Indie Games Uprising III Interview: Sententia

August 9, 2012 by 4 Comments

It’s back!  Last year, the ten games of extreme varying quality (somewhere between sublime and subfeces) took part in what was the most promoted event in Xbox Live Indie Game history.  This year, nine new games are ready to show off what the platform is capable of.  It’s called the Indie Games Uprising III.  The man running it, 19-year-old Michael Hicks, has a game of his own in it: artsy platformer Sententia.  I talked with him about his game, the event, and what exactly “art house” gaming means.

Kairi: When I hear the term “art house style game”, I typically throw-up a little bit in my mouth.  What do you think the medical term for that is?

Michael Hicks: Ha! Well, I guess you could say I used that to rebel against “the man” or status quo. It’s kind of a vague term looking back at it now, but this game is extremely personal to me and marked a big change on my outlook towards game design. I wanted to be sure that when going into the game people would know that I attempted to make something more than a game about jumping over blocks and attacking enemies; there’s a ton of reasoning behind all of the design decisions… almost an unhealthy amount! I guess I was just worried people wouldn’t get me, so I decided to go all hippie hipster and call it an art game!

Kairi: When I watched the video for Sententia, it looked to me like a cross between a punisher and Scribblenauts.  What is the actual inspiration for the game?

Michael: You’re the first one to call it a punisher! The game is very challenging and ramps up fast – I don’t think that’s something people typically take away from the trailer. The gameplay wasn’t really inspired by a particular game, but you could say that it was inspired by the themes and messages I wanted to convey. The games that made me open my eyes were “Aether” by Edmund McMillen, “Gravitation” by Jason Rohrer, and “Braid” by Jon Blow. These games are very powerful, but they tell stories through basic gameplay interactions and themes, I wanted to try and experiment with what they pioneered. As I started to get more technical with the platform designs I did reference “Super Meat Boy” quite a bit, as the game is very challenging, but never felt frustrating (at least to me!).

Kairi: Your previous games have been space shooters, and now you’re doing a self-described “art” game.  You’ve started taking drugs, haven’t you?

Michael: No, never! It’s insane how many times I get asked this by people… it’s so weird that when people start to make more expressive things others instantly think they’ve turned to smoking weed or something!

Kairi: I’m actually kind of surprised by the lack of quote-unquote “experimental” games on XBLIG.  Why do you think developers don’t try to get weird when they create their games?

Michael: It’s really easy to just stick with what has already been proven to be successful, it takes some practice to really work the “originality muscle”, and I’m still trying to exercise it myself. It also takes some guts to make something super personal/deep/experimental and release it to a wide audience; I’m very terrified to release my own game, I think the closer it gets to the release date the more I am going to lose my mind.


Kairi: When you made your previous games, was there any off-the-wall weird shit that you thought to include but chickened out of?

Michael: I don’t think I’ve ever censored myself like that, but before “Sententia” I was going to make a game based around this joke rap project that my friend and I do on occasion. We started recording music for it back in High School as a way of making fun of pop culture. In this game you were going to drive around with a police officer collecting donuts while this song of ours played on the radio. Then I remembered that I’m in a position where the games I make can actually affect people’s lives and I wasn’t interested in committing career suicide.

Kairi: You pussy!

Michael: Hey, I thought it was the right thing to do!

Kairi: Okay, so now that you’ve finally manned up and are doing something off the beaten path, are you finding it difficult to implement your vision using the XNA framework?

Michael: Definitely not, I hope I never have to work with anything else. I really don’t care for C++ or any of the hardcore techie languages, even though I can use them. I love to program, and I’m glad I can do it… but I don’t like spending time doing all of the crap that those languages require when I could be doing more game specific type stuff.

Kairi: You’re the man in charge, more or less, of the third Uprising.  Are you fucking insane?

Michael: A lot of people think I am, that’s for sure! It’s really an honor to be involved like this, but it’s a huge responsibility; I want to make sure this is a promotion that people won’t forget.

Kairi: Some people, who shall remain nameless (ME!) thought the last Uprising was incredibly disappointing.  This year looks much more promising right from the start.  What do you say to those (ME!) that are skeptical about the quality of the games this time around?

Michael: Reception of indie games at this level is kind of a weird thing, you get such mixed reactions. Personally though, I am really excited for the line up this year… a lot of the games are very interesting. I’ve played most of the titles thoroughly, and I would definitely rank a good number of them in my “Favorite XBLIGs Ever” list.

Kairi: I noticed all the Uprising games are single player titles.  Is the irony that we’re doing an event where the community rises up together yet plays games alone lost on you?

Michael: Wow, that never dawned on me before! We tried to get a variety of games, but mainly we wanted to scout out some titles that we thought were great games.

Kairi: In closing, how do you feel the games of this Uprising stack up against the games of the previous two events?

Michael: The selection this year is totally different from last time I think. I would classify those games as more extroverted and these games as more introverted… maybe that makes no sense. Either way, we’ll just have to see what people say when all of this kicks off!

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Face Slapper

August 5, 2012 by 4 Comments

Just by hearing the description of Face Slapper, you’ll know it’s on the wrong platform.  The idea is a bunch of faces will appear on a play field.  Using the analog stick, you line up a cursor over a face and press a button to slap it.  You get points for smacking dude and lose points for hitting chicks or animals.  Yea, this was without question a game designed with a touch-screen interface in mind.  Face Slapper is also out on Windows Phone, which is likely an okay fit.  I would personally prefer a bigger screen like iPad, but WP is easier to program for, even if it has a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the users.

On the Xbox?  Meh.  Face Slapper is actually pretty dumbed down.  The slapper is made to be pretty generous, smacking only the things that give you points, so if a bunch of faces are together, feel free to get button-stabby.  In fact, I theorized that you could chuck effort out the window and just button-mash while wiggling the controller all over the screen.  My previous, “pretend like I give a shit” efforts resulted in scores ranging from like 5,000 points to 8,000 points.  My “don’t give a shit” button-spammer approach netted me over 12,000, and I only stopped because my thumb got tired.  That, my friends, is broken game design.

Oddly enough, I did have an extremely limited amount of fun with Face Slapper, but that was had trying to unlock all the fake achievements in the game, which are pretty clever.  The real challenging one was trying to finish the game with a score of exactly negative one point.  I never actually accomplished it, but for a total of ten minutes I actually did want to.  Then the feeling passed.  It was like a bout of gaming constipation.

I can’t go out and recommend Face Slapper, just because it really is on the wrong platform.  This is a game designed with the precision of a touch screen in mind.  I can’t blame them for at least attempting to port it over the XBLIG, because as lightweight as the platform is, it’s unquestionably more viable than Windows Phone.  But Face Slapper’s problems extend beyond its control scheme.  The graphics aren’t distinctive enough, the background images can be disorienting, and I don’t feel there’s enough variety in gameplay.  If you have a Windows Phone, it might be worth a look at.  Also, ha ha, you own a Windows Phone!

Face Slapper was developed by Highbrow Games

80 Microsoft Points came this close to putting a game on the leaderboard designed by the guys who made Avatar Planking in the making of this review.

 

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Sunflower Farm

August 1, 2012 by 3 Comments

Sunflower Farm is a voxelish minigame collection where you and up to three buddies can sit down and be bored while slogging through three games that range from dull to clunky to outright abysmal.  First up is Harvest Time, where you walk around a wheat field trying to cut as much of it down as possible.  Real quick thought, guys: if the concept of your game sounds like something that you would rather hire out illegals to do while you sip piña coladas and watch Judge Judy, chances are it won’t make for the most exciting video game.

Something tells me that Sunflower Farm doesn’t fall into the “developer always dreamed of making a game about this subject matter” category.

In single player, you have an absurdly short time limit to accomplish this.  You need to unlock higher difficulties and play those in order to unlock more stages.  I’m adverse to forcing myself to be bored for longer than I have to be and thus I decided to skip effort and go with the “give it two tries and if I fail, fuck it” approach.  Items do rain down from the sky that could help, but they come down at random and not all of them are helpful.  One of them is an airhorn, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is used for.  In the sheep herding game, it has a function.  In this one?  It seems to scare crows off, but I don’t think the crows actually do anything.  The useful stuff, like something that stops the clock or a thing that makes you run fast, don’t seem to spawn as much as that stupid airhorn.

The second game is Sheep Herding.  There’s a field of sheep, and you have to run up behind them and coral them into the center of the screen.  Getting them to move is a slow, plodding, boring experience, probably not unlike real herding is.  The third game is Tractor Racing, which is a fancy way of saying kart racing.  This one is mired by terrible handling controls.  Steering is too loose, and thus driving ends up looking like a series of quick left and right swerves, like you’re watching a teenage girl test her learner’s permit out for the first time.  And she’s slightly intoxicated.  And texting while driving.  And the car is a Dodge.

For what it’s worth, if you can get used to the steering, the courses are only barely terrible.

Whether you play these single-player or with friends, Sunflower Farm is one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games of the year.  Harvest Time and Sheep Herding sound more like things you would punish a disobedient child with.  As for Tractor Racing, I might not have realized just how bad it was if I hadn’t already played Avatar Grand Prix 2, which was a pretty dang good game.  The tractor stuff is by far the best part of Sunflower Farm, which is like saying free body piercings is the best part of being executed by firing squad.  So I can’t recommend Sunflower Farm.  You would be way better off having your car break down in front of an old farmer’s house and having sex with his virginal daughter.  And you KNOW how those things end.

Sunflower Farm was developed by Tomlin Games

80 Microsoft Points wonder why so many cars break down in front of farms in the making of this review.  Then again, I wonder why so many strange people walk into bars as well.  Or why we’re so concerned with the amount of people required to screw in light bulbs. 

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Mirror

July 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

Mirror is one of those types of games where you play it and then wonder why nobody has done anything like it before.  For all I know, maybe someone has, but I’ve never played anything quite like it.  The idea is there is a dot on one side of a barrier, and you have to place a dot on where you think the exact mirror image side of that dot is.  It’s so simple, and yet it’s potently addictive.  I wish it was on iPad, because using a joystick to line up the dots is a bit clumsy, but otherwise I thought it was a perfectly good waste of an hour or so.  It was either that or watch Water Polo during the Olympics.  I asked Brian if they’re allowed to drown each-other.  He said no.  Mirror it was then.

Not my most in-depth review, I know, but it’s not exactly a game that lends itself well to my style.  I would like to point out that Mirror is by Silver Dollar Games, who I once kind of scorched on this site back when I first started.   It’s an editorial that I’m not really proud of, and one that I probably shouldn’t have done.  Don’t get me wrong: I think Silver Dollar squanders its talent more than it shows it, but they shouldn’t have been singled out for it.  Of course, the thing about squandering talent is you actually have to have talent to be able to do so.  If you count No Luca No, I’ve played three of their games, and I’ve placed two of those on my leaderboard.  Compare that to Team Shuriken.  I’ve reviewed five of their games, and not one of them has come remotely close to the board.

Sure, their percentage would drop like a rock if I played stuff like Who’s The Daddy? or Cassie’s Animal Sounds.  But if I review stuff like that, I’m sort of missing the point of why I started Indie Gamer Chick.  It might be fun to pick on the stuff you know is bad, like throwing water balloons filled with blue non-non-staining food coloring at the kids from juvenile hall as they do highway litter clean up, but at a certain point it loses its zing.  I don’t think I’m at that point yet, as evidenced by the blue stains on my finger tips, but the time is coming where I’ll get there.  Silver Dollar hasn’t put out a whole lot of new games lately.  They’re focusing on their Dream-Build-Play title One Finger Death-Punch, which looks pretty decent.  What I really hope from these guys is that they have one transcendent, platforming defining hit.  One that doesn’t involve trying to hold a fart in.

Mirror was developed by Silver Dollar Games

80 Microsoft Points want to know when they can take their foot out of their mouth in the making of this review.

Mirror  is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Tales from the Dev Side: Hooray for Us by Steve Smith

July 27, 2012 by 6 Comments

Forgive me guys.

 

♫ Yo they’re Smith Bros.

Collecting Disorder’s their game.

Landed on my leaderboard

with minimal pain.

They were lended a hand,

when they got to XBLIG land.

Even if punishers are for fuckers,

I respect those limey Brothers!

UHHH!♫

Oh God, I’m so sorry.  Here, read Mr. Steve Smith’s Tales from the Dead Side.  I’m going to go flog myself.

Read more of this post

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Murder for Dinner

July 26, 2012 by 6 Comments

When I heard the name “Murder for Dinner” I thought “Oh great, PETA made a game about McDonalds.  Just what we needed.”  But no, it’s actually a first-person murder mystery game.  First-person, 3D XBLIGs are a rare beast, so I had to ignore the fact that it was a point-and-click adventure and give it a try.  Even if said graphics looked like early first-generation PlayStation stuff.  Again, I am starting to understand where you old farts are coming from on this whole nostalgia thing, but how can anyone in their right mind be nostalgic for PlayStation 1 era graphics?  That’s my generation and I don’t understand why someone would remind people of that horrible shit.  It would be like reminding someone about the time that they had to sit and watch while the Blair Witch drowned their mother.  At least Daddy said it was the Blair Witch.

Note: My Father, who shall henceforth be known as Indie Gamer Killjoy, would like me to state my mother is alive and happy and was not murdered by the Blair Witch, or anyone.   I choose to remain skeptical until the DNA tests come back showing that really IS my mom.  Nobody who watches The View can possibly be related to me.

Of course someone would get killed in a place that looks like that! The only other thing that could possibly happen there is Dracula would come back from the dead and we’d have to send the Belmonts in.

The idea is an old crone calls a dinner party where everyone present is worried that their deep dark pasts will be revealed.  Yea, I’ve seen the movie Clue too.  Unlike Clue, Murder of Dinner is unfortunately played straight, without the slightest tinge of humor.  Ironically, this makes the game cornier than all of Iowa.  The writing in this game is all kinds of fucked up, like one character who outright confesses to you that they murdered someone, but it’s not the actual victim, and that’s good enough for you to clear them as a suspect.  I love that logic, and now I’ll spend the rest of my days wondering why more murders don’t use the “Oh I’ve totally killed people for sport and/or profit, but I just didn’t kill THIS guy” defense.  It’s fucking genius in its insanity.

Actually, it’s funny that the logic of that confession-slash-alibi is so demented, because the actual puzzle logic of the game is somewhat grounded in reality.  This was done by eliminating puzzles all together, but that still counts.  Instead, Murder for Dinner relies on hide-and-seek gameplay.  First, you talk to all the house guests.  Then you walk around the house looking for places that allow you to search for stuff.  If you find something, you take it around and show it to the house guests.  This will typically eliminate a suspect or two.  Then you search the grounds for more stuff, find it, and show it off.  Just keep repeating this until you reach the credits an hour later.  If this all sounds dull, it is.

Alright, I believe you when you say you didn’t bump off the old lady. Now let me ask you this: where were you the night Mr. Body got killed? Why, is that a candlestick in your hand? You’re coming downtown with me.

I’m not a big fan of point-and-click games, but that had nothing to do with why I dislike Murder for Dinner.  The characters, dialog, and setting are all just so boring.  I’m way into murder-mysteries.  I want to do one of those cheeseball “Murder Mystery Weekend” thingies at some point before I die or grow senile.  But this was just lifeless and bland, with a cast of unlikable characters and an ending I figured out thanks to one way over-played line of dialog about three-quarters of the way through.  The ending didn’t even make any sense!  And do you know what I have to say about that?  Red ties make great zebra traps, Joey!

Murder for Dinner was developed by Detroit Game Studio

240 Microsoft Points tilted the camera downwards and then shook the stick around as I descended down the staircase, to make it look like I had tripped on it and was falling to my death, because by golly, sometimes you have to figure out ways to amuse yourself in the making of this review.

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Slick

July 25, 2012 by 17 Comments

Slick received a Second Chance with the Chick. Both reviews should be taken together.  Read my updated thoughts here.

Slick has graphics and sound that try to mimic the look and feel of the original Game Boy.  This is sort of weird to me, because I truly don’t get how anyone could want their game to look like that.  This isn’t the Atari or the NES we’re talking about here, where the delusional say “gaming was never better than back in those days” and we all have a laugh.  I thought everyone was in agreement that gaming has done better than the Game Boy.  So I find it strange, in the same way that I do when I hear that senior citizens in Russia pine for the old days when Stalin was in charge.

For what it’s worth, Slick does a pretty dang good job of looking like a Game Boy game.  It even has a mono midi soundtrack.  I guess if you’re going to do something, it’s worth doing right, even if it’s recreating garbage.  But gameplay is all that matters to me, and Slick is one of the biggest offenders of being a gleefully evil fuck that I’ve come across on Indie Gamer Chick.  It’s a punisher, which isn’t exactly my favorite genre, but this one at least had some promise to it.  I made it past the first sixteen levels and was pretty impressed by the clever level design.

And then, I got to stage 1-17.  And that’s where I quit.  I’ve never done this, but I want to do a step-by-step breakdown of where this game failed.

1. You have to start the stage by bonking your head on the ceiling in the spot where there is no spike., and then land on the floor to the right.  Then you have to hop up to platform.  Trust me, this is all a lot harder than it sounds.

2. You have to jump up, turn mid-air, and land on this block.  Slick controls fairly decent, but the one thing it doesn’t do well is handle mid-air turns, so this seemingly easy bit is a lot harder than it should be.  But this isn’t even the worst offender of this problem on this stage, or even the second worst.

3. These spiked turtle things had popped up in previous levels, but I never noticed how off the collision detection on them was until here.  It is WAY the fuck off.  See the blue box I drew around the turtle to the left?  That’s a rough approximation of the enemy’s collision detection box.  If your dude enters anywhere into that field, you die.  You’ll also notice there are blocks above them, which prevent you from getting adequate clearance when you attempt to jump them.  This causes the difficulty of this section alone to spike to unnecessarily brutal levels, never mind the frustration a player experiences when they are killed by a creature that they didn’t come remotely close to touching.  Perhaps that’s not just a spike on its back.  Perhaps it’s a mound of polonium and you’re actually dying from acute radiation poisoning.  That’s hardly fighting fair at all.

4. Once you hop across those blocks, you have to fall down this chute, swerving right-to-left to avoid fireballs.  As I previously stated, the controls do everything BUT mid-air movement to varying degrees of decency.  So naturally the main challenge of this stage tests just that.  Well, there’s an added bonus to the assholery of this section: you actually accelerate while you fall.  So the game wants you to do something it is barely capable of doing in the first place, and it wants you to do so at a multiple of the normal speed you jump.  Oh, and there’s an enemy at the bottom of the jump, but don’t worry about it.  Like Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid, the fall will probably kill you.  Or, more accurately, the third fireball.

5. Was #4 fun for you?  Well now, you get to do it again, only in reverse!  Oh, and you start off with the fast acceleration here.  Oh, and there’s a twist to this part..

6. You can’t see it, but there’s an indestructible turtle enemy thingie that is walking along the spikes, and after you successfully (HA! As if!) reach the top of this chute, you have to land on it and bounce across the top of it to the goal.  I can’t really tell you if the fireball at the top of the screen is a problem because I never made it this far.  In fact, I tried over 100 times to beat this level, and made it past section #4 a whopping three times.

There are those that saw the picture above and will say to themselves “sign me up!”  But to those of you that haven’t gone off your meds today, Slick is not worth the effort.  What it offers isn’t really any more of a challenge than trying to thread a needle on the other side of the room.  You could do it, in theory, but aren’t there better uses of your time?  If you absolutely need something that plays like a punisher to justify your existence, you’re better off picking a game that gives you the proper tools needed to complete it.  It’s such a shame, because I actually liked Slick up until that point.  It was still challenging, but the level design was fun and had a lot of neat twists in it.  And then the game just went all emo and wanted you to know no joy ever again.   That’s only 17 of 100 levels in, mind you.  I’m almost afraid of how depressingly impossible this game might get.  Abraham Lincoln was famously afraid to carry a knife on him, for fear he might turn it on himself.  I used to wonder how a person gets like that, but after playing Slick, I think I know.  Which is why I just carved “bullet goes here” in the back of my head with an X-Acto Knife.

Slick was developed by Halcyon Softworks

80 Microsoft Points tried to search for videos on Slick and found Rainslick instead in the making of this review.  Cue the sirens. 

Thank you @Hamcha

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer.

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Dead Sea (2012 Xbox Live Indie Game Review)

July 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

Dead Sea isn’t a game that was half-assed. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was good, but actual effort was put into it. So here’s my question: why the hell did the developer choose not to capitalize the letter “S” in the word “sea”?

See what I mean about sea? Si?

It doesn’t seem like it was done for style reasons. It just seems like some kind of oversight on the developer’s part. I see stuff like this a lot on XBLIG, and every time it happens I think the same thing: sloppy. Like the developer simply did not give a shit while entering in the game’s information for the marketplace. It really starts things off on the wrong foot, because if the developer put no effort into simply typing their game’s name, why should I believe they made an effort building the game? Come on, Brave Men Games. You made it this far.  Could you really not spare that extra fraction of a second it would take you to hold down the shift key before hitting S?

I actually tweeted about Dead Sea before I played it. It looked bad, and people were anxious for me to sock it to it. Sorry to disappoint my fans, but I don’t really have a lot of bad things to say about Dead Sea. It’s not a good game or anything. It won’t be making the leaderboard. But it’s not horrible. The idea is you’re a chick who is on a boat when your boyfriend whips out a ring and proposes OH SWEET JESUS LORD HAVE MERCY!!

.. or do I have to devour your immortal soul?

Yea, that fucking thing will be giving me nightmares for a while.

Anyway, no sooner do you agree to marry whatever the fuck that’s supposed to be when a shark knocks him out of the boat and gobbles him up. She gets knocked into the water too, but the Sharks seem kind of picky and leaves her to swim for it. What “it” is or where “it” is at is never explained. There is a compass, but it doesn’t tell you what direction to go. The first time I played, I just swam in an arbitrary direction and ended up drowning. As it turns out, you are supposed to swim north. How I was supposed to know this, I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I had just encountered what looked to be a love-struck zombie pimple cream ad. To put this in perspective, I’ve walked in on my parents having sex. There was chocolate syrup and whipped cream involved. At least I hope it was chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Either way, that was less traumatic than Mr. Undead Acne Man.

The concept behind Dead Sea is not bad at all. But the gameplay is just so boring. All you do is point yourself north and then alternate the trigger buttons at a slow and steady pace. If you go too fast, you attract the attention of the sharks. If this happens, you have to survive a quick-time event. After that, you reposition yourself north and start alternating L and R again. After a couple of minutes of this, you reach a buoy. You tap a button to climb up it, and then survive a couple more quick time events. Then you swim some more, reach a boat, watch the sharks do their best Free Willy imitation while doing more QTEs. After a couple of those, a shark rams the bottom of the boat, splitting it in two. Do they eat her when she’s in the water? No. Granted, I’m the same way with curry. Seems good to smell and look at, but I’m always intimidated to taste it.

It has finally happened: Xbox Live Indie Games have sharked the jump.

After one final swim, you reach another boat. All you have to do is button mash to throw a barrel and then do a three-sequence quick-time event to detonate it. You win, game over. Total time: ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Which is fine. I don’t think I could have taken another fifteen minutes of Dead Sea. Is the game terrible? Not at all. The gameplay mechanics work, and despite the literally cringe-inducing graphics, this is a fully functioning game. The concept of an open-world game where you’re stranded in water trying to avoid sharks sounds great. I just don’t know how it can be executed in an entertaining way. Dead Sea certainly doesn’t do that.  I’m not sure how they could have done better, or if it’s even possible. Points to Brave Men Games for trying, minus several more points for actual execution. Also, I’m deducting 185,962 points for the opening cut scene. Mind you, these are the guys who made Hell’s House, a game that was about as scary as a kitten. But that dude? He’ll scare the enamel off teeth.

Fuck this, I’m taking my chances with the sharks.

Dead Sea was developed by Brave Men Games

80 Microsoft Points wonder what would happen if you fired the land shark gun from Armed & Dangerous at the sharks in Dead Sea in the making of this review. Shark on shark violence rules!

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer. He’s been providing these videos for the community for a while now. Go follow him on Youtube. He’s earned it.

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The Relic of Horus

July 22, 2012 by 5 Comments

Sigh.  Sometimes a game is just so damn dull that writing up a review of it becomes a challenge.  In that spirit, The Relic of Horus might as well be the Mount Everest of game reviews.  I paid 80MSP for it, and now I have taken on this review, just because it’s there.  I saw it on the marketplace this morning and figured “why not?”  After a couple of hours with it, I can say that it wasn’t the worst game I’ve played on XBLIG.  Not even close.  But it is relentlessly boring from start to finish, and there really is no such thing as degrees of boring.  Bad can go two ways.  It can be bad in an entertaining way, or bad in a bad way.  Good has all kinds of levels.  Good can come in the form of a game that is well designed.  Or good can mean better than the sum of its parts.  As in something that shouldn’t be fun, but is.  Boring, on the other hand, is just boring.  The Relic of Horus is boring.  Water-flavored candy boring.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

The idea is you’re a dude who has to shoot things.  And there are pyramids and shit.  Oh God, I’m having Stargate flashbacks here.  That shit was boring too.  The movie, not the show.  It was just a lot of sand and people with guns shooting things, and there was sand and pyramids and stuff.  How about we retire desert settings from entertainment?  I think we should strongly consider it.

Trying again.  The idea is you’re a dude who has to shoot things.  A wave of what looks like soccer players will charge at you.  You fire somewhere in their direction and they die.  Then you have to get a scroll and a key, which opens up a pyramid, in which you shoot more soccer players and the occasional mummy.  There’s switches.  Some of them give you items.  Some of them cause the ceiling to cave in on you.  Why?  Because the game sucks, that’s why.

I hope the whole “it’s just boring” thing didn’t imply that there is a decent game in here somewhere.  There isn’t.  If I had to describe The Relic of Horus in one word that wasn’t “boring” it would be “spiritless.”  The best indie games feel like a labor of love.  Horus just feels like a labor.  What you have here is the bare-bones skeleton of a game.  Just enough to function, without any real attempt at being fun or entertaining.  What few mechanics are here are clunky as hell.  The controls are bad, with movement feeling too loose and slippery.  The enemies are brain-dead, so all you have to do when they spawn in run around in a big circle to wrangle them up.  Once they’re in position, and assuming none of them get stuck in walls (it happens), you can turn around and pick them off.  Collision detection seemed a bit off, at least for the soccer dudes, so just shooting somewhere in their general vicinity should do.  Oddly enough, the game seems to fancy itself as a punisher, because it has a leaderboard that keeps track of the amount of respawns you need.  That’s weird, because the only time I ever died was when I hit the wrong switches in the stages.  By the way, the whole “wrong switch” thing might be the most stupid gameplay mechanic I’ve seen in an XBLIG yet.  It would be like a whack-a-mole game randomly spitting out mole-shaped landmines.

Snore

I started writing this review yesterday and for the life of me, I can’t think of anything nice to say about The Relic of Horus.  Bad graphics, horrible play control, busted mechanics, tons of glitches, and the underlying concept was boring to begin with.  I suppose the game didn’t crash on me, which I guess is the best thing I can say about it, although I’m shocked as hell it didn’t do that.  Ultimately, what I really hate about Relic of Horus is there’s no ambition on display here.  Gameplay this bad wouldn’t have cut it as a launch-title for the original PlayStation.  Not every game is going to succeed, but if you’re going to fail, do so trying something new.  You guys are indie game developers.  Be weird, just because you can be.  The only thing weird about Relic of Horus is that anyone could possibly think there would be interest in a game like this in 2012.

The Relic of Horus was developed by Golconda

80 Microsoft Points think the Stargate TV series kind of sucked too in the making of this review.

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

Name the Game Contest Winner

July 21, 2012 by 9 Comments

Last week I announced a contest.  Twas a fine contest, and many hearty laughs were had.  The object?  Come up with a name for this game.

Dozens of people submitted over a hundred possible names.  The judges mostly were in agreement.  Only one judge held out, and that would be Alan, just because he has to be different, which is why he’s British.  I hear it’s just a phase, and next he’ll be Irish or Scottish or Icelandic or something.  Ryan, Tim, Dave, and game creator Andreas all fell for one particular name so much they declared it the winner today and then proceeded to change the wording of it around.  But, it was the clear favorite (and also would have been my choice if I had been a judge), and so it gives me great pleasure to announce that the winner is:

@the_dudefather

You’ve won 1600 Microsoft Points, a free copy of the game, and your name in the credits.   And what will it be called?  Why, it will be titled Smooth Operators – Call Center Chaos.  Mr. DudeFather actually had the ordering of that in reverse.  He called it Call Center Chaos – Smooth Operators, but the judges liked it the other way around.  Andreas also wanted the Americanized version of the word “Center.”  Which is weird, because I thought Europeans were supposed to be super clingy to their spelling quirks (Alan throws his tea at me every time I spell “color” as “colour”), but I guess he wants to be more commercial.

We’re not done yet, because I was given two bonus copies of the game to give out.  Well, actually I was given one and Brian was given one.  Brian has selected Build-A-Corp by @sparkcloud87.  I’m not sure why, other than Brian’s eternal quest to remain somewhat boring.  No offense Sparky, but I thought the name was dull, but Brian liked how it summed the game up.  Personally, I preferred Case of the Mondays by @GaTechGrad, so I give my free copy to him.  Yea, it’s just a runner-up prize, which is like being rewarded for being the least sucky of all those that suck, but it’s a free game, so suck on, suckers!

Congratulations to DudeFather, the winner.  If you guys want to see more contests like this here, stay tuned.

Smooth Operators – Call Center Chaos is estimated to arrive in September.  I do like the name, even though it sounds like something that would star Quagmire.

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , , , ,

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