Mirror is one of those types of games where you play it and then wonder why nobody has done anything like it before. For all I know, maybe someone has, but I’ve never played anything quite like it. The idea is there is a dot on one side of a barrier, and you have to place a dot on where you think the exact mirror image side of that dot is. It’s so simple, and yet it’s potently addictive. I wish it was on iPad, because using a joystick to line up the dots is a bit clumsy, but otherwise I thought it was a perfectly good waste of an hour or so. It was either that or watch Water Polo during the Olympics. I asked Brian if they’re allowed to drown each-other. He said no. Mirror it was then.
Not my most in-depth review, I know, but it’s not exactly a game that lends itself well to my style. I would like to point out that Mirror is by Silver Dollar Games, who I once kind of scorched on this site back when I first started. It’s an editorial that I’m not really proud of, and one that I probably shouldn’t have done. Don’t get me wrong: I think Silver Dollar squanders its talent more than it shows it, but they shouldn’t have been singled out for it. Of course, the thing about squandering talent is you actually have to have talent to be able to do so. If you count No Luca No, I’ve played three of their games, and I’ve placed two of those on my leaderboard. Compare that to Team Shuriken. I’ve reviewed five of their games, and not one of them has come remotely close to the board.
Sure, their percentage would drop like a rock if I played stuff like Who’s The Daddy? or Cassie’s Animal Sounds. But if I review stuff like that, I’m sort of missing the point of why I started Indie Gamer Chick. It might be fun to pick on the stuff you know is bad, like throwing water balloons filled with blue non-non-staining food coloring at the kids from juvenile hall as they do highway litter clean up, but at a certain point it loses its zing. I don’t think I’m at that point yet, as evidenced by the blue stains on my finger tips, but the time is coming where I’ll get there. Silver Dollar hasn’t put out a whole lot of new games lately. They’re focusing on their Dream-Build-Play title One Finger Death-Punch, which looks pretty decent. What I really hope from these guys is that they have one transcendent, platforming defining hit. One that doesn’t involve trying to hold a fart in.
When I heard the name “Murder for Dinner” I thought “Oh great, PETA made a game about McDonalds. Just what we needed.” But no, it’s actually a first-person murder mystery game. First-person, 3D XBLIGs are a rare beast, so I had to ignore the fact that it was a point-and-click adventure and give it a try. Even if said graphics looked like early first-generation PlayStation stuff. Again, I am starting to understand where you old farts are coming from on this whole nostalgia thing, but how can anyone in their right mind be nostalgic for PlayStation 1 era graphics? That’s my generation and I don’t understand why someone would remind people of that horrible shit. It would be like reminding someone about the time that they had to sit and watch while the Blair Witch drowned their mother. At least Daddy said it was the Blair Witch.
Note: My Father, who shall henceforth be known as Indie Gamer Killjoy, would like me to state my mother is alive and happy and was not murdered by the Blair Witch, or anyone. I choose to remain skeptical until the DNA tests come back showing that really IS my mom. Nobody who watches The View can possibly be related to me.
Of course someone would get killed in a place that looks like that! The only other thing that could possibly happen there is Dracula would come back from the dead and we’d have to send the Belmonts in.
The idea is an old crone calls a dinner party where everyone present is worried that their deep dark pasts will be revealed. Yea, I’ve seen the movie Clue too. Unlike Clue, Murder of Dinner is unfortunately played straight, without the slightest tinge of humor. Ironically, this makes the game cornier than all of Iowa. The writing in this game is all kinds of fucked up, like one character who outright confesses to you that they murdered someone, but it’s not the actual victim, and that’s good enough for you to clear them as a suspect. I love that logic, and now I’ll spend the rest of my days wondering why more murders don’t use the “Oh I’ve totally killed people for sport and/or profit, but I just didn’t kill THIS guy” defense. It’s fucking genius in its insanity.
Actually, it’s funny that the logic of that confession-slash-alibi is so demented, because the actual puzzle logic of the game is somewhat grounded in reality. This was done by eliminating puzzles all together, but that still counts. Instead, Murder for Dinner relies on hide-and-seek gameplay. First, you talk to all the house guests. Then you walk around the house looking for places that allow you to search for stuff. If you find something, you take it around and show it to the house guests. This will typically eliminate a suspect or two. Then you search the grounds for more stuff, find it, and show it off. Just keep repeating this until you reach the credits an hour later. If this all sounds dull, it is.
Alright, I believe you when you say you didn’t bump off the old lady. Now let me ask you this: where were you the night Mr. Body got killed? Why, is that a candlestick in your hand? You’re coming downtown with me.
I’m not a big fan of point-and-click games, but that had nothing to do with why I dislike Murder for Dinner. The characters, dialog, and setting are all just so boring. I’m way into murder-mysteries. I want to do one of those cheeseball “Murder Mystery Weekend” thingies at some point before I die or grow senile. But this was just lifeless and bland, with a cast of unlikable characters and an ending I figured out thanks to one way over-played line of dialog about three-quarters of the way through. The ending didn’t even make any sense! And do you know what I have to say about that? Red ties make great zebra traps, Joey!
240 Microsoft Points tilted the camera downwards and then shook the stick around as I descended down the staircase, to make it look like I had tripped on it and was falling to my death, because by golly, sometimes you have to figure out ways to amuse yourself in the making of this review.
Slick received a Second Chance with the Chick. Both reviews should be taken together. Read my updated thoughts here.
Slick has graphics and sound that try to mimic the look and feel of the original Game Boy. This is sort of weird to me, because I truly don’t get how anyone could want their game to look like that. This isn’t the Atari or the NES we’re talking about here, where the delusional say “gaming was never better than back in those days” and we all have a laugh. I thought everyone was in agreement that gaming has done better than the Game Boy. So I find it strange, in the same way that I do when I hear that senior citizens in Russia pine for the old days when Stalin was in charge.
For what it’s worth, Slick does a pretty dang good job of looking like a Game Boy game. It even has a mono midi soundtrack. I guess if you’re going to do something, it’s worth doing right, even if it’s recreating garbage. But gameplay is all that matters to me, and Slick is one of the biggest offenders of being a gleefully evil fuck that I’ve come across on Indie Gamer Chick. It’s a punisher, which isn’t exactly my favorite genre, but this one at least had some promise to it. I made it past the first sixteen levels and was pretty impressed by the clever level design.
And then, I got to stage 1-17. And that’s where I quit. I’ve never done this, but I want to do a step-by-step breakdown of where this game failed.
1. You have to start the stage by bonking your head on the ceiling in the spot where there is no spike., and then land on the floor to the right. Then you have to hop up to platform. Trust me, this is all a lot harder than it sounds.
2. You have to jump up, turn mid-air, and land on this block. Slick controls fairly decent, but the one thing it doesn’t do well is handle mid-air turns, so this seemingly easy bit is a lot harder than it should be. But this isn’t even the worst offender of this problem on this stage, or even the second worst.
3. These spiked turtle things had popped up in previous levels, but I never noticed how off the collision detection on them was until here. It is WAY the fuck off. See the blue box I drew around the turtle to the left? That’s a rough approximation of the enemy’s collision detection box. If your dude enters anywhere into that field, you die. You’ll also notice there are blocks above them, which prevent you from getting adequate clearance when you attempt to jump them. This causes the difficulty of this section alone to spike to unnecessarily brutal levels, never mind the frustration a player experiences when they are killed by a creature that they didn’t come remotely close to touching. Perhaps that’s not just a spike on its back. Perhaps it’s a mound of polonium and you’re actually dying from acute radiation poisoning. That’s hardly fighting fair at all.
4. Once you hop across those blocks, you have to fall down this chute, swerving right-to-left to avoid fireballs. As I previously stated, the controls do everything BUT mid-air movement to varying degrees of decency. So naturally the main challenge of this stage tests just that. Well, there’s an added bonus to the assholery of this section: you actually accelerate while you fall. So the game wants you to do something it is barely capable of doing in the first place, and it wants you to do so at a multiple of the normal speed you jump. Oh, and there’s an enemy at the bottom of the jump, but don’t worry about it. Like Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid, the fall will probably kill you. Or, more accurately, the third fireball.
5. Was #4 fun for you? Well now, you get to do it again, only in reverse! Oh, and you start off with the fast acceleration here. Oh, and there’s a twist to this part..
6. You can’t see it, but there’s an indestructible turtle enemy thingie that is walking along the spikes, and after you successfully (HA! As if!) reach the top of this chute, you have to land on it and bounce across the top of it to the goal. I can’t really tell you if the fireball at the top of the screen is a problem because I never made it this far. In fact, I tried over 100 times to beat this level, and made it past section #4 a whopping three times.
There are those that saw the picture above and will say to themselves “sign me up!” But to those of you that haven’t gone off your meds today, Slick is not worth the effort. What it offers isn’t really any more of a challenge than trying to thread a needle on the other side of the room. You could do it, in theory, but aren’t there better uses of your time? If you absolutely need something that plays like a punisher to justify your existence, you’re better off picking a game that gives you the proper tools needed to complete it. It’s such a shame, because I actually liked Slick up until that point. It was still challenging, but the level design was fun and had a lot of neat twists in it. And then the game just went all emo and wanted you to know no joy ever again. That’s only 17 of 100 levels in, mind you. I’m almost afraid of how depressingly impossible this game might get. Abraham Lincoln was famously afraid to carry a knife on him, for fear he might turn it on himself. I used to wonder how a person gets like that, but after playing Slick, I think I know. Which is why I just carved “bullet goes here” in the back of my head with an X-Acto Knife.
Dead Sea isn’t a game that was half-assed. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was good, but actual effort was put into it. So here’s my question: why the hell did the developer choose not to capitalize the letter “S” in the word “sea”?
See what I mean about sea? Si?
It doesn’t seem like it was done for style reasons. It just seems like some kind of oversight on the developer’s part. I see stuff like this a lot on XBLIG, and every time it happens I think the same thing: sloppy. Like the developer simply did not give a shit while entering in the game’s information for the marketplace. It really starts things off on the wrong foot, because if the developer put no effort into simply typing their game’s name, why should I believe they made an effort building the game? Come on, Brave Men Games. You made it this far. Could you really not spare that extra fraction of a second it would take you to hold down the shift key before hitting S?
I actually tweeted about Dead Sea before I played it. It looked bad, and people were anxious for me to sock it to it. Sorry to disappoint my fans, but I don’t really have a lot of bad things to say about Dead Sea. It’s not a good game or anything. It won’t be making the leaderboard. But it’s not horrible. The idea is you’re a chick who is on a boat when your boyfriend whips out a ring and proposes OH SWEET JESUS LORD HAVE MERCY!!
.. or do I have to devour your immortal soul?
Yea, that fucking thing will be giving me nightmares for a while.
Anyway, no sooner do you agree to marry whatever the fuck that’s supposed to be when a shark knocks him out of the boat and gobbles him up. She gets knocked into the water too, but the Sharks seem kind of picky and leaves her to swim for it. What “it” is or where “it” is at is never explained. There is a compass, but it doesn’t tell you what direction to go. The first time I played, I just swam in an arbitrary direction and ended up drowning. As it turns out, you are supposed to swim north. How I was supposed to know this, I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I had just encountered what looked to be a love-struck zombie pimple cream ad. To put this in perspective, I’ve walked in on my parents having sex. There was chocolate syrup and whipped cream involved. At least I hope it was chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Either way, that was less traumatic than Mr. Undead Acne Man.
The concept behind Dead Sea is not bad at all. But the gameplay is just so boring. All you do is point yourself north and then alternate the trigger buttons at a slow and steady pace. If you go too fast, you attract the attention of the sharks. If this happens, you have to survive a quick-time event. After that, you reposition yourself north and start alternating L and R again. After a couple of minutes of this, you reach a buoy. You tap a button to climb up it, and then survive a couple more quick time events. Then you swim some more, reach a boat, watch the sharks do their best Free Willy imitation while doing more QTEs. After a couple of those, a shark rams the bottom of the boat, splitting it in two. Do they eat her when she’s in the water? No. Granted, I’m the same way with curry. Seems good to smell and look at, but I’m always intimidated to taste it.
It has finally happened: Xbox Live Indie Games have sharked the jump.
After one final swim, you reach another boat. All you have to do is button mash to throw a barrel and then do a three-sequence quick-time event to detonate it. You win, game over. Total time: ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Which is fine. I don’t think I could have taken another fifteen minutes of Dead Sea. Is the game terrible? Not at all. The gameplay mechanics work, and despite the literally cringe-inducing graphics, this is a fully functioning game. The concept of an open-world game where you’re stranded in water trying to avoid sharks sounds great. I just don’t know how it can be executed in an entertaining way. Dead Sea certainly doesn’t do that. I’m not sure how they could have done better, or if it’s even possible. Points to Brave Men Games for trying, minus several more points for actual execution. Also, I’m deducting 185,962 points for the opening cut scene. Mind you, these are the guys who made Hell’s House, a game that was about as scary as a kitten. But that dude? He’ll scare the enamel off teeth.
80 Microsoft Points wonder what would happen if you fired the land shark gun from Armed & Dangerous at the sharks in Dead Sea in the making of this review. Shark on shark violence rules!
Mambow is sort of the Xbox Live Indie Game version of Donkey Kong Country. Of course, when a game is the Xbox Live Indie Game version of any established franchise, that usually is a sign the game won’t be any good. Such is the case with Mambow, which has pretty decent graphics and little else going for it. You play as Mambow, a lion who is king of the jungle. I never got the whole “lions are king of the jungle” thing myself. I would think people would be the kings of the jungle, what with our guns and blood lust and the fact that we kill shit just for recreation. Lions, you need to step up your game. Kill a wildebeest and keep the corpse around just for decoration. Because that’s what we did with your grandfather. No eating it. Then you can have your title back.
If you have suffered any recent eye trauma, you really would mistake Mambow for Donkey Kong Country. Instead of bananas, you collect meat, and instead of a gorilla you play as a lion wearing jeans. Otherwise, the gameplay is pretty much the same idea. You make your way across 10 levels, searching for tons of hidden trinkets, swinging from vines, visiting platforming clichés, and jumping on the heads of various wildlife. It sounds great, and it looks like it will be fun, but the developers of Mambow failed to capture the intelligent level design of the DKC series. Too much of the platforming centers around leap of faith gaming, which is a pet peeve of mine. I’m so sick of titles that make you take blind jumps onto platforms with enemies or possibly into pits. It’s the gaming version of walking around your house in the dark and stubbing your toes. That is not fun. It fucking hurts.
The controls aren’t exactly silky smooth, either. Movement is really sensitive, sometimes forcing you to heel-toe it through sections. Some of the attacks, or at least I think they’re attacks, seem to be worthless. You can swat in front of you, but every time I tried it with even basic enemies led to me taking damage. Jumping on enemies can be a bit fickle too. They don’t seem to have a generous enough collision box, leading to times where you do seem to land square on them but still take damage. You get the ability to roar, but I never did figure out what the fuck its good for, beside getting the attention of enemies. Couple these with problems in the ascetics where platforms and decor are indistinguishable, and Mambow starts to cross into that “hopelessly broken beyond all repair” territory.
When Mambow launched, it was 400 Microsoft Points. I originally intended to review it soon after it came out, but the developers asked me to give them time to fix some problems. So I did. The biggest problem they fixed was dropping the price to a less insane 240MSP. It’s still 160MSP too much, but at least it stings significantly less. I’m not sure what glitches they tried to fix, but I encountered a few annoying moments. The camera shook violently a few times just from me standing on a moving platform, making it impossible to see what was going on. I also once got stuck clinging to a fence. For whatever reason, the dude would not let go of it. I thought my button had gotten jammed, but the guy remained stuck even after I pulled out the battery. Maybe it was a Venus Lion Trap.
I got used to seeing this after the character got stuck to the fence while I played it. I could move him. I just couldn’t get off.
Mambow looks really good, but gameplay is all that matters to me. The graphics are polished to a mirror shine (they reminded me a little of Yoshi’s Story), while the mechanics are as sloppy as they get. I don’t really care if Mambow is a Donkey Kong Country wannabe, even if I think that series was never good to begin with. Oddly enough, Shigeru Miyamoto is on my side here. He once famously said “Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good.” I agree with him, but I feel that it can also be applied to developers as well. Mambow is an example. I’m sure the developers are proud of it, because the graphics are sharp. But graphics should never trump gameplay. Mambow controls poorly and the level design is boring, if not terrible. I think this might have been their first game. If I’m right, highly commendable effort, fellas. Just remember: gameplay first, graphics second. Write it down and hang it up on a wall. Put it next to one of those “hang in there kitty!” posters. Meanwhile, the only reason why this lion is sleeping in the mighty jungle tonight is because I just euthanized his ass.
Let’s travel back to 1983. It was a dark time in the world. A time when people lived in fear of communism, nuclear annihilation, and Walter Mondale. A time when kids had to play their Ataris in three feet of snow, and do their math homework using solar-powered calculators like savages instead of their cell phones. A time when the most high-tech consoles had “vision” in them instead of “box” or “station.” A time when “playing with your Wii” sounded like a shameful act, as opposed to today where.. nevermind. Most importantly to me, it was a time where I wasn’t born yet. Thus, I’m not particularly nostalgic for what the early 80s had to offer.
Party like it’s 1983! Let’s all freebase cocaine and watch Knight Rider!
So Manic Miner 360, an XBLIG port of a 1983 ZX Spectrum game, isn’t something that would make me get all warm and gushy. My reader base might feel otherwise. Oddly enough, the average reader of Indie Gamer Chick tends to be about ten years older than I am. In a way, I’m tickled pink over that. I mean, it’s pretty cool that so many older people are interested in what I, some snooty little shit who wasn’t weened on Space Invaders and text-based RPGs, thinks about gaming. On the other hand, it can be a bit of a curse at times, especially when it comes to nostalgic releases like this. When I started to complain about the flaky controls and unforgiving design, I was immediately hit with several “it was good back in the day” tweets. Somehow, I’m guessing a response of “this isn’t back in the day! It’s today!” won’t be a sufficient explanation for why I’m not having fun.
I guess there’s no point in debating whether people who liked this game thirty years ago will still enjoy it today. They obviously do. I do question whether they really enjoy it on the same level they did as kids. You mean to tell me that all the evolution gaming has gone through in 30 years doesn’t change your perception of Manic Miner? Look, I can’t see things your way on this. Without the perspective of nostalgia, I kind of have to take games like this on face value. It controls like shit. Movement and jumping are very stiff. The levels are frustrating. The game centers around “gotcha” game design, where you can’t possibly know about a hidden trap until it activates. Manic Miner isn’t really a platformer or a punisher. It’s a trial-and-error memory test. Each level typically has one specific path that you have to follow, and enemies have predictable patterns that you have to memorize. Once you have that shit down, it’s just a matter of keeping it all together and fighting with the abysmal controls. Some people liked it. A few people told me they knew of people who could beat it without the infinite lives cheat (which is thankfully built-in and optional). Yea, that is impressive. So is being able to fart the Star-Spangled Banner on command, but I don’t want to take the time to learn how to do it.
Mind you, I’m told this is a truly faithful port, so if you loved the broken controls and restrictive design thirty years ago, nothing has changed here. Same graphics, same sound effects, same clunky jumping, same dick-moves. For some people, that’s all they want. This is a game made for them. Can a new audience from my generation get behind this game? Some weirdos might, in the same way there are people my age that have Pac-Man tattoos and dress like Don Johnson. I’m not saying everything from the 80s was terrible. I can’t think of anything that wasn’t off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s something from that decade didn’t suck.
After beating a level that featured things that were certainly not Pac-Man, I entered a stage that featured something that was definitely not Donkey Kong.
I know it’s aggravating for older people to have to listen to people my age say intolerant, obviously erroneous statements like “everything from the 80s sucked.” The 80s probably didn’t suck any more or less than the 90s or whatever the fuck the last decade was called. Did anyone ever come to a consensus on the name for the last decade? If not, may I suggest the Goobers. No reason why, I just think that would be funny. My point is, nostalgia is whatever you make of it. Like any form of entertainment, one Indie Gamer Chick’s trash is another geriatric’s treasure. Maybe people my age need re-releases like Manic Miner to show us whippersnappers just how lucky we are. Lucky that we didn’t grow up in an era where games had bad control inputs, shoddy design level design, load times of six minutes, install times upwards of hours and, uh, nevermind.
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.
In some ways, this review is a Second Chance with the Chick. I first played Blocky a few weeks back when it’s developer challenged me. And I actually liked what I played. It’s got an old school reflex-testing vibe to it, with small bits of action and experience upgrades peppered in. And then it all went to hell with one of the most infuriating boss fights I’ve ever come across. I was so pissed off I didn’t even bother to write the review. Instead, I took to e-mail and gave the developer holy hell for it. But then, being the benevolent goddess that I am, I told them I would hold off on my review until this one little bitty issue was patched up. See, I’m nice. Modest too.
Blocky feels like the type of casual game that would be developed by PopCap Games. Hey, don’t scoff at them until someone buys you for $650,000,000. You play as a square that has to avoid making contact with various baddies that move randomly around a static play field. There’s a wide variety of goals present. In some levels you have no offensive options and just have to try avoiding the enemies. In some, you have to destroy the enemies using power-ups that spawn in random intervals, or by causing them to get sucked up in whirlpools. In some levels you’re expected to collect as many coins as possible or gather a high score. Not all levels are equally as fun. I personally found the whirlpool levels to be the low point. In them, you’re supposed to use the magnetic power-ups to repel enemies to their deaths. However, the magnet power isn’t very strong, nor is it easy to steer the enemies. Having said that, if you just wait a while the baddies usually end up killing themselves. Maybe this is the evil spiky circle-block thingie way of committing Seppuku for failure to kill me in thirty seconds or less. Hell, I don’t know.
Blocky isn’t easy on the eyes, but the enemies are distinctive, even if the backgrounds have this psychedelic quality that can be a bit distracting. But overall the game is pretty fun, and at times a bit intense. In later levels, enemies spawn faster than mutant babies in a village full of moonshine-plied hillbillies. For the most part, you have to simply avoid them. You do have hope in the form of a handful of power-ups. I already mentioned the utterly useless magnet, but there’s also a fork that allows you to eat enemies for a few seconds. There’s a shield that allows you to bump into a single enemy. There’s a flashing thingie that slows enemies down. And finally there’s a hammer, which pauses the game to allow you to select a small radius of enemies to destroy, but it’s pretty rare to get. In fact, up until the boss fight, I had only gotten one via random spawning, but certainly that wouldn’t factor in later, right?
Oh, and there are experience upgrades. They seem really out-of-place in a game like this, and they’re really not all that helpful either. One of them increased the radius of the hammer, which again, I had only seen once over the entire length of the game. Hell, I’ve seen Sasquatch more times in my life. Another option increases your character’s speed. I never did this one because it seems like a recipe for disaster. In a game where dexterity and precision are so important, why on Earth would I want to make my character move faster? Maybe it does actually work, but I’m going off of nearly 20 years of gaming experience that says the faster anything moves, the harder it is to control. So I ended up pouring all my points into things that increase the amount of money you collect, and to my character’s gravitational pull for sucking money towards him when I’m too lazy to go grab it myself, in what I call the “Merrill Lynch Effect.” You can spend the money in a shop between stages to buy extra shields if you’re smart like me, or on stuff like the hammer that will kill one small cluster of enemies that will respawn anyway. There’s also stuff that slows baddies down or creates an escape portal for you, but I stuck with just the shields because I accept that I’m a total failure who will bounce off more enemies than Tiger Woods parachuting into a monogamy enthusiast convention.
I really did like Blocky. And then I got to the boss. There’s actually two bosses that you fight at the same time (later there are even more). Each has a symbol of a power-up inside of them. Once you get that symbol, you touch the boss and then mash the A button on them to inflict damage. Simple enough. The first boss I took down fairly easily. The second boss had a hammer symbol on him. Again, up to this point, I had only gotten one hammer in the entire play-through. “But surely since this is a boss that requires the hammer, they will appear more often, right?”
The game’s answer was “Fuck you, and don’t call me Shirley.”
TWENTY MINUTES! That’s how long it took me to get my very first hammer while “fighting” a boss that required a hammer to beat it. That’s not an exaggeration. Twenty minutes. And that hammer did so little damage that I figured it would take several hours to beat the damn thing. No thanks. So after thirty minutes of nothingness against a boss that has no attack, in a big room where all I had to do was avoid it, I decided to quit out to the menu and purchase some hammers. Only once I exited, I found out I would have to play the entire sixth world over again, only without shields I used to get there in the first place. After all, I had just spent all my money on hammers. World six was very difficult. I would have to play it again.
What followed I believe is known as a “conniption.” I absolutely blew my stack. I’ve seen a lot of good games with questionable design choices, but this was the absolute worst yet. First off, the game didn’t need a boss. Second, WHAT THE PISS GUZZLING HELL WAS THE DEVELOPER THINKING? So I sent off a calm, completely rational e-mail to him explaining to him that he had murdered fun and was going to jail for it.
This is a picture of the boss fight that drove me crazy and NOT a trip caused by the peyote you just took.
Actually, he took it really well and corrected the problem. So now if you play it the boss is so easy to beat that it’s laughable. Not that I’m complaining about that. Again, I think the entire concept of a boss in this kind of game is dumb. And it wasn’t difficult in the slightest bit to begin with. Tedium and difficulty should not be confused, and something that simply takes a long time to complete doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to do. Unless it’s running a marathon. That actually is long and difficult. But my point still stands. Also, I was able to directly enter the boss room this time. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.
With the boss issue corrected, Blocky is now an overall pretty good game. Hell, there were more levels after I beat the boss, and I wanted to keep playing them. It’s been a bad month for Xbox Live Indie Games, so maybe I’m just all for anything that offers me even the slightest amount of stimulation. I don’t think that’s the case though. Blocky has some really good twitchy-gameplay and I genuinely had a fun time playing it. It’s not mind-blowing by any stretch, and the added “retro” mode where you just go for a high score is useless without online leaderboards, but I do give the game my official seal of approval. And now that the boss battles are fixed, I won’t even be pinning it to the developer’s chest using a rusty nail and a sledge-hammer.
Milie & Telly is one part TwickS, one part shump, and 100% horrible. I hesitate to call it the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve yet played, because I’ve used that one a couple of times and I don’t want to sound like a person prone to hyperbole. Still, I put about 90 minutes into Milie & Telly and I’m hard-pressed to think of even the slightest complement to pay towards it.
It’s a shump. One that, for the most part, only had a couple of enemies on screen at a time. All of which are total bullet-sponges. They come in either a red or yellow variety and you have to shoot them with the correct bullet, like Ikaruga. It’s also a TwickS, so you in theory should have precision aiming. Instead, your gun fires one or two flimsy bullets at a rate so slow that it makes killing even the basic enemies such a slow process that it will sap your will to live. It certainly made me contemplate whether I could successfully bludgeon myself to death with my own controller.
The levels are long too, but that’s not a point in the game’s favor. There is no variety, and there are no power-ups. Just shoot a couple bullet-sponges, wait for more to appear, and start shooting them. Oh, and you have shields too. There are bosses, but I never successfully beat one, even on easy. I’m really trying here to say something positive about Milie & Telly just so I don’t come across like a negative meanie. The graphics are wretched, like they were lifted straight out of an animated banner ad from ten years ago, and the sound effects are more invasive to your senses than being skull-fucked by a rusty jack hammer. You know what, fuck it. Milie & Telly is weaponized boredom and should be subjected to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.
NOTE: If you’re unable to download Xbox Live Indie Games (or any games for that matter) off the marketplace, you’re not alone. I’m told they are now aware of the problem and it should be corrected shortly.
UnBound purports to be an “open world adventure game.” If this were true, all those juvenile delinquents who get ordered by courts to pick up trash on the side of a road should feel extra privileged. The only adventure offered in UnBound is to pick up various orbs scattered throughout a rocky coastal mountain. There’s no enemies to be found and the only objective is “find all the crap lying around.” So the slogan attached to the box art is misleading.
Unbound takes place from a first-person perspective. As stated above, the game is about finding orbs. There’s three game modes. In challenge, there’s five different scenarios for you to complete. These games play more like connect-the-dots, which you’ll know better as an activity for three-year-olds and NOT an adventure of the open-world variety. You basically just follow a string of orbs until you’ve collected every one on the map. The first two “challenges” really offer no challenge at all. And then you get to one called “Flood”, where the difficulty level curve goes so steep that it might be the world’s first successful space escalator. In it, you’re still collecting orbs, only this time you can’t touch the continuously rising water. The problem is it rises too fast, forcing you to hop back and forth to get each Orb. The jumping is floaty enough that you might over-shoot your target and lose precious milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds. That’s how little time you have to react.
I will say this: UnBound would have made a cool Virtual Reality game.
The other modes offer a slightly more pleasurable time. In adventure mode, you have to find 35 hidden blue orbs on an island. Here, the connect-the-dots gameplay is significantly toned down and it gives the game a true sense of exploration. As you collect the hundreds of green orbs lying around, your character becomes faster and can jump higher. It’s kind of neat, making you feel like a budding superhero. Unfortunately the land you traverse is lifeless and empty, so there’s not a whole lot for you to see or experience. It’s like choosing to vacation in death valley.
Finally, there’s Survival mode, where you have a health bar that slowly depletes, forcing you to scramble around the map collecting orbs as quickly as possible to replenish it. The object is to survive for as many days as possible. I played through it four times and never made it to the second day, so obviously I’m doing something wrong. Then again, I could never keep a goldfish alive for longer than a day either so maybe I’m not suited for this type of situation. I do feel that the developer could have explained exactly how you’re supposed to stay alive longer.
Overall, UnBound feels kind of like a tech demo that would have been used two console generations ago. It’s not exciting or engaging in the slightest bit, but it is functional and at times a teeny-tiny bit fun, especially when your character has all his stats maxed out and he’s jumping around the tops of mountains like he’s got Flubber on his shoes. But the thrills are short-lived because the environment is so sterile that it almost feels like it leeches pleasure from your very soul, and that’s not cool. Everyone knows souls that leak pleasure fetch lower prices in this market.
Mirror was developed by Silver Dollar Games
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