Apple Jack 2

June 15, 2012 by 8 Comments

It’s been almost a year since I played Apple Jack.  Judging by the reaction to my review of it, it would seem that was the most disagreeable of all my reviews.  That, or birds were turning into rocks and dive bombing my windows.  Do birds turn into rocks?  Either way, many people genuinely liked the game.  I didn’t.  I thought it was too hard, the levels too sprawling, and the design rather bland.  I didn’t hate it, but I certainly couldn’t endorse it.  At least not without a kickback from the guys who make high blood pressure medication.

A Super Meat Boy like “run from the big baddie” chase, only your character is about half as agile. Yes, this game hates you.

Apple Jack 2 is now out.  Despite having a pretty good idea that I wouldn’t like the game too much, I have to admit I thought it looked pretty good.  Sure, it’s still a punisher, but there’s now a Prince of Persia (or Braid if you’re the artsy-fartsy type) style rewind feature for the hopeless stumblefuck gaming population.  The graphics look more colorful too.  What could go wrong?

Well, about that.  I guess I can say without reservation that Apple Jack 2 is a better game than the original.  But I still didn’t like it.  I still don’t get the appeal in punishers.  Even with adjustable difficulty levels, I found Apple Jack 2 to be fucking maddening.  The rewind function, which was put in place to give you chances to undo fuck-ups, mostly just increased the aggravation factor.  I often rewound missteps, only to immediately die because I didn’t let go of the button at the right time.  You can only use it every six seconds, so it doesn’t really work as the immortality-granting super power I was hoping it would be.  I guess the argument was supposed to be “we didn’t want to make it too easy.”  To which I counter back “there are adjustable difficult levels.  I picked the pussy mode.  Obviously I wanted immortality, you jerks!”

So I didn’t get to live forever.  Or for more than twenty seconds at a time on average.  What I did get to do was enjoy the significantly improved level design.  Oh, it’s not easier.  Don’t get me wrong.  The game wants you to feel humiliated at your ineptness.  But stages are much more clever this time around.  Some have you trying to get to an exit.  Some have you trying to kill enemies.  Some have you running from things.  Some have you on giant platforms that auto-scroll.  Every new stage seems to be original in concept and execution, which is a big departure over some of the monotone stages of the original.  Unfortunately, originality didn’t extend to the enemies.  You’re still fighting the same pandas, washing machines, eyeballs, owls, and little spiky thimble thingies from the first game.  The only major addition to the enemy roster (as far as I could tell, rage got the better of me about half-way through) is giant saw blades.  As a result, Apple Jack 2 feels more like Apple Jack 1.5.  More of an expansion rather than a continuation.  It’s weird because the box art is a homage to Super Mario Bros. 2, which was a huge departure from the original game.  Despite improvements, Apple Jack 2 is pretty much the same game as the original.

Another change: enemies drop fruit instead of coins now, no doubt some kind of anti-capitalism subtext.

It’s a shame, because I think the developer has got to be oozing talent out his rear end.  The graphics, sound, music, and level design all suggest that.  I just don’t want a game that cheerfully holds my head underwater.  Some people do.  Weird people, sure, but they’re out there.  I do question if the market for these games is as big as people make it out to be. There have been punishers that are huge hits, but how often do those pop up?  Of the 90 top-selling XBLIGs as of this writing, only two are punishers: the Impossible Game and the Impossible Game Level Pack.  The market is trying to tell you developers something.  If you weren’t so busy dumping salt on slugs and blowing up frogs with firecrackers you would have noticed by now.

Apple Jack 2 was developed by My Owl Software

80 Microsoft Points said to debate which of the remaining 88 games are also punishers in the comments section in the making of this review. 

 

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Cherry Poke Prison

June 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

Cherry Poke Prison is a spin-off of the popular Trailer Park King games, which are popular because they have digital boobs.  And no, for you guys coming here from Google, there is no nudity or sex acts in this game.  Sorry, you’re going to have to settle for one of the three trillion, two-hundred and forty-eight billion, six-hundred and thirty-three million, two-hundred and four thousand, five-hundred and one other options you have out there.  Yea I know, life is cruel.  You know what else is cruel?  This is the only point and click series on XBLIG I actually give half a squirt about, and developer Sean Doherty dropped the ball here like it was lubricated in Crisco.

In Cherry Poke Prison, you play as Clyde, the cousin (hopefully just cousin and not also brother or something) of King.  He gets sent to a women’s prison because he’s a womanizer and um, yea.  Have I mentioned the stories in these games are the most outlandish, incomprehensible, brain-rotting, yet somehow charming pieces of shit ever?  I hate saying anything is “so bad that it’s good” but that really does apply to the Trailer Park King series.  As one-dimensional, crude, and quite frankly stupid as the writing in these games are, they’re kind of endearing.  I like the characters.  I think this would make a great webcomic.  As a game, it’s not as good.  It’s just typical point-and-click crap.  Only the logic has to be insane enough to match the writing, which leads to things like needing to stick tweezers in an electrical outlet, which causes the TV to turn on and not kill you.  Thus the game devolves into rubbing object A against object B and hoping it works, practical reasoning be damned.  I wish someone would make a  clicker where the logic is actually logical.  Actually, no I don’t.  I just thought about it and it still doesn’t sound fun.

But, I’m willing to slog through something that barely qualifies as a game if I’m entertained by the plot.  Like the previous two games, I admit that I was satisfied with Cherry Poke Prison.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad.  Oooh, yes, very bad.  I have to wash my ears out with bleach just for listening to it.  But, I wanted to see what happens next.  So I pressed on for a half-hour or so, and then I got a sliding puzzle.

What?

Actually, “Why?” is a better question.  I don’t get why game developers insist on including boring elements into their games.  Sliding puzzles are boring when they’re corporeal objects made from cheap plastic.  In video games, they’re fucking busywork and nothing more.  They’re certainly not fun.  Of the endless options the developer had to choose from, why did he pick this?  I love puzzles, but I hate THIS kind of puzzle.  It really has no place in a video game.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same stuff.  The absurd banter between the characters still provides a few smirks, with maybe a small “muuhuh” type of laugh for the ending gag.  I wasn’t a big fan of Clyde, mostly because his personality isn’t really distinctive from King.  It might as well have just been him.  I was half-expecting a weird “it really IS King” twist at the end, but that didn’t happen either.  So the main character wasn’t really needed all that much, and I won’t be sad if he is absent from the rest of the series.

I’m not going to take the easy way out and say that Cherry Poke Prison isn’t really any better or worse than the previous games.  The truth is, it is worse, because the chosen “minigames” are not as strong.  Both the slide puzzle and the weight lifting crap feel like chores, and they don’t fit in with the overall theme or tone of the game.  It’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not really good.  Not that it matters what I think.  I’m guessing most people who read this review got, ahem, stuck, after the first picture.  Hey guys, there’s more review down here.  Guys?  GUYS?

YO!  Over here!

Okay, now that I have your attention.

Cherry Poke Prison was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points said “hasn’t anyone ever told you guys that doing that so much makes you go blind?” in the making of this review. 

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SHOOTING CHICKENS Brutal Suckers

June 13, 2012 by 11 Comments

From the guys who brought you The Houchi Play (shudder) comes a game about shooting chickens, hence the title.  The game is also unreasonably difficult, again hence the title.  And actually it sucks too, hence the title.  Fuck it, my job is done.

SHOOTING CHICKENS Brutal Suckers was developed by Kohei

80 Microsoft Points said wait, that’s not enough?  Fine.

So the idea is you’re this chick with a shotgun who has to run through levels blowing away poultry.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe KFC fucked up her order and gave her coleslaw instead of baked beans, and the only appropriate course of action she could take was hunting their product to extinction.  Either way, she has a gun and the chickens are chickens.  In theory, this is hardly a fair fight.

The graphics are actually pretty decent.

Theories can be a fickle thing.  The chickens prove to be a little overwhelming.  This is a war of attrition, where your only resource is patience and the chickens have numbers to spare.  My “not a fair fight” theory was correct.  I was just wrong about which side had the advantage.  The chickens smother you in brutal numbers, sometimes on both sides, and you simply cannot avoid taking damage.  Health fills are scarce, weapon pick-ups have very limited ammo, and grenades are sparse as well.  You do get unlimited bullets with the shotty, but it’s not much help when enemies go from not being on-screen to causing you damage in a fraction of a second.

I struggled for over an hour just to reach the first checkpoint on the first stage.  After a while I started to question whether it was the game’s fault or mine own.  Maybe it was mine.  Maybe I was sick.  Maybe it was bird flu.  Get it?  Sigh.  I’m so sorry.

I did get to the first check point, but after a few tries I couldn’t make it to the next one.  What happened?  Chicks.  As in baby chickens.  Tiny little things only a couple pixels tall.  They take THREE point-blank shotgun blasts to kill, and they can absolutely gang-bang you while you try to hit them.  Mind you, most of the enemies in this game are ready for shaking and baking after only one shot.  Why are babies the toughest, and the most resilient?  Is this some kind of pro-life metaphor?  If so, it doesn’t work.  Hey, I don’t like the idea of abortions either, but if something is shot from a distance of one inch in the head with a shotgun and it doesn’t die, we’re no longer talking about God’s will.  In fact, I believe that would be the work of Satan, and you should call an exorcist.

Nope, never made it this far.

I was kind of hoping that SHOOTING CHICKENS would be more like Bird Assassin.  Just a run and spray shooter with an insane body count.  Although it has the body count, it lacks in the fun factor.  It has decent graphics and the controls work.  In fact, I like how it has the control scheme at the bottom of the screen so that you don’t have to pause the game if you want to know how to do something.  That’s smart design.  I just wish they had toned down the difficulty.  It’s inaccessible, to the point of being a bullet hell with chickens replacing artillery.  You can try to have fun with it, but you’ll just end up running around like a chicken with its head cut off.  What?  Oh come on, that wasn’t so bad.

SHOOTING CHICKENS Brutal Suckers was developed by Kohei

80 Microsoft Points used to think Popcorn Chicken was made from baby chickens in the making of this review.

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Crystal Skies

June 11, 2012 by 1 Comment

Imagine Crystal Skies as Sonic The Hedgehog with all the crappy parts of the game removed.  And by that, I mean it’s just the Chaos Emerald stages.  Of course, those aren’t too far off from the 1989 Tatio arcade game Cameltry, also known as Labyrinth if you owned a Nintendo DS, On the Ball if you owned a Super Nintendo, or “never heard of it” if you’ve never heard of it.

Full disclosure here: while I try to be rough and tough Kairi Vice, destroyer of awful games and all around bad ass gamer, in real life I’m not exactly the most capable individual.  I’m epileptic, and I’m also prone to motion sickness.  For the most part, games don’t effect me all that much when it comes to these things.  I’ve only had two seizures as the result of playing games for this site, and only one game gave me motion sickness.  Well, now it’s two.  Results will not be typical (I asked around and it only effected me), so don’t take this as me saying not to try out Crystal Skies.  The game is actually really fun.  At least in the opening ten or so stages.  And then it goes on the rag and starts to poison your goldfish.  Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Image

You play as a dead fish that has been flushed down the toilet, hence the spinning.  Unlike Cameltry, you don’t rotate the stage.  It rotates automatically.  Instead, you control the fish.  I figured this would spell disaster for controlling the game, but actually I thought the platforming was done really well.  There is a learning curve to dealing with the gravity issues, but controls are smooth enough that you slip into the game like it’s a comfortable pair of jeans.  The object is to navigate twenty sprawling stages in search of coins and keys.  I guess those were flushed down the toilet too.  You know, when I make unnecessary purchases, my father accuses me of flushing money down the toilet, and I usually respond to that by flushing his keys down the toilet, so I’m starting to think this game might be based on my recently deceased goldfish, Gary.  I’m starting to wonder if developers StarQuail hid a camera in my house as revenge for my Astroman review.  I guess if their next game involves a girl named Cathy spending an hour brandishing a fly swatter and inventing new curse words against the house fly that keeps buzz-bombing her, I’ll have my answer.

Once you have the target amount of coins, you have to locate the stage’s exit.  There is no time limit, thank Christ, so you’re free to explore levels in search of loot and move about gingerly if the situation calls for it.  You get ten hit points in each stage, which felt a little patronizing early on.  There’s hearts all over the place, and thus I never really came close to dying.  However, the levels grow increasingly large, the mazes become more complex, and the amount of traps grows to, quite frankly outlandish amounts.  About ten levels in and Crystal Skies is practically a punisher.  Mind you, the transition is not out of nowhere.  The game’s difficulty seems to ramp up at the right pace.  I just wonder if twenty levels was too much here.  By level 12, I was on my fourth play session with Crystal Skies, which has a pretty cool “save anywhere” feature that I wish more XBLIGs had.  Unfortunately, the game’s new-found sense of digital hatred combined with my nausea finally got the best of me and I couldn’t press on any further.  Too many deaths caused by bad luck.  Ultimately, you’re at the mercy of traps you can’t possibly avoid, blind jumps, and lack of direction.  Or moments where you try to work your way up a corridor, but you don’t make it through fast enough and fall all the way back through when the rotation reaches the point where you can’t continue moving forward.  I almost wish this game had a wall jump.

This leaves me with an odd predicament.  I’m not a fan of games so difficult that they’re demoralizing, and Crystal Skies does become that.  On the other hand, I really had fun with the first ten levels.  The fact that the game legitimately gave me motion sickness and I still wanted to play it should speak volumes of how much fun can be had here.  I just wish the developer had toned down the absolute extreme difficulty later on.  On the other-other hand, I have given a seal of approval to a few games that were so hard that I couldn’t finish them, such as Mr. Gravity, so I suppose I can here as well.  When Crystal Skies is good, it’s really fun, and fun is all that has ever mattered to me.  Well, that and not barfing, which is why I didn’t keep trying.  If I hadn’t gotten dizzy, I would have kept trying.  Actually, it’s probably a good thing I did get dizzy.  If I had kept trying, at the rate the difficulty was increasing I would have ended up with a broken TV and a bandaged hand.

Crystal Skies was developed by StarQuail Games

80 Microsoft Points said “if this is about stuff that has been flushed down the toilet, why isn’t the water a brownish-yellow?” in the making of this review. 

Footage courtesy of Aaron the Splazer 

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Mortal Legacies

June 9, 2012 by 14 Comments

When I first heard the name “Mortal Legacies” I thought it sounded like someone left out the word “Kombat” on an iPhone port of the series.  I mean, doesn’t Mortal Kombat Legacies sound like a crappy iPhone version of Mortal Kombat?  It does to me.  Something that uses digital controls and plays like shit.  Well, Mortal Legacies isn’t an iPhone version of Mortal Kombat.  It does play like shit though.

Okay, so the term “play like shit” is a bit harsh.  Utterly pointless, clunky, and containing less personality than a sea sponge is probably a better description for Mortal Legacies.  It’s a traditional turn-based RPG, where you play as a dude who has to kill a demon and return the king’s crown to him.  Why?  I don’t know.  Mortal Legacies does a decent job of recreating early 16-bit era graphics, but skimped out on stuff like storyline, characterization, and any sense of urgency to the situation.  Let’s face it, straight-laced RPGs are fucking boring as hell.  The only reason to play them is if they contain an absolute dynamite storyline that can keep you from zoning out while you navigate menus.  The guys at Zeboyd realized this, which is why they took copious amounts of laughing gas when it was time to write the batshit insane scripts for their games, or at least that’s my theory.

Okay, early-early-early 16-Bit era. I’m talking Beta stage here, people.

Mortal Legacies has five characters that join your party, but none of them have any back story, or even dialog beyond an introductory sentence.  Characters in towns typically speak only one fragmented sentence at you.  With no story and no characters, what is the point?  Maybe this was a learning-curve game for the developer, who frequently posts here as Ivatrix.  Cool dude he is.  But he has a long ways to go as a game developer.  Ignoring the lack of narrative, Mortal Legacies has all kinds of mechanical problems.  First of all, it’s a time-honored tradition in RPGs that you press A to talk to someone.  Here, you just walk up to them.  Early on, this created annoying situations where I missed dialog from my mother that I couldn’t repeat.  Maybe I missed something that would give the main protagonist something resembling a personality.  Probably not, at least outside of being a pussy-whipped momma’s boy.

Leveling up is fairly easy in Mortal Legacies.  I was easily able to max out all the stats of my party on normal difficulty in fairly short order.  It helps that you get experience points for completing objectives, like for example, talking to your mother.  You level up for that.  I’m not joking.  If that’s too easy for you, you can fight in random battles.  However, enemies shit out so much XP and Gold that they might as well shove a spigot in their ass and call themselves a tap.

You use gold to buy items, even though enemies hemorrhage those as well.  Chances are you’ll never actually need to buy any potions, so you can save up all your money for weapons and armor.  Equipping them is a bit tricky.  The menus are unintuitive, slow, and clunky, but thankfully the game only lasts a little over an hour so you won’t have to deal with them for too long.  Then again, there really is no reason to play Mortal Legacies.  When I say it has nothing to offer, I’m not being coy.  It literally has nothing to offer.  If this was Ivatrix’s babysteps into game development, bravo for the effort.  It’s too bad he missed the first lesson of RPG creation: have a fucking plot.  Do you know what you call an RPG that doesn’t have a plot?  That’s right: Final Fantasy XIII.

Mortal Legacies was developed by IvatrixGames

80 Microsoft Points said this should have been the ironic theme song of Mortal Legacies in the making of this review. 

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A Pixel Escape

June 8, 2012 by 9 Comments

There’s nothing wrong with ambition, and there’s especially nothing wrong with trying to be original.  However, in the land of video games, you have to tread lightly.  Not every idea is capable of working, no matter how ambitious or original.  For example, A Pixel Escape combines puzzle-platforming with first-person gameplay.  Despite moderately decent graphics, the result is the biggest disaster in “it sounded good on paper” since the Lakers landed Steve Nash and Dwight Howard.

The idea is you’re a single pixel trying to escape from a monitor.  Gameplay takes place on an entirely 2D plane, but you control the pixel from a first person view.  This was not a good idea.  Movement feels loose, jumping feels imprecise, and judging distance can be tricky.  Overshooting and undershooting platforms is a common hazard, and the landing is slippery enough that sometimes you can hit your target and still coast off it and into your doom.  I have never been a fan of first person platforming, because even fully funded major studios can’t seem to get it right.  A Pixel Escape feels like the Frankensteined version of all previous attempts.

Unfortunately, bad play control isn’t the only problem with A Pixel Escape.  The game has a problem with being overly complex.  There’s thirteen different colors you can change into.  You can create blocks with each color or use a color-specific super power.  This gives you dozens of different things you have to keep track of over the course of a game.  Brevity would have served this game well.  The developer should have limited the amount of colors to four, chose the best powers to center puzzles around, and refined the way those powers were used.  Having so many powers all at once makes the game feel overwhelming.  It doesn’t help that activating powers is clunky as hell.  You have to hold both triggers to use block related powers, Y to use the power on yourself, I think one of the bumpers to pitch the powers out, you have to click the left stick to change the map, X knocks on the glass, just one trigger to throw a punch at enemies.. you know what?  Thank Jesus Christ Almighty that XBLIG developers aren’t given Kinect support, or the guys behind this game would have probably made you hop up and down on one leg while doing all of this.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough, just wait, because there’s more.  Every power you use takes up Red-Green-Blue energy.  You have to constantly keep your source of this replenished.  Every color tells you how many points of each prime color is required to activate it.  If you fuck up just once, chances are it will necessitate a level restart.  With the controls as poor as they are, requiring this level of perfection is guaranteed to raise your frustration level through the roof.  The only way to refill the R-G-B energy is to destroy blocks.  However, doing so causes darkness to appear where the block was destroyed.  If that happens, enemies start to spawn in.  The enemies tend to move faster than you do, and they hone in on you like flies on shit, quickly draining away your health.  Your only defense against them is a clumsy punch that seems a bit hard to line up.  Granted, the enemies aren’t overall too bad.  Most of the your deaths will come from missteps in platforming, but with all the crap this game makes you go through, this bit seemed a little like overkill.

This shot comes later in the game. Not sure if you can go deeper or not. I actually gave up playing the tutorial, tried the main puzzle mode, quit that due to flaky controls, and then got a third Code-3 game crash. I took it as a sign to walk away. FYI, the developers are working on the crash issues. Not sure how they’re going to fix everything else, but I’m keeping the faith.

If something about A Pixel Escape could go wrong, it probably did.  Even with all the large problems above, it’s the little things that really drive a stake through it.  Some of the colors look too much alike, like Red and Orange.  Or the fact that the exit isn’t more clearly marked on the map.  In order to find out where it is, you have to knock on the glass and wait for the computer user to tell you which direction to head.  Why?  It’s cutesy, but it makes the game less fun.  Besides the fact that the graphics are not horrible, I can’t think of anything nice to say about A Pixel Escape.  Somewhere in here is the germ of a really cool game.  The idea of a pixel trying to escape a TV is solid, but the execution of this concept was completely botched.  It’s a shame because I really wanted to love A Pixel Escape.  I actually feel that it wanted to love me back, but could only express that by giving me half-eaten chocolates and kisses that tasted like an acidic fart.

A Pixel Escape was developed by Kunga Brothers

80 Microsoft Points said “oh well, still better than anything shown at E3” in the making of this review.  I bet that one gets quoted out of context.

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Minigame Marathon

June 7, 2012 by 6 Comments

I seem to have given many of my readers the wrong impression about me.  Believe it or not, I’m not here to trounce bad games.  My goal should be the goal of any game critic: find the good stuff.  Admittedly, that can be hard on Xbox Live Indie Games, but there is plenty of good stuff to be had if you look.  Take Minigame Marathon.  These days, whenever I hear the word “Minigame” I think of a Wii and go into convulsions.

Alas, I had nothing to fear from Minigame Marathon.  The concept is simple: take 26 small game types, string them together, and time how long it takes you to complete them all.  And guess what?  It’s fun and addictive!  Many of the games are modeled after classics such as Pong, Frogger, Snake, or Breakout.  Others involve simple tasks like staying inside a box, hoping across platforms, or collecting coins.  The game uses an easy-to-decipher color system.  You’re green.  Anything yellow is good.  Anything red is bad.  It gives all games an immediate pick-up-and-play quality that is often not found in XBLIGs.

Last Mother Fucking Brick Syndrome is back and trying to cost me the #1 spot on the high score leaderboards.

There are four difficulty levels to choose from, plus you can select whether or not you want to play the games in random order or not.  Each game starts with a brief explanation.  The timer only runs when a game is in progress, so these won’t slow you up too much.  I do wish that it gave you the option to turn off the help-screens once you had a feel for all the games included, but it’s not a deal breaker.  You get three attempts at each game.  If you fail at a game, you have to wait until you’ve finished all other games before getting another crack at the stuff you died on.  Again, it’s a smart design, and super addictive to boot.  About an hour into my play session, I declared to Brian that, to my shock and his, Minigame Marathon was in contention for a spot on the Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard.  If only the multiplayer could hold up.

Sadly, it doesn’t.  Minigame Marathon’s only option is split-screen local multiplayer, which requires the games to be shrunk to fit each box.  On some of the games, that’s fine.  But in stuff like Maze or Mine, which involves navigating tight spaces (especially on high difficulties), seeing which way to move is extremely tough.  I have a television  large enough to double as God’s surfboard and it still wasn’t enough for many of the games, crippling the fun.  Considering that the previous game by his developer was Avatar Grand Prix 2, which had a pretty decent and robust online mode to it, this feels even more like lost potential.

By time a four-player session has ended, your eyes will be permanently disfigured into a squint. Just tell people you were swimming in a pool with too much chlorine in it.

In the nit-picky department, I wish the controls had been a lot tighter, and also I think some of the games are downright impossible on the high difficulty levels.  In “split” you have to avoid touching walls while the room you’re in continuously divides into smaller sections.  Your character does not stop moving, so it requires you to press left and right repeatedly, in fast order, or die.  The problem is there’s a slight delay in the game’s reaction that makes timing this much harder than it sounds.  My gut tells me that the developer probably tested this using a keyboard instead of a wireless Xbox controller, which I hear is actually a common problem during development.  I’m not sure why developers wouldn’t test their game using the controller everyone will play it with.  It makes no sense to me.  It would be like training a Formula 1 driver by making him ride a Spider-Man Power Wheel.

Even with all the faults, I had a great time playing Minigame Marathon.  It reminded me a lot of Nintendo’s Wario Ware series.  Instead of trying to do something too ambitious, the guys at Battenberg Software took the concept of “keep it simple” by using old, worn game types and practically weaponized their addictive potential.  Games that last ten seconds?  Not fun.  Making you play all those games in a row for a high score?  Digital heroin.

Minigame Marathon was developed by Battenberg Software

igc_approved180 Microsoft Points are the girl living next door in the haunted mansion, so you better learn her name because it’s Kai-ri in the making of this review.

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Kairi on E3 2012: Nintendo Edition

June 5, 2012 by Leave a comment

Watch the conference at 9AM, start writing at 8PM.  Sounds fine, except I can’t remember a blasted thing that happened during the show.  Nintendo E3 events all have this problem.  Unless you’re a throbbing Nintendo fanboy, their press conferences all tend to bleed together.  It’s easy to understand why.  “Remember the year Nintendo talked about Mario?”  What Mario are you.. “Or that time that one year when Shigeru Miyamoto came out and pandered to us?”  Well actually that happens every.. “Or that time Reggie Fils-Aime looked like he couldn’t believe he’s 51 years old and trying to shill Let’s Dance?”  NO!  No I don’t remember that time!

Oh thank Christ we don’t have to go a whole fiscal quarter without a Mario game!

Of course, this is a hardware year, so we can call this the year they talked about Wii U.  Which could have been last year too I guess, but work with me here.  Nintendo fans in general seem a little disappointed this year, because Nintendo failed to say all the correct buzz words that cause a reaction in them.  They’re like dogs, conditioned to listen for only key terms.  “Mario!”  Woof!  “Pikmin!”  Woof!  “More Mario!”  WOOF WOOF! But then Nintendo left the poor pooches hanging by not saying other words, like “Smash Brothers” or “Zelda” or “Star Fox.”  Nintendo hounds are sad puppies tonight.  Yep, sorry, I have to cut to the picture.

The face of Nintendo fanboys following E3 2012.

Wii U is coming in 2012, which is ironic given that most Nintendo fanboys are doing the same in anticipation of it.  Most people are of two very different views on it.  They either think it’s brilliant, or that it’s a cumbersome looking piece of shit.  I lean for option two here.  I’m five-foot one-inch tall and I have tiny hands.  Nintendo wants people younger than me with even smaller hands to somehow not develop early-onset carpal tunnel using this.  I’m not saying kids are incapable of using it, but it’s very telling that many of the videos Nintendo showed involved grown adults handling the Wii U GamePad, not children.  Remind me, besides fanboys, what is Nintendo’s target audience again?  And no, it’s not the same as using an iPad.  I can use an iPad just fine, because it has no buttons to press, styluses to hold, or other screens to look at.

It’s weird because Nintendo is kind of famous for making comfortable controllers.  I know the Nintendo 64 bearclaw pad gets some flack, but at age 9 I felt it was just fine.  The Gamecube might have the most comfortable controller I’ve ever used in my life (never did like the Wave Bird as much), and I don’t hate the Wii Remote, even with a nunchuk attached.  It’s just bizarre to me that they could go from being the industry leaders in comfort to being the industry leaders in causing your hand to cramp up just by looking at picture of their next product.  I guess Nintendo wanted a piece of Playboy’s market share.

It doesn’t help that Nintendo showed me absolutely zero games that needed to have this, or more importantly, made me want to own a Wii U.  Yea, they showed a tech demo for a Luigi game that seemed like little more than an update to Pac-Man Vs., itself just a tech demo when you get down to it.  Otherwise, it was mostly used to look at a map.  Next year at E3, for you drinking game fans, just play one for Nintendo’s conference that uses the word “map.”  That’s it.  It’s probably not as potentially lethal to play as one where you take a drink every time someone says “Mario” but you’ll still be blitzed to the point that you won’t remember your own name.

Why do the baby Yoshis look drunk?

Ah yes, Mario.  We’re getting not one, but two games called “New Super Mario Bros.”  Hopefully this means they’ll retcon the previous games in the series to “Old New Super Mario Bros.”  The 3DS entry, called New Super Mario Bros. 2 (because Newer Super Mario Bros. sounded stupid I guess) brings back the leaf from Super Mario 3.  I’m sorry, but when you set out to make a game and call it “new”, maybe step one should be “include new shit in it!”  The Wii U version, called New Super Mario Bros. U (way to phone in the title, Nintendo) brings in Yoshis and the cape from Super Mario World, only this time it’s “new” because it looks like a flying squirrel suit.  It’s like asking your wife to dress up like a naughty nurse.  I don’t get why people do it, because at the end of the day you’re still getting sucked off by the same person.

I have a theory.  I think Nintendo games start off as a game of Mad Libs.  Picture it: a bunch of guys in Kyoto pass a joint around, sip some sake, and then try to name animals.  “Penguin!”  “Flying Squirrel!”  “Frog!”  “Bumble Bee!”  And this is where the power ups in Mario games come from.

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Kairi on E3 2012: Sony Edition

June 5, 2012 by 1 Comment

Tell me I’m the first one to say “J.K. Rowling cast the Avada Kedavra Killing Curse on Sony’s E3 press conference.”  I’m sure I’m not, but I just thought of it all on my own, and that counts!  Actually, it really is kind of funny how Sony can have such a well done press conference, but you have one little brain fart like a ten minute session of J.K. Rowling sitting oblivious to the fact that we would have rather seen J.K. Simmons and suddenly everything is less than hunky dory.  By time the conference was over, nobody was talking about all the fucking awesome videos of games.  They were making Harry Potter jokes.  Smooth, Sony.

I thought it was a good conference.  Besides WonderBook, they hit all the right notes.  No 3D bullshit (maybe the billion dollar bath they just took on 3D televisions had something to do with that), not a whole lot of Move, minimal talk about non-gaming applications, and a whole lot of major titles with actual game footage.  Not all of them interested me, and I’m sure not all of them interested you.  But there really was something for everybody here. Especially if you’re eight-years-old or stupid, because that’s all WonderBook can appeal to.

Either he’s playing WonderBook or he got into the medicine cabinet.

WonderBook was bad.  Like “why are they showing a tech demo for the PlayStation 2 Eye Toy like it’s 2003?” bad.  Just to point out how off base Sony is, they spend ten minutes pimping the game like it’s a child’s toy, complete with footage of elementary school kids hoping like hell Sony wasn’t lying about giving them free games for taking part in this ad.  And then what other game besides Book of Spells did they talk about, albeit very briefly?  A game called Digg’s Nightcrawler that has a Film Noir theme to it.  Way to nail down that target demographic, Sony!  Why, not a day goes by where a six-year-old doesn’t ask me if I’m a fan of the Maltese Falcon.

Otherwise, the conference was swell.  God of War is targeting other creatures of myth, which I assume means the Last Guardian will be one of the bosses in it.  Sure, it pretty much is the same old shit that we’ve had shoveled at us since 2005, but hey, God of War!  Look, Kratos killed some dudes by dismembering them!  Haven’t seen that before!  Actually, Kratos does have a new gift: he can rewind time to create platforms to hop on.  So you guys are grifting from Lego Star Wars now?  If  you had to do that, you should have just made this Lego God of War.  At least that would have been funny.

The highlight of the show was The Last of Us.  Like everything else shown at E3, the game’s pitch boils down to “It’s Uncharted, but..”  Resident Evil 6 was Uncharted, but with zombies.  Tomb Raider was Uncharted, but with boobies.  In this case, it’s Uncharted, but set in post-apocalyptic America.  It actually looked decent though.  Ironically, it had more stealth stuff in its footage than stealth-series Splinter Cell’s trailer did.  Of course, there were still moments of mind-numbing stupidity of design.  After all, we can’t venture too far away from Uncharted.  The scene that sunk the trailer for me involved a shoot out where people were using couches as cover.  Couches.  Things made of foam, cotton, and tiny little springs.  I kept thinking “shoot the fucking couch!”  Maybe the dude thought he would accidentally shoot the tag off and get arrested.

At least it looked like a game I wanted to play.  I can’t say the same thing about Beyond: Two Souls by Quantic Dream.  I thought their previous effort, Heavy Rain, was a boring piece of shit.  I think most people probably feel the same way as me about it, but won’t admit it because then they become “anti-video games as art” people.  I feel no shame when I say that I want to be a gamer, not an art connoisseur.  I also don’t feel I should have to volunteer to be bored for hours while waiting for the quote “good stuff.”  Yet, that’s what the argument for Heavy Rain is.  It starts slow, but a few hours in it gets better, so just wait for it.  Why should I?  Unless the good stuff will undoubtedly be the greatest thing EVER, wouldn’t that time spent being bored be better spent not being bored?  I know, crazy talk.

“Quick, before you die, where are the fire extinguishers again?”

Hold on though, they got Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page.  Great!  And then they showed it off by cutting to a cinematic where her character didn’t speak a word for five minutes.  When you actually got to hear her, she wasn’t really any better than 90% of all game voice overs.  Which is to say she totally phones in every line of dialog.  Money well spent, Sony.  Next time, do what Capcom does and just hire Sally from accounting to do the acting.

And no, I have nothing to say about the Vita.  I’m just like Sony!

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Kairi on E3 2012: Microsoft Edition

June 4, 2012 by 4 Comments

Another year, another Microsoft press conference that people were bitching about halfway through it.  “Show us some games!” people tweeted after watching trailers for new Halo, Gears of War, Fable, and Forza titles.  Jesus guys, the show was like 80% games, and that even included games you might want to play for a change!  As opposed to last year, where people had to feign interest in Sesame Street for Kinect.

Microsoft could have replaced the Halo 4 trailer with a static screen that said “coming in November. We didn’t bother putting together any footage. No need. You fuckers will line up at midnight to buy it anyway.” I think I speak for everyone when I say “here here!”

Of course, Microsoft still has no sense of showmanship.  They opened the conference with Halo 4, the only major title they have coming out this year.  Well, besides Forza.  They closed the show with Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, a game that is coming out on everything.  I mean everything.  You Colecovision enthusiasts out there are in for a real treat.  But, in essence, this means that Microsoft devoted a good portion of its show and the driver’s seat of their presentation to marketing a game where 45% of the copies (or more) will be sold on a competitor’s machine.  Oh sure, it gets the DLC first.  Not exclusively.  Just first.  Content that will probably be ready day one, which means it might as well ship with the game for free.  It’s like Activision is bragging “hey Microsoft fanboys, you get to suck our dick first.  Sony fanboys will have to taste your saliva on our cock.  Doesn’t that make you feel privileged?”

Speaking of things that suck, a new Fable was announced.  That is all.

I will grant Microsoft this: they have mastered the art of shameless pandering.  If the opinions of those attending the conference were anything like mine and the guys I follow on Twitter, a collective groan was let out when EA Sports took the stage.  Microsoft then strategically defused this by showing new Gears of War, Forza, and Fable trailers immediately following that.  Nintendo used to manipulate audiences like this.  Then they hit the honey pot with Wii and quit trying altogether.

Something did catch my attention from the EA Sports part: more realistic sports games.  How so?  Because the officiating is now crap and you get in trouble for cussing a bad call from an official.  They actually highlighted this while showing the new FIFA game.  The referee blew a call, the player cussed about it, and was slapped with a red card.  Oh goodie.  I guess someone at EA has been watching the Eastern Conference Finals.  It did make me wonder what happens if you’re playing the game and a spider crawls on you.  If that happens to me, every player on the team is getting ejected.  Although it did give me an idea of how to screw with Bryce the next time I see him playing Madden.  I’ll just blurt out and the worst possible time “hey ref, blow me!”  Good times are on the horizon.

More running, shooting bad guys, and wearing neon-green floodlights that could be seen from a mile away on a clear night. Behold: the latest stealth game!

Of course, everyone is talking about Xbox SmartGlass, which was previously known by its codename: Wii U.  I’m kidding of course.  SmartGlass actually is a smarter design, and it did that by making the tablet entirely optional.  No offense, Nintendo, but I’m not looking forward to holding a portable TV set to play video games on a television screen.  As neat as the features are, Nintendo already did similar things with the Gamecube and Game Boy Advance.  In Wind Waker, for example, you could use the Game Boy as a map for the dungeon, and even set off bombs to attack enemies.  Most people aren’t even aware this feature was in there, even though they had all the hardware needed to do it.  Why wasn’t it used?  Because our fucking attention was focused on the TV screen.  I don’t want to have to look up and down to play games!  The whole point of playing games is to focus your attention on one thing, so that all other reality ceases to be.  Between SmartGlass and Kinect, Wii Pads and Motion Controllers, Eye Toys and Moves, you game companies are really harshing our mellow here!

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