About To Blow Up Part 1

July 20, 2012 by 11 Comments

When I hear the term “Point & Click Adventure” it typically stimulates in me the same response as the term “Urinary Tract Infection.”  And when I hear the term “Hip-Hop” it usually causes my own stomach to digest and barf itself up.  So a game that purports to combine hip-hop culture with point & click adventures ranks right up there on the “things I’ve feared” list with “AIDS going airborne” or “Joel Schumacher is doing another Batman film.”  But it suckered me into buying it because the art style reminded me of a John Kricfalusi cartoon, and I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Yea, I’ve been to Oakland.

As it turns out, About To Blow Up is about as good as a point & click on XBLIG is capable of being, and the hip-hop crap doesn’t factor into the gameplay at all.  The story is actually kind of cute.  You play as a lovable loser who aspires to manage a hip-hop act.  However, the music scene (and the city as a whole) is dominated by a megalomaniacal bastard named Mr. Sleez.  It’s fun, almost to the point that you forget how tired this genre is.  The logic is as bullshit insane as any clicker is, and those times where you’re generally lost without direction can be draining.  There are a handful of puzzles, but they’re pretty simple and can generally be solved just by randomly clicking buttons until something happens.  Which is ironic because most of the item puzzles are solved by total random guesswork.  “So you put the wig on the rat.  Well duh, why didn’t I think of that?”

I don’t really have a lot to say about About To Blow Up, other than the fact that it’s a dick move on the developer’s part to start the game’s name with “about.”  Which led to the awkwardly worded sentence above that contained the word “about” twice in a row and is totally screwing with my grammar check.  Otherwise, About To Blow Up has the best story of any Plicker on the XBLIG, along with the best graphics and characters.  I’ll look forward to future installments.  I can’t say I’ll actually review them.  It took me all day to come up with the shit I wrote for this one, and I’m only 381 words in.  383 now.  384.  Oh fuck off.  387.  Sigh.  388.  I’m done.

390.

About To Blow Up Part 1 was developed by Facepuncher Worldwide LLC

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points said that all questions related to how to solve a section of this game that don’t begin with the phrase “I’m a surrender monkey” will go unanswered in the making of this review.

About To Blow Up Part 1  is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Spectrangle360

July 17, 2012 by 5 Comments

Board games.  I love them.  But as video games?  I’m not so sure.  Some games, like chess, are way over-produced.  Did I really need chess on my PlayStation Vita?  Do I really need two version of Scrabble on my iPhone?  That’s ignoring that most of the best board games use “house rules” that aren’t generally an option when you play them digitally.  No money for Free Parking, no starting in a room in Clue, no increasing the value of V in Scrabble.  But what really irks me is how few video board games there are out there that could only exist as video games.  Mario Party is still around, which I really adored as a kid.  As an adult, I see that it’s a game that doesn’t put a heavy premium in skill.  In fact, outcomes are generally determined by plain old luck to such a degree that it might as well be called Mario Bingo.  However, there are nine console Mario Parties now.  Obviously there is a market for this thing, and not just because it has “Mario” in the title.  Let’s say Nintendo marketed the shit out of a multiplayer game where Mario and his friends performed tax audits on people.  Ain’t nobody buying that game, let alone enough people to spawn more sequels than Friday the 13th.  Nintendo already proved my theory by releasing Wii Party, which sold 7.5 million copies.

Spectrangle isn’t one of those “it has to be a video game” type of deals.  Think of it as a color-coated version of dominoes.  You have a grid of 36 interlocking triangles, some of which have multipliers on them.  Each player draws four tiles, which are visible to each-other.  The first player must place a tile on one of the spaces that does not have a multiplier.  The next player then must build off of the placed tile by matching the colors.  Each tile has a value to it, and scoring is based on the value of the tile multiplied by the amount of other tiles it is touching.  Play continues until there are no more moves open to either player or until someone runs out.

It’s a pretty simple concept, and it is fun.  The guys at IronReaverGames have done a fine job of porting it over to XBLIG.  Even the AI is kind of balanced.  Kind of.  I could slaughter the game on easy, while normal took a little bit of thinking power.  I lost a few games to the computer on hard, although I would like to say that luck factored into that.  Actually, it factored in so much that Brian started laughing hysterically while I quietly stewed and wondered if there was any spot on my Xbox that I could safely stab without killing it or myself.  And then I played the game on its insane difficulty and absolutely demolished it twice in a row.  At first I thought “damn, I’m just fucking awesome!”  But then I went back to the hard difficulty, which was the only setting that beat me, and I lost another two out of three games.  So maybe “insane” in this context meant “the game plays like it is in an abnormal mental state.”  Because although it had to pause to think, it still made DUMB moves.  It’s less “Bobby Fischer playing chess” insane and more “Bobby Fischer doing anything but playing chess” insane.

Despite not being very impressive from a visual standpoint, Spectrangle360 works well.  It even has online play, which I was able to enjoy without any glitches.  I’m not a big fan of the fact that it dumps you out to the menu after every game, but otherwise I have no complaints.  Ultimately though, it has limited appeal.  If you’re not into these types of board games, this won’t sway you.  It’s not unique enough to be something you just HAVE to try, nor does it need to exist as a video game.  Is it fun?  It was for me.  I can’t tell you if it will be fun for you though.  Spectrangle360 is what it is.  If you’ve never played anything like it, it’s at least worth trying.  Otherwise, you already know whether you will like this game or not just by reading how it works.

I added a circle to this picture to highlight something that does bug me a lot about some XBLIGs: that damn font that constantly shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s the default font that comes in the XNA starter kit or something, because it’s in so many games. It’s ugly, it’s often blurry, it’s cheap looking, and it always makes a game seem somehow badder. Always. Spectrangle360 looks just fine without it. With it, it looks ten times worse than it really is. Guys, if you’ve made it this far in the development process, you would be doing yourself a big favor by taking the time to make any on-screen text look better than stock.

Board games will always be ported over to gaming devices.  Spectrangle360 is a port itself.  And these types of games will always have their place.  But maybe if you’re going to port it, you should think about spicing it up a little.  Include modes that contain content that can’t be done with boards and dice and luck of the draw.  Board games are limited by the laws of physics.  Video games are only limited by the amount of cocaine the developer has snorted.  I want games to take advantage of this.  I want to see Monopoly where you don’t just buy Baltic Avenue.  I want to see one where you load up on rifles and take the fucker by force.  I don’t want to eat marbles while playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.  I want to be eating something adorable and fluffy that looks like it feels pain.  I don’t want to just bump a guy off a slide on Sorry!  I want to bayonet them in the back, drag their corpse to my home, and eat it raw.  Hey, why am I telling you guys this?  Yo, Hasbro, get on the ball with this shit.  If you could get away turning Transformers from children’s toy into ultra-violent testosterone flick featuring a pot-brownie eating mother, you can get away with making a version of Operation where no anesthetic is used.

Spectrangle360 was developed by IronReaverGames

80 Microsoft Points noted that the corporeal version of this game costs anywhere between $10 and $50, so obviously this version is the one to get, unless you just really hate money in the making of this review. 

Spectrangle360 is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Puzzle Cubicle

July 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

It’s a bitch trying to think of ways to keep puzzle reviews interesting.  Even if the game is decent, which Puzzle Cubicle is, it really is hard to get emotional over it.  Emotions are the fuel of my writings.  I use them as the compass for what direction I take with my reviews.  But when a game offers absolutely no stimuli and has the personality of a piece of chalk laying on top of a loaf of tofu, writing about it can be almost painful.  I’ve been staring at my monitor for an hour now trying to come up with someway to spice this review up.  It just didn’t provide me with any material to start with.  I guess I could go back and try it some more, but after a few hours with it I feel about as emotional as a corpse.

Puzzle Cubicle is sort of like one of those “make a shape out of other shapes” thingies.  The hook here is that you’re given only a small point of reference to what exactly the final look of the design is supposed to be.  Pieces are arranged on a grid, with a small “example” in the left corner that shows the location of a couple of the blocks.  Using this as a reference point, you must create an enclosed cubicle (or more).  I almost activated a case of narcolepsy in myself trying to describe it.  Some games just sound boring on paper.

Oddly enough, I really liked Puzzle Cubicle.  It’s not for everyone, and it’s probably out-of-place on XBLIG, but the mechanics are solid and I could finish all 50 puzzles without the game crashing on me.  I do have a few complaints.  First off, the explanation screen is terrible.  The goals of the game needed to be articulated better.  Second, I hate how it’s sometimes possible to create the desired pattern exactly how it’s supposed to look, but you don’t actually win because the alignment is off.  Who gives a shit?  Is that the pattern?  Yes?  Good, I beat it.  Next!  Third, the game’s timer keeps going if you pause the game.  Why?  I wasn’t using it to cheat.  I was using it to piss or to answer the phone.  You know, the type of thing people need to do from time to time.  Not that the timer matters at all, but I was using it to measure my own intelligence and it really irked me.  Although it did prove my theory that phone calls from my mother drop my IQ.  Finally, why aren’t the pieces that are shown in the example just locked into place at the start of each round?  That would have hastened the pace of the game and maybe made it more attractive to our cro-magnon population.  No, really!  I’m being serious here.  Stop laughing!

If you haven’t fallen asleep by this point, Puzzle Cubicle might just be for you.  It’s not exactly exciting, but it got my attention.  Mechanically it’s functional and the puzzles are well made.  Will it be the kind of game you talk about with your friends?  No.  Will you remember it after you’ve finished it?  No.  Is it worth your dollar?  Probably.  You can safely liken it to Ben Stein: impressively intelligent, but duller than a butter knife.

Puzzle Cubicle was developed by Geek Mode Games

80 Microsoft Points turned your Cubicle into a Youbicle in the making of this review.

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

Win 1600 Microsoft Points, a free Xbox Live Indie Game, and your name in the credits of a game.  It’s the Name the Game contest.  Click here for details.

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Tales from the Dev Side: Redefining Indie Success by Shahed Chowdhuri

July 12, 2012 by 15 Comments

Back in March, I published what is probably the most optimistic edition of Tales from the Dev Side I have gotten yet. Mr. Shahed Chowdhuri is the developer of Angry Zombie Ninja Cats, a game that I boiled in oil back in November. He’s also the creator of the XBLIG Sales Data Analyzer, which has been well received among his peers. He’s also one of the most gosh-darned nice guys in the community, and his first editorial on here about gaining community acceptance was cited as being inspirational to newcomers on the Xbox Live Indie Game scene. Now, Mr. Shahed has a different, yet still insanely chirpy and upbeat message to share with everyone: success is what you make of it.

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Andy’s Notepad [Saucers]

July 10, 2012 by 6 Comments

Despite not being an artsy-fartsy graphics junkie, I do appreciate games that have a sense of style.  Yea, I’ve said that gameplay is all that matters to me, and that is still true, but I have to admit that good graphics will get you my attention.  Andy’s Notepad [Saucers] has a style that’s not totally original on XBLIG.  It reminded me of Robot Platformer, which I reviewed way back in August of 2011.  It had the same casual-doodle look, which helped to push aside the fact that it was as utterly generic and basic as a platformer could be.  It’s like the difference between a guy who dies in his sleep and one who dies while driving his Ferrari over endangered jaguars before crashing into a maternity ward at a veteran’s hospital.  Which dude do you think people will talk about in the morning?  Style counts.

The heat ray weapon is so slow, even when it’s fully upgraded, that I think starvation is actually a quicker form of death.

Andy’s Notepad takes the sketchbook look and applies it to the classic space warfare genre.  It’s sort of like the granddaddy of all of gaming, Spacewar!, with twin-stick shooting thrown into the mix.  You select one of nine flying saucers that dogfight each other.  In single player, you have to go through 20 matches, earning upgrades to your various weapons along the way.  Matches take place with near a moon of which gravity is centered around.  If this sounds boring, it is.  The game is as dull as a plastic spoon.  Mechanically, it works fine.  The physics and controls are difficult to work with, but that’s sort of the point of Spacewar!.  Cycling through the various weapons is what the real problem is.  The AI ships can change-up on the fly, while you have to fumble around with buttons.  After the first half-dozen battles, even after upgrading my stats to their max, AI ships were able to stun-lock me and fire without giving me a nano-second to fight back.  Cheap?  Oh yea.  This is the boxed wine served in Dixie cups of XBLIG.

I gave up after nine or so levels, because I simply could not make any progress against the unreasonably perfect AI.  But, Andy’s Notepad is unquestionably made with multiplayer in mind.  Since the game does play like an updated version of an antiquated gaming treasure, I conned my father and his best friend A.J. to play a few rounds with me.  Both are in their sixties and I figured they must have played something like this at some point in their lives.  They even probably had to walk uphill in three feet of snow and work for six days to earn the quarter it took to play a single round of it too.  As it turns out, A.J. hadn’t.  Daddy had played stuff like Spacewar! though, and both guys had enjoyed playing Chompy Chomp Chomp with me.  I figured why not?

Well, it was a semi-bust.  Andy’s Notepad can be fun, but the game gives too much power to the person who wins the first round.  The winner gets more upgrade points than the losers, and the obvious strategy is to pour everything into those God damned stun-lock bombs, which can cause you to crash into the moon.  Contact with the surface causes your health to drain faster than anything else (I think), so all you really need is those stun-lock bombs, and one good shot.  Since there’s no limit on the amount you can fire, you just have to keep shooting them until the person bangs themselves to death on the planetoid.  Even guys that don’t spend all day and night philosophizing about games could figure that out, as evidenced by the fact that A.J. handed my father and me our asses.  Even then, the old guys really didn’t enjoy the game.  In fact, I liked it more than they did, which was a surprise.  What the game needed is balance, or some form of a counter attack.  There is a tractor beam thing which you can use to drag someone onto the moon, but it’s clunky as hell and only works at a short-range, and quite frankly you’re just as likely to kill yourself trying to use it.

There’s other problems.  The bullets are too small for one thing.  I have a television that could comfortably double as a highway billboard, yet the bullets are so small that they might as well be invisible.  Also, the nine different ships you can choose from are not distinctive enough, and since they’re all drawn in black and white, it becomes too easy to lose which one you are.  Again, I appreciate the art style, but ease of gameplay should never take a backseat to art.  Adding color to the things would have completely fixed the problem, but of course doing so would have gone against the whole sketchbook thing.  I guess Andy’s parents were too cheap to buy him colored pencils.

I do love the character and planet design. It’s almost Dr. Seuss-like.

Andy’s Notepad is not entirely without merit.  There’s a good game somewhere in this mess, but the horrible AI destroys the single player experience and the imbalance of weapons cripples the multiplayer mode.  With some small fixes, this could be a leaderboard game, but right now Andy is a doodle of a smelly turd, stink lines and all.  I guess I should be thankful that Andy is drawing UFOs instead of tits made out of guns like a normal teenager.

Andy’s Notepad [Saucers] was developed by Coneware

80 Microsoft Points used to make doodles of praying mantis-spider hybrids in the making of this review.  Can you picture one?  Scary, huh?  Well, sweet dreams!

 

 

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Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

July 8, 2012 by 10 Comments

Update: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure recieved a Second Chance with the Chick to cover the Steam build of the game. Click here for my updated thoughts.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is alleged to be an Oregon Trail homage.  And it is, only you actually have to fight your own battles, there’s blood and gore, intentional humor, and it’s actually fun to play.  Okay, so that means it’s absolutely NOTHING like Oregon Trail, but that’s what people are comparing it to.  Basically, take everything that made Oregon Trail educational and strip it out.  Replace it with sadism and adult situations, and you have Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, a game that is most certainly NOT educational.  In fact, I think it might actually make you stupider while you play it.  I went from being a reasonably smart person to putting my shoes on the wrong feet and watching Jersey Shore in just a matter of hours.  Potent is the derp in this one.

I’m changing my name from Kairi Vice to Kairi Buffokill.

As a game, Wagon has little going for it.  It’s part space-shooter (well, minus the space part.. mostly) and part TwickS.  Both variations are fairly primitive in their play style, and other than the occasional power-up, this is really as basic as you can get.  Calling it Atari-esq would be fair.  Where it won me over was with its personality.  From the dead-pan descriptions of your frequent failures to the gleeful mass slaughter of indigenous animals,  this is a game that revels in its absurdity.  But never to the point that it becomes obnoxious, like Torque Quest did.  Thus a game that is very fundamental in its design actually becomes something you want to press on with, just to see what crazy shit will happen next.

What’s really cool is Wagon has so many different possible scenarios built into it, all of which are chosen at random.  I played it for over two hours and I never once had the same experience.  It doesn’t mean they’re all good ones.  Sometimes I would start a game and the first thing that would happen was one of the people in my wagon would get some kind of illness and immediately lose all their health but one.  Sometimes my wagon would break and I would have to walk to the nearest outpost to fix it, which might be one screen away, or it might be three screens away.  Either way, the enemies tend to move faster than your bullets shoot, so you’re pretty fucked.  Actually, a lot of the boards tend to overwhelm you with too many enemies, and you’re often not equipped to avoid them.  There’s even scenarios where you spawn and are almost immediately fired upon, before you even realize the round has begun.  As quirky as Wagon is, it can be pretty brutal as well, and that saps the fun out of it.  I probably would have kept playing, but I was so pissed by time I finally beat the damn thing that I didn’t want to see what I missed.

And they said Sputnik was the first thing in orbit. Psssh, historians. What do they know?

I missed a lot too.  Again, over the course of two hours the game never repeated itself in the same way twice.  I still had alternative wagons to unlock.  I kind of wanted to, because they actually have different abilities.  You can ride a dinosaur and hurl eggs at enemies.  You can fly a space shuttle that moves quickly.  My personal favorite was a wagon pulled by a buffalo where you send a falcon to attack enemies.  But, there were a lot of things I missed.  And I will continue to miss them.  Yes, I had fun playing Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, but sometimes it’s too damn frustrating for its own good.  One time I was close to the end, only to lose one member to disease and one member to artistically poor play control brought on alcoholism.  This is a game that does not want you to ever be comfortable.  You’ll have laughs, but you’ll also gnash your teeth when the game decides you’re doing just a little too good and pulls a dick move.  I suppose this is what the settlers went through, which means it actually is educational.  Wait, did the settlers really fight off pterodactyls and do mushrooms?  Wow.  History is way cooler than Little House on the Prairie made it seem.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure was developed by Sparsevector
Point of Sale: Steam – Desura – Xbox Live Indie Games
Port played for this review: Xbox Live Indie Games.

IGC_Approved$1 Died of dysentery in the making of this review.

 Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

Happy Birthday Brian.  I love you with all my heart.

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Obsessive Collecting Disorder

July 6, 2012 by 10 Comments

I had a problem with Obsessive Collecting Disorder.  It was the name.  The name is all wrong.  It should have been called Obsessive Collective Disorder.  You see, the name is a play on the anxiety disorder known as obsessive-compulsive disorder.  It’s not obsessive compulsing disorder, because there is no such word as compulsing.  But there is a word called collective, so the game should have used it.  Sure, Obsessive Collective Disorder sounds like something that happens to a cult that undergoes a mass suicide in order to catch a ride on a UFO, but it works better as a pun.

Welcome back to Xbox Live Indie Games: Your source for self-hating gameplay.

I had one other problem with Obese Cauliflower Disorder: the game is a punisher, and I hate those fucking things.  They seem like they’re some kind of repressed anger stemming from not getting enough love as a child, manifested in video game form.  The idea is you’re a stick figure who is being put through various test chambers owned by the, and I’m not making this up, the CrAperture Corporation.  Isn’t it ironic how one of the most clever and original games to come around in a long time has somehow managed to kill the creativity of an entire generation?  Let me guess, the game will end with some kind of reference to the cake being a lie.  Oh, yep, there it is.  Very nice, guys.  What, you couldn’t work in a psychotic artificial intelligence while you were at it?  Well, at least the ending was good for a small giggle.  You know what?  I guess kleptomania falls into the OCD spectrum, so we’ll just say they were running with the theme and move on.

As a game, Opal Chin Disorder is pretty much just like any other punisher.  The idea is similar to N+.  You run around, avoiding traps and collecting coins.  The platforming mechanics are pretty basic.  A jumps, X or the right trigger run, and that’s it.  There’s no double jumps, wall jumps, ducking, sliding, doing short-form taxes, or breaking out into the chorus line from Oklahoma.  It’s just you, jumping, and shit that wants you dead, like some ingenious Olympic Committee person combined the hurdles and archery events.

Platformers live and die on controls.  If a game wants you dead, like Omnipotent Cactus Disorder does, it’s typically because the controls are shit and it’s an over-compensation thing.  In Octogenarian Colon Disorder’s case, I don’t think the controls are shit.  Brian suggested the word “serviceable” to me, but that sounds a bit too generous.  I think I’ll go with “tolerable.”  That sounds unhating yet highly critical.  The controls are just so strange.  The jumping is simultaneously too floaty yet too stiff, like a cloud on Viagra.  You do get used to it, in the same way you would probably get used to hitting your thumb with a hammer if you kept it up long enough, though it would be preferable to not do that.

The developer assured me that people told them Ornery Cardinal Disorder had tight controls. Ha. Where did they get that from? A game of Scattergories? “Things that are tight that start with the letter ‘C’. And GO!” “Oh gee um, collar! Um, cage! Uh uh uh, controls!” BUZZ! “Yes, we challenge ‘control’ and also we can’t believe you guys didn’t come up with cu..”

Everything about Obsessive Collective Disorder does just enough to not suck but not enough to wow me.  The minimalist graphics are tiring and bland.  The level design freshens things up with new obstacles every ten stages, but some of the challenges are copied and pasted far more than needed.  If this makes it seem like I hated the game, I actually didn’t.  It’s short enough to not feel like you’re taking a vacation on death row.  The level design is fair, I guess.  Ultimately, it never feels like you’re trying to shout at the tide to turn back.  It’s a punisher that feels doable.  Assuming you don’t play on Hardcore mode which gives you a limited amount of lives.  Some whack jobs might give that a chance.  Me?  Ha ha ha, no.  Still, I recommend Obsessive Collective Disorder.  Not a ringing endorsement or anything.  I guess it’s like saying “if you want to forfeit your dignity to just one Xbox Live Indie Game this week, make it this one!”

Obsessive Collecting Disorder was developed by Super Smith Bros.

80 Microsoft Points washed their hands seven times, flicked the light switch on an off seven times, then washed their hands seven more times in the making of this review.

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

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Chester (Second Chance with the Chick)

June 29, 2012 by 3 Comments

Despite being a bit on the underwhelming side, the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising had a few gems floating among the sewage.  Cute Things Dying Violently provided some good laughs, while Take Arms provided me with being called a “camping ho-bag.”  Which brought a smile to my face, if nothing else.  And then there was Chester, a polarizing game that I loved, but others loathed for reasons that baffle me.  Even my brother from a different mother Alan told me he thought Chester was lame.  Dude.  We had something between us, you and I.  But our views on Chester have driven us apart.  Now he’ll return to his life of Goolin and Fish & Chips, while I’ll return to my life of hanging out with Brian, watching Top Gear and Doctor Who.  Wait, which one of us is British again?

Chester, which I reviewed way back in September, impressed the hell out of me with its quirky hand-drawn graphics coupled with running and shooting platforming.  It had what so many games on the service doesn’t: personality.  Well, that and it actually played well.  But here’s the weird thing: the version I played back in September was more or less an unfinished beta build.  The Chester that is currently on the marketplace is a much more complex game.  And it’s even more fucking awesome than before.

In the old build of Chester, you could change the backgrounds of each stage to reflect different art styles.  Now, the styles actually change the gameplay, affecting the strength or speed of the enemies, or your weapons, or the amount of rare items enemies drop.  There are eight different backgrounds, and scrolling through them is a breeze: just use the bumpers.  Likewise, the character of Chester takes ten different forms, all with unique abilities and attributes.  Combine this with the elemental system that turns battles with enemies into a game of rock-paper-scissors and what once was a fairly simple (if stylish) game is now a pretty complex one.

Chester is so loaded with so many unlockables and extra content that it’s actually a bit overwhelming.  Every stage has various trinkets to find, hidden rooms, and enemies that drop delicious brains (thus making the  XBLIG minimum zombie quota in a roundabout kind of way).  You have catalogs to fill up, shit to buy from stores, and multiple difficult levels to try.  If you’re gaming on a limited budget, Chester could very well be the game you’ve been waiting for.  Hell, I bitched about the game’s lack of boss the first time around and now there is one.  It kinda sucks, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, and I appreciate the effort.

If I had to make a complaint about Chester, and I do, it’s that the controls are still a bit on the stiff side.  Then again, each character handles a little differently, and stuff like gravity affects each one in different ways.  Maybe I made a booboo by playing through most of the game with the default character.  The game can also feel like too much of a collectathon at times.  If you’re the type prone to OCD, Chester might be the worst thing to happen to you.  There’s so much shit to collect and stuff to buy in stores that I don’t think I could ever spend the days it will take to get it all.  Don’t worry, you’re not going to be missing out on levels or anything.  But still, I kind of want a chance to see everything a game, especially an indie game, has to offer without having to invest enough time to drive cross-country and back.  I want my games to feel like a diversion, not a second job.

Still, Chester is amazing.  It offers so much value for so little money.  That is, if you buy on Xbox.  On IndieVania or Dasura, it will cost you a whopping $9.99, compared to a meager 80 Mega Super Pesos on Xbox.  Quite a jump there, fellas, one that doesn’t make a whole ton of sense to me.  It would be as silly as asking for $20 for a Blu-ray, but $50 for a 3D Blu-ray.  Okay, bad example.  Or maybe good example seeing how those things would have trouble selling if they came bundled with a holographic Angelina Jolie giving out force-feedback handjobs.

Chester was developed by Brilliant Blue-G

80 Microsoft Points have Chester’s nuts roasting on an open fire in the making of this review.

 

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Washington’s Wig

June 27, 2012 by 6 Comments

Washington’s Wig will win no points for historical accuracy.  Hey guys, Washington didn’t have a dog named Dogsworth.  That sounds like the name of a dog that would follow around Scrooge McDuck or something.  Washington in fact had dozens of dogs throughout his life, including ones named Rover, Drunkard, Vulcan, and Captain.  But none named Dogsworth.  For shame, Team2Bit.  If you can’t trust Xbox Live Indie Games for historic.. wait, they actually have “Historically Inaccurate” right on the box art.  Crap.  I had about 500 words worth of complaints about the type of boat used for crossing the Delaware in this game.  Now I actually have to talk about the gameplay and shit.  Sigh.  I really hate those guys.

Washington’s Wig was the game that won for Team2Bit IGN’s Next Game Boss competition.  It was kind of surprising to me, because when I watched it I thought the game looked so fucking stupid.  Well, now the game is out on XBLIG and having finally had a chance to play it, it might surprise you to hear that I think the game is, well, fucking stupid.  Washington’s Wig is an auto-runner where only the A button is required.  You hop across icebergs, collecting coins, stars, and getting assistance from sturgeons and eagles.  It’s a shallow, completely one-dimensional time sink of a game.  One that I burned a couple of hours on.  With a smile on my face.  To all those who say I have no taste, trust me when I say, I question that myself all the time.

To be clear, Washington’s Wig is dumb.  Wearing your socks over your shoes dumb.  But it’s also kind of addictive.  It’s simple even for an auto-runner.  There’s only basic obstacles to clear.  Mostly dogs that are fighting for the Red Coats.  Some of them stand still, some of them charge at you, some of them jump up at you.  This kind of stuff has been done dozens of times before.  If not for the absurd theme, Washington’s Wig would probably be forgotten almost as soon as you turned it off.

It is lacking in some areas.  It’s a game driven by scores, but there’s no online leaderboards.  The game also has no variety in backdrops.  You’re stuck crossing the Delaware, on a freezey cold night, and that’s it.  They could have totally fucked with the source material and had other levels where Washington crosses the Nile, the Amazon, or the Rio Grande.  But no, it’s just the boring ass Delaware.  There is an included two player race mode, but I thought it kind of stunk.  Really, Washington’s Wig would have been a better fit on iPhone, with Game Center support.  Without competing against other scores, there’s really no reason to play it more than once.  You won’t get much out of Washington’s Wig, but I actually still had fun with it.  Even though I’m not sure if that’s because the game is good or because I have some kind of undiagnosed mental illness.

Washington’s Wig was developed by Team2Bit

80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind a sequel.  Perhaps some kind of aerobics game for the Wii starring Sally Hemings.  They can call it Jefferson’s Hand-Job in the making of this review.

Whoever put that God-awful “Washington’s—–Wig” music in the game is now on my list.  That is the worst fucking music in game history, and I can’t get it out of my head.  They used to behead people for less. 

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Compromised

June 23, 2012 by 1 Comment

Have you ever played a game that seemed like you should like it, but you didn’t?  I got that vibe from Compromised, a patch-work of twin stick shooting, wave shooting, space shooting, and shooty shooted shooter shooting.  It’s a typical “aliens invade and you have to save the world” claptrap storyline.  In the case of Compromised, I’m not sure why you would want to save this world.  The environments are pretty dank and depressing.  It doesn’t look like a world any reasonable being would want to live on.  For all the people of this planet know, the invaders are a race of architects and home decorators who are trying to liven the fucking place up.  Maybe we shouldn’t start blowing them up so fast.  I mean, they can’t possibly make this place any worse.

Compromised is pretty high in production values, as far as XBLIGs go.  At a whopping 426MB, it damn well better be.  Sounds, character models, special effects, they’re all top-notch.  And yet, the actual setting of the game offers such little visual stimulation that the game ultimately becomes a little draining.  Bleak works sometimes, but I feel doing so requires characters and interaction.  When you put a ship alone with no supporting characters in a sterile environment, it can be depressing.  I had the same problem with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.  The reason why galactic stuff like Metroid or Mass Effect offer such a variety of locales is because the alternative is boring.  In Compromised, the only variety is a change in color.  It’s as inviting as a traffic light.

Gameplay is a bit more lively and typically involves moving forward, fighting a few waves of enemies, moving forward a little more, fighting more waves, and then fighting bosses.  It’s a solid design, but there’s so many little mistakes that I ultimately really don’t like Compromised at all.  The best way to explain why that is can be summed up with all the times I had to pause the game to say “Whaaaaa?”

The first instance was during the tutorial, when the game was trying and failing to explain how the special attacks work.  Each of the four face buttons activates such an ability, with some kind of sub-space nuclear anti-matter black-hole creating fuck you unholy universe killing bomb mapped to the B button.  The game told me to try each of the weapons, so I did, and the thing mapped to B detonated and pretty much insta-killed me.  During the tutorial, after the game told me to use it.  Whaaaaa?

That was pretty much par for the course for that weapon, by the way.  It lingers, and once its been let loose, you can’t safely be around it.  It’s like one of my dog’s farts.

You can upgrade your stats by collecting little orange cores that enemies drop.  You can use them to increase your health bar, which sounds great!  The only problem is, when you die and respawn from a checkpoint, you don’t get the bar filled all the way.  Whaaaaaa?  Typically if you die and come back to life, that’s like a universal cue that you could use a full health bar, but the game doesn’t think so.  Also, you can upgrade how much health refills charge you up.  Again, sounds great.  The only problem is that enemies don’t actually drop the damn things.  They only appear during preset intervals.  In a game where enemies absolutely swarm the shit out of you and you might fight waves of hundreds of guys between checkpoints, you have no way to gain health.  Whaaaaa?

Enemies can spawn into a position where they’re instantly chewing your ass, before you have any chance to defend yourself.  Whaaaaa?

Compromised is a TwinkS, but missiles don’t fire the way your aiming stick is pointing.  Instead, they fire whichever way your ship is pointing.  Whaaaaa?  The whole point of TwickS are that you can move one direction and fire in the other!

I’ve never been the type of critic who settles for saying “it just wasn’t for me.”  I didn’t like Compromised, so I can’t recommend it to anyone else.  Even without all the problems, I found it to be pretty dull.  It’s not as if you just fight one wave at a time.  You fight strings of waves, one after another, in the same drab environments.  Fire-fights stick around too long, well after you’re ready to move on to the next section of the game.  Checkpoints are often spread too far apart, and without a traditional method of health drops and enemies that are completely unfair, you’ll end up replaying the same sections again and again.  I had maxed out my gun’s strength, my missile load and their power, and I still died often and had trouble making progress.  After five hours, lots of grinding, and no end in sight, I gave up.  I wasn’t having any fun.  Ultimately, I feel that Compromised is built using top quality bricks, but they’re held together with rancid tartar sauce and dental plaque.

Compromised was developed by Super Soul

240 Microsoft Points have a friend who really enjoyed the shit out of this game and spent last night telling me I have no taste at all because he’s a big meanie in the making of this review.

 

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