In sports, Knicks beat the Warriors 103 to 95. Or possibly 99 to 93. In fact, we’re not even sure if the Knicks won. Carmelo Anthony had 31 points off 27 for 27 shooting from the field. That statistic is actually impossible, but we can only report on the numbers as they are given to us.
Thankfully, real life sports statistics tend to be fairly accurate, unlike the post-game stats that Null Battles spits out. Talking about the type of game it is (arena shooter), how it plays (kind of fun, kind of sloppy), and what makes it unique (strange gravity effects) is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I find that knowing who wins or loses arena shooters is a pretty big deal to most gamers. I’m the type of person who meticulously studies my post-game stats when I play Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty. If those games reported different scores and stats to each player, who would want to play them? I wouldn’t.
I tried reviewing Null Battles back in early September and this problem came up. When I took on my amigo Bryce online, this is the score that showed on their screen.
And this is what showed up on mine.
Same game, vastly different stats. My policy with online games is to give developers a chance to fix the problems before I post the proper review. I got notice that the game was finally ready a few weeks ago, but I got caught up in the latest batch of new releases and forgot to go back to Null Battles. As it turns out, there was no reason to rush. Again, here are the results from Bryce’s side of things.
And here are the results from mine.
Again, same game. We’re in agreement of the following things: #1, Bryce did NOT have 100% headshot percentage, and I didn’t have anywhere close to 70%. #2, none of the scores seemed to lineup with what was happening in the game, except the fact that I lost. #3, not knowing does negate the amount of fun you have leading up to it. Sorry, it just plain does. Maybe not for some (Brian for example) as much as it did so for me. But this is my blog and I have to say this problem renders Null Battles appeal null and void.
80 Microsoft Points have absolutely no interest in playing split-screen multiplayer in this day and age in the making of this review.
A review copy was provided by Techno Hermit Games for this review. The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The opinions of this review are her’s alone.
They still have a Second Chance with the Chick. If the scores were accurate, this game would have made the Leaderboard.
Well, this has never been done before. A review of a game done while simultaneously interviewing the developer. I almost didn’t review Three Dead Zed, which sponsors my review index. Sponsorship on my site is done by donating to charities (either Autism Speaks or the Epilepsy Foundation), so I don’t personally gain anything from it. Well, unless the $50 minimum that is contributed to the Epilepsy Foundation is exactly what they need at that very moment to cure epilepsy forever. And you never know, that might happen! Still, I didn’t want to be accused of a conflict of interest. If the game sucked, that’s fine. Nobody would accuse me of slamming a game because it sponsored my site. But, what if the game was good? What if it was the best XBLIG I’ve ever played? People would question whether it was legitimate or not.
Thankfully for me (and not so thankfully for the guys at Gentleman Squid), I don’t have to worry about it. Three Dead Zed is atrocious. The idea is you control three zombies, switching between them to make your way across platforms, shoving boxes, avoiding lasers, and killing people. The game looks great, but the controls are never responsive. The standard, default zombie feels sluggish and slow, and the jumping physics feel too heavy. This is the only zombie that can climb ladders or hit switches. On the flip side of this, there’s a quadrupedal that moves way too fast, jumps way too high, too far, and is a nightmare to control. It can’t climb ladders, operate switches, or do anything but jumping and wall jumping. Finally, there’s a giant, angry she-zombie that you use to break down walls and move heavy objects. This one is slower than death by starvation, can’t jump, and its attacks don’t feel like they have any oomph to them.
Basically, I didn’t like Three Dead Zed at all. Since I was due to interview developer Fabian Florez, I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and do the interview at the same time, and see what he had to say about some of the issues I had. All things considered, he was a good sport about it!
Cathy: Before I get to brow-beating you for the ungodly piece of shit that is the game you made, can you give me a little background on your team and how you guys came together?
Fabian Florez: Heh. Well we all work in the same main company. We normally make interactive training for things like online courses for schools or other technical related subjects. Well, the main business was getting slow, and rather than let us all go, I proposed that we take a crack at making games. We had all the primary people needed for a team right there: Artists, programmers, lover of games. So they took a chance on us. Now, with my review coming up, I think “Why would you make this piece of shit” might hurt my chances of a good review.
Cathy: If your job security was depended upon how likely your supervisor is able to hit one of the light switches in the game, would you just immediately start packing your desk?
Fabian: NEXT QUESTION PLEASE!
Cathy: Do you know pink slips typically aren’t pink? The ones I use are white. Even the rubber stamp isn’t pink. More like a crimson.
Fabian: I don’t even think they give slips at all. They just coral you into a room and just say, “Yea it’s been nice but you got to go.”
Cathy: Okay, okay, in all seriousness, why are the controls in Three Dead Zed so all over the place?
Fabian: We drink a lot. OK, *I* drink a lot. It seemed to make sense to me when I was playtesting…that one night…before release. Can you help clarify a specific point?
Cathy: I’ll start with the speedy dude that runs on all fours. It’s too easy to overshoot everything. He moves too fast, he jumps too far, and it’s too loose so it’s easy to over jump stuff. But the controls are also so loose that if you try self-correct mid-air, you’re just as likely to under-jump.
Fabian: He’s very debatable. Some people don’t mind him and adapt quickly. Others hate him outright. I do think it’s a bit of a failure on our part for tutorials and stage layout. For example, on the second tutorial stage after you unlock him, some people don’t just jump straight up. I’ve seen people play this on YouTube, streams, and in person. They always want to jump in a direction first. He jumps higher and you can have a control fall if you do that first. Or jump higher to stick to a higher part of the wall. Sometimes I’ve seen people always want to jump with him everywhere. Some of the jumping puzzles were meant to be played with the classic zombie, not the jumper, but it’s not obvious enough. That’s just a failure on us.
I could go more into it, but ultimately, a game should just be played without a “guide” so I think that’s why we get hot/cold responses.
Cathy: I get a lot of developers who want to send me a detailed analysis of how to play their game when they request a review. Always pisses me off and gets things off on the wrong foot. Doesn’t mean I am certain to hate a game (Hidden in Plain Sight’s developer did it and I ranked it), but it feels like developers know from the get-go there are problems and still release anyway. Do you think if you had held off on release you could have addressed these issues, or did the game pass the point of no return for salvation?
Fabian: That’s a great question. We initially released the game earlier in the year for Windows and we though we addressed a lot of those initial issues. Our tutorial section for example is longer and added things to what we though might be “second nature” had to be added. Like the area showing you how to drop down from floors. So unfortunately, it’s just that developer trap of “I think we got everything! Release it. OH NO not again!” Tried to touch all bases, but I think it’s really difficult.
But, I think there was also some confusion on our part because a lot of those comments did come from people playing with a keyboard. We did get feedback from people saying switching to a controller made things easier. So, porting to Xbox seemed like it would alleviate that since you can only play with a controller.
Cathy: There’s a lot of niggling control issues. Jumping off ladders with the default zombie, hitting switches, and some problems with collision detection. We’ll start with the switches first. I’m personally having problems lining up and pushing them correctly. Brian isn’t. His IQ is about 50 points lower than mine, so if your target audience is dumbass pseudo-gingers, mission accomplished, but wouldn’t larger area-detections be a no-brainer?
Fabian: Switches: It’s a pretty sizable hit detection. It was increased from the Windows to the Xbox build. The reason why it’s not even bigger, if I remember correctly, is because we didn’t want you activating things behind a wall on the other side on some scenarios. We’ll take a look at it again though.
Ladders is the new one that I did witness in our Peer Review. Never heard that until we ported it. It’s another one of those, “Probably include it in the tutorials?” Push left or right and jump. I saw Ryan (aka MasterBlud of VVGTV) playing the game and he was stating how he hated the ladders also. The problem there is we have areas where you are going to want to jump from ladder to ladder. If you just push left or right and he drops, you wont be able to jump to the ladder. Minus the actual jumping from ladder to ladder, this is very similar to Mega Man’s approach. Except once you push jump, Mega Man would drop.
Cathy: I get that you guys were trying to go for a Trine feel, but one of the other problems was the game couldn’t seem to decide what it should focus on: platforming or puzzling. Some games comfortably blend both, but this one seemed to jump from one to the other and it was jarring and killed the pace. I don’t really know how to word that into a question for you. First off, I assume Trine was inspiration for Three Dead Zed?
Fabian: We get Trine a lot and I swear, that was not our intent! It was one of those things that just happened that way. Although I owned it, I still haven’t played it. 3DZ was inspired by a mix of the C64 game Goonies and NES Batman (hence the wall cling). If you never played The Goonies, you controlled two people who need to do something to unlock a door. Tough as nails. Anyway, along the way, we dropped that because, hey, we’re new devs and that was biting off more than we can chew. So we combined them all together to be one “super zombie” and made it more of a traditional puzzle platformer. Nothing too crazy in the way of puzzles though simple things for the most part. The NES Batman was also a heavy influence on why the fast zombie sprints forward so quickly. Some like it. Some hate it. It was meant more for moving from wall to wall and that was it. “You are going this direction!”
(While this interview is going on, Bryce and my boyfriend Brian are playing through Three Dead Zed, enjoying it way more than I did, and start busting up laughing from chasing an old lady into a saw blade).
Cathy: Brian and Bryce just chased an old lady into a saw blade.
Fabian: Brian and Bryce, you are AWESOME. We wanted people to scare “innocents” into the hazards. We think it’s funny too. We almost had an award for scaring old ladies into buzz-saws but then pulled it.
Cathy: I guess this moves us into the art. It’s pretty good. It reminded me of the stuff by Behemoth (Castle Crashers, Alien Hominid). I find a lot of games on XBLIG that put a premium on audio-visuals tend to be mediocre or worse. You just became the poster child for that. Yay?
Fabian: *laughing* Well we tried! We thought, “Man if we could just make something so beautiful, it’ll be like a Greek Siren to Indie Gamer Chick and she’ll give us glowing reviews!”
Cathy: Good graphics do get my attention when it comes time to review a game, but once I start playing, gameplay is all that matters. However, your game does have appeal in other areas. The voice overs are great. Who did them?
Fabian: Awesome to hear! Get it?! Hear?
Cathy: ..
Fabian: Ahem.. Actually our star voice actor would love to read that. The two main voices you hear the most (intercom and shadowy figure) are actually the same guy. The intercom is inspired by Rick Moranis/Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. The Shadowy voice is…shadowy? The other voices are various people including the team. He also does the voice in the cut scene changing from zombie to zombie. He actually does professional voice over work, and he offered to help us out for free.
Cathy: Do you have any future plans for game development?
Fabian: After your review? No. Closing shop. Taking our ball home and doing lots of crying.
Cathy: Hang on one second, I need to add another check mark to my gun.
Fabian: Actually, yes. We’re working on another game. It’ll be our first multiplayer game. You can put the chisel down.
Cathy: Awwww.
Fabian: Hey, you killed our joy. Only fair we kill yours.
Cathy: Touché. What lessons did you learn from making Three Dead Zed that you’re going to apply to the development of.. what the fuck is it called anyway?
Fabian: It’s called 2012. Better late than never? Actually we have no name yet. Basically: Playtest, playtest, and playtest. You really can’t do enough. We did quite a bit for Three Dead Zed (Both online and in person) but you just really need to do more than you think. A BIG sample definitely helps you find trouble areas.
Cathy: Have anything to say in closing?
Fabian: I do thank you for trying out our game regardless! You’re tough as nails, we’ll hopefully win you over with the next game.
I hope so too. I would like to thank Fabian for being cool about this admittedly awkward situation. He’s a good guy, and he should be proud of his efforts. I still can’t recommend Three Dead Zed though. Great graphics, great concept, and its heart was in the right place. It’s just not beating.
What can I say about the Trailer Park King games that I haven’t already said here, here, or here? Nothing has changed for the third (or fourth) installment. Horrible voice acting. Ridiculous, nonsensical plot. Lack of actual gameplay. Humor so crude and forced that it would make Seth MacFarlane blush with shame. By all rights, these are games I should hate. So why do I keep coming back to them? More importantly, why do I keep adding them to my Leaderboard? Granted, not one game in the series is in the top 100, but still, shouldn’t I be lining them up against a wall and gunning them down like Al Capone? These are bad games. I’m known to clean and gut bad games and mount them on my wall. So what the fuck, Cathy?
Doctor House would diagnose the nurse with explosive jug syndrome. Or it could be lupus.
I think part of it is how much Trailer Park King revels in its subject matter. The characters are all so uncouth, shallow, and flat-out stupid that you can’t help but laugh at it. Another part of it is developer Sean Doherty is Canadian and it strikes me as a potentially offensive look at how our neighbors to the north view the poor of our country. It straddles the line between parody and socioeconomic bigotry, but it’s so damn absurd that nobody could possibly be offended. It’s also one of those “raunchy” games that other developers burn in effigy. I see where they’re coming from, but Trailer Park King doesn’t strike me as particularly sexy. The characters here are so.. well.. trashy, that I can’t believe anyone could get off on this stuff. If these were real people, you could probably get an STD just by thinking about them while jerking off. Never mind that the characters are grossly malnourished and their tits are obviously fake.
It’s rare that games on XBLIG are so bad that they’re good, but that’s the best way to summarize the Trailer Park King series. They’re guilty pleasures. The series might be running out of steam though. This time around, you have to prove that series antagonist Truck is not a zombie. How do you do this? Well, zombies can’t dance, can’t be hypnotized, eat brains, animals don’t like them, and most important, they can’t be anal probed. So you run down those things like a checklist and see if Truck takes the bait on any of them. It’s as dumb as it sounds, but it’s still funny in a self-aware “I’m playing a game where someone shoves a large anal prob up a dude’s ass to prove he’s not a zombie” sort of away.
The only minigame in Trailer Park King carries on the tradition of being needless and dull.
For the third (or fourth) episode in the series, there’s only one mini-game: a shooting gallery where you must fire on wanted posters that have descriptions like “skank” or “dumbass.” Prior knowledge of the series is probably required, or you can just wait for dumbass to pop up and shoot the posters of Truck like I did. It’s not the most well conceived, but it’s better than the sliding puzzle of Cherry Poke Prison. Otherwise, the game seemed like the shortest of the series (it took me about thirty minutes to finish) and the jokes are starting to wear a bit thin. I still enjoyed Trailer Park King 3, but I won’t be reviewing any more games in the series. Quite frankly, I’m running out of stuff to say about them. They are what they are. You’ll either hate them on principle, or you’ll enjoy them for being utterly bad, yet oddly compelling pieces of shit. And hey, white trash is totally an in thing right now. If Ted Nugent is looking for someone to make a video game about her life, she should ring up Sean.
Writing about a really bad game is easy. Writing about a really good game is easy. When a game is middling, neither that good nor that bad, I struggle with my goal to write an entertaining review. I’ve done a few first-person shooters on XBLIG. Of them, two are on my leaderboard: Send in Jimmy and Devil Blood. As of this writing, they occupy the very bottom two spots. I’ll fully admit, those games are both atrocious and could (some would argue “should”) be exorcised from the board. But at least they were playable and fun in a train-wreck sort of way. Others have either been glitchy, poorly conceived, or just plain boring. I previously noted that I was surprised at how few FPSs are on XBLIG, considering that the Xbox 360 is pretty much a dedicated shooter console for many of its owners. Sadly, every XBLIG FPS plays like it arrived to the party about fifteen years too late to be enjoyable. Demon House is not really different. It’s not horrible, but it’s not exceptional enough to make this a fun review to write. This will probably not be one of my better ones, so here’s a preemptive apology. For what it’s worth, I’m doing Trailer Park King 3 next!
Weapon design in Demon House ranges from inspired to predictable, and getting the really fun stuff takes too long for such a short game.
First off, yea, Demon House looks relatively good. I mean, it still looks archaic. It would have been just fine in 2000 as a Nintendo 64 or PlayStation title. In 2012? It falls into the dreaded “it looks good for an XBLIG” category. And that’s where it also falls in other areas. It’s designed well. You know, for a FPS on XBLIG. The controls are pretty good, at least for an FPS on XBLIG. I accept that a first-person shooter is an incredibly hard game to design and the guys behind Demon House should be commended for creating one of the better ones on the platform. But all I care about is how much fun I can have with a game, and fun is a fleeting commodity here.
It started good. Really good in fact. The game opens inside a haunted house. This is your stereotypical amusement-park style ghost mansion, with all the clichés. Piano playing itself? Check. Spooky shadows? Check. Lightning custom-designed to give me a seizure? Grumble, check. Baby carriage that rocks itself? Check, and fucking creepy. I wasn’t kidding about the amusement park feel of Demon House. Considering that the enemies are all robotic devices, I kind of figured the concept here was supposed to be something like Westworld, where the animatronics had simply started to run amok. That would be an interesting plot, but instead you’re dealing with a mad alchemist. That’s lame, but at least the haunted house setting is.. oh. Never mind, that’s only for the first half of the game. The second half takes place in an utterly generic cathedral/catacombs place thingie that looks like it was lifted from Quake and/or any of a trillion Quake mods out there. Good move Photonic Games. I was almost interested for a bit.
The only thing Demon House: FPS had going for it that made it stand out was the legitimately creepy haunted house setting. Once you’re removed from that and instead inserted into the boring, sterile, lifeless second act, the game becomes a chore. Oddly enough, after about thirty minutes in that section, I was hoping the game would just end. And then it did. That was very kind of it.
It’s not THAT complex. I’m pretty sure enemies that stand back and shoot at you instead of charging at you has been around since I was at least old enough to ride the Haunted Mansion ride.
Let’s be clear here: I had fun with Demon House and it is going on the leaderboard. I liked the opening act that much. While playing it, I figured it could be a top-fifty game. Despite dated gameplay, the shooting mechanics are fun, the enemy design is neat, and the floor layout with the multiple hidden nooks made this enjoyable. And then you leave the house and suddenly you’re transported back to 1996, which is not where I wanted to be. The placement of the game started to sink. Not like a rock, which would have been quick and relatively painless. It sinks more like a boat. You know that scene in Titanic where they watch as the ship breaks apart and the lifeboats (some filled to half-capacity) look on in horror? Yea, Demon House is the Titanic and you’re Kathy Bates watching on in horror. Not me though. I’m more like Kathy Bates from Misery, taking a sledge-hammer to the feet of Photonic Games. Out of love of course. 🙂
Hostile Hustle combines a Space Invaders clone with a climber. Sounds like it should work, and maybe it can, but not the way its done here. The problem is gaming has kind of evolved past the original, slow-as-constipated-shit Space Invaders formula. That’s why recent titles in the franchise feature insane amounts of power-ups and move at the speed of lightning. Hostile Hustle slows things back to a crawl, resulting in a title that is exhausting in its tedium. Most innovations in gaming these days come from combining one type of game with another to create an unholy hybrid. In this regard, combing a climber with Space Invaders is like combing a rain forest with napalm. Well, not really I guess, because that would at least be fun to watch.
Here’s the basic setup: a wave of baddies takes formation. As you shoot at them, they disappear and platforms spawn. Jump up the platforms, more baddies appear. Shoot them and more platforms appear. Eventually, an exit will appear. Some traps might pop up, like spikes, stun-lock lasers, air compressors, or spiky balls, but otherwise it’s just you, shooting, and more shooting. 30 levels, good luck having fun.
People out there wonder how other people can truly believe the Earth is only 4,000 years old. To which I say, look at how some people choose to ignore 30 years of gaming evolution in favor of recycling stale gameplay. It’s not that big a stretch.
Mechanically, Hostile Hustle mostly works. The controls are adequate, but I spent most of the game wishing I had a double jump instead of the lame ass “push the enemies back and/or give yourself a seizure” wave thingie that happens when you press the A button mid-jump. Never needed it once, thought it was the most worthless creation since the solar-powered toaster. However, there are some design choices that are really mind bogglingly stupid, like having a bright-orange sun in the background. Why is that annoying? Because enemy projectiles are bright-orange fireballs. It doesn’t seem like it was something done to make the game challenging either. It just seems like a brain fart that made it all the way through production, which made me question whether anyone at Lethal Martini actually played their own fucking game.
Other hiccups include not having enough power-ups, and the ones you get not lasting long enough. Sure, they might make the game too easy. Quick survey though: who wants to play a game that is fun, fast-paced, and easy over a game that is slow, plodding, and only slightly less easy? These are the choices you have to make, developers. Remember, your goal is to give players a couple of hours of entertainment, not bore them into a coma. Hostile Hustle’s lack of frills strikes me as done in that manner because that’s how games used to be. Sure, because games used to be designed to rob you of money one-quarter at a time. When your game is a one-time purchase of $1, your entire focus should be “make sure my game isn’t boring 99% of the time, so that anyone who plays it recommends it to others.” Come on people, this shit should be self-explanatory.
After about 45 minutes, I wanted to throw the towel in with Hostile Hustle, but the only thing it was truly guilty of was being about as exciting as bread-flavored gum. Then I fought the first boss, and once I picked apart all the little green blobs, the stage didn’t end. Why? Because some of the enemies were hanging out at the far left and right edges of the screen, not moving, not shakable with the silly solar-wave thingie. There were also no platforms for which I could stand on to shoot them, because the level was designed by someone with no interest in actually playing the game, and thus I had to fall all the way to the bottom of the map just to be able to shoot the fuckers.
Hostile Hustle would have been way more interesting if it had been made up just of these types of fights. There’s only two, and one ended with my system crashing.
At this point, I had the excuse I needed to quit Hostile Hustle, because it had officially crossed the line from being bland to being bad. Like an idiot, I pressed on because I held out hope that something could be salvaged from this piece of shit. But no, just 14 more levels of agony followed by another shitty boss fight. The only changes being more traps and seemingly shorter levels. By level 25, I was seriously contemplating whether I wanted to play a game ever again, but there’s only five levels left, and how much worse could it get? Then I beat the final boss, and the game promptly crashed. Of course it did. So nearly 90 minutes of my life burned to see the infamous Code 4 ending. Do I recommend Hostile Hustle? I would sooner recommend you drink an actual Lethal Martini.
Entropy was part of the third Indie Games Uprising. Like other members belonging to the second week of the event, it was one of the weaker games. Graphically, it was head-and-shoulders above the rest, but the gameplay was clunky and boring. The developers, even knowing that I wasn’t likely to upgrade the status of their creation to Chick Approved, still asked me to play around with it some more today to show the progress they’ve made. Guess what? They were right. The game is improved, but my personal seal of quality is out of reach.
I would make a Jerry Lee Lewis joke, but there’s nothing great about Entropy. Not even the balls of fire.
Before going any further, you should probably check out my write-up on Entropy. So what’s changed? Well, thankfully I didn’t offer up my immortal soul for the ability to pick up the balls. The guys at Autotivity Games added such a feature in. It’s not perfect by any means. In fact, the learning curve for it is almost as steep as figuring out the best way to slowly push the balls around using your body. It’s still a step in the right direction, even if they got a little dog doo on their shoes. They also cut out some of the more tedious bits in the opening section of the game. Again, smart move.
Thankfully there’s no cake joke.
Sadly, the choppy frame-rate is not only still intact, but it’s actually a bit skippier. So now when you chase around the little pink ball of light designed to point you in the right direction to go, you might not even see where it’s going. One step forward in dog poo, one step backwards into a bear trap. It sucks because Entropy really did go all out with clever puzzles and beautiful scenery, but the biggest problem still remains: Entropy is boring. I’m not encouraging the guys at Autotivity to call it quits. But they need to stop mending this snoozer and start work on something that can capture people’s imaginations. Start by giving it a name less depressing. What is the opposite of Entropy? I don’t know. Euphoric Kangaroos Dancing the Polka? Feel free to steal that one. It has to be good enough to sell at least 100 copies.
Note: this review originally said that Ninja Crash was 80MSP. The actual price is 240MSP. Sorry for the mistake.
Being lazy, I prefer to sum up the Xbox Live Indie Game market by saying a game is just XBLIG’s version of an existing game. It saves a lot of time. So I can say Gateways is XBLIG’s version of Portal. Doom & Destiny is XBLIG’s version of Final Fantasy. Sushi Castle is XBLIG’s version of Binding of Isaac. It’s easy! Frees up my time to watch reruns of House with my boyfriend.
Today’s game is Ninja Crash, which I’ll call XBLIG’s version of Balloon Fight. Which was Nintendo’s version of Joust. Which was Williams’ version of mixing tequila and LSD and translating it to a video game. To be perfectly honest, I never played Joust. I’ve played Balloon Fight, because I got it for my birthday on Animal Crossing. Played it for about fifteen minutes, thought it was okay, wish my gift had been bamboo flooring for my house instead. Haven’t really thought much of it since. Well, now it’s back as an XBLIG, only with more features, modern graphics, and somewhat shoddier gameplay.
I’ve shown this game to five people and they all said “wow, looks like Smash Bros.!” And then they see it in motion and are like “oh, it’s Balloon Fight.” And then they make a sad face.
One of the reasons why I never got into Balloon Fight was the slow, plodding controls combined with the unforgiving inertia that seemed designed to inspire new curse words being invented. Sadly for me, those controls are faithfully recreated here. It’s not that the game controls like shit. It controls just like the 1984 Nintendo game it was inspired by. My problem is, gaming has come far in the last 28 years. All that progress is ignored in Ninja Crash. Maybe that’s what fans of the original want. When I tweeted that I was playing a Balloon Fight clone, I had several people do the Dance of Joy and demand that I release the name of the game I was playing to them. Guess what? I’m sure they’ll love it.
I didn’t though. I might have, if their attempts at improving the formula didn’t fail. But they did. Here’s a common problem they tried to fix: enemies hanging out near the ceiling. Happened in Balloon Fight. As I just learned, happened in Joust too. Unlike a lot of attempts at improving games, this is a real thing that did require improvement, so I applaud them for giving it a try. It just didn’t work. When you or enemies hover too close to the ceiling, a finger comes down from the sky and pushes you back towards the ground. And I’ll be damned if it’s not the most annoying thing in gaming since Baby Mario’s cry in Yoshi’s Island. It also pushes the enemies down, often right into you. I appreciate the effort, but wouldn’t a better idea have been to line the ceiling with barbed wire or something? Hell, they actually did do that in later levels, and it worked. The finger thing is like trying to stop people from speeding by putting a brick wall up every five feet.
The other big problem is popping guys doesn’t result in their death. It didn’t in Balloon Fight either, but at least if they landed on the ground, you had a few seconds to kick them off the edge before they inflated another balloon and took off. You don’t even have a full second in Ninja Crash. Once a dude lands, they immediately begin inflating a new balloon and take to the skies before you can even collect yourself. And unlike Balloon Fight, simply touching them while they’re grounded does not defeat them. You have to land on them again. Because you don’t so much control your character as you do aim him and hope for the best, this feature serves to multiply the frustration factor. Granted, they did make it so if you pop a dude and he falls too great a distance before hitting the floor, he dies (or crashes, if you will), but I almost never did kill a dude that way. I either had to pop them above the water or hope like hell I could pop them close enough to land that I could double-tap them. What was so wrong with the way it was done in Balloon Fight?
The screenshots don’t do the game justice. It does look really good in motion. Oh, and see those spears in the corner? They kill you.
Team Devil Games had their heart in the right place with Ninja Crash, and some additions to the formula (environmental hazards, weapons) are a welcome change of pace. But every step forward is followedby a bigger step backwards. Ninja Crash has an audience out there that will enjoy its take on the classic Joust formula, but I didn’t like it at all and I can’t recommend it. I also didn’t get a chance to give this a try in competitive four-player mode. Sorry Team Devil Games, but you did sort of release right in the middle of the holiday gaming season. Trying to tear my friends away from Borderlands 2, Halo 4, or Black Ops 2 is an act of futility not seen since the time I watched Brian attempt to break the world record for most live bees fit into a mouth.
It’s been a while since I did one of these. I really wish developers would take me up on the Second Chance with the Chick offer more often. I know a lot of games I bust on here get patched up later, but developers are gun-shy about having me “go after” their games again. Even if Second Chances are typically lighter and focus on the changes to the game, with less emphasis on smacking games down. Or sometimes they patch the game and expect me to just Second Chance it on my own. I don’t keep track of what games have been patched (XboxIndies.com has a sidebar that lets you know what games have been updated). It’s up to developers to let me know. And then just wait while I drag my feet to write the review. Speaking of which, hi there Halcyon Softworks! I didn’t forget you!
We’re in Hell already?
I reviewed Slick, a punisher with Game Boy-like visuals back in July and I hated it because I felt it was too brutal. People say I have a bias against punishers, and I say “guilty as charged.” I don’t understand the appeal in them. I don’t understand why they keep getting made, especially when they consistently sell like shit on XBLIG (only 2 out of the top 100 best-selling XBLIGs are punishers). The market as a whole doesn’t want them. They’ll earn you fans among a very small niche of “retro” gamers, and they might even earn you fans among the development community if they are well designed and bear and uncanny resemblance to vintage games of yesteryear. But if you are capable of doing a very well made, yet overly difficult platformer, you should be capable of making a game that everyone can enjoy. Who knows? It might even sell in greater numbers.
I think everyone agrees that the Apple Jack games are the pinnacle of design among punishers on XBLIG. I don’t even like them, but I tip my hat to them for audio-visual design, play control, and charm. Especially the sequel. Among the closed-off XBLIG community, they’re highly regarded. But when you get down to the cold, hard facts, the original Apple Jack isn’t one of the top 300 selling games. Apple Jack 2 isn’t even in the top 900. Mind you, Apple Jack 2 made the rounds on mainstream gaming sites, including full reviews at IGN and Kotaku. And it’s already been passed on the top seller list by such recent fare as Lucky. Fans of the game don’t understand it. Hell, I don’t even totally understand it, but I’ll make a guess: punishers don’t lend themselves to word-of-mouth sales. I’m guessing not many people say “this game is damn near impossible to play and makes me feel like an inadequate twat. GO BUY IT!”
Where was I?
Slick. So in my original review, I did a step-by-step diagram of why one of the stages didn’t work so well. The game asked for perfect precision from players, while dealing with shaky controls and insanely unfair collision detection. The guys behind it have tightened these issues up. Collision detection more closely resembles the outlines of the enemies, and controls seem to be tightened, but that might be a perception thing. I still don’t like the level design, or the art style. Then again, I never owned an original Game Boy, so this does nothing to tickle my nostalgia rib. I do actively question why anyone would do a Game Boyish game these days. With the possible exception of Donkey Kong (aka Donkey Kong ’94), most of the games on that platform have aged with the grace and dignity of an unembalmed corpse.
Slick is either pretty or Joan Rivers-esq grotesque, depending on how old you are.
Slick really is no better or worse than your average hateful platform. With the corrections made to it, Slick can now stand on its own and be reviewed on the merit of level design. In that regard, it’s a total bastard that hates you and all things sunny and innocent. If this is what you’re looking for in a game, you’ll enjoy it. It’s not what I’m looking for, so I didn’t. Hopefully the skilled dudes at Halcyon Softworks can apply their talent towards something with more mass-market appeal next time. You guys proved you can blow up a bullfrog with a firecracker. Now show me you can take that frog and make delicious frog legs with it.
Alien Siege is a clone of the 1980 Atari classic Missile Command, a game that predates my birth by almost a decade. Yet, it’s one of those rare games from that time frame that I can actually enjoy today. It’s frantic, scoring driven, and a lot of fun. And that’s coming from someone who never has had the privilege of playing a proper game of it using the trackball. I’ve played lots of clones of iconic arcade classics on XBLIG, and most of them are honestly not that good. Alien Siege is one of those rare exceptions. It’s a lot of fun! No, really! What, I can’t enjoy knock-offs of ancient games just because I’m me? Hey, I can if they don’t suck.
My latest XBLIG review or the Republican reaction to the recent election?
So what can you do with a modern take on a classic game that appeals to fans of the original while appeasing people of my generation that don’t give two squirts about nostalgia? Well, improving the formula is a good place to start. Alien Siege does that, by giving you upgrade points you can spend to improve the launch speed of your rockets, the firing rate of them, or to improve your gun. Instead of just intercepting missiles, you also have to fire on UFOs and meteors. Missiles don’t work on them, so you have to split your time between intercepting enemy missiles with one button and fighting everything else with another button. It sounds like it would be too much to juggle, and it is. But in a good, old-time arcadey way.
There’s even a co-op mode, and I had enough fun playing it by myself that I actually wanted to play it as more than an afterthought. Now sure, I could use Brian. He’s 29 and thus the right age to have played something similar to this as a kid. But Brian was one of those odd kids who never owned a console and played outside like a savage. What I need to test this thing is someone old enough to have played the original but decrepit enough that they’ll barely remember it.
Ohhhhh Dadddddddyyyyyyy!!
Thirty Minutes Later
Ugh, so here’s where things like my killjoy label come from. Daddy thought it was okay, but liked the original better because of the trackball. Seems to be a common theme. I showed this to the oldest, most GET OFF MY LAWNish gamer I know, and he responded with “no shoes, no shirt, no track ball, no service.” Exact quote, which I think was a joke, but it also shows that games like this start with more ground to make up. It seems almost unfair that something that’s mostly well made, like Alien Siege, could be the victim of its own legacy. But it happens. For the record, it controls better than any console version of Missile Command I’ve seen, but that won’t be enough to win over your average geriatric gamer.
And I’m not giving Alien Siege a free pass either. No online scoreboards, bad sound design, mediocre graphics, and backgrounds that often unintentionally hide missiles. Check out this screen:
Notice how the color of the missiles matches the color of the mountains. Annoying? Oh yea. But that’s the only major complaint that have, because all the other stuff takes a backseat to gameplay. Alien Siege is a lot of fun, and worth your time and money. It’s a great example of taking something old and making it new and fresh again. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit Craigslist and find a vintage Missile Command coin-op for my Daddy. It’s either that or super glue his mouth shut.
80 Microsoft Points want to know why aliens were firing ICBMs at cities. They’re fucking ALIENS!! Shouldn’t they have better technology? I know they had to stick with the theme, but the guys at Lost World Creations should have come up with something else and I’ll shut up now in the making of this review.
Halloween Scream is a text-based adventure where you play as a young man who inherits a haunted house. Yea, these things always end well. I’ve done text-based games before on here and they usually leave me wanting to lop off my wrists and replace my hands with sabres to stab myself with. But, every game I play starts off with a clean slate, so I plugged my nose and dove in. Then I forgot that being a text-based adventure, this would be a bit shallow and I brained myself on the cement bottom. Smooth, Cathy.
So many options, I don’t know what to do with myself.
There’s no play control to talk about, or graphics, or sound, or level design, or anything remotely resembling a game. That leaves me to just talk about the writing, which I have a major problem with. It’s the tone. It’s all over the place. The game sets a dark and somber mood, but then will randomly spit out lines or gags that break the atmosphere with more ease than NASA. For example, you’ll be examining the servant’s quarters and come across a magazine titled “Repressed Servants Monthly.” Huh, well that’s both not funny and grossly against the tone I thought they were going for here. There are lots of moments like that, but the overall story never goes the humor route. Then again, it doesn’t go the scary route, or the Halloween route either. I kind of figured a game named “Halloween Scream” would either be scary, be themed around Halloween activities, or both. Here you get a story involving vampires and it takes place on Halloween, but otherwise, nothing. What’s the scary thing? “They brought an awful, long forgotten genre back from the dead!! AHHHHHHHHH!”
Writing isn’t the only problem. The game has another consistency problem, this time involving back-tracking. Being an adventure game, you’ll occasionally pick up trinkets that you’ll need to use along the way. Sometimes, the game lets you pick up stuff that you have no idea what you’ll be using it for. Other times, the game will have a “wait, didn’t you see something like this earlier? Maybe you should go back and get it” moment. It’s saddest attempt at padding I’ve seen since I stuffed my bra with water balloons at age 12.
My maps were way better. Sure, they were practically illegible, but.. never mind.
Halloween Scream has its moments, like a couple of maze-sections that required me to draw my own maps. I wish the game had stuck to these, because the writing and exploration are dull, and the false-ending only aggravated me because at that point I was ready for the game to be over with. Shockingly, I didn’t outright hate Halloween Scream, but I didn’t like it either. What would be really cool is if someone could do a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark type of game along the lines of this. Something genuinely spooky, with morbid artwork and a haunting soundtrack. Otherwise, this genre remains dead. I’m not sure if that technically makes this a zombie game or not.
Null Battles was developed by Techno Hermit Games
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