Boob games. They’re all over Xbox. They make more money than most of the top-ranked games on my Leaderboard do. Other XBLIG developers hate them. I’m tolerate of them, and sometimes even award them my Seal of Approval. All I want to do is be entertained, which isn’t as hard as people think. Take the Trailer Park King series. The three main releases (Trailer Park King 1, 2, and 3) all made the Leaderboard. The first spin-off, Cherry Poke Prison, did not. In part, because of burnout on the, ahem, humor, which is exactly what hurt Trailer Park King 3 as well. DERP of Duty is the second spin-off, and now I’m so burned out that I need a fucking skin-graft.
Ha, BB! That’s a gun too! Brilliant! And the place has Bazookas in the name! That’s a euphemism for tits! I haven’t seen this many plays on words since I last played Scrabble!
DERP of Duty was developed by Freelance Games (80 Microsoft Points still think Trailer Park King is begging to be made into an animated series in the making of this review)
I want to say something in defense of Sean Doherty, the developer of the TPK games: he’s a genuinely cool dude. He was the first developer I ever talked directly with as Indie Gamer Chick. I also think he’s probably as burned out on this series as well. DERP of Duty feels like it’s trying too hard. As cringe-inducing and skin-crawly as the dialog could be in the early TPK games, at least it felt somewhat organic. Maybe Sean felt the need to top those efforts with even more shocking banter, but this time it feels hollow. Without a compelling narrative, the overly-simple pointing and clicking simply can’t carry the game. I think even the most staunch fans of Trailer Park King will be letdown by DERP of Duty. It’s time to retire this series. Sean has established he has the talent to make, ahem, interesting characters and accompanying mythology. Now, I want to see him apply all this towards a more involved game.
And I don’t mean more involved as in getting guys to spank their monkeys harder than they already do. XBLIG has enough games that do that, as seen in this collage by Mount Your Friends developer Daniel Steger. Which I’m sure he compiled for market research and not as part of his newest cardio-vascular workout routine.
But, the real question is: how well do they sell? Really, boobs seems like no more a sure bet than recent Minecraft clones do. Judging by the success of Mount Your Friends, it would seem there’s an emerging market for penis-themed games that you guys are missing out on. So stop being boobs and start dicking around.
And while I’m on the subject of boob games, Team Shuriken is back. The guys behind such classics as Temple of Dogolrak and Mystic Forest return with a game that has, gasp, actual gameplay! I know they’ve tried that in the past with Dream Divers, but I still thought the gameplay felt sloppy in execution. Here, Team Shuriken took no risks. Uncraft Me ! is a bare-bones punisher with the hook being instead of just jumping, you use a jetpack to thrust around. And this is Team Shuriken we’re talking about, so beating levels means unlocking risque anime girls with breasts so large I believe they’re medically considered cancerous.
It’s also their first game to win my Seal of Approval and get ranked on the Leaderboard.
Yea.
Pretty sure this was spoken of in Revelations.
Or maybe it’s not a jetpack and the main guysis hovering around using highly-pressurized urine. Which I’m sure is another fetish but I’m too cowardly to Google it.
Look, all I’ve ever cared about is being entertained. If a game is 50.000001% entertaining and 49.999999% shit, it wins my seal of approval. On balance, I had more fun with Uncraft Me ! than not, so it gets it. Sometimes the levels have clever design. Other times they go for precision-platforming involving, simultaneously mind you: buzz saws, missiles, and timed-barriers that stay closed permanently if you’re not fast enough. There’s no margin of error for these sections, and the controls aren’t exactly perfect enough to validate their existence. I had Uncraft Me penciled in as yet another Team Shuriken failure when I played it last week. As often is the case when I dislike a game by a razor-thin margin, I boot it up one last time just to make sure. And, what do you know, I was able to finish the nearly-impossible stages. Barely. My amigo from TheXBLIG.com Tim didn’t like it it, but I thought overall it was Shuriken’s first decent game. Not spectacular, mind you. I could probably name thirty better platformers for XBLIG off the top of my head. But your money isn’t totally wasted here, nor is Team Shuriken’s talent.
Uncraft Mewas developed by Team Shuriken (80 Microsoft Points recommend these girls get a mammogram ASAP in the making of this review)
I guess that’s the most gratifying part. Yes, they have talent. Not just talent to lure in the horny teenage demographic. Actual game design talent. They’re like Larry Flint. Peel away the filthy exterior that makes you feel like you need a shower and you discover something downright decent in them. Do I expect them to focus on gameplay instead of mammary glands? No. Then again, I don’t expect to get struck by lightning while holding the holy grail in one hand and a winning lottery ticket in the other.
People are always asking me what I think of certain indie games that existed before I started Indie Gamer Chick. The two most commonly asked about titles are Fez and Limbo. I couldn’t finish Fez because of my epilepsy, so Limbo is the only one I’m really qualified to speak of. (UPDATE: I did end up reviewing it!) But seriously, it’s like a daily thing. “What did you think of Limbo?” As if Limbo is the be-all, end-all of console-based indies.
I liked Limbo. I really did. I also feel the game is fairly overrated. When you strip out of the visuals and bleakness, it’s just a good, but not great, platformer. A trend I’ve noticed is that a lot of people only played through the early part of the game. When you first enter Limbo, you can be left shell-shocked by the dark tone, spooky visuals, and the fact that one of the first things that happens is an awesome, intense encounter with a giant spider. It perhaps gives the false impression that all those emotions will retain their impact through-out the game. They don’t. At least for me, I found myself desensitized to the whole concept not even half-way in. Once Limbo started focusing more on twitchy-platforming instead of physics-based puzzles, I started finding myself almost bored. It never fully becomes a chore, but once it starts becoming a platforming cliché, it does sort of burn out.
I filled in the blanks by pretending that the game starred Schroeder from The Peanuts. Here he is, learning of Charlie Brown’s final fate.
Also, it was hard to get worked up about the setting when the game was using the all-deflecting “it’s an art game” shield, which pretty much guaranteed an ending “left open to interpretation.” Never been a fan of that. Especially when the game was abstract to begin with. So I guess the idea is the kid, or kids, are dead. How they died or when or where or why is never explained. Theories range from a car wreck to falling out of the tree house to being murdered. I guess from a marketing point of view, it works, because at least people are talking about the game. But I found the ending unsatisfying, because it offered no closure at all. When you invest hours into a game hoping to get some kind of explanation for all the fucked up happenings and the payoff is more questions, it almost feels like the director himself didn’t really know where to go with it. I’ll call this the “Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes Effect.”
Yea, sometimes the questions are more fun than the answers, but in the case of Limbo, you’re playing characters that have no characterization at all. The boy has no back story, no dialog, no personality, no facial expressions, or anything else going for him. The girl is no different. You’re forced to fill in the blanks yourself, but most of the symbolism is in the background and can be easily missed on account of you playing the game. Because the actual gameplay starts to dull towards the end, Limbo really doesn’t lend itself well to replaying to look for the clues that you missed.
Limbo’s ending. I apologize for comparing it to Burton’s Planet of the Apes. That’s a low-blow.
I don’t mean to be too negative here. Sometimes Limbo is brilliantly designed from a gameplay perspective. The bits with the spider early on are one of my all-time gaming highlights. Unfortunately, Limbo pretty much shot its wad in the first twenty minutes. Nothing that followed the sequence where you’re hopping in the spider’s cocoon came remotely close to the thrills and chills that section offered. All that’s left is solid physics-based platforming that I almost wish was in a more cheerful setting, because too much dark shit can get exhausting. But hey, dark is in right now. Any product that aims to be joyful is setting itself up for failure. If an indie game isn’t so bleak that you want to bury your face in your hands and cry, the developer must be mentally ill. Or possibly not mentally ill enough.
1200 Microsoft Points honest to God can’t believe they just ported this thing to iOS. There is no fucking way this can be played well with fake virtual buttons in the making of this review.
So I’m making the transition from an XBLIG-centered site to more sweeping coverage of indies across all platforms. It’s kind of scary. I’ve spent two years focusing on this little unsung platform that is Xbox Live Indie Games. But I’m not the only one braving new waters. Hundreds of Xbox Live Indie Game developers are exploring new development formats such as Unity or Monogame, with the intent of going multi-platform. With both Sony and Nintendo aggressively courting indies, not to mention upstart Ouya and the existing (and thriving) PC indie community, there’s no shortage of places to go. Well, so far Microsoft hasn’t said anything. My theory is they’re in a medically-induced coma after sustaining life-threatening whiplash following the quick and reckless 180 they pulled. Again, just a theory. But if you see any Xbox guys wearing neck braces, just nod knowingly.
Anyway, with this move I’m making, which has me a little on the jittery side, I was curious how the development community that has supported me for the last two years is handling the transition. What plans they have for the future, and what lessons they’ve learned from Xbox Live Indie Games that they’ll be applying to the future. Here’s what they had to say.
I’ve always hated using the cop-out “it’s just not for me” in relation to anything. It just seems so non-committal. And yet, after putting a few hours into Hotline Miami and simply not getting what everyone else is raving about, I feel “it’s just not for me” is the only answer I can give, because it really isn’t for me.
And that has nothing to do with the violence. I like violence. I’m proud that I live in a time where the violence on television is so awesome that it makes even the most grizzled of war veterans become physically ill. People are talking about the violence in Hotline Miami like we’ve reached the zenith of virtual murders. Where have you people been the last few years? There’s shit in the latest Mortal Kombat that would make even the most fetishistic psychopath go limp with shame. Hell, I’ve played a game that gives you an achievement for tying a nun to railroad tracks and letting her get hit by a train. And I loved it. Sorry Hotline Miami, but your eight-bit violence is just not cutting it with me.
The typical after-party at the MTV Music Video Awards.
I think the raving is based mostly on the novelty factor. Violence was never this masterful when games looked like this. With modern indie gaming, we can take all the theatrical bloodshed we’ve accumulated from years of premium cable shows and modern M rated titles and apply it to games that seem like they could have existed in the 80s. So the thrill comes from “hey, it’s an old game but it’s really gory. Neat!” But it’s not an old game. I’m not saying Hotline Miami isn’t extraordinarily fucked up. It is. What I’m saying is, shouldn’t everyone over the age of twenty be desensitized to this type of shit by now?
What turned me off most about Hotline Miami was the difficulty. I just could not make any progress, often repeating stages several dozen times to no avail. Hypothetically, the game is a bit of a puzzler, a bit of a brawler, a bit of a shooter, and a bit of a stealthy dungeon crawler type of thing. It’s a cavalcade of ideas and it doesn’t always blend together smoothly. This also helps mute the violence that is, let’s face it, the chief selling point of the game. For example, the scalding water thing. Everyone had been telling me about the water thing for the last year. Grab a pot of boiling water off a stove and throw it on some dude. Pretty brutal, right? But the act of throwing boiling water loses its sting when you have to repeat that upwards of fifty times because of any number of reasons, such as having one of the enemies randomly move off its preset path and blow you away. Or having enemies that can turn and fire on you faster than you can react. Or clearing out a room only to miss one dude who gets up and casually blows you away with a shotgun.
My guess is Hotline Miami would have played better if I could have played it with a mouse and keyboard. Using the PS3 controller was an exercise in frustration. Locking on to an enemy requires lining up a cursor somewhere near them. Of course, sometimes enemies bunch together, so trying to line up exactly the right is tough. The game probably needed something along the lines of Metroid Prime’s lock-on system that generally lined up the closest person to you. Not that it would have mattered. The AI is a crack shot every time from seemingly all distances, and it can process information faster than you. Thus the moment one centimeter of your body is exposed, you’re dead. The puzzle aspect doesn’t really work right because the AI can be so brutally unfair but also prone to fits of randomness where guys break off their preset paths. Or sometimes they just wouldn’t play along at all. I would play rounds where I would fire a shotgun through a door and set off every single dude in the place to come and murder me. At other times I could fire from the exact same location, killing the exact same guy, and have nobody react to it. There was no consistency from one life to the next.
As a full disclosure type of deal, I had to play Hotline Miami in shorter play sessions (about 30 to 45 minutes at a time) due to epilepsy concerns. But I was never bummed when it was time for a break. The repetition can be exhausting.
I will say this: if you absolutely do not want to play the PC version and you have Vita as an option, go with it. It’s a trend I’ve noticed with these cross-platform PS3/Vita releases. The Vita version always has superior control. For Miami, movement isn’t as loose, aiming is more efficient because targeting is handled via the touch screen, and scrolling is done by dragging your finger around. By comparison, the PS3 port is clunky, cumbersome, and imprecise. As if the too smart, too quick, too accurate AI isn’t enough of a problem, you have to deal with controls that never feel intuitive or smooth.
I can’t really explain how I could enjoy a game like Spelunky and not enjoy Hotline Miami. Both had control issues. Both are based around frequent dying, trial-and-error gameplay and unfair design. I wish I could explain it. It would probably save me a lot of grief that I’m already getting from fans of this game. I can’t even say I hate the game. Maybe it’s been the year of crushing hype that everyone has been showering me with. People talked about Hotline Miami like it was the second coming of Grand Theft Auto. But I don’t think it’s that. I really don’t think this game is as good as everyone is saying. What it does do is meet the three rules for an indie game to get critical acclaim no matter how flawed or broken it is. They are:
1. Have retro graphics. Because if you hate a game with retro graphics, you’re pissing on gaming’s heritage and thus your opinion is invalidated. Even if you’re talking about a brand new game released this year (or the port of a PC game released last year).
2. Be insanely, unfairly, unreasonably difficult. Because if you hate a game that’s all of those, you’re just a low-skill gamer whose opinion is invalidated by the sheer force of your sucking. Or you’re too young to remember a period when all games were this hard (there’s no such thing) and thus your opinion is invalidated because you’re a whippersnapper used to be coddled by games that hold your hand from start to finish.
3. Be gratuitously violent and shocking in ways so brazen that if you were to describe them to a psychiatrist out of context, you would be committed. Disliking games like this means you’re a prude at best, and an anti-gaming sissy in league with the Jack Thompsons of the world at worst. Clearly someone whose opinion isn’t valid.
Me? I’m a neo-retro loving, violence embracing gamer. Okay, fine, I’ve never understood the whole “be as insanely difficult as possible” thing that some people thrive on, but I can put up with it if I’m having fun. I didn’t have fun with Hotline Miami. Not just for the controls or the unfair AI. I just didn’t like it. It was boring to me. Almost everyone else seems to like it. Which is fine, because the groundwork for something spectacular is laid here. I just couldn’t get into it. So I’ll chalk this one up to “it’s not for me” and move on. By the way, Brian is noting right now that I’ve used the “it’s not for me” excuse to avoid watching F1 with him, so I can’t claim this is my first use of it. Fine. I’ll you what Brian: when drivers start throwing scalding water on each-other and are allowed to use firearms during the race, get back to me.
$9.99 admits that I didn’t make it very far, but not for a lack of trying. Having said that, I spent five hours failing again and again, so I feel I have enough room to talk about this game in the making of this review.
A couple of months ago I reviewed a game for iPhone called Year Walk, and stated my opinion that I don’t think horror can be done properly on a platform like iPhone. Well, a few days ago, a fairly popular PC indie made the jump over to iOS, and it happens to be a horror game. People were telling me “even if I think you were wrong about Year Walk, you have got to try this. It really is scary.”
No. Home isn’t really scary. It’s creepy. It does creepy well, but I feel there’s a difference between that and scary. The basic idea is you play as Conan O’Brien (that’s who it looks like, and until someone says otherwise, I’m pretending it’s him) who wakes up with no memory of how he got to where he is. His leg is injured and he has no idea how it got that way. Oh, and there’s at least one dead body nearby. I don’t know why he’s so fussy over it. It’s basically how every Sunday morning begins for me.
Other candidates besides Conan O’Brien: Ron Howard pre-baldness, my boyfriend (though I’ve never seen him wear a sweater in my life), or Andy from Toy Story.
All of this is told through a pixel-art point-and-click adventure. If it sounds interesting, you’re right, it is. The problem with Home is that it’s one of those fireworks where you light the fuse and nothing happens. It took me all of five minutes to guess what the big plot twist would be. Was I right? I don’t know. The solution to what happened I guess changes depending on how many clues you find throughout the hour-long play-through. At the end of my session, the game saw fit to give me no ending at all. It didn’t crash or anything. It just ended with no resolution. Conan walked to the final door, some text pondering the nature of what just happened popped up, and then BAM, credits. The fuck?
All choices you can make happen in the form of questions. Like if you find a knife, the game will ask you what happened in a past tense form. “Did you pick up the Knife? Yes/No.” Here’s the weird part. Near the end of the game, I was asked if I thought one of the other characters in the game was the murderer. I said no, because all the clues from the get-go said otherwise. But now I’m mildly curious whether that would have become the solution if I had said yes. Not so curious that I’ll play through it again. Once was enough.
The thing is, there’s no actual game here. You walk, you click stuff, and stuff happens. There’s no real puzzles to solve besides typical lock-and-key stuff. At most, you might have to hit a switch. So while the graphics are pretty good, the atmosphere hits the mark, and even the dialog is well done, Home is actually kind of boring. Mechanically speaking, at least. It tells a story well, but it’s not a game in the strictest sense. It’s a visual novel where paragraph breaks come in the form of having to walk around trying to figure out where to go next. It does very little to take advantage of the medium, and that’s a shame. Unlike a lot of misfires I deal with here, I can’t chalk this up to poor writing or over ambition. It’s just a dull game.
I took this picture at the worst possible time.
One last thought on the whole “multiple ending” thing which I’ve never been a big fan of. Here’s why I’m against it: because I don’t know if I’m going to end up with the same ending if I play through again. I played once and the end result was NO ending. I felt I played pretty well the first time. I clicked everything. I backtracked occasionally to place items where they belonged. What the fuck more do I need to do, Home? Well whose to say if I do things differently that I won’t fall into that one and only trap that sets off the exact same ending I just got? If a game is going to base itself around having multiple endings, it needs to set up a way to take advantage of that besides “replay the whole thing again.” Especially stuff like point and click adventures, which just don’t lend themselves to multiple play-throughs. My usual way around this is to simply look up the other endings online, but as it turns out, a game called “Home” isn’t the most Google-friendly title.
I was a bit on the fence about this one. On one hand, I think the game successfully achieved its goal of having a well written story with genuine suspense and chills. On the other hand, the gameplay is boring and the hook requires multiple play-throughs, which will certainly mute those chills and shrink the suspense. I’ve spent more time trying to figure out if I liked Home than I spent actually playing Home. For that reason, I can’t recommend it. The deciding factor was if I had a magic “undo” button that would give me the hour I spent playing it back, would I do it? I can quickly answer that: yes, because the ending sucked. Results will vary by player, but for me, I felt borderline cheated by the ending I got. It literally had no closure at all. Every single question left unanswered. That’s just plain stupid. If the power had gone out while I was watching the series finale of Lost, I probably wouldn’t have called that a brilliant ending. Though in retrospect, that would have been an upgrade.
$2.99 admits that I hate replaying games anyway and thus the odds of me playing through Home again was probably slim to begin with in the making of this review.
Do you know what the very toughest thing I have to do as Indie Gamer Chick is? Find people to play XBLIGs with or against. It’s my fault. My friends.. well Brian’s friends actually.. have had to deal with nearly two years of complaining. They have bad timing. They never bump into me when I’m playing really awesome games. Oh no, they run into me when I’m playing stuff that would better be used during enhanced interrogation. So when the time comes to say “hey guys, I have a shiny new XBLIG party game” they all seem to have better stuff to do. Wash the car. Run a marathon. Return over-due library books. It’s total bullshit of course. None of my friends read books.
But, sometimes I can wrangle them together. The results aren’t always pretty, but every once in a while a game provides us with a level of entertainment that we can’t get from a movie or, quite frankly, some mainstream games. Take Chompy Chomp Chomp. It was a smash hit last year during a Memorial Day party, and since then, has been on the top ten in my leaderboard. But it wasn’t without issue. The game could spawn players unfairly, and some of the maps were poorly conceived. It’s been a year since I last sat down with it. I know the game got patched, but I never got around to trying it again. Well, on Sunday I had the chance. And guess what? Chompy Chomp Chomp is better than ever. It is, unquestionably, the best party game on Xbox 360, indie or otherwise.
Pictured: absolute multiplayer bliss.
First off, go check out my original review. Nothing has changed with the core gameplay. What’s different is nearly every complaint has been fixed. For starters, spawns are significantly more fair. Before, it wasn’t rare for you to spawn too close to someone that’s designated to eat you. In a couple hours of playtime, that never once happened. Nor did the game ever spawn me or anyone else playing into a live trap. That alone makes Chompy Chomp Chomp so much more fun to play. In our previous play sessions, fits of laughter and general happy chatter would occasionally be interrupted by the random scream of “that’s bullshit!” when the game would screw you with a shitty spawn. Now, it’s all happiness all the time. The only other way that could have been accomplished was with laughing gas, but that wouldn’t have been cost efficient. Fixing it was much easier.
Chompy Chomp Chomp was developed by Utopian World of Sandwiches (80 Microsoft Points admit that the Xbox 360 hasn’t exactly been the best platform for party games, but regardless, this is still the best on it in the making of this review.)
Yea, there’s still some really horrible levels where you can get cornered with no hope of escape. The guys at Utopian World of Sandwiches insist that there are people who swear those are the best stages. They’re not. They’re unfair and stupid. Thankfully, they made up for their continued existence by throwing in more stages. These new levels, based on classic gaming themes, are fricking awesome. Finally, some of the dumber traps, such as gaseous time bombs that drain your score away, can outright be turned off. Previously, turning off items was an all or nothing type of deal. Now, you can select which ones you want to use. That’s perfect. The online play was totally hiccup-free as well. I can’t stress how amazing this game is. You simply have to play it, whether you do it locally or online. Make sure you’re playing with real players though. The AI goes from being too easy to too hard. When I was playing with my buddies, it was probably the single best multiplayer experience I’ve had since I’ve known them all. Chompy Chomp Chomp is Fuckity Fuck Fuck excellent.
But, if the whole “no shooting, cutesy characters” stuff is an affront to your heterosexuality (seriously, at least one moron on Twitter said of Chompy Chomp Chomp that it “looked like gay children’s shit”. How this guy is an expert in gay children’s shit is beyond me), you can try Blocks and Tanks instead. In a way, it’s getting a bad shake here, because I’m comparing it directly to Chompy Chomp Chomp. Both are simple party games for XBLIG with online play. But while Chompy’s gameplay reminds me of old school arcade games, Blocks is more like a Nintendo 64 era arena-shooter. Not a whole lot to it. Aim and shoot, one shot kills (with the cannon), most kills wins. The fact that it revels in its simplicity is part of the charm. It’s a shooter stripped down to its purest, most refined fun.
Of course, Blocks and Tanks is also a voxel game. When I announced that this game was on deck and next to be reviewed, people immediately dismissed it as yet another Minecraft clone. It’s not. But, the voxel angle is a neat one, as the environments are destructible and it opens some pretty neat strategies. In addition to the tank shells and machine gun, you can shoot blocks from your turret, which immediately cling to the environment and change colors to fit that. In a way, this crippled one versus one multiplayer, as whoever was able to get the first kill could immediately burrow a hole and fill it in to remain hidden until time ran out. Of course, only a total coward would do that.
Don’t shake your head at me, Brian. You’re only mad because you didn’t think of it first.
Pictured: the developers of games I was less than kind to waiting for my car to get within range. It’s a Honda Fit! Do your worst!
Blocks and Tanks is a lot of fun and does a lot right. The controls are very responsive. There is a bit of a learning curve to aiming, but once you get over it, it does the trick. It also has some very well designed arenas, many of which take after famous locations. It handles eight players online. I was never once able to get into an eight player game, but when I had six players going, it was super fast-paced and very enjoyable. But, the game has more problems than an algebra book.
We’ll start with the spawns. They’re among the most unfair I’ve ever seen. Sometimes the game will respawn you right in front of someone else. You’ll literally die immediately upon respawning. More often than not, you’ll be put back to life in the thick of a battle. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. The game needs to place you away from the action. Movement speed is decent, and maps are not that big, so there’s no reason to have to drop people in the middle of a firefight. It gives the game an unpolished feel.
But the biggest problem, as of this writing, is online stability. The developer is aware of the issues and asked me to go forward with this review, as long as I note that he will continue to improve the game. Duly noted. Over the course of seven play sessions and about three hours of total play, I experienced a magnitude of connectivity problems. Players would be dumped at random. Brian got a rare “code 3” error on his Xbox, while mine simply froze solid. Again, the developers are on top of it, and the current build is easily the most stable yet. The first time I played, we had problems with synchronization, where shots would register as a hit and a kill on my end, but on my opponent’s side of things, they would still be alive and actively fighting. This is no longer a problem. Actually, the weirdest problem is totally out of the hands of the developer. It’s the type of people playing. I kept finding myself in sessions where players were not trying to kill each other, but instead building stuff. When I would go in to attack, they would boot me out. Huh. I mean, sure. It’s not like there are different, more appropriate voxel-based games on XBLIG that cater to that type of gameplay.
We had a ton of fun on stages that had cliffs, trying to blow the ground out from underneath each-other. What would have been really neat is if the game had to rely on structural integrity and you could cause massive cave-ins. Hint hint Maximinus Games.
Blocks and Tanks was developed by Maximinus Games(*NOW DELISTED* 80 Microsoft Points wish the build-gun worked better on water in the making of this review. Yea, that’s not a joke, but I had to squeeze that in somewhere.)
Having said that, if you look around enough, you should be able to find a real game where people have the courtesy to kill each other like civilized people. It’s not as supported as, say, Shark Attack Deathmatch, but Blocks and Tanks does seem to have a growing community. There’s a reason for that. It’s quite good. I feel bad for the guys behind it, that it’s going to be ignored by a lot of people who feel it’s just another generic Minecraft clone. It’s almost unbelievable that such an art style can now be considered a handicap on XBLIG, but that’s what it is now. If Blocks and Tanks had come out three years ago, it would probably be one of the biggest sellers on the platform. Talk about bad timing. It’s a genuinely good game that is worth your time and money. Unless you want to use it to build stuff. It’s not made for that you block heads. Tanks for nothing.
Blocks and Tanks is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Chompy Chomp Chomp already was, but hey, it moved up five spots!
Review copies were provided for both games by the developers. The copies played by Cathy were paid for by her with her own money. The review copies were given to a friend to test online play. That person had no feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.
Update: Mount Your Friends received a Second Chance with the Chick. Click here for my updated thoughts. Consider this review to be for the XBLIG version and the Second Chance to be for the Steam version.
Okay, so the name is as absurd and juvenile as a title can possibly get. But, we are talking about a game by Daniel Steger here. His previous hits include a game called Baby Maker Extreme (the ninth all-time selling XBLIG), This is Hard, and Blow Me Up. But the really weird part is, his games tend to be pretty decent. Blow Me Up and Lots of Guns both are Chick Approved and ranked on my Leaderboard. And now we have this, a game about building a human pyramid. In keeping with Steg’s tendency towards gratuitousness, it features Team Ninja-like jiggle physics.. for penises. This is a game tailor-made to generate scorn and ridicule from the XBLIG scene.
It’s also Daniel Steger’s best game by far.
Schwing!
This is exactly the type of weird, experimental game that I had in mind when I started Indie Gamer Chick. Okay, maybe I didn’t picture those games having dicks that behave like bobbleheads. But I figured I would play a lot of games unlike anything I’ve seen before. Mount Your Friends does that. It’s like a video game version of the popular Catalonian pastime known as Castell. In other words, people climbing on each other to build the tallest human-building they can make. Only here, there’s no worries about the laws of physics or structural integrity.
The way you go about moving at first seemed like it would be overly complicated. Each limb is controlled by a separate button. You move one limb at a time, with limbs automatically clinging to the bodies already placed. Each turn, you must climb higher than the highest body on the stack. Once you’ve above the line, you can press start to end the turn and start from the bottom with a new body. In the normal mode, you have 60 seconds to get above the line. It sounds dull, but it can be exhilarating. Especially when time is running short. There were multiple situations where the timer was nearing zero and I just barely got my hand over the line. This always resulted in hooting and hollering. Well, just from me, while my friends told me to sit down and shut up. But hey, I was excited!
Simpsons already did it!
Where Mount Your Friends really shines is in the multiplayer mode. Here, each player takes a turn trying to cross the bar at the highest point in the stack. Play continues until one player can’t make it to the top in the time limit. I’m shocked to say this, but this is one of the best multiplayer experiences to ever hit XBLIG. It even has online play that went off without a hitch. My biggest overall complaints relate to the movement physics. Flinging yourself instead of moving one hand at a time feels loose in terms of gravity and imprecise. I also had issues keeping limbs I didn’t want to use from going limp and getting stuck to one of the guys on the stack. I mean, wait, probably shouldn’t use the term limp in relation to this game. I mean they had trouble staying stiff. NO, erect. NO! God damn, this is tough to write about.
Okay, so the Mount Your Friends might be embarrassing to pull out to show friends and.. FUCK!! See what I mean?
Stegs, I fucking hate you. You make this really awesome game that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen or played before, but it’s almost impossible to describe without receiving an awkward stare. You know what? I don’t care. Mount Your Friends is fun, plain and simple. It’s not very deep. The best concepts rarely are. But you simply have to try it, because there’s nothing else like it. I’m not the most athletic person in the world, and I’m afraid of heights, so this is probably the closest I can come to climbing a rock wall. Well actually, this is probably more like one of those walls where you hold a peg in each hand.
Don’t do that Cathy. Just don’t give him any more ideas. He’s incorrigible enough as is.
When I first saw the cover art and heard the name, I figured it was going to be a professional wrestling game.
$1 (Steam version $3.99) asked if you heard the one about three guys laying in the same bed? They wake up in the morning and the guy on the left says “I had the best dream! I dreamed I was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy on the right says “that’s weird, *I* dreamed *I* was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy in the middle goes “I dreamed I was skiing!” in the making of this review.
A review copy of Mount Your Friends was provided to Indie Gamer Chick to test online functions. The copy purchased by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test out online components. The person receiving it had no feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.
I wasn’t very nice to Hop Til You Drop when I briefly covered it a couple of weeks ago. It’s a twitchy single-screen punisher that involves dodging random hazards the game spits at you. I immediately grasped what the game’s schtick would be and thought “this could be addictive.” But then I died and found out that replaying the game meant going through a seemingly endless series of menus. After just a couple more plays, I decided my time would better be spent brow beating the developer for being such a dummy. My hopes were that he would fix his game. He did. Good thing too, because SWAT was closing in on my house. I admit, taking his family hostage might have been going too far, but at Indie Gamer Chick, we like to take that extra step towards improving the game industry.
None of these screens will make sense. Just look at Aaron the Splazer’s video at the end of this review.
A lot of developers seem to take my advice on aspects of game design, which I have to say is more fucking cool than you can imagine. But a lot of the advice I give them is stuff that they should have come up with on their own. In that spirit, I’m going to offer makers of punishers the biggest no-brainer advice you’ll ever get.
Make your game addictive.
Sure, addictive gameplay varies from person to person. But there are steps you can take to maximum the potency of a game’s addictive potential. It all boils down to the speed and downtime. If you’re making a game where players will die a lot, keep the time between death and rebirth at a minimum. Look at some of the most successful punishers in recent years. In Super Meat Boy, when you die, BAM, you’re back to life. It’s a game that could offer a lot of frustration, but because the game skips theatrics and bullshit in favor of gameplay, you don’t notice it. Who has time to be frustrated when that giant saw you’ve been trying to jump over for the last ten minutes is right fucking there? Spelunky did this too. When you die in it, restarting the game is done with a single button press. The lack of downtime is what gives those games their hypnotic “just one more try” quality.
Now imagine if Super Meat Boy’s failures resulted in theatrical death animations followed by a menu. It would have been relegated to gaming purgatory. Nobody would remember it today. Super Meat Boy is famous for many things. It’s art style, historical gaming references, and challenge. But its success probably hinged on how accessible it was. It’s a game that wanted to be played, and so it cut the bullshit out. Gameplay was continuous with minimal interruptions. This is something all punishers should have. And yet it’s among the most common things bad punishers have wrong with them. I know you guys have all played these games. So how do you miss such an obvious thing? It’s not about the insane challenge. It never was. Those games succeeded because they were addictive. When a person can lose time to a game and not realize it, that’s a game that is more likely to spread by word-of-mouth.
In a way, it sucks that I won’t have Hop Til You Drop to point to as the poster child for that particular problem. But I’m happy this simple problem was fixed. Now, the game is genuinely fun. Controls might be a bit too loose, and sometimes the random traps are just plain not fair. The biggest problem by far with Hop Til You Drop is that it’s on the wrong platform. It’s the perfect micro-session game, suited more for playing on Vita via PlayStation Mobile. Because it requires precision movement, I wouldn’t want to play it on a touch device like iPhone. But on Vita? This would be the perfect game to bust out on a break. It doesn’t lend itself well to extended play sessions, which is what a platform like XBLIG is better suited for.
But fun is fun, and Hop Til You Drop is fun. There’s even a couple nifty new additions like bullet-time effects that kick in when you have a close call with an enemy. Or a moderately amusing time attack mode. So I do recommend Hop Til You Drop. It won’t have a lasting effect on you. Without online leaderboards, there won’t be a lot to keep you coming back. But it’s a worthy waste of a dollar and probably fifteen to thirty minutes on your Xbox. Congratulations go out to Chris Outen for saving his game. By the way, your mother’s pinky finger should arrive by Fed-Ex tomorrow.
80 Microsoft Points said this game was one “S” away from being a video game version of a gameshow I watched as a kid in the making of this review. Though I usually only watched it because I was too lazy to change the channel after Supermarket Sweep.
Hop Til You Drop is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. On July 1, the Leaderboard will go multi-platform to include indies from all consoles and handhelds.
I’m always skeptical of a game that tries to mix multiple genres. I picture they’re the product of a development meeting full of passive-aggressive types with no alpha to make the final decision. “Let’s do a RTS!” “No, a brawler!” “No, shooter!” “Tower defense!” And then whoever is in charge just sheepishly says “whatever, just do them all.” Often, those games turn out to be fairly mediocre. Jack of all trades, master of jack shit, or something like that. And thus with CastleStorm skepticism bells were ringing in my ears like someone had strapped me to a gong and smacked it with a wrecking ball.
Can you blame me? It’s part tower defense, but you simultaneously call people to defend your castle while actively shooting the opposing enemies and their castle with a ballista, thus turning it into a gallery shooter. But, sometimes you’ll have to take on enemy troops directly by calling your hero into play in a pseudo platformer-brawler. Huh. Plus, with the whole “knock over the enemy’s castle by flinging shit at it” angle, there’s a hint of Angry Birds in it as well. And all this from a studio whose claim to fame is a few video pinball games? I mean, I fucking adore pinball like you can’t imagine. But pinball is about as relevant to gaming today as bloodletting is to modern medicine. Not only that, but I had people on Twitter telling me they had played the demo and came away about as unimpressed from it as anyone could possibly be. Thus I mentally prepared myself for a weekend of boredom.
Which happened. When I watched Cloud Atlas.
Not when I played CastleStorm. It was very fun.
Full disclosure: early Saturday morning, I suffered a moderately severe seizure that pretty much put me out of commission for the entire day. It almost certainly had some influence on the rotten time I had playing CastleStorm online, which I’ll be getting to later. But the seizure also means I “lost” about two full hours worth of play time that I simply can’t remember. I am told I was having a good time during it though.
We downloaded our copies of CastleStorm on Friday night. The first thing that impressed me was how a game with so many play styles could actually tie everything together in a quick-to-learn package. It never feels like there’s too much to juggle. That’s the most common problem with these smörgåsbord games. So without falling into that trap, it should be clear sailing, right?
Well, not quiet. But the single player game is hugely satisfying with a wide variety of objectives and really snappy writing. There’s also a huge assortment of weapons, spells, and bonus rooms for your customizable castle that can be upgraded. Oh, did you say upgrade system? You mean that thing I’m known to abuse? Did I abuse it? You bet your sweet ass I did. One level involves “a frenzy” in which weapons don’t have a cool down time. Here, I set the difficulty to hard, upgraded my Sheep (which acts like the yellow bird in Angry Birds) to its max level, and ended up clearing out the level in six-seconds a turn. I just replayed it doing this for about an hour. By time I was done, every weapon, spell, soldier, and room was fully upgraded. Yea for abuse! I then steamrolled the remaining game. Well, until it forced me to switch over from knights to vikings.
D’oh.
In retrospect I probably should have seen that coming.
It doesn’t matter. I still had a great time. I haven’t actually finished the Vikings section yet. I got my $10 worth just from the first half of the game. Oh, I will totally finish the Vikings stuff at some point. But I plan on saving it for a time when I have nothing to do and I need an activity I know I’ll have fun with. That would be CastleStorm.
Graphically, the game looks pretty good, but I do have some complaints. The backgrounds are pretty noisy, with lots of stuff to distract you. Mind you, the game is beautiful, but I found this stuff to sometimes annoy. Now, that pesky epilepsy thing normally means I can’t touch stuff in 3D, but I figured those noisy backgrounds were so noisy because of the 3D stuff. Things that look like they could be in the foreground probably look further back if you play in 3D mode. But that’s not something I should risk. So I enlisted Bryce (who received the review code so that he could help me test online stuff) and Brian (who mostly just sat and gave Bryce advice, even when he was playing *me*. What an asshole, am I right?) to throw on the 3D glasses. They were both immediately blown away, declaring it the best use of 3D they had seen ever, movies or games. They raved about it so much that I threw the glasses on myself for a quick gander. They were right. It was absolutely stunning. More so than, say, Life of Pi or Avatar on 3D Blu-ray. Granted, because of my condition, I haven’t been privileged to experiment too much with my fancy-schmancy 3D television. I only had the glasses on for about two minutes and I wish I could have done more.
It looks a little Angry Birdsish, but the structures in CastleStorm take more than a couple shots to take down.
Onto the multiplayer stuff. This is where the seizure bit comes in. We didn’t play too much of the single-player stuff before we got into the multiplayer. Bryce and I played a few rounds against each-other and had a swell time. Your stats and upgrades from single player don’t carry over to online play. You get a starting budget that you can use to immediately upgrade some of your stuff. It probably wasn’t a good idea to spend that budget before I knew what I was doing, because once you spend it, as best as I can tell there’s no option to start over from square one. So I was committed to using shitty upgrades that can’t possibly help me beat people. That mistake was on me, but the horrible online setup is entirely on the developer.
And then the seizure happened. Completely unrelated to CastleStorm or any other game. I just have them every few days or so. This was a particularly nasty one that put me out of commission for basically the rest of the day. By the time I was able to play again, Bryce had put upwards of 15 hours into CastleStorm and I couldn’t hope to be competitive with him again. But finding online matches against people of my experience level wasn’t smooth either. I was a level one. The game mostly saw fit to pair me against someone who was a level 155. That’s not a typo. I’m not even sure how he got up that high. The game just came out on Wednesday for f*ck’s sake. As it turns out, many people who were attempting to play on Live (including Bryce) would get stuck with this guy all weekend long. It felt like that World of Warcraft episode of South Park. The dude absolutely demolished me in, on average, 20 seconds or less. Fun? No. Annoying? Oh yea. Even worse, I never had a chance to make a single coin during these battles, which meant I couldn’t upgrade my stats. And even when it wasn’t pairing me up with Jenkins, I was way more likely to get paired up against guys thirty or more ranks higher than me than someone on my level. That meant quick losses and little if any earned coins to upgrade my stuff. It’s a terrible online system. Borderline broken.
There’s also a cooperative survival mode, which is a little more promising. The problem here is one person gets to have all the fun by being in control of the ballista. The other person assumes the role of the hero. In the main game and during the online battles, the hero is a spell you can cast that puts you directly onto the battlefield to hack and slash enemies for thirty seconds or so. It’s fun. For thirty seconds. But Survival mode lasts longer than that, and the hero has a limited moveset. He can swing his sword. He can jump. He can use a bow and arrow, though it’s slow to use and tough to aim with. Or, if you want to be fancy, he has a charge move. That’s it. It’s simply not a play style that lends itself well to extended sessions. Of course, Bryce was having a good time. Of course he was. He got to shoot things. And trust me, no matter what mode you’re playing with, the ballista is hugely entertaining to use, and scoring headshots with it is extremely satisfying. So he had all the fun while I got his sloppy seconds.
The game zooms in when you play as the hero. For what its worth, the controls of this mode are solid. It’s just not very fun past the usual thirty seconds you normally use it.
I wish CastleStorm had some kind of casual online mode where two people can have the same attribute points. Just have every weapon, character, room, and spell set to level 5 (out of 10). I would play the shit out of that. When the playing field is level, CastleStorm can be a great competitive game. The problem is it’s next to impossible to find someone who isn’t going to throttle you in seconds. As a result, games play out like a highlight reel of the Harlem Globetrotters versus Washington Generals, and you’re the Generals.
Regardless, CastleStorm is one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had at Indie Gamer Chick in a while. It doesn’t really do any one thing exceptionally well, but the sum of all parts is undeniably engrossing. The online stuff isn’t so hot, but it wouldn’t take too much tinkering to get that right. But really, the reason to own CastleStorm is the single player stuff. It’s a fun quest, with a robust upgrade system. If you’re into building things, the castle customization stuff is apparently well done and easy to handle. I’m not into that kind of sh*t myself, but Brian took over for it and said it was intuitive and enjoyable. I don’t know if I would have had more fun if I hadn’t lost my entire Saturday and thus my preferred playing partner, but I still highly recommend CastleStorm. I went into it with my expectations set to “cautiously optimistic” and came away knowing that Zen Studios will never be known as just those pinball guys again (Cathy from the future: HAH!)
Although I should probably mention that I absolutely LOATHED this level. See that big, mushroom-shaped mountain-thing? Yea. It actually blocks your shots. At first, I couldn’t even tell it was in the foreground. I constantly vomited curse words that my father didn’t even know I knew when stuck here, which is where most multiplayer matches seemed to be set in.
Oh, and one last thing: CastleStorm? Really? That’s the best you guys could come up with? CastleStorm sounds like something a sitcom writer would come up with on five seconds notice when they need the name of a fictional video game for the characters to be shopping for during the holiday episode. The actual game is oozing personality, but the name screams generic and forgettable. If it bombs in sales, it will be because of the name. Then again, the studio is called Zen Studios. Given how the frustrations of being paired with a guy 154 ranks higher than me induced a state of being in me that was anything but Zen like, I’m guessing their name is purely ironic.
800 Microsoft Points thought all the banter in the game actually sounded very pinball-like in the making of this review.
CastleStorm is Chick-Approved.
A review copy of CastleStorm was provided to Indie Gamer Chick to test online features. The copy played by Cathy was paid for with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend who had minimal feedback in this review.
From the studio that brought you the Oozi games comes an utterly generic, avatar-based punisher with bad level design. Can’t get enough of those. This is also one of those annoying auto-scrollers. Hate those in general. Especially hate them when they’re done vertically. I probably should have researched my game selection better, because there was almost no way I would have enjoyed Deadly Tomb from the get-go. Yea, it was a bit of a dick move for me to pick it. And if you’re expecting some Planet of the Apes style “it was a good game all along!” twist, think again. I played Avatar and the Deadly Tomb on the easy difficulty, because I’m shamefully bad at punishers and blunt in my admission of this. Even then, I found it to be beyond frustrating.
So boring I can’t even muster the humor to make a funny caption.
But, I think I must stress the difference between a fair challenge and an unfair challenge. I feel a fair challenge means you have a realistic (if far-fetched) shot at getting past an obstacle on your first attempt, using nothing but your reflexes and gaming acumen. When a player of any skill level has no remote shot of clearing some spots on their first try, that’s when a game crosses the line for me. It’s the difference between “smart-difficult” and “asshole-difficult.” Auto-scrolling punishers almost always fall into the asshole-difficult category, and Tomb is no exception. Things like timed-trap platforms combined with vertical auto-scrolling are just cruel, since your vertical field of vision isn’t as large as your horizontal vision. Not only that, but some sections of the game require you to clear timed sections, then drop down to a lower platform before climbing up. This is while a column of fire continuously rises. Unless you are 90% flawless in your run (which you probably won’t be), you have no reasonable chance of clearing these sections on your first attempt. By time you drop to those lower levels, the fire is probably already there and you’re doing your best impression of Frollo.
I’ve had this review sit unfinished for nearly a week now. I’ve made several attempts to finish it, but as of yet have been unsuccessful. Part of that has to do with the utterly generic theme. Whether or not I thought the Oozi games were ambitious, at least they aspired to look good. Avatar and the Deadly Tomb features a bland theme and boring graphics. It doesn’t exactly control that well either. The biggest problem is the wall-jump is handled the same way as the ledge-cling. Sometimes for those timed puzzles you’ll need to cling from a ledge. But most of the time you’ll just want to do wall jumps, but the clinging will get in the way of that. Screw it. I give up. There’s no way to describe my experience with Avatar and the Deadly Tomb in a stimulating way. The game was dull as a book on cooking with tofu, although I would recommend reading that over playing Deadly Tomb. At least you’ll get something to eat out of it.
80 Microsoft Points noted their avatar would never actually have the guts to explore a deadly tomb so the game made no sense from a story perspective either in the making of this review. Then again, my avatar wouldn’t snowboard, do parkour, or run across the top of a moving train either. It’s kind of a coward.
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