranks right up there on the “things I’ve feared” list with “AIDS going airborne” or “Joel Schumacher is doing another Batman film.” But it suckered me into buying it because the art style reminded me of a John Kricfalusi cartoon, and I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.
Yea, I’ve been to Oakland.
As it turns out, About To Blow Up is about as good as a point & click on XBLIG is capable of being, and the hip-hop crap doesn’t factor into the gameplay at all. The story is actually kind of cute. You play as a lovable loser who aspires to manage a hip-hop act. However, the music scene (and the city as a whole) is dominated by a megalomaniacal bastard named Mr. Sleez. It’s fun, almost to the point that you forget how tired this genre is. The logic is as bullshit insane as any clicker is, and those times where you’re generally lost without direction can be draining. There are a handful of puzzles, but they’re pretty simple and can generally be solved just by randomly clicking buttons until something happens. Which is ironic because most of the item puzzles are solved by total random guesswork. “So you put the wig on the rat. Well duh, why didn’t I think of that?”
I don’t really have a lot to say about About To Blow Up, other than the fact that it’s a dick move on the developer’s part to start the game’s name with “about.” Which led to the awkwardly worded sentence above that contained the word “about” twice in a row and is totally screwing with my grammar check. Otherwise, About To Blow Up has the best story of any Plicker on the XBLIG, along with the best graphics and characters. I’ll look forward to future installments. I can’t say I’ll actually review them. It took me all day to come up with the shit I wrote for this one, and I’m only 381 words in. 383 now. 384. Oh fuck off. 387. Sigh. 388. I’m done.
80 Microsoft Points said that all questions related to how to solve a section of this game that don’t begin with the phrase “I’m a surrender monkey” will go unanswered in the making of this review.
Sushi Castle sounds like the logical spinoff of Panda Express, but actually it’s the latest game by Milkstone Studios. Apparently, it’s supposed to be like the XBLIG version of The Binding of Isaac, a popular independent game available on Steam. I haven’t played it and I have no plans to, so I can’t really comment on that. Thus, Sushi Castle has to stand on its own for this review. And stand it does, albeit with the aid of 20lb leg braces and something sturdy to lean on. It would seem the game has been crippled by a case of video polio.
Sushi Castle is a roguelike twin-stick shooter where you explore various randomized levels looking for trinkets and shooting enemies. It can be fun, when the amount of enemies you have to fight is manageable. When they’re not, which is all too often, the game gets kind of boring. It’s not that the enemies are difficult. They typically have simple-to-memorize patterns and are about as easy to avoid as vegetarians at KFC.
The red stuff is blood. The green stuff is acid. Don’t touch the acid. You probably shouldn’t touch the blood either. It’s not sanitary.
The difficulty really comes from the sheer volume of them. Some rooms throw too many at you, all shooting at you from different sides, which makes taking damage unavoidable. Despite the setup as a TwickS, you can only fire in eight-directions, and thus you’re forced to put yourself into a direct line-of-fire with the enemies. Sometimes there are enemies that spawn other enemies. And every single baddie in the game is a total bullet sponge. The biggest challenge with the combat in this game is staying awake. In rooms where there’s only a couple of guys to take out, it’s not bad at all. When you have a half-dozen or more, the action is so boring, so repetitive, and so unfair that Sushi Castle jumps in and out of being a bad game, like it’s indecisive about whether it wants to suck or not.
Levels are relatively small and straight-forward, which probably owes greatly to the random nature of the game. There are tons of items to be had, although you generally have no fucking clue what they do before using them. Some of them outright screw you over. Don’t you love it when games do that? “Hey fellas, being trapped in a room with unavoidable artillery isn’t enough. Let’s make the items be potentially hazardous too. That shit is always a crowd-pleaser!” I don’t understand the logic of it. I can’t understand the logic of it. Given that the game would be pretty fucking swell without them, I don’t think Sushi Castle is on the fence about whether it wants to suck or not. I think it made its choice. I think it wants to suck.
But, these are the guys who did Raventhorne, so it should be no surprise that they even failed at that. Sushi Castle honestly isn’t bad. Despite the barrage of items that are really dick moves or the spongy enemies, I had fun with it. Sort of. I mean, it sucked that I could build up my gun’s strength to fuck-you levels of badassery, have twenty points of health, a stockpile of bombs, and a cloud-thing that let me float over blocks, yet it just takes one room with a hateful random spawn to fuck everything up. I mean, come on. Four guys who have every possible angle of fire covered, AND they spawn little fireball dudes, and all of them take more bullets to kill than Rasputin? That’s just spiteful.
This screen-shot alone is enough to send fans of the Binding of Isaac into a rage if the comments on YouTube are any indication.
Okay, so Sushi Castle isn’t great or anything, nor is it a game that will stick with you after you either finish it or get pissed off and rage-delete it from your hard drive. But, it can be a perfectly fine waste of an hour or two. It’s funny though, because the guys at Milkstone do obviously have the chops. Their games are always a tier or two above the average XBLIG in terms of audio-visual standards, and the games are at least decent in concept. Yet, there’s always something about them that reels the game back into mediocrity. I’m telling you guys, I think I’m on to something about the “minimal shittiness quota” that Xbox Live Indie Games seems to have. If it actually turns out to be a real thing, props to Milkstone for their skillfulness. It takes a real mastery of your craft to subtly crap-up your games. Even Nintendo couldn’t do it properly, which is why they said “oh fuck it, let’s just make the controller an unresponsive piece of shit and call it a day.”
Board games. I love them. But as video games? I’m not so sure. Some games, like chess, are way over-produced. Did I really need chess on my PlayStation Vita? Do I really need two version of Scrabble on my iPhone? That’s ignoring that most of the best board games use “house rules” that aren’t generally an option when you play them digitally. No money for Free Parking, no starting in a room in Clue, no increasing the value of V in Scrabble. But what really irks me is how few video board games there are out there that could only exist as video games. Mario Party is still around, which I really adored as a kid. As an adult, I see that it’s a game that doesn’t put a heavy premium in skill. In fact, outcomes are generally determined by plain old luck to such a degree that it might as well be called Mario Bingo. However, there are nine console Mario Parties now. Obviously there is a market for this thing, and not just because it has “Mario” in the title. Let’s say Nintendo marketed the shit out of a multiplayer game where Mario and his friends performed tax audits on people. Ain’t nobody buying that game, let alone enough people to spawn more sequels than Friday the 13th. Nintendo already proved my theory by releasing Wii Party, which sold 7.5 million copies.
Spectrangle isn’t one of those “it has to be a video game” type of deals. Think of it as a color-coated version of dominoes. You have a grid of 36 interlocking triangles, some of which have multipliers on them. Each player draws four tiles, which are visible to each-other. The first player must place a tile on one of the spaces that does not have a multiplier. The next player then must build off of the placed tile by matching the colors. Each tile has a value to it, and scoring is based on the value of the tile multiplied by the amount of other tiles it is touching. Play continues until there are no more moves open to either player or until someone runs out.
It’s a pretty simple concept, and it is fun. The guys at IronReaverGames have done a fine job of porting it over to XBLIG. Even the AI is kind of balanced. Kind of. I could slaughter the game on easy, while normal took a little bit of thinking power. I lost a few games to the computer on hard, although I would like to say that luck factored into that. Actually, it factored in so much that Brian started laughing hysterically while I quietly stewed and wondered if there was any spot on my Xbox that I could safely stab without killing it or myself. And then I played the game on its insane difficulty and absolutely demolished it twice in a row. At first I thought “damn, I’m just fucking awesome!” But then I went back to the hard difficulty, which was the only setting that beat me, and I lost another two out of three games. So maybe “insane” in this context meant “the game plays like it is in an abnormal mental state.” Because although it had to pause to think, it still made DUMB moves. It’s less “Bobby Fischer playing chess” insane and more “Bobby Fischer doing anything but playing chess” insane.
Despite not being very impressive from a visual standpoint, Spectrangle360 works well. It even has online play, which I was able to enjoy without any glitches. I’m not a big fan of the fact that it dumps you out to the menu after every game, but otherwise I have no complaints. Ultimately though, it has limited appeal. If you’re not into these types of board games, this won’t sway you. It’s not unique enough to be something you just HAVE to try, nor does it need to exist as a video game. Is it fun? It was for me. I can’t tell you if it will be fun for you though. Spectrangle360 is what it is. If you’ve never played anything like it, it’s at least worth trying. Otherwise, you already know whether you will like this game or not just by reading how it works.
I added a circle to this picture to highlight something that does bug me a lot about some XBLIGs: that damn font that constantly shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s the default font that comes in the XNA starter kit or something, because it’s in so many games. It’s ugly, it’s often blurry, it’s cheap looking, and it always makes a game seem somehow badder. Always. Spectrangle360 looks just fine without it. With it, it looks ten times worse than it really is. Guys, if you’ve made it this far in the development process, you would be doing yourself a big favor by taking the time to make any on-screen text look better than stock.
Board games will always be ported over to gaming devices. Spectrangle360 is a port itself. And these types of games will always have their place. But maybe if you’re going to port it, you should think about spicing it up a little. Include modes that contain content that can’t be done with boards and dice and luck of the draw. Board games are limited by the laws of physics. Video games are only limited by the amount of cocaine the developer has snorted. I want games to take advantage of this. I want to see Monopoly where you don’t just buy Baltic Avenue. I want to see one where you load up on rifles and take the fucker by force. I don’t want to eat marbles while playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. I want to be eating something adorable and fluffy that looks like it feels pain. I don’t want to just bump a guy off a slide on Sorry! I want to bayonet them in the back, drag their corpse to my home, and eat it raw. Hey, why am I telling you guys this? Yo, Hasbro, get on the ball with this shit. If you could get away turning Transformers from children’s toy into ultra-violent testosterone flick featuring a pot-brownie eating mother, you can get away with making a version of Operation where no anesthetic is used.
80 Microsoft Points noted that the corporeal version of this game costs anywhere between $10 and $50, so obviously this version is the one to get, unless you just really hate money in the making of this review.
It’s a bitch trying to think of ways to keep puzzle reviews interesting. Even if the game is decent, which Puzzle Cubicle is, it really is hard to get emotional over it. Emotions are the fuel of my writings. I use them as the compass for what direction I take with my reviews. But when a game offers absolutely no stimuli and has the personality of a piece of chalk laying on top of a loaf of tofu, writing about it can be almost painful. I’ve been staring at my monitor for an hour now trying to come up with someway to spice this review up. It just didn’t provide me with any material to start with. I guess I could go back and try it some more, but after a few hours with it I feel about as emotional as a corpse.
Puzzle Cubicle is sort of like one of those “make a shape out of other shapes” thingies. The hook here is that you’re given only a small point of reference to what exactly the final look of the design is supposed to be. Pieces are arranged on a grid, with a small “example” in the left corner that shows the location of a couple of the blocks. Using this as a reference point, you must create an enclosed cubicle (or more). I almost activated a case of narcolepsy in myself trying to describe it. Some games just sound boring on paper.
Oddly enough, I really liked Puzzle Cubicle. It’s not for everyone, and it’s probably out-of-place on XBLIG, but the mechanics are solid and I could finish all 50 puzzles without the game crashing on me. I do have a few complaints. First off, the explanation screen is terrible. The goals of the game needed to be articulated better. Second, I hate how it’s sometimes possible to create the desired pattern exactly how it’s supposed to look, but you don’t actually win because the alignment is off. Who gives a shit? Is that the pattern? Yes? Good, I beat it. Next! Third, the game’s timer keeps going if you pause the game. Why? I wasn’t using it to cheat. I was using it to piss or to answer the phone. You know, the type of thing people need to do from time to time. Not that the timer matters at all, but I was using it to measure my own intelligence and it really irked me. Although it did prove my theory that phone calls from my mother drop my IQ. Finally, why aren’t the pieces that are shown in the example just locked into place at the start of each round? That would have hastened the pace of the game and maybe made it more attractive to our cro-magnon population. No, really! I’m being serious here. Stop laughing!
If you haven’t fallen asleep by this point, Puzzle Cubicle might just be for you. It’s not exactly exciting, but it got my attention. Mechanically it’s functional and the puzzles are well made. Will it be the kind of game you talk about with your friends? No. Will you remember it after you’ve finished it? No. Is it worth your dollar? Probably. You can safely liken it to Ben Stein: impressively intelligent, but duller than a butter knife.
Win 1600 Microsoft Points, a free Xbox Live Indie Game, and your name in the credits of a game. It’s the Name the Game contest. Click here for details.
Back in March, I published what is probably the most optimistic edition of Tales from the Dev Side I have gotten yet. Mr. Shahed Chowdhuri is the developer of Angry Zombie Ninja Cats, a game that I boiled in oil back in November. He’s also the creator of the XBLIG Sales Data Analyzer, which has been well received among his peers. He’s also one of the most gosh-darned nice guys in the community, and his first editorial on here about gaining community acceptance was cited as being inspirational to newcomers on the Xbox Live Indie Game scene. Now, Mr. Shahed has a different, yet still insanely chirpy and upbeat message to share with everyone: success is what you make of it.
Every once in a while, I need a break from XBLIG. I love you guys, but a girl can only take so many punishers before she needs a vacation from that. So, I’m going to review Spelunky, a recent punisher on Xbox Live Arcamuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Damnit.
Spelunky is a game made by assholes, for assholes. Having put somewhere around ten hours into it since this last weekend, I’m wearing a jumbo-sized asshole badge on this one too. I couldn’t help myself. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even having fun, but at the same time I was practically hypnotized by what was transpiring on-screen. A series of colossal dick moves, one after another, so random and so spiteful that I’m pretty sure this is a game designed to specifically take players down a peg. I’m know people will say that I just sucked at Spelunky and thus I suck at games and life in general. You know what? Fine, guilty as charged. But Spelunky is a bastard.
The idea is you’re a little explorer dude who has to go through a series of randomly-generated levels, looking for treasure, items, and exits. The game plays out like a platformer, but the first sign that Spelunky shoots baby giraffes with bullets made from the ground-up hoofs of their own mother is the fact that it’s also a Roguelike. When you die, you go back to start, and any progress you’ve made will be lost. And you will die. You’ll die from falling too far. You’ll die from getting squashed by giant boulders. You’ll die from being shot by arrows. Annoyingly, you’ll die from dodging arrows, only for them to bounce off a wall and land on you. You’ll die from bats. You’ll die from trying to avoid bats. You’ll die from trying to throw a rock at a bat, missing, and having the rock land on you. Everything seems to want you dead in this game. If Gandhi was in it he would probably spray you with bullets.
Oh yea, he’s fucked.
I didn’t make it very far into Spelunky. Most of that is on me and a little thing called greed. I’m incapable of doing a bare minimum to survive. The game is filled with tons of treasure just lying around, and I wanted all of it. But the game sends a bit of a mixed message, because Spelunky seems to actively discourage exploration. You only have a couple of minutes to “enjoy” each stage before a giant ghost monster thingie comes to kill you. Thus, you’re forced to rush through each stage, which has far more things to explore than you can reasonably hope to grab. However, rushing means you don’t have time to check to make sure there isn’t something just out of sight that will immediately result in your death. In a way, I like how you have to calculate the risk versus reward. On the other hand, filling the game up with so much shit and forbidding a person from trying to collect it all makes me want to slowly insert a lit cherry bomb up the developer’s piss pipe. Well, not too slowly. I’m not trying to blow my own fingers off here. In fact, maybe I should wait to light it until it’s inserted fully.
Honestly, Spelunky isn’t really that good of a game, mechanically at least. The controls are kind of weird. Jumping and movement are mostly fine, but I was constantly and unintentionally clinging to walls and leaving myself wide open for attack. Aiming your throws is a bit clunky too, and not without risk. If you try to throw a rock in the air, you’re just as likely to kill yourself doing it when it ricochets off a wall and hits you upside your noggin. Items that are allegedly there to help you aren’t safe either. I got a glove that allowed me to throw stuff better. And by better, I mean the shit you throw just keeps going until it hits something. This one time I threw a rock, and then about two seconds later the sound of the shopkeeper declaring his intent to murder me rang throughout the stage. Well fuck. Another time I bought a green glove, which allows you to climb. Sounded great, but remember that “stuck to the wall” bit I was talking about earlier? Multiply that by every fucking jump you make to get an idea of how useful it ultimately is.
Don’t let the cute graphics fool you. This game is evil.
I think the biggest problem is Spelunky relies too much on just plain old stupid luck. This is mostly due to the random level design. Fans of the game disagree with me, while others have said that Spelunky is only 25% luck. I would suggest 1% is too much for certain games, but fine, it’s only 25%. What does that mean? Well, most of the “damsels” that you need to fill up your health will be right out in the open. But sometimes she (or he, or a dog) will be stuck behind a wall that requires a minimum of three bombs to get through, and those are usually in short supply. Or sometimes the game will just randomly make a level dark and practically impossible to navigate. For a while I tried to work my way through those, but after hours of failure after failure, I said “fuck it” and started to commit suicide as soon as those godforsaken things popped up. I figured fate dealt me a shitty hand, and so fuck fate. I won’t give it the satisfaction of watching me fall on a spike.
And then there are the fun random deaths. I’m willing to concede that 19 out of 20 deaths were entirely my fault. Having said that, in a game this brutally difficult, having just 1 of those 20 be something I had nothing to do with is just vile. And probably hilarious if you’re a spectator. This one time I got to level 1-4 and I was having my best run yet. I had taken no damage, gotten my health up to seven points, built up over twenty bombs, ten ropes, and had enough items that I was better equipped to invade a small country. I start the level, walk a little bit to the right, and then an explosion happens somewhere off-screen. And then something that sent a shockwave down my spine occurred: the “TERRORIST!” splash that pops up when you “attack” one of the shopkeeper dudes popped up. When that happens, they pull out a shotgun and open fire on you, and it’s nearly impossible to fight back. Sure enough, we ran into each-other not long after and I was killed. Fuck you, Spelunky.
Do you know what Spelunky really needed? A video sharing function. Without a doubt the most fun I’ve had from the game is swapping tales of my biggest failures with my fellow masochists. They’re all over Twitter. Spelunky is the new “Big Fish Story” game of choice. Everyone that spends at least an hour with it walks away with stories of comical ineptness. Being able to send your friends videos of your most spectacular deaths would have been a huge selling point for the game. But alas, it’s not to be. In fact, other than some lame leaderboards, Spelunky doesn’t take advantage of Xbox Live at all. There’s a way useless death match feature that’s local-only. It’s so badly done that I’m not sure why they bothered. Matches last just a few seconds, and finding three other people capable of lasting longer will be tough even for those of you with an actual social life. There’s also co-op, but don’t even bother trying it. Save some time and stab your nearest friend in the knee with a screwdriver. Trust me, this way is faster. You’ll just end up wanting to do it anyway.
One of the most pointless modes I’ve seen added to a game in a long while.
Here’s a thought: combine the death-match with the co-op, remove any bullshit about working together, and put the fucking thing on Xbox Live where it belongs. Make it a race/death-match where the four players are not anchored together on a single screen. A race to the exit, or the last man left alive. That would have been awesome. Hell, it might have even justified the 1200MSP price tag. Seriously, $15 for this? Out-fucking-rageous. This isn’t an XBLIG we’re talking about here. This is an Arcade game, yet it lacks some of the fundamental bells and whistles of the service.
I can’t recommend Spelunky, because I feel doing so would make me a horrible person. Any fun you have playing it slowly vanishes, yet you can’t stop playing. It owns you. God help me, I’m going to go play it some more as soon as I finish this review. And then when I’m actually playing it, I have trouble tearing myself away from it. One time I only quit because my battery charge went out. This isn’t a game. It’s a drug. And not one of those fun drugs that rock stars overdose on in the grand suite at a five-star hotel. Oh no. This is one of those drugs that hillbillies cook up in their bathtub in Bumfuck, Wyoming. One that’s sold to you by a ragged-looking teenager that’s missing half his teeth. One that you should know better than to try, because just one taste will hook you for life.
Oh fuck it, just buy the damn thing. Just make sure you cancel any plans you have pending in the coming weeks. And absolutely no faking German Measles to get out of work. I already did that one. By the way, chances are you won’t have any more fun than I am having. I’m just telling you to buy it in hopes that Spelunky is secretly running some kind of bizarre version of a video game Ponzi Scheme and if I convince enough people to buy it, the game will suddenly become magically easier for me.
1200 Microsoft Points have never laughed harder than the time they spent a fortune on one of the helpers in Spelunky only to watch him jump up and impale himself on spikes only five seconds later for no reason at all in the making of this review.
Some people chalk up my site’s growth to what is called “The Girl Thing.” I don’t agree with that, because I don’t really play the gender card too often. And when I do, it’s usually self-deprecating and done for laughs. I’ve had a couple of people tell me my site’s name is cringe-worthy, or “atrocious” as one fan described it. Yikes. Look, it’s really simple. We came up with a list of names, and Indie Gamer Chick seemed like the most memorable. That’s all. It was almost Indie Game Stuff. That would have sucked. So would have Random Game Crap. Indie Gamer Chick was catchy. That’s why we chose it.
I’ll admit, people might be more likely to give my writing a look over because of The Girl Thing. But landing a long-term reader requires more than that. It takes a unique point of view, and I’m not really interested in looking at gaming from the point of view of a female. But gaming from the point of view of someone from my generation? Now that is something I want to communicate. I turned 23-years-old today. On average, that’s eight to ten years younger than my typical reader. That doesn’t sound big, but in terms of how far games had progressed from their childhoods to mine, it’s humongous. My average reader grew up in the era of Atari or the NES. I grew up with PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Dreamcast. While your teen years were spent with Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo, I spent my teens on PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox. Needless to say, I think that gives me a different perspective.
Memory is a funny thing. I honestly don’t remember my childhood looking this bland.
My older readers had it easier than me, because gaming evolved with them. They were there as games transitioned from large sprites to complex open 3D worlds. On the other hand, I have to look back on gaming’s history without the benefit of nostalgia. Thankfully I did have a Game Boy Advance, and as everyone knows, 90% of the really good games on there were just ports of SNES games. So I don’t go into shock every time I play something from gaming’s past. In fact, I’m quite fond of several Golden Age coin-ops. But, I do have to admit that I can be mortified by some of the games you guys consider classics. I also can’t put myself in your shoes and try to picture a game like, say, Manic Miner, at a time when it was considered good.
People get weirdly over-protective about nostalgia. Some people have told me that when they have kids, they won’t be allowed to play modern stuff until they learn to have an appreciation of their classic games. Scary. Do you know what a normal person would call that? Brainwashing. And the whole concept is fucking absurd as hell. It would be like saying your kid can’t watch 30 Rock until he sits through the entire series of Mork & Mindy whether he likes it or not, but he damn well better like it. What that attitude does is turn gaming from a pastime into a cult. If the child catches a whiff of what modern games are like from one of his friends (assuming he has any friends left after his father is done fucking him up), he’s not going to have an appreciation for his daddy’s era of games. He’s going to think his dad is off his fucking nut. Every form of entertainment his father pitches to him from that point forward will carry the taint of that time daddy sat him down and forced him to play Golden Axe.
The thing about nostalgia is it’s always in the eye of the beholder. The childhood favorites I have played as an adult, even HD ports of them, haven’t aged well. Xbox Live Arcade has brought me re-releases of Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark. These were two of the defining games of my childhood, and yet after an hour spent with each of them today, I would rather be dead. Games have come so far, and I can’t pretend they haven’t for the sake of feeling like a child again. I don’t even like Modern Warfare 3, but I would rather play that today over Perfect Dark, which was probably the definitive game of my childhood. Despite that, saying that I have no interest in playing it anymore in no way tarnishes my memories of Perfect Dark.
Portal 2 is amazing to you and I, but our children could very well prefer cutting their own fingers off to playing it. Only time will tell.
Which is not to say nostalgia is wrong. You should feel proud of your gaming heritage, and there is nothing wrong with replaying your childhood favorites and not cringing at them like I have mine. Perhaps your classics have aged better than mine. What I’m saying is don’t try to convince people of my generation that those games are relevant to us. They’re not. Most of the games that were legendary at the time of your childhood are probably going to be torture to people my age. Very few games are truly capable of withstanding the test of time and becoming masterpieces. And really, shouldn’t it be that way? There’s no 30-something trying to convince me of the greatness of Pauly Shore’s filmography, yet plenty are trying to tell me that I have it all wrong about Manic Miner. Here’s the thing though: Pauly Shore was HUGE for a time, a tremendous box-office draw. Nobody would dare call In The Army Now or Bio Dome timeless masterpieces. That would be silly.
Yet, every rinky-dinky game from the 80s that wasn’t a total abomination is somehow just as good today as it was when you were a kid. And it might be, but for you. For me? Not so much. I think the original Legend of Zelda is lame. I can’t honestly believe anyone would still want to play that over almost any triple-A game released over the last five years. I certainly can’t believe anyone would say it’s still the best Zelda ever! To me, guys who say that sound like fucking raving lunatics. Then again, when I say I don’t think it’s any good, people say I’m the raving lunatic. Which side is right? Both. Or neither. I guess.
On the other hand, I think Link to the Past holds up almost flawlessly, and that’s a game that I didn’t play until it had been out for over a decade. I think it’s fitting that the first game in the series doesn’t hold up as well. It demonstrates progress. Why do we have to pretend that people my age will find the original Metroid good? Super Metroid is right there, and there is a chance they will find that good, on account of it actually holding up. Don’t get me wrong, a game doesn’t have to be an absolutely flawless diamond to still be good today. I played the Adventures of Lolo since starting this site, and I thought it was perfectly swell. Is it an all-time classic? No. And neither was Boulder Dash, a game I tried after reviewing an XBLIG clone of it, just to see if I was missing some perspective. I wasn’t. Judging a game’s merits by today’s standards in no way takes away from its accomplishments at the time it came out. Would anyone want to play Space Invaders today? Of course not, unless you’re really desperate to be bored. Does that take away from what it has meant to gaming history? No way. Would I like to play Pac-Man today? No. Would I like to play Pac-Man Championship Edition DX? Fuck yea. Does that mean Pac-Man Championship Edition is more important to the history of gaming than the original? Of course not. Having an appreciation of history and wanting to experience history are two very different things. I don’t need to infect myself with the black plaque to grasp how bad things were in 14th century Europe.
I’m not a big fan of Frogger, but I really want to try Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition. By the way, it is my birthday, Konami. Hint, hint.
It’s this perspective that makes me unique. Gamers of past generations need people my age to tell them where gaming is now. Just like my generation needs yours to give us a sense of where gaming has come from. Somewhere between the two, we might get a sense of where gaming is going. Here’s a preview: your kids are going to be even more mortified by your stuff than I was. And their kids? They’ll end up passing laws saying that anyone with a Pac-Man tattoo or a Donkey Kong cabinet in their garage just opted out of Social Security. It will make you long for the days when that miserable Indie Gamer Chick was simply saying “you know, I do believe The Simpsons Arcade Game was kind of shit.”
Despite not being an artsy-fartsy graphics junkie, I do appreciate games that have a sense of style. Yea, I’ve said that gameplay is all that matters to me, and that is still true, but I have to admit that good graphics will get you my attention. Andy’s Notepad [Saucers] has a style that’s not totally original on XBLIG. It reminded me of Robot Platformer, which I reviewed way back in August of 2011. It had the same casual-doodle look, which helped to push aside the fact that it was as utterly generic and basic as a platformer could be. It’s like the difference between a guy who dies in his sleep and one who dies while driving his Ferrari over endangered jaguars before crashing into a maternity ward at a veteran’s hospital. Which dude do you think people will talk about in the morning? Style counts.
The heat ray weapon is so slow, even when it’s fully upgraded, that I think starvation is actually a quicker form of death.
Andy’s Notepad takes the sketchbook look and applies it to the classic space warfare genre. It’s sort of like the granddaddy of all of gaming, Spacewar!, with twin-stick shooting thrown into the mix. You select one of nine flying saucers that dogfight each other. In single player, you have to go through 20 matches, earning upgrades to your various weapons along the way. Matches take place with near a moon of which gravity is centered around. If this sounds boring, it is. The game is as dull as a plastic spoon. Mechanically, it works fine. The physics and controls are difficult to work with, but that’s sort of the point of Spacewar!. Cycling through the various weapons is what the real problem is. The AI ships can change-up on the fly, while you have to fumble around with buttons. After the first half-dozen battles, even after upgrading my stats to their max, AI ships were able to stun-lock me and fire without giving me a nano-second to fight back. Cheap? Oh yea. This is the boxed wine served in Dixie cups of XBLIG.
I gave up after nine or so levels, because I simply could not make any progress against the unreasonably perfect AI. But, Andy’s Notepad is unquestionably made with multiplayer in mind. Since the game does play like an updated version of an antiquated gaming treasure, I conned my father and his best friend A.J. to play a few rounds with me. Both are in their sixties and I figured they must have played something like this at some point in their lives. They even probably had to walk uphill in three feet of snow and work for six days to earn the quarter it took to play a single round of it too. As it turns out, A.J. hadn’t. Daddy had played stuff like Spacewar! though, and both guys had enjoyed playing Chompy Chomp Chomp with me. I figured why not?
Well, it was a semi-bust. Andy’s Notepad can be fun, but the game gives too much power to the person who wins the first round. The winner gets more upgrade points than the losers, and the obvious strategy is to pour everything into those God damned stun-lock bombs, which can cause you to crash into the moon. Contact with the surface causes your health to drain faster than anything else (I think), so all you really need is those stun-lock bombs, and one good shot. Since there’s no limit on the amount you can fire, you just have to keep shooting them until the person bangs themselves to death on the planetoid. Even guys that don’t spend all day and night philosophizing about games could figure that out, as evidenced by the fact that A.J. handed my father and me our asses. Even then, the old guys really didn’t enjoy the game. In fact, I liked it more than they did, which was a surprise. What the game needed is balance, or some form of a counter attack. There is a tractor beam thing which you can use to drag someone onto the moon, but it’s clunky as hell and only works at a short-range, and quite frankly you’re just as likely to kill yourself trying to use it.
There’s other problems. The bullets are too small for one thing. I have a television that could comfortably double as a highway billboard, yet the bullets are so small that they might as well be invisible. Also, the nine different ships you can choose from are not distinctive enough, and since they’re all drawn in black and white, it becomes too easy to lose which one you are. Again, I appreciate the art style, but ease of gameplay should never take a backseat to art. Adding color to the things would have completely fixed the problem, but of course doing so would have gone against the whole sketchbook thing. I guess Andy’s parents were too cheap to buy him colored pencils.
I do love the character and planet design. It’s almost Dr. Seuss-like.
Andy’s Notepad is not entirely without merit. There’s a good game somewhere in this mess, but the horrible AI destroys the single player experience and the imbalance of weapons cripples the multiplayer mode. With some small fixes, this could be a leaderboard game, but right now Andy is a doodle of a smelly turd, stink lines and all. I guess I should be thankful that Andy is drawing UFOs instead of tits made out of guns like a normal teenager.
80 Microsoft Points used to make doodles of praying mantis-spider hybrids in the making of this review. Can you picture one? Scary, huh? Well, sweet dreams!
Update: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure recieved a Second Chance with the Chick to cover the Steam build of the game. Click here for my updated thoughts.
Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is alleged to be an Oregon Trail homage. And it is, only you actually have to fight your own battles, there’s blood and gore, intentional humor, and it’s actually fun to play. Okay, so that means it’s absolutely NOTHING like Oregon Trail, but that’s what people are comparing it to. Basically, take everything that made Oregon Trail educational and strip it out. Replace it with sadism and adult situations, and you have Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, a game that is most certainly NOT educational. In fact, I think it might actually make you stupider while you play it. I went from being a reasonably smart person to putting my shoes on the wrong feet and watching Jersey Shore in just a matter of hours. Potent is the derp in this one.
I’m changing my name from Kairi Vice to Kairi Buffokill.
As a game, Wagon has little going for it. It’s part space-shooter (well, minus the space part.. mostly) and part TwickS. Both variations are fairly primitive in their play style, and other than the occasional power-up, this is really as basic as you can get. Calling it Atari-esq would be fair. Where it won me over was with its personality. From the dead-pan descriptions of your frequent failures to the gleeful mass slaughter of indigenous animals, this is a game that revels in its absurdity. But never to the point that it becomes obnoxious, like Torque Quest did. Thus a game that is very fundamental in its design actually becomes something you want to press on with, just to see what crazy shit will happen next.
What’s really cool is Wagon has so many different possible scenarios built into it, all of which are chosen at random. I played it for over two hours and I never once had the same experience. It doesn’t mean they’re all good ones. Sometimes I would start a game and the first thing that would happen was one of the people in my wagon would get some kind of illness and immediately lose all their health but one. Sometimes my wagon would break and I would have to walk to the nearest outpost to fix it, which might be one screen away, or it might be three screens away. Either way, the enemies tend to move faster than your bullets shoot, so you’re pretty fucked. Actually, a lot of the boards tend to overwhelm you with too many enemies, and you’re often not equipped to avoid them. There’s even scenarios where you spawn and are almost immediately fired upon, before you even realize the round has begun. As quirky as Wagon is, it can be pretty brutal as well, and that saps the fun out of it. I probably would have kept playing, but I was so pissed by time I finally beat the damn thing that I didn’t want to see what I missed.
And they said Sputnik was the first thing in orbit. Psssh, historians. What do they know?
I missed a lot too. Again, over the course of two hours the game never repeated itself in the same way twice. I still had alternative wagons to unlock. I kind of wanted to, because they actually have different abilities. You can ride a dinosaur and hurl eggs at enemies. You can fly a space shuttle that moves quickly. My personal favorite was a wagon pulled by a buffalo where you send a falcon to attack enemies. But, there were a lot of things I missed. And I will continue to miss them. Yes, I had fun playing Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, but sometimes it’s too damn frustrating for its own good. One time I was close to the end, only to lose one member to disease and one member to artistically poor play control brought on alcoholism. This is a game that does not want you to ever be comfortable. You’ll have laughs, but you’ll also gnash your teeth when the game decides you’re doing just a little too good and pulls a dick move. I suppose this is what the settlers went through, which means it actually is educational. Wait, did the settlers really fight off pterodactyls and do mushrooms? Wow. History is way cooler than Little House on the Prairie made it seem.
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