Dark Quest

July 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

Dark Quest is based on the early 90s cult board game hit HeroQuest.  I’ve never played the game, but after asking around on Twitter, I had a few fans of it confirm that it’s a very close facsimile of the real thing.  If that’s what you’ve been looking for over the last twenty years, this review is irrelevant to you.  Go get it.  This review is for those who missed out on it when it was played using cheap plastic characters, dice, and cardboard.

In the interest of professionalism, I looked up the original rules to the game.  And by that, I mean I watched a four-minute long video by the Angry Video Game Nerd that kind of, sort of explained the rules.  I thought “ugh, looks complicated.  Well, at least I’ll be able to learn how the game plays in the tutorial they no doubt took the time to meticulously craft.”  Which again proves that the whole Cuban women having clairvoyance thing is hogwash.  There is no tutorial for Dark Quest.  You’re thrown into the first dungeon immediately, which offers things that are sort of pointers, but not really.  Fighting enemies, discovering hidden traps, and using various weapons are mechanics the player is left to discover on their own.  I suppose if you’re familiar with HeroQuest, this might not be so bad.  For people like me, it’s clear that we’re unwelcome guests at the Dark Quest party.

Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.

Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.

After somehow stumbling through the first dungeon and picking up a couple secondary characters, I shamefully succumbed to boredom and ignorance in the second level.  Here, you have to find hidden jewels, insert them into statues to activate a door, and then fight roughly five million skeletons, give or take.  The problem here was my previously established “worst random luck in gaming” status was confirmed about ten fold.  I would swing at the skeletons with my barbarian and miss.  Then my dwarf and miss.  Then my wizard and miss.  Or, if I didn’t miss, something would pop up that said “CHEAT DEATH” which I think is basically a fancy way of saying “missed.”  Then, the room full of skeletons would attack.  Funny enough, they would also miss more often than hit, no matter which of the characters they attacked.  But, they had numbers on me, and slowly I would drain away until I was reduced to a pile of bones.  I either was killed by the skeletons or I died of boredom.  Not sure which.

I tried this level a few times.  There is a small instruction card, which noted that the dwarf was the best defender.  So, on my second attempt, when I would enter a room that I knew was filled with baddies, I would lead with him.  Which made sense, since he has the largest movement.  Now, here’s where it gets weird: the dwarf, the guy with the alleged best defense, was the character that the enemies missed the least.  It was un-fucking-canny.  I’m not blaming the developers for me being unlucky, but I would ask them “are you sure this guy has extra points of defense?”  What am I missing here?  Besides 3 out of 4 of my attempts at attacks?  To make matters worse, every once in a while the dungeon master would spit out a random effect, which includes such things as “lose some gold” or “lose your turn.”  What did he hit most often?  “Lose one health.”  Of course that’s what he did.  Meanwhile, I was getting my will to go on sapped by the game’s snail-like pace and unintuitive control scheme.  After giving that second dungeon a fourth go and dying in the same fucking room, I’d had enough.  Yep, I couldn’t even complete the second stage.  Shame on me, I suck as a gamer, yada yada yada.

You know what?  In this case, I don’t think it was just me.  I’ve heard from at least one other player that they were the victim of missing far too often when they went to attack.  Or sometimes a character can be next to an enemy and they can spend multiple turns swinging at each other and missing every time.  Each stage has a time limit in the form of a limited number of turns the player can take.  I never came close to the limit, but the sheer number of turns that a battle can drag out could be problematic in later levels.  Maybe.

Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!

Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!

I know I’m not who this game was made for, and that’s fine with me.  It looks good.  It sounds good.  I know HeroQuest fans are satisfied with it.  Although they’re a little puzzled by the lack of dice.  However, non-fans will find a slow, newb-hating dungeon crawler in board-game form that is about as exciting a watching paint dry.  On top of that, I also think fans of HeroQuest will find things to be disappointed in it.  There’s no multiplayer.  Granted, eliminating a player controlling the enemies is probably a logical and reasonable thing to hand off to the AI.  But, not having the option for four players to take control of the heroes is kind of silly, especially since board games such as this are built entirely around social interaction.  I guess you could hypothetically just pass the controller off to other players after making your move.  It’s not really convenient, but hey, it’s a chance to play a moderately popular  game twenty years after it dropped off the face of the earth.  I mean, it wasn’t popular enough to last more than a couple of years on store shelves.  And you would think fans of the game would still own the corporeal board and game pieces.  Okay, so I have no fucking clue at all why this game exists, since it takes almost no advantage of things that can only be done in the realm of video games.  H.i.v.e. demonstrated they can at least be used to ease people into learning a new game, but Dark Quest doesn’t even do that.  Nor does it have online support.  This was a weird one to review.  A really well produced homage to some vintage thing that I’d never heard of.  I can’t recommend it to non-fans of the thing it’s based on, but even fans might find little to get excited about.  Don’t get me wrong: there’s an audience for Dark Quest.  Twitter already confirmed that for me.  What I’m saying is, if you want to properly pay tribute to a classic gaming property, here’s a thought: use some of this space-age technology we have these days and make the original concept better.  Otherwise, it’s less a tribute and more like grave robbery.

xboxboxartDark Quest was developed by Brain Seal Entertainment

80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind some kind of version of Don’t Break the Ice for Wii U, but only if it involves using the touch screen and an actual mallet in the making of this review.

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Man, I Hate That Indie Game!

July 16, 2013 by 4 Comments

I get Man, I Hate That Indie Game.

I don’t like it, but I get it.

I think.

Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick.  It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined.  This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows.  And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers.  Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions.  I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.

This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off.  The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck.  But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions.  The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here.  The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them.  Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it.  The other two are looking for profits.  And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called "Google" now that you can use to look for boobs that don't cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs.  His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it.  Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio.  Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one.  If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible.  This is rubbing people the wrong way.

Guys, come on.  This is clearly a satire.  And I’m not joking about that either.  I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here.  This was obviously a joke.  And, in a way, it might be brilliant.  I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick.  Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character.  Jaded.  Bitter.  Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit.  The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with.  It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.

As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys.  You can’t be that thick.  It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community.  The kind that nobody really should take seriously.  I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it.  The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting.  It’s uncanny.  And it’s also clearly parody.  The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog.  They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game.  Get it?  This was spot on.  Perhaps too deadpan though.  There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die.  They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.

Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it.  I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes.  No, really.  There are multiple endings of course.  I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls.  This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game.  Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me.  Yea, go figure.  I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it.  My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character "John Conner" and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present.  When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog.  You have to start from the beginning.  Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason.  The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls.  Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game!  You know what?  I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought.  I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have.  It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.

xboxboxartMan, I Hate That Indie Game! was developed by cupholder

240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review.  You know what?  It’s an RPG that actually looks good!

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Monkey Poo Flinger

July 15, 2013 by 7 Comments

No, really.

You can file Monkey Poo Flinger.. again, no really.. under novelty games. It has no real value as a game. On my most generous day, I would call its gameplay mediocre. On a less than generous day, I would probably just flip the bird and make fart noises with my mouth. But seriously, you don’t buy a game called Monkey Poo Flinger expecting the next Spec Ops – The Line. You get it because monkeys are hilarious, poo is hilarious, and monkeys throwing poo is the greatest comedy goldmine of all time.

BUT, if your game is going to be themed around a monkey throwing poo at people, it has to at least look good. Covering some gawking human with feces should be a visually satisfying experience. That’s not the case here. The graphics look crude, so any successful shot doesn’t have any zing to it. I mean, you just absolutely plastered some asshole in the face with a handful of shit. When I do that to Brian, it’s the highlight of my day. Here, it’s just hollow. I mean, look at it.

Footage courtesy of Splazer Productions

It looks horrible. It’s actually not as bad as it appears from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still not fun.  Monkey Poo Flinger is a pretty basic gallery shooter. Press the right trigger to shoot. Targets walk in front of you and you shoot them. Sometimes there are barriers between you and then. Sometimes they throw stuff back. Sometimes the game forgets to take its brain pills and takes away your ability to shoot altogether in a level that is, I shit you not, themed around being constipated. Not that I’m offended. I’ve played games where you have to feed cows prune juice to give them diarrhea and games where you use yellow snowballs as weapons. Do you know what all those games have in common? The novelty wore thin pretty fast, and you’re left with a game that was average at best (Conker) or pretty terrible (South Park 64). The novelty is a non-factor in Monkey Poo Flinger because the graphics just don’t do the concept justice. Thus, it’s boring right from the get-go.

I’ll say this: I thought I would be playing something utterly broken, and that’s not the case. There’s a real game here. It’s just not fun at all. There’s other problems too, like projectiles (especially from the seagulls) being too hard to see, or the targets not being large enough. Probably the best thing about the game is the dialog, which is like saying the best part about getting hypothermia is you get a souvenir blanket. The between-the-levels banter offers, at best, a smirk and a shake of the head. But you have to play a dull as dirt game to get those meager crumbs of entertainment. So I can’t really recommend Monkey Poo Flinger. I also have to ask a couple of questions that really ought to be addressed: where the hell is that monkey getting all that shit from? Does his anus contain a fucking zip-drive? And why does the zoo leave this monkey in such a high foot-trafficked area? I think a better concept would have been a mad monkey won’t stop throwing shit at people and we have to stop it, with the ultimate goal of dropping it off at the state department so that we can send it to North Korea as a, ahem, diplomatic gift.

xboxboxartMonkey Poo Flinger was developed by Derf ‘N’ Derf

80 Microsoft Points had a shitty day in the making of this review.

Yea, I know my reviews have sucked these last couple weeks. I promise, I’ll try to get back into form this week.

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Aqua Kitty

July 9, 2013 by 8 Comments

It’s strange how Defender, one of gaming’s iconic titles of the Golden Age of arcades, hasn’t been cloned to death by modern indie developers. I’m cool with that. Having played an endless supply of uninspired-inspired neo-retro games, I’m not keen on seeing Defender done wrong. Still, how did Defender fall through the cracks? Here’s a game that was predicted to be a huge bust, but went on to become the seventh-best selling coin-operated game ever. Maybe it’s because it was eclipsed by Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Or maybe because Defender’s track record since its original release has been mediocre at best. It got one of the laziest sequels of all time (which was called “Stargate” because of some legal posturing by Williams. James Spader was unavailable for comment). There was an unofficial sequel by Midway that nobody I’ve spoken with has ever played. There was an all-but-forgotten update to the format on Atari Jaguar of all systems, which means it probably sold like six copies. And finally, there was a 2002 3D remake for sixth-generation consoles that quickly found its way into clearance bins. Your average child actor has a more graceful flame-out than Defender has had as a franchise.

You know, for a spry young whippersnapper with a reputation for hating classic games, I sure do seem to have a love for Defender. I even have a Defender homage in my top 25. Then again, Orbitron: Revolution only mimics the flight and shooting mechanics of the arcade classic. You’re actually not defending anything  So I guess it’s not really Defender  More like Aggressor. Was there a game called Aggressor? No? Well, there ought to have been.

Aqua Kitty on Xbox Live Indie Games. AKA the really good version.

Aqua Kitty on Xbox Live Indie Games. AKA the really good version.

If you’re looking for a modern Defender-based indie, Aqua Kitty is probably a closer knock-off. I still prefer Orbitron’s faster pace and modern graphics.  But let it be said, Aqua Kitty is a damn fine game. You’re a cat in a submarine that must defend little aquanauts while shooting wave after wave of enemy. And the cat smokes a pipe, which means he’s one cultured pussy. But, other than the setting and a couple of power-ups, this really is Defender.

Despite being a bit on the bare-bones side, Aqua Kitty is really well produced. I played both the XBLIG and PlayStation Mobile versions. I prefer the XBLIG port, which plays faster. The Vita version has the advantage of being mobile, but it seems clunkier in both framerate and controls. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still a pretty good game. But I would go with the XBLIG port.

It’s not perfect by any stretch. What really bugs me about Aqua Kitty is the total lack of ambition. Defender is an old formula in need of renovation.  Aqua Kitty does some things to smooth that over, but it’s just not enough. Turbo shots? Good idea. But only have one type of turbo shot? Not so ambitious. Power-ups? Good idea. But having only three power-ups, one of which is a bomb, one of which is a health-up, and one of which adds flankers to your ship? Not so ambitious. Plus, the flankers are time-limited. This was presumably done to preserve the difficulty. Given that the screen gets utterly spammed with enemies and projectiles in later levels, this was unnecessary, as those guys really aren’t that effective at combating it. So where’s the wild, more modern weapons and items? Nowhere to be found, and that’s a shame.

The PlayStation Mobile version. Which, as it turns out, I could have got for free a few weeks ago but I mistook it for another, less epilepsy-friendly title. Instead, I ended up paying more for this version than I did for the superior XBLIG port. Smooth, Cathy.

The PlayStation Mobile version. Which, as it turns out, I could have got for free a few weeks ago but I mistook it for another, less epilepsy-friendly title. Instead, I ended up paying more for this version than I did for the superior XBLIG port. Smooth, Cathy.

Don’t let that all discourage you. Aqua Kitty is probably the best pure Defender clone in years and a genuinely good game. Near-perfect difficulty curve. Distinctive enemies. Cutesy themes. Solid play-control. What’s not to love here?  I’m not sure why the inferior PlayStation Mobile is priced $0.50 higher than the XBLIG version. Some kind of temporary insanity brought on by the awesomeness of a pipe-smoking kitten perhaps. Happens to the best of us. I saw the pipe-smoking kitten and totally blacked out. The next thing I know, I’ve got a tattoo and I attempted to marry my Wii U.

xboxboxartAqua Kitty was developed by Tikipod

IGC_Approved240 Microsoft Points (XBLIG) and $3.49 (PlayStation Mobile) were unaware of the existence of a Defender song until some bastard sent it to me. It shall never leave my head now in the making of this review.

Both versions of Aqua Kitty are Chick-Approved, and the XBLIG version is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Even the developers admitted to me that they prefer the XBLIG port. Go with that one.

 

Filed under PlayStation Reviews, XBLIG / Creators Collection Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

DERP of Duty and Uncraft Me !

July 6, 2013 by 7 Comments

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. 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!

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)

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.

xbligLadies

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 guys is hovering around using highly-pressurized urine. Which I'm sure is another fetish but I'm too cowardly to Google it.

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 Me was developed by Team Shuriken (80 Microsoft Points recommend these girls get a mammogram ASAP in the making of this review)

Uncraft Me was 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.

Uncraft Me is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

IGC_Approved

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Limbo

July 3, 2013 by 8 Comments

Probably spoilers in here.  Just a warning.

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.

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.

boxartlgLimbo was developed by Playdead

IGC_Approved1200 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.

Limbo is Chick Approved. 

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Your Bright Futures

July 1, 2013 by 11 Comments

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.

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Hotline Miami

June 29, 2013 by 12 Comments

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.

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.

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.

imageHotline Miami was developed by Dennaton Games

$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. 

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Tales from the Dev Side: Why Boardgames are a Great First Game by Sean Colombo

June 28, 2013 by 5 Comments

Why Boardgames are a Great First-Game

by Sean Colombo of BlueLine Game Studios

After Indie Gamer Chick said that our game, Hive, was the best game since Tetris (okay, I’m seriously over-exaggerating heavily paraphrasing here), she brought up that there seem to be a decent number of game developers starting out by making video versions of board games.

It was no accident that I chose to start with our first major offering being a board game. There are quite a few advantages of starting your game company with board games, and today I’m going to share some of them because it’s IGC’s anniversary and I’m an Indie Game Developer so I’m too cheap/skinflint to buy her team a real gift.

Faster to Market

Probably the single biggest obstacle that I’ve seen keeping people out of the game industry is that they can’t finish their game. We all love games and tend to have big visions (eyes) and finite amounts of time (stomaches). So it’s really a race to finish a game before we lose motivation or come up with a more distracting idea to pull us away.

Acknowledging this tendency, we should set ourselves up for success by choosing projects where the total amount of work is smaller. Starting with an existing engine (eg: Unity) or releasing a very simple game are good strategies. Similarly, you can cut down the scope of your game drastically by choosing something – such as board games – where thousands of hours of playtesting have already been done on the concept.

Many people forget to bake this into their time-estimates for the game, but the playtesting needed to make a game actually fun and with high replayability, is far trivial. For some examples, I was playing a paper-prototype of Chess: The Gathering around a year ago and I think Tim has been playing it every time I’ve seen him since then. It was a little awkward that one time during yoga class, but let’s just all be thankful that using Warrior Pose to summon pieces didn’t make it in the game. Similarly, I played Cannon Brawl about a year ago and the gameplay was what many would call “done”, but Pete and his testers kept at that thing and now there’s awesome new units that are like magic missiles and ba-bombs!

We certainly had to do a bunch of playtesting of our interface for Hive, but the literally-thousands of games of gameplay playtesting by John Yianni (the developer of the Hive board game), made it so that we could spend a decent chunk of time polishing visuals and AI while still being able to complete the game before we died of old age, went broke, gave up, etc..

screen4

Market Recognition

Additionally, when you’re starting out nobody knows/cares who you are. If you start with a board game, all of its fans already know what your game is about! On our very first blog post where we announced Hive, we almost immediately had a commenter (who was a complete stranger as far as I know) telling us that they were looking forward to it! That kind of instant fanbase doesn’t happen on its own.

This is probably the point where someone digs up that quote from one of the Team Meat guys that goes something like ‘if you have a good game, the internet will make sure everyone finds it’. Those meaty fellows are wrong. They make great games and I love them to itty bitty pieces, but they built up a following from about a decade of games prior to Super Meat Boy and even had a specific MB following from their flash game “Meat Boy”. If they didn’t have their presence built up, SMB would not have sold as well. This buildup is the same for many of the indies that we think of as overnight successes: Behemoth cranked on several Alien Hominid releases before the (mainstream) world learned their name from Castle Crashers, Rovio released around 35 games before they ‘launched’ (ba-dum-cha) Angry Birds, and Notch (Minecraft) has been making games since the mid-80s.

Are you still not convinced? Wow, you’re stubborn. Allow me to predict the future! Ian Stocker made Escape Goat which Indie Gamer Chick reviewed as the best XBLIG of all time (no joke) and currently reigns #1 as the king-goat of the Leaderboard. He’s also released Soul Caster I & II and is finishing up Escape Goat 2 with Waking Mars artist Randy O’Connor, at the time of this writing. My prediction: even though EG1 was critically acclaimed, the reputation-snowball is going to make EG2 sell more than twice as much as EG1. I’m so confident that if it doesn’t, I’ll give out all of my remaining free-codes to Coagulate on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Now that I’ve beaten this dead-horse back into stardust… we all agree that your sales suck until people know you. Here’s where boardgames come in: board game fans will buy your game without knowing who you are. Now, you won’t get all “board game fans” but fans of Hive didn’t need to hear of BlueLine Games before they bought our first game. After 100 repetitions of our splash-screen, now they’re fully borgified and will probably buy our next title, Khet 2.0, even if they haven’t played that specific board game.

Attainable IP

Other than the very mainstream board games whose rights have been bought up by Mattel and Hasbro, many board games creators are still willing to deal with indie developers. The board game industry itself is parallel to the video game industry in many ways and most of their developers are “indies”. One of the larger challenges in working with these developers is that most of them aren’t going to want to put an up-front financial investment in. You’ll have to be prepared to eat through your savings just to take the gamble at releasing another game to market that may or may not be successful. That’s just part of the job though.

In addition to indie IP, there are a ton of games that don’t even require a license. For example, BoardGameGeek lists of over 600 public domain board games. These come with their own challenges too, of course; every platform seems to have 3 versions of Chess, Checkers and Go within a week of launch.

Spectrangle360 was another Chick-Approved board game based on an existing property.

Spectrangle360 was another Chick-Approved board game based on an existing property.

Reusable Code

Board games have a lot of re-usable concepts in them. Players, pieces, boards, plies, AI based on Minimax, etc.. If you do it right, you can make your second game far more quickly than your first. We had hoped we could make our second game in half the time of the first. So far, it looks like Khet 2.0 will take one-quarter of the dev-time that Hive took.

One huge caveat here is that making reusable code is a huge difference from writing a general-purpose board-game engine. If you want to start your project by making the most universal, extensible board game engine in the world, then you’re almost certainly never going to finish your project (see the first section of this post!). However, as you create things you need, it’s fairly easy to plan ahead and make sure that anything general you’re writing (such as Minimax AI), is made in a reusable way.

Now, Step Off!

If you’re looking to make a game to break into the industry, board games can be a great way to start! However, if you try to knock off Hive or Khet, I may have to go all Dr. Karate on you!

But seriously, have fun making games and whatever game you decide to make – best of luck finishing it!
– Sean Colombo

If you like board games or indie game development, please follow our twitter @BlueLineGames, or our Facebook page to see behind the scenes!

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Home: A Unique Horror Adventure

June 24, 2013 by 2 Comments

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.

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.

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.

HomeHome: A Unique Horror Adventure was developed by Benjamin Rivers Inc.

$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.

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