It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed Retro Arcade Adventure, a hack-and-slasher that was sort of like Smash TV for the dark ages. I didn’t really like the game. It was short, repetitive, and boring. You could see potential in the developer, but the experience was tedious. So I was skeptical when I saw that they had decided to remake the title instead of patching the original. Ballsy for sure, since the first wasn’t very good. It would be like burning a steak and trying to correct it by throwing it back on the grill for ten minutes.
Right away, I noticed the game was somewhat improved. Enemies still come out you in boring, mindless waves, but they hack up pretty good. Levels felt shorter, power-ups more plentiful, and boss battles were fun if unspectacular.
And then I encountered this fucking thing.
It could very well be the most boring boss I’ve taken on in an indie game. It very much reminded me of the final boss in Sonic 4. Too spongy, takes too long to open itself up to attack, and made me question whether or not I had died in a horrific traffic accident and had gone to gaming hell. The first time I fought it, I was low on health (I seemed to be taking unaccountable damage in the stage leading up to it), but it took me a full ten minutes to slip up. The second time around, after over 15 minutes hitting presumably the weak spot on the boss, it still wasn’t dead. I was though. I paused the game, casually got up, turned the power off, and decided to go watch some TV. I think it was a documentary on tape worms. Vastly more entertaining than that boss was.
In short, this needs to be fixed. And it will be. The developer assured me of it, under penalty of torture by honey and fire ants. Until then, you can spend your time with the two minigames included. I just realized I never actually played them. Let me give them a shot.
(15 minutes later)
Oh dear God, what horrible shit. I’m not waiting. Break out the honey and fire ants. This developer needs a good torturing.
80 Microsoft Points liked Smash TV years ago but don’t think it’s possible to be good in this day and age so prove me wrong indie developers in the making of this review.
It’s been about a year since I reviewed Quiet, Please!, a pleasant little mix of puzzles and point-and-click adventures. I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t exactly the deepest game. It was also a shorty at around thirty minutes. To this day, I still get people complaining that I didn’t give a thumbs up to City Tuesday, yet a game like Quiet, Please! got my recommendation, even though they were similar in length and style. The difference between the two is Quiet felt finished and fully realized, while City Tuesday felt like it was just starting at the moment it ended, making the overall impact of the game unsatisfactory. It would be like going to a bakery and asking for a dozen cookies, six of them the Quiet cookies and six of them the Tuesday cookies. First you’re handed the Quiet cookies, and they’re decent, if not memorable. Then you anxiously await for the Tuesday cookies, only to have the baker throw the uncooked dough at your face. And then call you a cunt for not being happy with the dough. Even if the dough was delicious (it was), you can only imagine how good the finished cookie would have been.
Extending that analogy further, Quiet Christmas is an overcooked cookie. If it had been bundled with the original as a freebie, I could have appreciated it more and probably bumped up Quiet’s standing on the leaderboard. But it’s not, and I can’t. The real problem with Quiet Christmas is it’s very much the same game, only with a small handful of new puzzles. It takes place in the same house as the original, features the same cast, and the logic of the puzzles is largely the same as before. It would be like buying a DVD for $20 and being told that you can get the alternate ending for an additional $20. No, that should have been on the DVD in the first place.
Once again, my warped brain conceived horrible things to do to my family. I figured I would grease the floor with butter to cause my hyperactive brother to slip and knock himself unconscious. Not making that up. I watch too much YouTube.
If you played the first Quiet game, you’ll breeze through this expansion. I used a stopwatch. Ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds was my time. And, because it’s the same location, there’s no surprises here for players. I think this could possibly become a series of games, but not like this. Keep the family around (I suspect the parents are both drunks and the brother is hyperactive) but send them to new, exotic locations. That works! Look at Home Alone 2. Same movie. Same plot. Same characters. Different location. $360,000,000 at the box office. By the way, I didn’t actually know how much that flick made until just now. Wow. I think I’m going to start cutting myself.
On Monday, I reviewed Terraria for PlayStation Network/Xbox Live Arcade. I said that I did have fun playing the title, but I didn’t recommend it because it was too glitchy and unfinished. I also said that I had lost interest in the game. Since then, there hasn’t been a review up at my blog. Why? Because I’ve been busy playing Terraria. So allow me to eat some crow and do a 180 here. Terraria IS worth your time, glitches and all.
By the way, even more annoying glitches have popped up over the last few days. The game froze after we defeated the Eye of Cthulhu, crashed while I was harvesting meteor ore, and Brian got a really weird one that forced him to start a new map, then exit that map and reload the old one. Naturally, the one that required that was “our world.” The one we built together. The one that has all of our shit in it. We were seriously worried that we had lost access to it. Apparently, it has something to do with the placement of the bed in the house. Who knew this game was one of those weird “feng shui is real and you must obey it” weirdos?
Starting next year, you’ll be fighting pelicans instead of hornets.
But, despite dozens of bugs (some of them game-enders), I’ve been pressing on. I figured Terraria was a possible life-ender, and I was spot on. When a game like this owns me, my only choice is to “get it out of my system.” Brian’s heard that term before with me, but this is the only time I’ve dragged him along for the ride. It’s okay though. We’ve both made projects for ourselves. I’ve been focusing on exploring the sky. Brian is alternating between building our house and mining Hell itself. He also built an elaborate trap that we use in the event of a goblin army attacking. Of course, said attacks are rare. Mostly, his trap just kills innocent bunnies.
We named this “Rabbit Season, FIRE” after watching a dozen bunnies off-themselves using it.
It was sometime a couple of days ago that Brian asked me “do you want to reconsider your review?” After thinking it over, yes. Yes I do. I still stand by all the complaints I said in that review. Terraria is clearly not completely finished and needs a lot of work. But I can’t deny the sheer scope of things you can do in this title. It’s insanity. It’s consumed my thoughts and utterly devoured my free time. I had a seizure earlier this morning (completely unrelated to the game), and since then all I can think about is “I hope I feel good enough to play Terraria later.” It’s single-handedly crippled my productivity here at Indie Gamer Chick. It really says something about a game that, after forty hours, I’m still anxious to dive in. I make no apologies for it either. Look at this game I’m supposed to be writing a review of.
This is Short Circuit for XBLIG by developer Jason Yarber. Jason’s a cool dude, but his game is so fucking boring. I’ve always been bored silly by Lights Out, since the moment Santa Claus put one in my stocking when I was ten years old. And this version doesn’t look particularly engaging. It has that lazy XBLIG font that makes me break out into hives. Now, I can either spend hours trying to be snarky over this, or I can spend them fighting monsters and harvesting rare ore. Hmmmm.. sorry Jason. For what it’s worth, your game isn’t total shit or anything, but I can play Lights Out for free at any number of sites. I can also take a handful of sleeping pills and feel the same stimuli.
I haven’t really paid too much attention to recent XBLIG releases. Over the past couple days, a couple of titles have hit that will be reviewed over the next seven days. Well, maybe. When a game utterly owns me the way Terraria does, I can’t make promises. I don’t take back anything else I said about Terraria, except the part where I said I can’t recommend it. I can, and I do. Put it this way: I got the new Bioshock earlier this week and was enjoying what I was playing, until I started playing this. A little $15 indie game on PSN is completely dominating my game time. And now I’m like one of those evil drug pushers, encouraging players to just take one hit. Come on, one won’t kill you.
Update: I had second thoughts on Terraria, and you can read them here. Terraria is now Chick Approved.
Being primarily an Xbox Live Indie Game critic, I don’t get a whole ton of requests for XBLA/PSN titles. But, when I do, they usually come in droves. Terraria was such a game. Partially that’s because none of the major sites have a review up yet. Also because people are simply dying to know what I think of crafting games. Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask me about my opinion on Minecraft. I still haven’t played it. Not out of any moral or anti-bandwagon objection. It’s just one of those “I’ll get around to it at some point” type of deals. Plus I live in fear of the potential addiction factor. Time sinks like Minecraft have ruined my life in the past. Now that I work and have a boyfriend and shit, I’m not really up to risking that by playing a game with life-ruining potential.
But, I aim to please my readers, so I decided to go ahead and buy Terraria on PlayStation Network. And, just to be on the safe side, I brought my boyfriend along for the ride. If I’m going to destroy my life, I’m bringing him down with me. It’s the gaming version of the Days of Wine and Roses.
I guess Terraria is supposed to be Minecraft in 2D. Maybe that’s over simplifying things, but that’s the game in a nutshell. You have to mine for materials that you use to build shit to mine for more materials. There are enemies to fight, a huge (and I do mean fucking huge if you pick the largest map) world to explore, lots of different items, and a few twists along the way. Brian created the world, chose “large” because he’s a total clod who forgot that I needed to play the game as fast as possible so that I could crank out a review, and away we went.
My world started out in a snowy wasteland. Brian’s started out in a beautiful, serene forest. I think the game was trying to send me a message with that.
As a young couple that’s getting ready to buy a house, I figured this would be a good test to see how we do at the whole “co-habitation” thing. The weird thing is, we sort of fell into what our real life roles will be. Brian became the home maker. Literally. He built our house, while I set about bringing home the materials we would need to survive. For the first couple hours, Brian never ventured far outside of our home. He kept adding floors, furniture, basements, and buildings for NPCs to live in. Meanwhile, I was off fighting monsters and tunneling all over the Earth looking for shit to build us more shit with. It was quite fun, and very 21st century of us.
Finally, I think Brian got jealous of me constantly going “look at all this cool shit I’m finding!” and built a mineshaft, then proceeded to dig a hole straight to fucking China. That got me all jealous. Suddenly he was the one saying “hey Cathy, look at all this cool shit!” I responded to this in a completely rational way: I dug a tunnel to a lake and flooded his ass out. We’re going to make a great couple.
We put about fifteen hours into Terraria, but it felt like a lot less. Despite being a time sink without shame, gameplay is rewarding. Every piece of progress you make is exhilarating. And really, what else can you say about a game where at least once every thirty minutes, we looked at each other as if to say “can you believe how much fun this game is?”
So I recommend it right?
Well, no, actually. I don’t. Terraria is too unstable and glitchy in its current state. Over the course of fifteen hours, a laundry list of bugs popped up, grew, and frustrated the ever-loving shit out of me. Chief of which was the game had a tendency to crash at the worst possible times. It happened to me twice, and both times I had lost all the materials that I had harvested. To say I blew a gasket is an understatement. Who knew I was capable of crushing a controller with my bare hands?
How come our place didn’t look this nice, Brian? You suck at interior design. Suck suck suck at it!
I can’t stress how furious I was when this happened the second time with Brian. After hours of searching, I had stumbled upon a vein that was the mother lode of precious metals and rare gems. I stuffed my pockets and was about to head home with, poof, gone. Game crashed. Not for Brian, just for me. But all those metals that were in my pockets were gone. Gone permanently from my pockets and from his world. Ceased to exist. They can’t be replaced.
At this point, I was done with Terraria. This had already happened once and I was pretty pissed then, but I was having such a good time that I wanted to go back. After the second time? Fuck that. The game was a waste of my time. I begrudgingly played on my own just because it seemed like the professional thing to do, but the magic was gone. That took a lot of work to get those. Hours of gameplay. Am I bitter? Fuck yea, but with just cause. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a game that cost money should, you know, fucking work.
That crash also made a lot of the niggling little glitches that seemed minor before seem not so innocent. Such as:
Going to craft items and being told I didn’t have the materials. Even though I did. Right there, in my pocket. So I would have to exit out of the crafting menu and reenter it. Sometimes I would have to do this two or three times before the game would say “oh hey, look, you actually do have them. My bad!”
It had issues keeping track of how much money I had gathered. I would fight hoards of zombies, picking up coins from each one that died, then go to put my cash away in a chest at home only to find out that the dozens of coins I had picked up was now four or five. We never actually spent all that much money, so I wasn’t that annoyed by it. But still.
We had trouble picking up the shooting stars. It seemed to be a networking issue. Brian would see stars that I wouldn’t and vice-versa.
Offline, the game froze for me while it was loading up the world.
I had the music start to glitch out on me upon respawning more than once, making it sound like nails on a chalkboard.
It’s also worth mentioning that I had a couple reports on Twitter of XBLA owners also crashing their game.
While going through the screenshots on the official page for Terraria on the PlayStation Store, I realized how very little I had seen of Terraria, even after fifteen hours of gameplay. I want to keep playing. But I won’t, because I don’t want to get burned again.
As far as the non-glitchy elements go, movement physics are fairly smooth. Jumping is decent. But, the interface is so cumbersome and clunky that, even after over ten hours, it never feels intuitive. When we finally got organized and created a room that was nothing but chests to keep all of the stuff we’d dug up, we could spend fifteen or more minutes just fumbling to empty our pockets into them. Brian got more used to it than I did. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. Have you ever been stuck in line at a supermarket while some asshole has to get a price check on a pack of gum, then decides to pay for it with his card instead of the quarter you just fucking know is collecting lint in his pocket? Every single menu in Terraria feels like that.
I sure hope that patches are on the way for Terraria. I can’t stress enough: this game is fun. Very, very fun. But it’s not worth getting right now. Simply put: it’s not finished. Hopefully it will be someday soon. If you’re one of those types who can put up with great games rendered too buggy to enjoy, have at it. For me, Terraria can be fun, but it’s too unstable to recommend. Funny, because that’s exactly how my parents described me to possible suitors.
$14.99 briefly thought about taking hostages and demanding that the 73 Gold Ore, 103 Silver Ore, 17 Demeteor Ore, 15 emeralds, 7 Topaz, 8 sapphire, and Skeleton Statue that I lost when the game crashed were returned to me, but Brian said “honey, the cops made it clear, no more hostage situations” in the making of this review. Well fuck.
Correction: There are apparently more than six questions in this “game”. I played through this four times and got the same six questions in the same order, than I played again to make sure and again got the same six questions in the same order, so you can see how I would think there are only six questions. But, I’ve heard from playtesters that there are apparently more than six questions. Does that make the game better? Um, no.
The bible thumping wackos are right: the only thing keeping me, a well-adjusted heterosexual that is very much in love with a member of the opposite sex, from engaging in full-fledged lesbian orgies straight out of Caligula, is shit like the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop 8. Really, I’m only as straight as the law forces me to be. Of course, I’m a plan-ahead type of chick, and if the Supreme Court rules that I can marry anyone, including a fellow toilet-sitter, I’m going to need tips on how to court them properly. Thank God for How to Get a Girlfriend. Which is ironic when you think about it, because it basically spits on His divine plan. Just think, for the low price of 80 Microsoft Points, someone like me, an introverted autistic girl who took 20 years to get her first boyfriend, can learn the secrets that only the most debonair of ladies men would know. This will certainly give me a leg up on all those house wives that will almost assuredly leave their husbands as society as we know it crumbles around us.
How to Get a Girlfriend presents players (and I sure plan on being a player if you catch my classy drift) with six questions related to picking up women. And it is the same six questions every time, because men who seek dating advice from Xbox Live Indie Games featuring malformed anime girls on the cover art are notoriously slow learners.
The first question asked what you do if you see a cute girl in a bar. I went with the option that most suited me: look really thirsty so that she would buy me a drink.
Shows what I know.
Of course! It all makes sense. So women are parasitic beings whose love, attention, and affection needs to be bought? Oh my God. I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME! I can’t tell you what it means to find out that we’re all really this simplistic and shallow.
The next question hypothesized that you would encounter a girl dancing, but you yourself are not a good dancer. Wow. This game really knows me. Well, I’m an American and I was on Xbox Live at the time, so I figured I would call her a loser and tell her dancing sucks. Wrong again. As it turns out, dancing is vital, because if you can’t dance, you won’t know what to do with a girl in your arms. Duly noted. It would have been nice if it had been more specific about the type of dance you need to learn. The closest I could find was square dancing lessons at the local Y. Chicks dig that, right?
Next up, what do you do if you have a crush on a girl but she only considers you a friend? I admit, this was a head scratcher. Ultimately, I figured the right thing to do would be hit on her best friend to make her jealous. But no, as it turns out, you should instead keep a distance on her.
That.. makes sense to me. I mean, mysterious is way in vogue right now. Think about it. Those Twilight movies grossed like a bagillion dollars! Sure, I’m not a hundred-plus-year-old-pedophile on the prowl for subservient chicks who can’t think or act for themselves, so those movies weren’t all that educational. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers. I’m not sure how the whole “mysterious” thing works with someone you’re already good friends with, but I guess that’s why I’m not the dating expert.
Next up: where do you take a girl on a first date? I decided not to go with carnival. Worst case is the girl really doesn’t like me and tells them I escaped from their sideshow. Next thing you know, I’m stuck on the road, going to places like Sheboygan, watching meth producers pay two bits a gander to see the Amazingly Ugly Girl. No thanks. As it turns out, coffee is a good first date. Not the movies. Or ice skating. Oh thank God. So a first date won’t involve me falling on my ass repeatedly. Weird, because if I met the chick at a bar, she would already be used to seeing that.
The next question deals with a subject matter important to all people in the hypothetical end of civilization homosexual apocalypse dating scenario:
With no option for “hire a hitman and have that bitch whacked”, I decided to go with the laxatives. Not only was I wrong, but as it turns out I’ve been using the totally wrong descriptive language towards the women I’ve been courting.
I admit it. I wouldn’t have thought to call (or even think of) any women I was trying to pick up “broads.” But this is 2013. Maybe it’s time we all embrace aggressive, obnoxious flirtation.
Finally, what do you do if a girl comes up to you and tells you she’s not really interested? I actually know the answer to this, but my lawyer has advised me against going into detail here. At least before the jury comes back with a verdict.
Final score? 0 for 6. Well fuck, I guess I really did buy the right Xbox Live Indie Game dating guide, because I had a lot to learn. With the knowledge I have acquired, I’m in an even better position now to commit a crime against nature. Which I sort of already did when I paid $1 for this absolutely unfunny, unlikable, useless, sexist piece of shit game that was developed by a douchebag who wouldn’t know pussy if it sat on his mouth and queefed.
80 Microsoft Points are waiting for the Supreme Court to legalize working on the sabbath so that I can do that without fear of being put to dea.. wait, what do you mean you can already do that? But the Bible says not to! You’re all a bunch of sinners and you’re going to Hell in the making of this review!
Imagine a game centered around quick-time events where pressing the correct button doesn’t always work. Sounds fucking terrible, right? But wait, what if I told you that if you fail (or if the game determines you fail even when you don’t), the load times can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds before you get a chance at restarting? Or what if I told you the frame-rate can stutter right as the enemy that will touch-off the quick time event draws near you, causing the quick-time-event to only appear on-screen for a small fraction of a second? What if the graphics are choppy and the enemies have issues clipping when interacting with your character? What if your character moves as slow as a snail encased in liquid nitrogen? What if the text was so small that you have to physically get out of your chair to read it, even when you possess a television large enough to cover an active volcano? What can you say about a game where nothing seems to have gone right?
It’s really strange because the first Dead Sea was not God awful or anything. I ultimately didn’t recommend it, because the gameplay was boring and repetitive. But I think with some work, the concept of being stuck in the middle of the ocean with sharks out to turn you into the catch-of-the-day might be a good one. When I heard the guys at Brave Men Games were working on a sequel, I was hoping they would try to mend the concept, which I think is salvageable. The developers seemed to disagree with that assessment, because Dead Sea II is completely different from the original, with no real connection besides starring the same chick. Actually, I think the “mutation” part refers to the girl, because that’s the only explanation for why she has the spray-on-tan from Hell, making her look like the love child of Courtney Stodden and Hulk Hogan. How did she get that tan? Didn’t she just spend, like, days bobbing around the ocean? That wouldn’t have bronzed her. That would have had her peeling a human onion. A pickled human onion.
It’s also possible she’s in need a liver transplant. In which case, I’m sorry.
My biggest disappointment with Dead Sea 2 is that the original was a bad game merely because the mechanics were not fun. It did give me hope that the developers were on the right track. Instead, the sequel is broken to the point of being nearly unplayable. Being attacked by giant mutant-shark-people-things might not be the worst idea, but the execution here is awful. I searched around for viable pathways to make stealth kills on the enemies, but couldn’t find any without being detected. When an enemy charges you, you have to perform a quick-time-event to escape. However, sometimes I would push the correct button almost immediately and still die. It seemed completely random when it would work. Combine this with excruciating load times and I didn’t really feel the urge to press on. I tried to finish one floor that had two mutant dudes for a good solid hour, but a combination of stuttering frame rate, broken quick-time-events, and demoralizing load times made me give up. Maybe without technical hangups, Dead Sea 2 could have been decent. Instead, it’s dead in the water. Ba-ba-baaaaaaa.
DLC Quest was one of those rare games that exists strictly to parody the industry, did everything right, and ended before the joke stopped being funny. It did real well, even taking home the Official Xbox Magazine’s XBLIG of the year award. I really liked it too, to the point that I wrote my single most boring review ever because I was dead afraid of spoiling the game. I wanted people to play it.
I also did not want there to be a sequel. I just figured that there was no way the joke could be stretched any further. DLC Quest is pretty much a game without flaws, in the sense that it gives you just enough gameplay to not get too bored while waiting for the next gag to hit. It gave players one hour worth of genuinely funny jokes, and ended before they started going flat. It really felt like the joke had gone as far as it could.
Zombie sheep. Also known as Nintendo’s fanbase.
Still, everyone clamored for a sequel. Not me. I did everything I could to discourage it. I asked creator Ben Kane nicely to not do it. Then I asked not so nicely. Then I made threats. Then I blackmailed. Then I held his parents hostage. Then I left a horse’s head in his bed. Then I burned his house down. Then I found out I was talking to the wrong Ben Kane. Then I had to explain to the cops that I hadn’t grossly over-reacted to an ultimately trivial situation. Then I had to make with the bribes. By time I had tracked down the real Ben Kane, it was this morning and the sequel was already out. Grumble.
Guess what? My fears were for not. DLC Quest: Live Freemium or Die is still quite funny, briskly paced, and offers genuine laughs. Having said that, the best jokes clearly came in the original, where you had to get “DLC” just to be able to pause the game, or walk to the left. It took absurdity to a new extreme. The punchlines in Live Freemium feel more like run-of-the-mill gaming humor. Well done, mind you, but still the type of jokes that can be done in any type of game. Stuff like making guys speak with Canadian accents, or having a token NPC character that adds fuck-all to the game. If the writing wasn’t so damn good, it would have really been a letdown, because this shit has been done before.
As a game, DLC Quest 2, like its predecessor, is as basic as buttered bread. Jump around, collect coins, find the occasional secret room that contains more coins, and that’s pretty much it. I’ve reviewed dozens of games at Indie Gamer Chick that have minimal gameplay and focus on the writing, but platforming is much more preferable to scrolling through menus, or pointing and clicking. And I have to stress, the writing is sublime. As an example, there’s a section of the game that focuses on fetch quests. Such events in any game are guaranteed to induce cringes, and this was no different. Then, just as tedium was about to settle in and make of mess of things, a brilliant punch-line to the whole sequence instantly defused me. It was the biggest laugh of the whole game. I actually shook my head in disbelief. I can’t believe he made that part work the way he did. He got me.
Add an extra thirty minutes to the playtime to find everything if you so wish.
Like the original, Live Freemium takes about an hour to finish. Unlike the original, it doesn’t stay fresh to the end. It doesn’t really get annoying or boring. In fact, I didn’t think the game had run out of steam until right before the finale. But, yes, the joke has officially ran its course. It’s nothing short of remarkable that Ben Kane stretched it for over two hours before it grew stale. His talent as a game designer is remarkable. At the time of this writing, he has three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, ranked #19, #20, and #31. That’s pretty damn impressive. Thus, I officially proclaim Ben Kane and his Going Loud Studios the first recipient of the Indie Gamer Chick Certified Developer Who Doesn’t Suck Award.
Congratulations Ben. But for God’s sake, don’t make another one. I don’t care if this earns you enough money to buy a small nation. Don’t make me put a horse’s head in your bed. This time I’ll get it right. How many Ben Kanes can there be?
80 Microsoft Points said “no seriously, I know I doubted you before, but there is no possible way you can stretch out this joke for another episode. Think of Naked Gun 3. That shit was unwatchable” in the making of this review.
In this edition of Second Chance with the Chick, I take a look at a game I played way back in August of 2011. A game that was a participant in the 2011 Summer Indie Uprising. A game that..
Huh? What do you mean this is a different game? No.
Really?
(checks notes)
Well I’ll be damned. It really is a sequel.
Awkward.
Even more awkward is the original Battle High that I played I sort of took a big dump on. Perhaps an undeserved dump. I was only on my second month as Indie Gamer Chick at that point, and the game was prominently featured in the Uprising event despite being completely unoriginal. I think my expectations for the types of games in the Uprising (and XBLIGs in general) were misguided. I thought I would be playing dozens of weird, exotic, experimental games. Why? Because I was (some would say “still am“) fucking stupid.
The beautiful truth about Xbox Live Indie Games is that the best titles typically are directly inspired by classic games and formulas. So was I overly harsh on Mattrified Games? Yes. I’ll eat some humble pie and admit that I was wrong, and that Battle High was better than I said. Their primary goal was to pay respectable tribute to a beloved genre, and I can’t deny they succeeded with Battle High. I didn’t like it all that much, because I didn’t grow up with an endless stream of 2D fighters that were practically indistinguishable from one another. I imagine if I had, I might have been more receptive towards it. Sort like how my father keeps trying to sell me on the new Dallas. I gave it a shot and thought that it was total crap. My father watched the original and eats the shit up with a spoon. The point being whether it’s crap or not is irrelevant to the target audience.
Not that I think Battle High 2 is crap. It’s not. If you’re into fighters, I seriously doubt you’ll find a better one on Xbox Live Indie Games. It controls well. I guess. I mean, I would bet it controls much better on an arcade stick. I had difficulty imputing even the simplest of moves. Neither the standard Xbox 360 controller or the transforming d-pad one I have are suited for fighters. But I already learned that lesson years ago when attempting to play Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 on XBLA. I can hardly blame the developer for that.
Calling it a sequel is a bit of a stretch though. It has basically the same graphics, same characters, same bonus games, same setting, and same controls as the original. Maybe a new move here, or more emphasis on plot there, or a small handful of new characters. But, it just doesn’t feel like an evolution. Maybe more like a special edition, sort of how there were five fucking versions of Street Fighter II before they brought out Street Fighter III. Put it this way. If you looked at the two screenshots below, could you tell me which is the original and which is the sequel? Is it this one?
Or this one?
The top shot is the new one. The bottom one is the original. See what I mean? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Capcom made millions re-relasing the same game with minor tweaks. If it’s good for them, it’s good for XBLIGs.
I guess there is one major difference I could point out: I had fun this time around. Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing about XBLIGs for nearly two years, so I have a better understanding of the platform. Originality is not the goal of every developer. I imagine if you were a kid who played fighters and dreamed of making your own fighting game, your first goal on a platform like XBLIG would be to do just that. That’s what Mattrified Games did with Battle High, and they did a damn good job. Maybe Battle High is a glorified patch disguised as a sequel, but I enjoyed it, and I have little love in my heart for 2D fighters of the 90s. I was weaned on Soul Caliber, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and God-awful 3D Mortal Kombat games. I chalk my dislike of SNK-style fighters to a generational thing. To me, they’re boring. Just like how you guys hate the contributions of my generation, like um.. uhhhhhhh.. we had that thing where that guy did that thing that one time and um.. this review is over.
80 Microsoft Points thought this game was about Matthew Riddle. That dude always battled high in the making of this review.
Battle High 2 is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. No, I’m not retroactively putting Battle High 1 on there, unless you count Battle High 2 as Battle High 1.5, which I do.
Laser Fry has the feel of a twitchy 80s arcade game. I can and have gotten into those. Most of them are based on existing games. We Are Cubes is like a mixture of Tempest and Buster Bros. DecimationX3 was a souped-up version of Space Invaders. There’s been new takes on Defender, Contra, Frogger, Qix, Pac-Man.. pretty much every vintage coin-op under the sun. Laser Fry is apparently an original idea. You’re a dude, and there are lasers and balls. Avoid the balls, or destroy the balls with the lasers. Just don’t be standing in the path of the laser when you activate it. Basic stuff they teach you at Testicle Removal School*.
I figured when I started Indie Gamer Chick, I would be neck-deep in original game concepts. That’s not the case, of course. Entirely original concepts are as rare as a Yeti. Developers, even gutsy ones, tend to stick to what they know works, only making minor tweaks on established formulas. Still, the occasional game centered around a new idea does pop up from time to time. Such is the case here. I asked around, and nobody had played anything like it (there were some games on the Commodore 64 that looked similar but turned out to be much different). Great! So how does this original idea fare?
No, you can’t make sense of this. I think you have a better chance of deciphering the Voynich manuscript.
Not so good. The main gameplay problem is the background is simply too noisy. On easy mode, you only have to keep track of the yellow balls and yellow lasers. This by itself is a decent challenge, especially once the action speeds up. On higher difficulties, you have three different colors of lasers, three colors of balls, and lots of background shit for those to bleed into. If you can actually follow the action, your super vision could probably be put to better use in the fields of espionage or Lex Luthor foiling. Despite decent enough play control, the action in this game is incomprehensible.
But, even if it wasn’t, I don’t think the concept lends itself well to a good game. That’s the biggest sin Laser Fry commits: it simply is not fun, and probably doesn’t have the potential to ever be fun. So, like most original ideas that flop, I’ll chalk Laser Fry up to being a worthy experiment that produced an undesirable product. Sometimes you simply can’t know what will and won’t work until you try it. It takes a brave person to begin with, who sees a void in innovation and says “I’m going to give this a shot!” Like an egghead with a chemistry set. Sometimes you accidentally cure cancer, and sometimes you blow yourself up.
Chronicles of the Fairy is kind of like a Kirby game. The protagonist can “fly” indefinitely, levels center around the simple act of reaching a goal, and the game is as easy as a round of dodge ball against a group of senior citizens. It also features some pretty good 16-bit graphics and decent play control. If we left it simply at that, Chronicles of the Fairy would be a decent, albeit forgettable game.
Come on, now. How often can we leave it at just that?
It looks the part, but Chronicles of the Fairy feels unfinished.
Chronicles of the Fairy isn’t really terrible, but it’s underwhelming or mediocre in so many ways that I simply have to shake my head in disappointment. It looks like it should be good, and feels like it should be good. But the six levels that take all of twenty minutes to complete are boring and uninspired in design. The music is annoying, the enemies are all but useless, and lives are far too plentiful. But what’s really awful is the collision detection on the spikes. Levels are littered with spikes all over the place, with the main challenge being having to squeeze between them. The problem with this is, the collision box for the spikes is not too generous. It leads to many moments where you don’t come that close to the spikes and still take damage for them. Imagine if real life was like that. Imagine if, in football, getting to the three yard line was considered good enough for a touchdown. Raving insanity! Even if replacement referees apparently liked that idea.
Even if that wasn’t the case, 妖精冒険記 is boring. The whole experience feels like the demo for what should be a larger game, or perhaps an early beta-build or proof-of-concept, as evidenced by the ball-and-chain swinging enemy who clipped right into a wall and got stuck. There’s no challenge (even the spikes don’t make much difference when you’re tripping over extra lives every two feet), and no real reason to keep playing once you’re past the opening stage. Then, just as it looks like the game might grow some teeth and ramp up in difficulty, it’s over. It’s quite disappointing. I was interested to check it out because it’s rare when a Japanese-developed XBLIG shows up on the marketplace. It seemed like it might be exotic. Instead, I feel like one of those chicks who gets a tramp stamp in Japanese characters that she thinks says “Free Spirit” and only later learns that it says “Insert Umbrella Below.”
Retro Arcade Adventure Remade was developed by SIACTRO 
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