Dead Pixels (Second Chance with the Chick)

June 19, 2012 by 7 Comments

It’s been just over nine months since I reviewed Dead Pixels, the #2 game as of this writing on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, and the former king of the mountain.  Despite really enjoying my time with the game, I never really got around to playing the two extra modes that launched months after its release.  With less than two weeks to go before my first anniversary as Indie Gamer Chick, I figured I should finally take a look and see if the content would be enough to elevate Dead Pixels back into the #1 spot on the board.  Of course, my expectations that it might do just that were somewhat dashed by the developer outright telling me that it would not reclaim the spot.

You get more characters to choose from in The Solution, all of whom have been bad little boys. Lord knows that when you have an emergency situation, the only solution is to send in hardened criminals to do all the heroics. I know how it works. I saw Pitch Black too.

He wasn’t being coy.  In fact, he’s right.  The two new modes of Dead Pixels are swell extras, but they ultimately add nothing to the experience.  First up is The Solution.  It’s kind of like a survival mode, where you have to run X amount of streets (depending on the difficult level) and then back again.  You have even more limited resources, and the city is vacant so there are no humans to negotiate goods with.  You can still loot empty buildings for goods, but you don’t want to get bogged down by carrying too much weight.  I had that happen to me when I played the main quest, and I think I would have moved faster if I had waited for plate tectonics to push me to the goal.

I ended up carrying only the default shotgun, and only stocking up on shells for it.  If that doesn’t sound like the most exciting way to play the game, that’s because it wasn’t.  I ended up just holding down left and avoiding enemies.  This did come in handy on the final part of the “walk left” section of the game, when the lights started flickering on and off.  Due to my epilepsy, this was a high-risk section of the game for me to play.  I decided to walk up to the top of the screen, hold the stick left, and not do anything else.  Boring but effective, because it worked.  However, this mode proved to be dull, and not really worthy of the excellent main game.

Last Stand worked better.  It’s a wave shooter where you play as a couple of twats named Hurley and Nate (no joke) as they lock themselves in a mall with a bunch of zombies.  I doubt they would actually do something like that, because I know I wouldn’t do that.  Since they exist only to steal my ideas, their zombie plan would probably involve some kind of elaborate suicide, because that’s what I’m going to do.  If the zombies attack, I’m going to kiss the end of a shotgun that has bullets soaked in cyanide while wearing a vest made of dynamite and the timer set for five seconds from now.  I am taking NO chances of surviving the outbreak.  Among other things, I never see a working Taco Bell in these games or movies, and I will be damned if I’m going to live out the rest of my life without a Chulupa.

I ended up playing as Hurley. And no, that doesn’t mean I ended up with blisters on my hands and a craving for bacon. It’s just a game, not a transmorphic body swapping thingie.

So Last Stand.  The wave shooter part.  Well, you shoot a bunch of zombies and they drop money.  Then between waves you can upgrade your stats, buy different guns, more ammo, health kits, etc.  Every round the zombies grow in numbers.  That’s pretty much it.  This mode is more fun, but then again I’m predisposed to enjoying wave shooters, which is why such a game could overthrow Dead Pixels for the #1 spot on the leaderboard in the first place.  However, I didn’t love the wave shooting mode the way I did the main campaign.  Part of that is there’s no online leaderboards to show off how far you’ve made it.  But it’s mostly because I already got all the value out of Dead Pixels that I could.  The game rocked in single player mode, rocked harder in co-op (even if Brian didn’t like the game as much as me and thought I was out of my mind for putting it #1 in the first place), but its time has come and gone.  Dead Pixels is still an amazing game and will probably hold onto a high spot on the leaderboard for a long time to come, but I’ve moved on.  Granted, what I moved on to has been mostly inferior games, negating my point.  I’m just going to shut up now and leave this review.  Buh-Bye.

Dead Pixels was developed by CSR Studios

80 Microsoft Points have an alternative zombie plan, but it requires duct tape and a steamroller in the making of this review.

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Indies in Due Time: Dream-Build-Play 2012 Episode 1

June 18, 2012 by 7 Comments

Originally, Brian and I planned to look at ALL the trailers for the 2012 Dream Build Play competition.  And then nearly 400 people entered.  Yea, so plans have changed.  Although Brian and I will be getting to as many of these trailers as we can in the coming weeks, our planned alliance with Armless Octopus to do so is semi-on-hold.  Yes, Dave Voyles and Mike Wall will be joining us this week.  But we’re also now pairing up with Alan of Indie Ocean, and Tim & Nate from Gear-Fish.  Nate is up first, fresh off the first anniversary of Gear-Fish, so you should all head over there and check their site out.  They’re way better writers than me, so you should have been doing that all along.  All four of today’s games were selected by Nate.  Off we go.

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Monster King

June 18, 2012 by 6 Comments

Monster King is the second RPG that I’ve played this month that’s missing some key ingredients.  When the core mechanics of your game involve scrolling menus, you have to really jazz things with witty dialog, a compelling story, or charismatic characters.  If you have none of that, it’s like serving a customer a bowl of warm water and calling it the Soup of the Day.

Today, I ordered a big bowl of Cream of Void because Monster King has the personality of a mannequin.  You play as a dude who has to, um, do something.  If it was explained, I forgot it.  Probably save the kingdom.  It’s always about one dude saving the kingdom.  Don’t these kingdoms ever have a standing army?  Here’s a thought: since in these classic RPGs, the “kingdom” usually consists of a dozen or so towns, each populated by between 4 and 10 people, why not just gather everyone up and move to a new kingdom?  One with better infrastructure, a standing army, and monsters not camping just outside the border of every town?  Come to think of it, why are there never monsters in the towns?  You’re a lone hero who is attempting to save the entire kingdom, armed to the teeth, and you still have to stock up on potions and regenerative magic.  The towns are populated by five idiots who say the same line of dialog every time you try to converse with them.  The monsters should be able to steamroll over them in like five seconds.  These games never make any sense.

It would have been cooler if he was standing by the dock of the bay, even though there’s nothing to do there either, besides watching the tide roll away.

The hook of Monster King is that you can capture enemies when they’re weakened and then use them during battle.  It’s not exactly Pokemon, because you can only use each monster once during a battle.  However, the magic and monster system are basically the same idea.  Use fire against things made of wood, water against things made of fire, Bengay against things made of old people, etc.  Figuring out which enemies work on others is a little trickier, and most enemies pack a pretty decent punch, so you don’t have time to experiment.  Your defense never upgrades when you level up, probably to keep the game from getting too easy, so you have to camp out near towns so you can refill your health and magic points every-other battle.  Are we having fun yet?

Monster King does make an effort to have some form of humor in it, but it really doesn’t work all that well.  Here, humor comes in the form of jokes from the towns people.  The one that stuck with me is “people ask me if I’ve lived here my whole life.  I tell them no, not yet.”  That’s about as sophisticated as it gets.  For the most part, it’s just go to town, buy weapons, fight monsters, level up, slap yourself in the face to prevent yourself from falling asleep, explore caves, and fight bosses.  However, Monster King is more stripped down than Mortal Legacies in some other aspects.  Weapons and armor are automatically equipped, you can’t hock any old ones, and stores do not sell potions.  After playing for over an hour, I never found any item stronger than the standard potion, which can only be got out of treasure chests.  MP can only be restored by sleeping at an inn or leveling up.  Thus, the already boring gameplay is really taken to its most basic level of design.  I don’t get why people make games like this anymore.  This doesn’t feel like a game someone made because it was something they wanted to play.  It seems more like a game that someone made to see if they could.  That’s fine.  That’s how you learn.  But maybe it’s best to not attempt to sell that game.

Status? Sleepy, getting sleepier.

I was ready to write off Monster King as competent and functional, but as shallow as refrigerator condensation.  And then, it happened.  What happened?  Well, I was fighting snowmen and grinding up my XP.  I had just fought a boss, had leveled up a couple of times, bought some new armor, and was about to buy a new sword.  Then I got a message from a friend asking if I could check to see how much something on the Xbox marketplace cost.  I scooted over to the town, slept in the inn, saved the game, and turned it off.  I returned just a few minutes later and loaded up my game.  Only my game was from about twenty minutes before my last save, meaning I had to fight the boss again and make up for the five levels I had climbed and then lost.  I am not sure how this happened.  I typically save XBLIG files to my memory card.  Hang on, let me check and see if I accidentally saved it to the hard drive.

Nope.  No save file found on my hard drive.  Mind you, I’m hyper-compulsive about saving in games.  When I was a kid, I went a little too long between saves playing Kingdom Hearts, and a power-outage resulted in my first legitimate gaming rage moment.  My SpongeBob pillow suffered one lost limb and three stab wounds of unknown origin (pssss, it was from a nail file).  Since then, I’ve been vigilant about saving.  And so I did save after every level-up.  But, come to think of it, the game was a little weird about when the save happened more than the one time.  I did die after a battle or two.  Sometimes I would go back to my previous save spot, but more often I would go back further.  Obviously something is not working here.  Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have recommended Monster King anyway.  Like Mortal Legacies, it seemed like a good first-attempt, but not a game I could recommend spending actual money on.  But, I’m sure there are people out there who are looking for bland, one-dimensional time wasters.  If that’s the case, and the save thing doesn’t discourage you, knock yourself out with Monster King.  Or, here’s a better idea: go see a fucking doctor because you obviously have no pulse.

Monster King was developed by NickB

80 Microsoft Points wondered why the tree that is brandishing a gun is called the “Tree Killer.”  Wouldn’t “Killer Tree” make more sense?  I mean, I guess it could be killing trees when it’s not attacking professional monster slayers like a dumbass.  But if that was the case, why does it have a gun?  Guns aren’t very effective at killing trees, unless it’s a gun that fires big bullets.  Like a cannon, but that really isn’t a gun.  It should have been brandishing a chainsaw, which would have been a good chance to add humor to the game.  I mean, a tree that uses a chainsaw?  Ironic comedy.  A tree with a gun?  Just weird.

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Breasts, Avatars, Crafting, and You

June 16, 2012 by 14 Comments

Sex sells.  It’s an expression as old as the concept of mass-marketing.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my year as Indie Gamer Chick, it’s that the expression is absolutely true.  I’m closing in on nearly a year of having this site, and I’m on the cusp on having 200,000 lifetime views for it.  This will be the 300th item I’ve posted on my site since launching on July 1, 2011.  As tough as this is to admit, I would have just over half of those 200,000 views if not for three game reviews: Don’t Die Dateless Dummy, Temple of Dogolrak, and Trailer Park King.  What do these three games have in common?  Well, they’re graphic adventures.  They all are kind of lame.  The writing isn’t particularly good.

Oh, and they are about tits.  Or space twats. And this really infuriates other developers of Xbox Live Indie Games.  There is an undercurrent of bitterness among developers who work hard on their fine-tuned platformers or RPGs who have to sit and watch their games get buried on the sales charts by games that offer little more than static-pictures of anime breasts.

Although I can’t blame those developers for being sore, I have to side with the smut peddlers on this one.  Yea, I haven’t exactly loved the quote-unquote “sexy games” I’ve reviewed here, but that’s on account of the games being no good.  If the gameplay was decent, I would have probably cracked a joke or two about the content, but I’m certainly not offended.  I know that there is a market from them.  I’ve had over 40,000 views come from search engines, the top-10 of which are as follows:

don’t die dateless dummy 2,707
temple of dogolrak 2,506
indie gamer chick 2,190
trailer park king 2,159
indiegamerchick 747
dont die dateless dummy 491
dead pixels game 373
trailer park king review 286
dlc quest 272
trailer park king game 248

As you can see, the top-10 is dominated by those three games.  If I ignored all other search results, the six hits off “boob games” account for over 20% of all search terms in my site’s history.  Oh, but it’s actually far more.  In fact, it’s around 25,000 of those searches, or over 60%.

Pictured: the game that has generated 10% of my total views.

But you didn’t need me to tell you this is what sells on Xbox Live Indie Games.  When I reviewed Apple Jack 2 yesterday, I pointed out that only 2 of the 90 best-selling games Xbox Live Indie Games were punishers.  Although I admit that what constitutes a punisher varies (Alan pointed out to me that Soul, which I have not played, would count as a punisher in his book due to extreme difficulty).  Still, I think my point is valid: punishers are an over-represented genre on Xbox Live Indie Games.  For all the bitching people do about Minecraft clones, avatar games, or raunchy stuff, you can’t say that the market hasn’t spoken, and spoken clearly.  Minecraft clones dominate the top of the charts, while games with the word “avatar” in the title represent 21 of the top 90.  Meanwhile, stuff featuring women on the cover (including pregnant women) account for 14 of the top 90 sellers.

The people have spoken, and they’ve done so with their wallets.  So while I sympathize with those developers who feel they can’t compete with Avatar Boobcraft, I would like to point out that you asked for this.  This is what all real artists go through.  You don’t think there’s some dejected filmmaker out there who poured his time, money, and life into his project only to watch in agony while something completely shallow and empty like Transformers 3 out-grossed it by over a billion dollars?  You don’t think talented singers started measuring themselves for the noose when Ashlee Simpson’s albums went triple-platinum?  Artistic success is rarely a measurement of talent or effort, which is why the average person my age can name all of the Spice Girls but none of the Three Tenors.

Yea, I don’t like it when these games totally half-ass it, but I don’t like it when ANY game half asses it.  Also, I find it obnoxious when games put women all over the cover, yet the game has little or nothing to do with sexuality.  This was the case with my latest review, Superdimension Iliad.  The actual game starred a blocky avatar and was about platforming and shooting your way through gaming history.  The game looked like this:

The cover looked like this:

In cases like this, I’ll side with the crybabies.  There should be some kind of “cover art that actually represents the game” rule for Xbox Live Indie Games.  If you allow developers to shameless pander to the pocket-pool enthusiasts even when their game is about as erotic as watching an old man sleep on a hammock, the results could get ugly.

Oh who am I kidding?  This would be on the top 90 in a week or two.

Thanks to Michael Wilson for the (completely fictional) box art above. 

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Superdimension Iliad

June 15, 2012 by 10 Comments

Fuck Superdimension Iliad.  This game pisses me off, because it’s a really great idea.  You play a little Fez-looking thing that has to travel through all stages of gaming history, shooting at enemies Mega Man-style.  Apparently, you can even get weapons from beating bosses, just like in Mega Man.  Sounds great!  And it really does do a remarkable job of having graphics that invoke each era  you’re traveling through.  This should have been one of the best titles on Xbox Live Indie Games.  But it’s not, because the game’s difficulty reaches new levels of delusional expectations on players.

Behold, the only stage I could beat.

I only made it to the first branching path of the game.  Which is a nice way of saying that I beat the first level.  I then spent about an hour trying to get past either of the next stages, one of which is based on Atari graphics and the other Intellivision.  I really, really wanted to, because I wanted to see what would be next.  Again, the concept is fricken awesome.  But I couldn’t get past either of these stages.  There are too many enemies firing too many projectiles at you.  You have a health bar, but it fades quickly.  Enemy bullets move faster than you do, and you often don’t have enough space to avoid them, because if you jump over a bullet you’re probably going to come in direct contact with an enemy.  In the Atari stage, I was being bombarded on all sides by shots, plus a slow-moving dot that follows you around and is an instant-kill if it touches you.  The space you have to navigate this gauntlet is just a few character-lengths high.  If you stop moving, the dot will catch you.  Oh, and there’s also instant-kill landmines to jump over.  Does this sound fun to you?  It sounds like corporal punishment to me.

The Intellivision level (or is it Coleco?) is even worse.  After doing Mega Manish “hop on the disappearing blocks” for a few sections,  you end up in a meteor shower.  The meteors move faster than you do, plus there are these little instant-kill UFO thingies that move WAY faster than you.  They take more than one shot to kill, so by time you’ve put enough bullets into them, chances are they’re probably already celebrating over your corpse.  This is a game with difficulty so extreme that I seriously doubt anyone who play-tested it actually finished it.  Did the developer get too good at their own game and lose track of reality?

There’s more problems.  There’s a lives system in place and you only get three of them, upping the frustration factor to such a degree that NASA’s computers crashed trying to calculate it.  Check-points are too far apart.  And for some reason there’s a modern techno-soundtrack.  They nailed the graphics almost perfectly, and the sound effects are spot-on too, and then they ruined the illusion of it by sticking in a generic metal/techno soundtrack.  That would be like Eminem doing the soundtrack for Schindler’s List.

Boy, that stage inspired by Super Mario 3 sure looks fun. It’s too bad that the game is damn-near impossible and thus it’s unlikely most players will ever reach that far to appreciate it.

I’m so disappointed in Superdimension Iliad, because it really has a great idea.  It’s an idea I wanted to see through to the end.  If it had worked, it might have been one of the best games on the platform.  But it doesn’t work, and the only reason it doesn’t is because the developer wanted to make it as difficult as possible to enjoy his creation.  Imagine if the only way you could view the Sistine Chapel was to walk around on a floor covered in bear traps, because that’s what the developer did.  He murdered his own idea.  Bravo.

Superdimension Iliad was developed by We Love Hamsters Software

80 Microsoft Points couldn’t locate a trailer or the website for the developer in the making of this review. 

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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 

Filed under XBLIG / Creators Collection

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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