Twin-stick shooters. I’m willing to bet that I’ve played more of them than anyone my age on the planet. I’ve reviewed over a dozen here alone, and that’s not counting the ones I sampled for a few minutes before realizing that there would be no unique hook. I get why they exist in the numbers they do. It’s a relatively simple genre to pull off successfully. It’s perfect for a new developer who wants to get his or her feet wet in the whole game creation process. But I’m to a point where I’m so over twin-stick shooters. They need something that makes them stand out, or I’ll bore quickly.
E.Y.E.R.I.S., God bless it, really does try to be different. Unfortunately, it takes the art-house route to get there. There have been artsy TwickS in the past. Hell, I would say the grand-daddy of all XBLIG hits I Made a Game with Zombies is an artsy example of the genre. Here, the art vibe is less subtle and borderline pretentious, as you get motivational snippets of guidance that seemingly have no relevancy or anchor of any sort to the goings-on. Maybe it means more to the guys who made this, but for me, I just couldn’t get a feel for what concept or feeling they were trying to invoke here. It just came across as snooty.
Wait, without vision your path is revealed? How in the fuck do see the path? Without vision, I’ll end up walking into walls!
There is an actual game here though, and it’s a decent one. Of course it is. It’s pretty fucking hard to botch a twin-stick shooter. In E.Y.E.R.I.S. (I have no clue what it stands for, and the game doesn’t tell you) you start off on a stage where you have no ability to shoot and have to avoid the baddies for about a minute. Once you finish that, you’ll be given a choice of what the next stage will be. All the stages are the same, as far as I can tell, with the only difference being what gun you’re given. Repeat this three more times, adding additional weapons and shields with each new stage, and afterwards the game ends and simply cycles back to the opening screen, with no explanation of what this whole thing was about. I made up my own and assumed I was fighting off some kind of aggressive eye-infection.
Bad picture for the marketplace. It makes it seem like the soft-focus will be a major element in the game. It isn’t.
Again, it’s pretty hard to screw up a genre this simple. I spent a lot of time on the fence, trying to figure out how I felt about E.Y.E.R.I.S., and I came to the conclusion that it’s a decent game, and for those not burned out on the genre, or for those that get all touchy-feelly about games like this, you’ll probably enjoy it more than me. I don’t feel strongly about it one way or another, which means it gets to hang out at the bottom of the Leaderboard, but a decent game is a decent game, even if it sniffs its own farts.
$1 has no idea why I complain about people sniffing farts when I’m a world-renowned fan of picking one’s own nose. Mmm Hmmm, few things in life as satisfying as picking one’s own nose in the making of this review.
Hey, I wash my hands afterward. And I don’t eat any thing that comes out of it. Hello? Gross.
Wind-Up Knight is a pretty decent game, and Ouya is in short supply of those. I figured I should say that in the first sentence of this review since I have a lot of not-so-nice things to say about it. It’s yet another take on BIT.TRIP RUNNER, a game so frequently cloned that it’s posed to be a genre in and of itself. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Gamers really need to remove the corks from their blowholes regarding the issue. Popular games get cloned. They have since the dawn of time. Some people seem to think indies shouldn’t be subjected to this, out of respect or something.
Heh.
Haha.
WAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Oh God. Good times.
Annoying marketing covering the game’s pictures? Yep, it’s a mobile port.
Seriously, what planet are you guys from? All forms of entertainment are based on the principle of monkey see, monkey do. And in the case of indie games being copied, it really doesn’t bother me because this is how genres get established. In the case of Ouya, BIT.TRIP isn’t on here. Never mind that there probably isn’t a single person on the planet who owns a Ouya but doesn’t own a platform that you can find RUNNER on somewhere. That’s not the point. Personally, I think it’s cool that a reasonably good facsimile of RUNNER is on the little indie box. Cool in the same way that someone with one of those fully functional Optimus Prime cosplay costumes is, the ones that make you stare in awe and wonder “how the fuck did he make that out of caulking and used paper towel tubes?”
Not that Wind-Up Knight tries to copy BIT.TRIP entirely. To its credit, it really does try to be something more. Unfortunately, “more” involves micro-transaction oriented upgrades. Yes, you can earn the cash to get these over the course of the game, and maybe most players will do better at it than I did. I’m a busy person, and I was trying to fly through Wind-Up Knight as quickly as possible. Hell, I completely forgot about the upgrades until there were only a few levels left. At which point I bought a sword that shoots a beam out that kills enemies quite far from you. I guess my forgetfulness was lucky in this case, because that sword pretty much stripped more than half the difficulty out of the game. I call this the “scissors on a tube of toothpaste effect.” But, if I hadn’t forgotten about the upgrades and had at any point purchased anything, I almost certainly would never have owned that sword unless I paid extra for it. It makes it feel like a free-to-play mobile game, which it in fact is.
Wind-Up Knight’s biggest problem, besides doing that thing most decent Ouya games seem to do where the seams from the game’s mobile roots stick out like a sore thumb, is the difficulty curve. Too often, a moderately challenging stage is immediately followed up by multiple levels that could be generously described as a cakewalk. (By the way, that term has meant “something incredibly easy” since the 1860s. Who even knew they had cake back then?)
Is wall jumping really something worth advertising? It’s so commonplace these days it would be like having a car advertise that it comes with wheels.
Or maybe not. Until the 47th level (of 48 total), I absolutely flew through Wind-Up Knight, which is weird because I got off to a rough start over the first ten or so levels. The same thing happened to me with BIT.TRIP RUNNER 2. I have to consider the possibility that I just got really good at it. Then it took me a few days to finish level 47, though a combination of seizures and having my annoying boyfriend around might have had something to do with that. Funny enough, once I beat that stage, I cleared the final level on my third attempt. Sadly, it was unquestionably easier, and only serves as the final stage because the graphical backdrop is more climatic. Sigh.
Oh, and in the really petty complaint department, I have a policy at Indie Gamer Chick that I pay for all the games and avoid demos. The Ouya obviously isn’t a system suited for this, even though you can now purchase a game without the mandatory play through. So I purchased Wind-Up Knight for $7.99. After finishing the first book, it gave me the option to purchase it for $4.99. I don’t know why, but that really pissed me off. It’s like punishing me for buying it earlier than expected. A lot of games do this, and trust me developers, it always annoys the consumers. Stop doing this.
Maybe my counting is off, because I only noticed 48 stages. Meh, whatever. I got an ending screen and thus I’m satisfied. I mean, the ending screen then wouldn’t go away. It was laid on top of the menu. The menu still worked under it though. It’s weird, but I’ve had that happen at least a dozen times over the course of Indie Gamer Chick.
You know what though? I would be lying if I said I didn’t really enjoy Wind-Up Knight a lot from start to finish. It’s a pretty satisfying game. With a PlayStation 3 pad, the controls were responsive, the graphics worked, the level design was mostly good (unavoidable GOTCHA! style traps don’t appear until the very end of the game), and there’s plenty of extra challenges to extend the gameplay. Where Wind-Up Knight falters most is in personality. Or, more specifically, not having any. Characters are bland, writing is bland, levels look bland, weapons look bland, the music is bland, and the sound effects are bland. It’s almost tiring in how joyless the atmosphere is. Wind-Up Knight was inspired by BIT.TRIP RUNNER, but the inspiration begins and ends with gameplay. It has none of the charm or quirkiness of BIT.TRIP, which is one of the major attractions of that franchise. The developers at Robot Invader are making a sequel, and if they take away only one thing from this review, I hope it’s this: have more fun making it. I can always tell when developers were too serious when developing a game, and I suspect that’s what went wrong with Wind-Up Knight. So please, pull the sticks out of your asses and put them where they belong: up Ben Kuchera’s ass.
$7.99 (Grumble) said Robot Invader could make me feel less butt-hurt over that extra $3 I spent by donating the difference to Autism Speaks in the making of this review.
Wind-Up Knight is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. I also played the iOS and Android ports, and they also are Chick-Approved. Levels 13 through 48 can be unlocked for 1,200 “notes” (in-game currency) or $1.99 for each pack of 12. Go with the Ouya version if that’s an option.
If I waited until I was good at Gunslugs to write this review, it would basically never go up. Roguelikes are just not something I’m good at. I get accused all the time of disliking certain games only because of my lack of skill with them. Instead of wasting time defending myself, I’ve taken to waving Spelunky back-and-forth with one hand while flipping the bird with the other. I *suck* at Spelunky. I’m fucking terrible at it. And yet, it’s the only game I’ve played for review at Indie Gamer Chick that I play every single day, especially since they added Daily Challenges to the console and handheld ports. Mind you, my skill level is still nowhere near being classified as “respectable.” But I love it.
Or, a more recent example would be Don’t Starve. I put a lot of time into Don’t Starve, fulling expecting to review it here. While I liked it.. a lot.. I was so bad at it (as people who watched me play it on Indie Gamer Chick TV will testify to) that I didn’t experience 90% of the content. I still play it and plan on being good at it some day. But, considering how little of the game I’ve as of yet seen, reviewing it now seems somehow unfair. I typically have no problem slamming bad games that I don’t make it far into. I’ve never yet encountered a game that was bad or boring for the opening hours suddenly become worth playing. On the other hand, I’ve played a LOT of good games that went bad later on, and for all I know, Don’t Starve is ready to jump shark on me.
There’s really no worry of that happening with Gunslugs. It is what it is: a fun, quirky, simple, and charming roguelike-like shooter. Think Contra or Metal Slug, only with a lifebar instead of one-hit-kills. Oh, and the graphics are ultra-cute 8-bit fare. I’m kind of over the whole “cutesy graphics juxtaposing FUCK YOU levels of difficulty” thing, which is about as common in gaming these days as the ability to jump is, but at least Gunslugs does it well. I can’t stress enough how tough this game gets. I’ve had multiple instances of where I thought I was having a good run only for some cunt with a flamethrower to jump out and drain my health almost instantly, resulting in me screaming unintelligible gibberish that my boyfriend believes translates to “I’m appalled that you would ambush me in such an unbecoming, ungentlemanly manner and I wish to state my displeasure over the situation.”
He’s wrong. I’m trying to say “fuck you, you fucking fucker!” but I get choked up on my own rage.
But, the formula works. Difficult enough to be addictive, like loading a Pez-dispenser. Gunslugs is genuinely fun. It’s not perfect by any means. Like any randomly-generated game, not every run is equally as fun or rewarding. Or fair, for that matter. Gunslugs has all kinds of quirky ideas, like being able to enter levels modeled after Game Boy stuff. But the problem is, that all costs coins. Just now, as I was writing this section, the first randomly generated level asked for 50 coins to enter an “art school” minigame thing. The problem is, I had just started. I couldn’t have possibly had 50 coins by that point. So I went off to murder some enemies, all of whom liberally drop money, ammo, and health refills. By time I had the 50 coins, the door to the art thing was locked. Shit like that happens constantly in Gunslugs, and it’s infuriating.
The random weapon drops often lack “oomph” too. I kept getting stuff like the double gun, which allows you to shoot in both directions. Sounds great, except 90% of the enemies you encounter are in front of you, and thus shooting behind you is about as useful as a snorkel is for exploring the Mariana Trench. The ratio of double-guns to anything else was about 10 of them for any other item. When the most boring item is far and away the most common pick-up, it lessens the entertainment value of the game.
Enjoy this screencap, because I died attempting to take it. Paid 75 coins for it. This job sucks sometimes.
Basically, every problem I have can boil down to the random-generation engine not being refined enough. On one stage, I was able to get a bottle of alcohol (a spendy 25-coin purchase), which makes everything move in slow-motion. “FINALLY!” I screamed. Sure, it had a limited timer, but at least I would be able to put that bad-boy to good use while it lasted. Unfortunately, I got this at the very end of a level. As in, the exit was right next to the building I got it from. As I hopped in the escape helicopter, I watched in fucking horror as the power-meter for it instantly disappeared. No, what remained did NOT carry over to the next level. Sigh. What a dick this game is.
Gunslugs is a lot of fun, in the same way hanging out with one of those whack jobs that blows up bullfrogs for giggles can be. But, unlike a game like Spelunky, it lacks a certain intelligence in design. Not that Spelunky is a genius or anything. Anyone who has seen the damsel stuck in ten feet of solid rock when you’ve almost certainly not had a chance to collect enough bombs to get to him or her can attest to that. Gunslugs is too dumb though. Not so dumb that I would say “skip it.” Fuck that. At $2.49 ($1.99 with PS+ discount), it’s one of the best steals in gaming at this point in 2014. But I feel they had something special going here, and blew it by being too lax in how the computer can spit out the layout. And I’m not saying that because it would make Gunslugs easier. The difference in difficulty fixing all this stuff would result in is negligible. No, I’m saying all this because it would make Gunslugs more fun. That’s what you guys are supposed to be doing. Entertain us. I’m ranking Gunslugs as the 68th best indie I’ve reviewed as of this writing, and that’s somehow disappointing to me. It should have been better. It *deserved* to be better. Instead, Gunslugs is like one of those prodigies that by all rights should be lecturing at Harvard but instead is flipping burgers.
*Note: only the PlayStation Vita port is approved here. The iPhone/Android versions are horrendous, like any game that features on-screen digital control schemes. Can we all agree those suck and abolish the fucking things?
Ouya’s biggest problem is it has a lot of games that sound like they’ll be fun and look just fine when you’re browsing the marketplace. Then you actually get them and you realize they’re, if not awful, bland and uninspired. MushRoom Bounce! looked decent and sounded unique. It didn’t take too long after booting it up to figure out that it’s actually pretty boring.
Pretty much anything movable can be pocketed, though the points don’t seem worth the effort.
There’s been games like this. You take various mushrooms or “interactive” objects and push them into holes (sort of like billiards) for points. Once you’ve pocketed all the mushrooms, the stage is cleared and you move on. I guess it’s kind of similar to Namco’s 1985 coin-op/compilation seat-warmer Motos, only with no sense of danger and a lot less polish. And although there’s not a whole lot technically wrong with it, MushRoom Bounce! is just plain not fun. That makes it kind of tough to talk about.
I guess I can focus on how the physics doesn’t always seem stable. To hit stuff, you simply walk into it. This one time, a mushroom was on the edge of one of the holes. I walked straight into it from the right side. In theory, this should have immediately pocketed the mushroom. Instead, it flew straight upwards. It was baffling. Not that this was a regular thing, but there was more than one instant where a mushroom seemed to take an unexplained irregular bounce. Other times, I would see the mushrooms get stuck in corners, or stuck behind objects, or lose all momentum for seemingly no reason. Controls are slightly clunky, which makes aiming a bit of a chore. Then again, since the game has no real sense of tension or ways to fail, the game feels more like a chore-simulator so I guess that’s appropriate.
A bigger problem is the menus themselves. I went to customize the PlayStation 3 controller I was using, but none of my actions with the controller while attempting this seemed to correspond to what was happening in the menu, and I was ultimately locked completely out of the game. Until I restarted my Ouya at least. I’m not just picking on the developers of MushRoom Bounce here, either. Bad menus have been a recurring theme during my adventures in Indie Land. Surely you guys that are making these games have yourselves played games at some point. And, when I go to the developers to ask them what happened, it typically boils down to “I never really checked them because I didn’t think they were important.” That’s not the case with MushRoom Bounce, by the way. I haven’t talked with the devs since they requested the review. But for God’s sake, check the damn things before you send the game out.
I didn’t play this far. I got to level 20 before I couldn’t take any more. I think the premium levels don’t start until a little bit after that, meaning I totally threw away a dollar. I could have gotten an over-sized novelty gumball or fed a starving African child for a week. My teeth thank you, Two Squid Games. The starving African child might not.
Despite what people might think, based on my reputation, I always look for positive things to say about games I review. I couldn’t come up with anything for MushRoom Bounce, besides the fact that it might be an okay title for very, very young children. There’s just no point to it. You can go for high scores on the online leaderboards, but with gameplay this tedious, why bother? You have items to shake things up, but there’s no limit on them, and thus I stuck to laying out large bombs and letting physics take over, then tapping in anything that wasn’t pocketed by the explosions. Maybe if this had been multiplayer, it might have been more tolerable. As is, it’s like playing Hungry-Hungry Hippos by yourself. As someone who was one of those sad kids that played Hungry-Hungry-Hippos by herself, I assure you, that’s about as fun as it sounds like. Which is to say, not at all.
I’m supposed to be taking notes when I game for reviews now. Stupid brain. It used to soak up information like a sponge. Now it soaks up information like, I dunno, a washcloth or something. Stuff still clings, but it gets wrung out whenever I have a seizure. Now I have to write down everything like a fucking savage. And what is my first game I’m doing under this primitive system? Some piece of shit religious game that feels like it fell out of a time warp from 1999. Oh, and get this, it’s called Adam’s Venture. The only problem is, the character is called Adam Venture. It’s Adam Venture’s Venture. Works for me. My name is Cathy Vice. Cigarettes are my vice. They’re Cathy Vice’s Vice. I should use that in the review. It’s fucking clever.
9:18 AM: Okay, well let’s just fire this fucker up. Yes, I’m aware that this game autosaves. What kind of idiot just randomly turns off their console when a little circle-thing is spinning in the corner, indicating that the game is saving? Oh shit, Judge Judy is on. A…….. oops.
10:11AM: All system errors are now fixed. Stupid short attention span. Now I feel like an idiot. Later today, I’ll go on Twitter and get all preachy and self-righteous about Nintendo or how much cooler I am than everyone else. That always cheers me up. Okay, onto the game.
Da nanana, nu nu nuuuuuuuu. Da-nana, nah nu nah nah nah.
10:30AM: Ugh. I can’t believe they still make games like this. The character moves like he’s shit his pants. He jumps like he’s liquid-shit his pants and it’s seeping through his underwear. Dude, I have epilepsy. Been there, buddy. I’ll save my own panty-oopsie stuff for later, when I say something stupid on Twitter and need to get sympathy. Suckers. So easy to manipulate.
12:15AM: Adam’s Venture is trying to do the Indiana Jones thing. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Which was an alright game back in 1999, when I was stupid. All kids are stupid. I was STOOPID stupid. I watched Big Bad BeetleBorgs. Oh, set a reminder to bring that up on Twitter at some point, preferably when someone talks about their superior 80s shows. Even though I found their shows better, I will stand my ground and insist my shows were better. Hell, the retweets I get for mentioning BeetleBorgs will up my geek cred and probably land me at least six new followers.
Anyway, the set pieces are nice. It really does kind of feel like I’m exploring a vast, abandoned, booby-trapped cavern. If not for the Dreamcast-era graphics, I might be positively immersed right now. Oh, and I’m now being followed by an evil cloud-monster-thing that reminds me of Dark Heart from Care Bears II. But it only shows up in cut scenes. There’s no enemies or combat. It’s just about getting from point A to point B by solving rudimentary math and logic puzzles. It’s really linear, so it’s almost impossible to get lost. In a way, I appreciate that. But it all comes back to those controls. It’s like the designers of this game went into full-on panic mode as the millennium neared and locked themselves in a fucking bunker for fourteen years to escape the Y2K fallout. Then they spent the next fourteen years kicking themselves for not hanging the “We’re in here, Jesus!” sign that they had lovingly quilted and figured the rapture had passed by without them being saved . Then, one day, they emerged, blurry-eyed, and discovered the world hadn’t ended. After the initial disappointment, and trying to figure out their cover story for why they only waited two weeks to cannibalize their buddy Harry when they had plenty of rations, they tried their hand at game making. They had a PlayStation 1 and a copy of Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain to play endlessly to pass the time, and that shit was so cutting edge that there was NO WAY the format was improved over the last fifty-six seasons.Oh, and this is a religious game, so stick a snarky “what a surprise, a religious game that disproves the theory of evolution” quip in the review. Maybe too obvious and lazy a joke, but fuck it, I’ve got shit to do today.
12:20PM: Brian just pointed out to me that I, in fact, don’t have anything to do today. Whatever. You know what? Fuck him. No sex for him tonight.
The settings are the best part of the game. A lot of care went into them. It makes it look like the game will be exhilarating. It’s not. It’s very slow-paced.
1:15PM: There’s really not enough story to sink my teeth into. Just lots of vague religious stuff. Some of the puzzles involve arranging three lines of scripture in the correct order. I’ll bring up that I’m actually a practicing Catholic here, even though I don’t actually believe that shit. Just hedging my bets, in case when I repent on my deathbed God sees my fingers crossed. Still though, it’s not horrible or offensive. A little old-fashioned, but then again, so is religion. You know what? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this will win my seal of approval after all.
1:16PM: OMG, fuck this game. Fuck it in its mouth with a hepatitis-laced rusty scrub brush. It has timed environmental puzzles. And the timer is too short. For this one puzzle, you have to light two torches, climb a rope ladder, jump up on a platform, and duck under a door before one of the torches goes out and it closes. Why that sucks is, lighting the torches is done via context sensitivity. Simply pressing the button doesn’t light the torch. When you do press it, the game takes over movement and gingerly stumbles back and forth until the character is locked into place. Then, it slowly lowers your torch into the torch you’re trying to light. This whole thing DOES NOT STOP THE TIMER, which wouldn’t be an issue if there is only one torch. But, because there’s two, if you don’t hit the button in the very small space that is lined up most ideally, you’re going to watch while the game operates your character like it’s trying to not break a nail. Mind you, even if you do it correctly, you still have to line up correctly with the ladder, get up it fast enough, then get to the ledge and jump on it. Jumping on it isn’t smooth either. In the very first part of the game that required you to jump, I had to try five times to jump up a ledge that was about six inches off the ground. This is not a game designed with dexterity or speed in mind. I spent forty minutes trying to get this room correct. I was convinced I was doing it wrong and looked for an item or something else I was missing. I can’t believe this made it through play testing without the poor sap playing throwing down his controller in disgust and converting to Scientology. Suddenly, the whole religious thing makes sense. By the time this room was over, I was praying. “Please God, don’t let there be another room like that.”
2:04PM: There was another room like that. This one had four torches that seemed to have even shorter timers. They were all spread out in the corner of a large room. The only thing I had to do was light the torches. No other hoops to jump through. It took me another thirty-minutes to do it, just because of the animation thing. It felt like one of those plate-spinning gags, only it would be like if the plate spinner had to tie his shoelaces before spinning the plate more.
2:35PM: I’m finally done with Adam Venture’s Venture. Well that was short and…………
2:36PM: Shit. I forgot this is a compilation of a game that had been released episodically on PC. Well, I’m done. I can’t take anymore. If they patch the torch thing, which I’m sure can only be done by increasing the timer on the torches or stopping the timer while the auto-animation is going, I’ll come back to it. I don’t even know if there are going to be more rooms like that, but the fear of it is stronger than my fear of cigar-smoking clowns. Damn that Are You Afraid of the Dark? show. Twenty years later and I still have nightmares. Those sections really were the only things remotely challenging, but not in a good way. I’ll wrap up the review by reenforcing that Adam’s Venture Chronicles is far from horrible, but it really is too old-fashioned for anyone expecting a game released in 2014 to have control-sensibilities from the last ten years. Maybe this would have been a terrific game in 1999. But it’s not 1999.
Seriously, Vertigo Games. Patch those timed-puzzles and I think I would be ready to award this my Seal of Approval. Also, you guys need to flog yourselves with a cat o’ nine tails for committing such a sin in the first place.
I bet if I had been a kid when this came out, Mommy and Daddy would have gotten this for me. I mean, assuming they could find out about it. How do you find out about games of this nature, anyway? The religious aspects of the Adam’s Venture Chronicles aren’t even mentioned on its PSN profile. Imagine if a militantly secular family accidentally bought this. It seems like it wouldn’t go over well. More over, to not boast of the nature of the game itself defies the scriptures. Timothy 2:15 tells us “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” Of course, it also tells us to kill every mouthy child, homosexual, or person who works on a Sunday. Grand Theft Auto isn’t this bloodthirsty. But it would be facetious if I put that in the review, even if the liberals who read me would lap it up. In truth, if parents only want their kids playing games of this nature, the kids life wouldn’t be ruined by Adam’s Venture. It’s mostly only a bad game because it’s so outdated in the way it’s executed. Had this controlled like Tomb Raider 2013 did, it wouldn’t have been amazing or anything, but I probably would have liked it a lot more. Hmmm, executed wrong. I should probably work in some kind of really inappropriate joke here. Something involving Jesus and an electric chair or something.
Now for the crappy part: I have to turn these notes into a review. I could just post them like this, lazy as it would be. But then people would realize I’m an aloof, pompous, self-indulgent, self-righteous, stuck-up bitch, instead of the awesome crusader for indie developers people think I am. Hey, wait a second. I’m a game critic. I’m SUPPOSED to be those things. And…. published.
$9.59 with PlayStation Plus discount ($11.99 MSRP) probably didn’t stick to the concept behind this review well enough in the making of this review.
There are two Vertigo Games as far as I can tell. One of them should consider changing their name to avoid market confusion. The link above points to the guys behind Adam’s Venture. But these guys are also Vertigo Games. It’s an uninspired name anyway.
A review copy of Adam’s Venture: Chronicles was provided to Indie Gamer Chick by publisher Playlogic before the game’s scheduled release on February 4, 2014. At Indie Gamer Chick, all games reviewed are paid for in full by the writer. Upon the release of the game, Cathy provided a $20 PSN card to a friend who purchased the game. The friend has a PlayStation Plus subscription, meaning the purchase price was $9.59. For more on this policy, check out our FAQ.
Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge is a SHMUP/platformer (SHMUP-former? former-SHMUP?) where you play as Serena, heroine of the universe, who is out for revenge after being trolled on Spacebook by the Space Prince. After crash landing on his planet, you have to make your way through a number of stages to reach his castle so you may exact revenge.
A normal start.
The game pulls its looks from PC games of the mid-90s—classics such as Jazz Jackrabbit and Duke Nukem. It looks great and the animations are fluid. Regarding animations, the game does have some…suggestive assets that may turn some users onto or off from it. The heroine is quite voluptuous, and the opening sequence takes particular care to emphasize this. She also runs around in a barely-there space suit as she makes her way to the final castle. I felt it was done in a humorous manner, but I can see it being a problem for some.
I want to point out the controls because, to me, they are one of the most important aspects of any game. Ultionus takes time to get used to. The opening stage is your standard space SHMUP, but once you’re on the planet’s surface, things change drastically. One of my largest complaints with this game is also one of the most common complaints I read online, it’s that you can’t fire while moving. The game does try to use part of one stage to get you used to the idea but it’s still jarring once the action starts. If you do stop, you’re unable to keep up with the enemy spawns as you try to clear a path. Most players probably stop at this point but if you master jumping while moving, an action that doesn’t slow you down, you’ll be fine.
She stopped to shoot. Bad idea!
I played through Ultionus on Normal, and while there were some portions of the game where I died a lot that gave me some trouble, overall the game didn’t feel terribly difficult. You get nine lives and unlimited continues, which makes beating the game a venture that takes maybe a couple of hours your first time.There are a handful of vehicle stages where you are rewarded for how fast you can smash the Fire key which will kill your wrist. I had to take a day’s break to recover after one such stage.
One part of the game made me question the design of its absurd art style the first time I saw it: The Game Over screen depicts a “bad end” scene with the main character bent over, drooling and ass in the air. (NSFW-ish, triggering pic) It caught me off guard and left me feeling awkward.
All in all, I would not recommend this game. I did enjoy parts of it and the ending was satisfying, but the overall length of the game and easy patterns in boss fights left much to be desired.
Full disclosure: Kris Steele, developer of today’s two games, is my friend. Our relationship got off to a rocky start. When I was brand new to the scene, barely two weeks after I launched Indie Gamer Chick, I interviewed Kris. By this point, I hadn’t won the respect of the community, but they were happy to have ANYONE covering XBLIGs besides the two or three sites that already did. I was someone new to talk to. Or, more accurately, someone to gossip to. At the time, I was interviewing developers for the second XBLIG Uprising event, and one of the candidates for it was Volchaos, a game by Kris. The only problem was Kris was also organizing the event, and there was skepticism on how good Volchaos was. (Side note: Volchaos did not make the Uprising. It wasn’t finished in time. The next year, the developer of Sententia organized the third event, and his game most certainly DID make it in, and it basically soured the whole thing). At the time, I was still kind of finding my identity, so when the time came for the interview, I was still in “pretend to be a serious writer asking tough-questions” mode. By the time it was over, I’m pretty sure he didn’t like. Nor should he have. I was a douche. Straight up.
But, he was never unkind to me. By the time I figured out that I should drop any pretense of professionalism and just be myself, he was still there and willing to help me. Even after I didn’t enjoy Volchaos, he was encouraging of me, and endorsed me to the community. Fast forward to today. Kris is my friend. A really, really good friend. I’m proud to be his friend. All bullshit aside, he’s a good man, and I consider our relationship a privilege. He’s always there for me to answer questions about game development, indie politics, or if I need his fingerprints on a bloody crowbar. It’s really a sign of his character that he became friends with me.
And now I’m going to put that character to the test by calling one of his latest games digital dog feces.
One thing I never imagined when I started Indie Gamer Chick is that I would form a close relationship with any developer. Today, I have just that with a few dozen. For many of them, I’ve reviewed at least one of their games. If that’s the case, there’s roughly a 55% chance I didn’t like their effort. At first, I was worried that people might accuse me of going soft on those that are my friends. Even if it’s not true (and if you ask Kris Steele or Dave Voyles, they’ll tell you it’s not. And probably cry), that perception is there. I take great pride in the fairness of my reviews. People might think that someone might expect their critic friend to show mercy on them. To those that believe that, nothing I can say or do would convince them it’s not otherwise. Anyone with real friends knows that real friends would never ask that of their critic friend.
So, what did my friend release recently? First up, I looked at Abduction Action! Plus on XBLIG and Ouya. I had heard of this game days earlier, when a child psychologist recommended that the average punishment for a disobedient child be changed from grounding to playing Abduction Action. Less timing consuming, faster results. No child will fuck with mommy and daddy again. Okay, I’m kidding, but it is a pretty awful game. The idea is you’re a UFO that must torment Earthlings for shits and giggles. Using a tractor beam, you’ll abduct humans, or crush them with various objects, or drop them from lethal heights. In theory, this is the game you give evil little children to break them of their habit of torturing ants for the lulz.
In Iowa, they call this “Tuesday.”
Unfortunately, Abduction Action! Plus is let down by poor controls. Many of the challenges in the game, such flying into birds, requires precision movement, and that’s not really an option. It gets bad when you’re forced to accelerate into objects using the turbo boost. For those watching me, it was probably comical. I tried to splatter a birdie on the UFO, and instead overshot it no less than a dozen times, until it finally flew off the screen. It was maddening. And that’s ultimately why I couldn’t enjoy AA+. It’s a game about lining up to do stuff. Line up to grab a rock and drop it on a jock’s head. Line up to pull someone up in your tractor beam. Line up bullets to turbo-boost through them. That shit is hard to do when the UFO only has two speeds: too fast and suicidally fast.
Then there’s the problem of having to remain stationary while you suck up the people and objects. If a projectile hits your UFO, the beam is deactivated and you drop whatever you’re carrying. This is kind of tough when you have people shooting you pretty much non-stop anytime you’re low enough to grab anyone. I’m not sure why a standard gun or even a shotgun would cause a UFO to do anything but laugh. You mean to tell me these things are designed to travel through space and torment any living creature they happen across, but a single bullet fucks their mojo up? I tried to find something positive to say about Abduction Action Plus’s gameplay, and I couldn’t come up with anything. That is unfortunate, because the writing is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny and the concept is solid. But gameplay is king, and AA+ controls like a game in dire need of an AA meeting.
What’s shocking about Abduction’s badness is Kris released another game recently, this one on iPhone, and it is fucking awesome. It’s called Hypership Still Out of Control. It’s a sort-of-sequel, but not really, of a couple earlier games. I reviewed both Hypership Out of Control for iPhone and Hypership Still Out of Control on Xbox Live Indie Games last year. Like Abduction Action, the XBLIG version of Hypership was overly-sensitive to control. On iPhone, the control was near flawless. Still Out on Control offers more of the same, only the levels are different. Same graphics, same control scheme, and the levels themselves progress seemingly the same way. The meteors are in the first stage. The eyeball wall things are the second stage, etc, etc. So, despite Kris’ objections, I’m basically calling this more of a DLC pack. A very good one, mind you. I highly recommend it.
Damn game won’t take the sky from me.
But, the honeymoon with Hypership is over, and now a lot of the glaring flaws are starting to be noticed. Stuff like how sometimes setting off a bomb is too hard. You have to double-tap the screen to do it. I don’t know if it prefers you to tap in the same spot or not. It’s sometimes a difficult thing to pull off, and setting off a bomb when you most need to is very challenging because the screen is usually too full to safely stay still long enough to detonate it. Also, when you’ve built up a stockpile of 3 bombs, which is the max, why doesn’t picking up a 4th bomb automatically detonate it? It wouldn’t make the game too easy, but it’s too hard to see the new bomb on-screen and react fast enough to detonate a bomb you’re holding before picking it up. Since you can’t use a finger on your spare hand (for those that have such a thing, and to those who don’t, you shouldn’t have played around with firecrackers like that) to set off a bomb, the system is just too busted. This is a game based around speed, lots of it. You probably won’t have enough time to safely take your finger off the screen for the less-than-a-second it takes to use it. I would kill to be able to play Hypership with a mouse or a trackball. The joystick controls of the XBLIG were too damn loose, while the phone version lacks buttons that would make the game so much better. A marriage between the two might make one of the best space-shooters of the modern era.
Don’t let any of those complaints turn you off. They’re here because I’m hoping like hell Kris gets the message and makes some fixes to his already excellent game. Hypership, no matter which version you get on your iThing, is a truly special game. One of my favorite iPhone games, indie or otherwise. One of the few space-shooters I’ve ever enjoyed. One of the few games on any platform I play on a regular basis. And my enjoyment of it isn’t based on my friendship with Kris. If friendship somehow softened my thoughts on his Abduction Action! Plus, then you should be scared because it might be so bad that it causes cancer. No, I like Hypership purely because it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. You know, I’ve had a bad break lately with health issues. I don’t know what my future holds. I don’t find out until February 27. I am lucky that I have friends who will be there for me. And here’s where the friendship thing matters to me: how fucking cool is it that one of my friends, who will be there for me through the worst of whatever I face, also is someone who made one of the best games I’ve ever played? It proves once again something I’ve known for a long time: I’m the luckiest person I know.
This is for Hypership. For Abduction Action! Plus, picture Sweetie with pock marks on her face, blood dripping out of her nose, the stench of death on her, with skulls and crossbones all around the edges saying “not approved for any use besides enhanced interrogation.”
$1.99 said Kris could remake the same game, only set it on I-80 in California and claim it’s based on a true story in the making of this review.
Hypership Still Out of Control is Chick-Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
Protip: when naming your game, don’t give it a name that is just asking to be mocked. Such is the case with Iota. If I wanted to be an unoriginal wiseass, I could say “I didn’t like Iota one iota.” But I’m above such laziness.
Well, then again, I’ve been updating only like once a week for a couple of months now. So fuck it. Laziness for the win.
I didn’t like Iota one iota.
Iota looks really good.. for an XBLIG. But typically, really good XBLIGs would look merely decent on Sega Dreamcast, which you’ll note is fifteen years old.
Iota is one of those XBLIGs that falls into the category of “looks too good.” It’s the curse of the platform. With only a few exceptions, the better an XBLIG looks, the worse it plays. Iota looks pretty dang good, which means the curse is especially potent here. The idea is you play as a robot that must go around stages collecting shiny balls of light. Collecting all of them opens up a shinier ball of light, clearing the stage. Oh, and the platforming is sort of like a stripped-down Outland, which itself could best be described as “Ikaruga with jumping.”
In the interest of fairness, I’ll disclose that I’m not wired to really like Iota all that much to begin with. I don’t like bullet hells, and I don’t like platformers that drink the bullet-hell Kool-Aid. But, in the case of Iota, the stuff I dislike the most has nothing to do with the bulletly hellness of it, and honestly the bullet-hell stuff isn’t even that bad, at least up to the point where I determined that I would never have fun with this and quit. Quick: what’s the most important thing a precision-based platformer OR a bullet hell would need? Tight controls, right?
Guess what Iota doesn’t have?
If Sega hit the Sake too much and made a platformer that controlled exactly like Sonic the Hedgehog, only heavier and starring Juggernaut from X-Men, that’s what Iota would feel like. Starting movement is too slow, stopping isn’t instantaneous, jumping feels too heavy or sometimes just doesn’t respond in time at all. In just the first three levels, I lost count of how many times I went to jump, hit the button long before I got to the cliff, and then watched as my character didn’t jump and plunged to his death. If it was less than ten times, I’ll eat my hat.
The 2.5D perspective also made calculating distances and heights annoying at times, but that’s hardly Iota’s biggest problem.
Another issue is the inconsistency of the color-swapping bullet hell gimmick. You switch the robot from red to blue, which allows you to pass harmlessly through bullets. Using the triggers as a sort of dash-attack, you can also knock out the enemies. Except the game is a bit fickle about the timing of it. Switching mostly allows you to instantaneously pass through the bullets with relative ease, but upon landing on the platform and dashing into the robot (which has to match your color in order to kill it), sometimes it would register me as still changing colors, resulting in a death. I experimented with this a lot (probably more than any play-tester did, judging by how bad it is), and it was bizarre how the bullets could be passed through instantaneously, but there was a lag in using it to kill enemies. I found out that the jumping and landing had nothing to do with the lag. I could situation myself on a platform, wait for the robot to come at me, switch colors, to the point that my robot looked fully like he had switched, dash, and die because it thought I was still the wrong color.
Level design was nearly my biggest issue, which is really impressive considering that I only played four stages. I don’t think the idea of collecting all the trinkets in a level to open up an exit works in a game like this. Maybe it was worth experimenting to find out, but really, a game based around one-hit kills and a broken checkpoint system should have simply been about getting from point A to point B. With all the backtracking, it bogs the game down, makes it less exciting. And then there was the third level, which is almost entirely done in the dark. It’s not a particularly hard stage, but because you have very limited visibility, you have to heel-toe it, nudging the stick one tiny bit at a time, like you’re masturbating the microscopic penis of a Ferrari owner. It’s shameful that the developers didn’t recognize this as BORING design. Because, above all else, your games should not bore. Every other aspect of Iota has potential to be a pretty decent platformer. But a stage like this, which can’t be played at a speed above molecular-degradation of an atom, never had potential to be anything but the most boring level in platform history. It’s only purpose is now to point and it and say “for fuck’s sake, don’t ever make a stage like this” to other developers.
Although I found nothing to like about Iota, I don’t deny this could have been something good. Certainly a foundation has been laid for something that could be entertaining. But Iota put a premium on graphics, and didn’t focus on the stuff that really matters in a platformer of this sort, and the result is a game with limited value. Tighter controls would have made a world of difference here. And stuff like the all-dark level should have never entered into the thoughts of the developer. Ten seconds of research would have shown that the number-one gripe of the vast majority of Spelunky player are the dark stages, and in Iota, the visibility a player has is much worse. Thus, Iota serves as a reminder that, with the freedom indie developers have, the flip side is you end up with level design such as this that nobody in their right fucking mind would attempt. I absolutely can’t believe the developers didn’t second-guess some of the design choices here. Ultimately, Iota’s only hope is to lure people in with its impressive graphics. Except, Iota really only looks good for an XBLIG. And that’s like saying melanoma looks good as far as cancer goes.
Do you know what the irony of Contrast is? It became the replacement PlayStation Plus PS4 launch game when Driveclub didn’t make its deadline. That makes me laugh, because there is no way that Driveclub could have been more unfinished than Contrast. Here’s a game whose concept I loved before I even tried it, and even while I was playing it, I so wanted to love it. And, in a sense, I did. But, like someone with an elderly dog that keeps making a doodoo on the carpet, at some point you have to admit it’s over and put it down.
Contrast at least fills the indie quota of being dark enough to cause clinical depression.
Contrast takes place in a stylized 1930s art-deco world. The idea is you play as on over-imaginative young lady named Didi, who defies her mother’s wishes by sneaking out of the house and going on an adventure of sexual intrigue, betrayal, and discovery. Honestly, I thought the story was heavy-handed and boring. The setting did nothing for me, mostly owing to how damn empty and artificial it all seems. Perhaps if the world had seemed more alive, I could have gotten into it. But the world of Contrast seems so drab and lifeless, as if nothing fun or whimsical has ever graced it. Which is really fucking bizarre because of how damn cool the hook is.
The idea is, gameplay can shift entirely into your shadow on a surface as long as there’s a light projecting it. I love this idea, even if it’s so shamelessly convoluted in the ways they had to implement it. I call this “Aquaman Syndrome” because it reminded me of how the Super Friends scriptwriters had to come up with the most roundabout ways imaginable to include Aquaman in the show, like having Lex Luthor steal the plans for a Doomsday Device that was hidden underneath a fish store. So, you’ll spend a lot of time in Contrast moving light fixtures around, so as to make sure all the shadows cast are exactly the right height and right size that they can be platformed across. Then you’ll spend the next three weeks readjusting them over and over again while cursing the Gods that Watch Dogs fell behind schedule and you’re stuck doing this instead.
I have no idea why, but at times Contrast made me think of Castlevania 64. For no reason at all, but that’s what popped into my brain.
I can’t stress enough how tough it is to properly calculate where to line up those shadows when it’s up to you to project them. Maybe it was just me, but I often could not get a feel for the sense of scale the game required. It also doesn’t help that many of the puzzles are timed, with the shadows reverting back to their original positions if you don’t move quickly enough. Early in the game, one of the puzzles took place in an enormous, sprawling room where I had to position lights, elevators, and platforms just right, or else I would have to go back and position them all again. Gateways had similar puzzle designs, but at least there the controls were tight and objectives and end goals were more clear, thus making the complex puzzles boil down to simple reverse-engineering. Here, I typically was never sure exactly where the final landing point was, and the controls were loose and sloppy at best.
I didn’t make it much further past that room at the hotel, in the first fucking chapter. Yes, shameful as hell of me, I admit. I should hang up my critic card and shoot myself or something. But here’s the thing: Contrast is clearly not finished, and since it’s not, I don’t really feel under any obligation to complete the game myself. It was not ready for prime time. While running around, looking for things to dash into, I got stuck in walls no less than one hundred times over the course of a couple of hours of wandering around. I honestly don’t remember any game where I clipped into walls even 10% as much as I did here. More over, sometimes the glitches are just super random. While running around a fire escape, she started jumping, without me pushing any buttons besides the control stick. She just started springing up and down like she was busting for a piss while using a pogo stick. Not only that, but she seemed to be jumping much higher than the natural jump mechanics allow for. It’s one of the most randomly bizarre bugs I’ve ever come across. It didn’t kill the game or impede my progress in any way, but just having it there made me feel like I was wasting my time at amateur hour.
Apparently, nobody told her that only monkeys point.
Plus, as a showcase game for PlayStation Plus and PS4, Contrast sure is ugly. It would have been ugly on PS3. It looks more like an early PS2 game, and not a good-looking one. Completing the “just now released after twelve years in the can” feel of Contrast is an unstable camera and clippy character models. There is nothing “next-gen” on display here. I’m so disappointed because the gimmick was solid and the setting could have held a lot of promise, even if the Film Noir thing is getting dangerously close to over-saturated. This was a weird one for me, because I loved it for the first hour or so, even if I spent a lot of that aimlessly wandering around the lifeless city. But as I came to realize how unpolished Contrast was, my love quickly was replaced by loathing, and I suddenly noticed how broken so much of it is. How the phasing into the walls was touchy, slow in response, and not suited for the types of quick-actions the game sometimes requires. Or how sometimes I would have to stab the square button multiple times to activate a switch, even though I was lined-up correctly enough to have the context-sensitive “PRESS SQUARE YOU IDIOT!!” prompt on the screen. Or how I spent more time bouncing off invisible walls than I did navigating successfully to the next area. So sadly, I must ask Contrast to take a seat next to Mortal Kombat Gold, NFL Fever, and Evergrace in the “victims of a launch deadline rush” memorial wall. Contrast wasn’t quite as dead on arrival as those titles, but the last rites have been administered and its time to go all Old Yeller on it. Bang. Tears. Fade out.
A quick update to Monday’s post about Triviador. The developers of the game quickly got in touch with me and assured me that they would get to the bottom of the problem. It would appear that they’ve fixed the majority of the problems and that Triviador is back to being the awesome Trivial Pursuit meets Risk game I fell in love with. I re-award it my Seal of Approval and have re-ranked it on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
E.Y.E.R.I.S. was developed by AbstrAKT Games
$1 has no idea why I complain about people sniffing farts when I’m a world-renowned fan of picking one’s own nose. Mmm Hmmm, few things in life as satisfying as picking one’s own nose in the making of this review.
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