Brand

February 3, 2012 by 11 Comments

Brand.

Brand.

Braaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd.

Nope.  The name doesn’t work.  It doesn’t sound like a video game.  It sounds like a breakfast cereal, and a bland one at that.  The type that you would need to add copious amounts of sugar to just to choke down.  When you can name your game anything that your imagination can come up with and Brand is the best you can do, what does that say about the developer?  It’s not one of those catchy one-word names that you can get away with, like Halo or Infamous.  Brand.  Seriously, the name of the game is Brand.  What were they thinking?

“Brand thought Braid” says Brian.  Excuse me while I untie my tongue.

Brand is a hack-and-slash platformer where you try to upgrade your starting sword to make it “fit for a king.”  Once you’ve done this fifteen times (or sixteen, whatever) you move on to a final battle.  There are nine ways to upgrade the sword, and you can do each upgrade up to five times.  To get an upgrade, you select what one you’re going for, and then you’re sent off on a fetch-quest in one of three locations.  Once you’ve met the terms of the quest, you open up an exit portal and wait five seconds, then return to the shop and activate it.

It sounds like a solid idea, and if it worked it would have been fun.  But it doesn’t work.  I put eight hours into Brand yesterday and I can honestly say it’s one of the worst games I’ve played on Xbox Live Indie Games.  Wholly and entirely without any redeeming value whatsoever.

Let’s start with the first thing people talk about with Brand: the graphics.  They seem really good.  Certainly a couple notches above what people expect from an XBLIG.  But really, what do those good graphics get you?  In Brand, there’s only four enemy types.  Those four creatures are the same in every one of the three levels.  Nine Dots Studio didn’t even bother re-skinning the enemies to match the theme of each stage.  Variety is achieved through palette-swapping, with the stronger enemies usually signified by darker colors, resulting in the characters lacking distinguishing features.  The spitting frog-monster thingies are particularly pitiful in design.  It looks like someone just vomited out a puddle of sprites on a screen and said “good enough!”  If it seems petty of me to call out one creature type, I’ll remind you that creature represents 25% of the monsters you fight.  Great graphics?  Not when the character design is that bad.

Oooh, pretty! I can't make out anything, but damn!

Ironically, it’s the backgrounds that stand out the most.  They’re rendered beautifully and would work at setting the mood for the title.  They would, if they didn’t come with a tradeoff in performance.  The game has major issues with lag.  Especially the Castle, which scrolls very jerkily, like a first-generation Playstation 1 game.  These also are probably the contributing factor in the brutal load times throughout the game.  I actually used a stopwatch to time them.  It takes 52.2 seconds for the Mine stage to load.  If you die in the level and want to restart, the total time it will take is a 1 minute, 16 seconds.  For a 2D side-scrolling indie game.  The other two levels are worse, both taking over a minute to load, and about a minute and-a-half to reload if you die.  It’s not unlikely you’ll spend over an hour waiting for stuff to load up, in a game that should only take a couple of hours to beat.  It’s outrageous.

Once you’re actually playing the game, things go downhill quickly.  Combat is relatively simple: X is weak attack, Y is strong attack, B you’ll never ever ever ever ever ever use (it’s a useless dash attack) and A jumps.  Allegedly there are combos, but you’re not told what they are and I couldn’t figure out how to activate any.  The one or two times I thought I had done one, they didn’t really do any damage so I didn’t bother experimenting further.

Not doing any damage to baddies was a recurring theme throughout Brand.  Of the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades you have to do, I “refined” my sword four times and strengthened it three times.  I also gave it the ability to poison, I made it so a magical light sword thingie would poke out my back allowing me to fight creatures behind me, and I added a fire wave to it and upgraded that a couple of times.  The end result?  The starter enemies might die in one hit, but everything else remained damage sponges.  Mind you, the entire game is about upgrading your offense.  There’s no defensive upgrades at all.  Yet, even once I had done the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades and was dumped into the final stage, I felt like I had made no progress.  My dude was still a total pussy and my sword couldn’t cut butter.

Part of it seems to be a result of the game just ignoring your actions.  Direct combat seems to work best, in that about half of your attacks will result in damage.  On the other hand, the upgraded effects do not want to work at all and will fight you every step of the way.  As I noted, I got the fire sword thingie and then upgraded it once.  I then watched as I would send a colossal wave of fire at an enemy and have it pass right through him, doing no damage at all.  I know it didn’t because the enemy didn’t do it’s damage-indication flash.  I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but actually it got so bad that I started keeping count of how many attacks a single enemy could fail to take.  Around three seemed about average.  Ten wasn’t all that rare.  The most was this one mid-level wasp that was all alone in a normal room with no walls, barriers, or anything else in the way.  I was swinging the sword close enough that in theory the sword itself would do damage, but if that failed the fire would get it as the wasp was dead center in the wave.  Total swings before it registered damage for the first time?  Twenty-fucking-two times.

In order: useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, and useless.

Again, there’s no defensive upgrades in the game.  Well, there is one.  It makes it so you damage a creature you block.  Sounds great!  Sure, the block doesn’t even work on anything past entry-level enemies, but at least you’ll be dealing them damage back!  Yea, about that.  If you get this upgrade and use it too much, it kills you.  No really, you die from it.  And once you have it, you can’t turn it off.  Thus, you’ll be unable to defend yourself throughout levels for the rest of the game.  Given the fact that harder enemies attack faster, cause more damage, and gang up on you, you’re already screwed without the block “upgrade.”  With it, you might as well take your sword and commit Seppuku.  Although if you could actually do that, it would probably take the game five or six tries before registering it.  You can’t increase your lifebar, armor, speed, or jumping ability.  I guess Brand wanted to prove that a good defense is a strong offense.  It’s too bad a strong offense is not an option.

Once you’ve made the last upgrades to your character, you enter the final stage.  Hopefully your sword will be strong enough -snicker- because you’re entering the arena.  You know those stages in Zelda games where you fall down a hole and then you have to fight every single enemy in the game?  Yea, that’s what this is.  You fight a wave of ten or so guys off, all attacking your literally defenseless ass all at once.  If you kill them, a door unlocks, you fall down a hole, and you repeat the process.  There’s no situational health refills.  It seems like one random enemy in each stage will restore a sliver of your bar, so naturally it was always the first enemy I killed each time.  Hell, I can’t say with 100% certainty that there is a random enemy giving away a teeny tiny scrap of health each floor.  I cleared whole rooms out and was always left with a micro-fraction of health left.  I tried beating this for an hour yesterday and another thirty minutes today, never actually making it past the fourth wave.  Perhaps I didn’t upgrade my sword correctly.

Yes, Brand has avatar support. No, I have no fucking clue why this was added instead of fixing the game.

Apparently there is some kind of boss monster at the end of it.  I never found out for myself.  The thing is, I’m guessing that the giant scorpion-dog thingies that were scattered throughout the normal stages are in the Arena and I just hadn’t reached them yet.  If they are, I want to go on the record of saying the game is probably impossible.  I encountered several of those fucking things throughout the game and I only managed to kill one.  They have four attacks, three of which are maybe-unblockable quick strikes that drain your health faster than smoking the exhaust pipe of a bus.  If you manage to get close enough to start swinging, they take dozens of shots before they die.  The mere threat of them was enough to make me realize playing the arena wasn’t worth it, because unless the game ends with you shoving the sword through the throat of the king, then deleting Brand from your hard drive and replacing it with a better game, it’s just not worth the effort.

I could go on about the play control (meh) or the jumping (bleech) or the fact that the price of Brand is going to be raised to 240MSP in 90 days (a proclamation so fucking arrogant the developer ought to be flogged just for thinking about it) but I think I’ve said enough.  If anything I’ve said about this game sounds like something you want to play, have at it, you fucking weirdo.  I’ll close by going back to the graphics, because once again the usual gang of idiots are saying “it’s worth it just for the graphics!”  Quite frankly, I don’t think the graphics are that good.  But let’s say they were.  I think saying gameplay doesn’t matter if the art is good is kind of a hypocritical stance from a community that complains about everything done by guys like Silver Dollar who phone-in nearly every title they release.  How come it’s not okay for them to release busted, broken games with limited play mechanics, but a game like Brand can be nearly unplayable and still get you XBLIGers to stock up on tissues and baby lotion?  I don’t get it.  It would be like only being able to enter the Louvre if the curator gets to cockslap you across the face while the janitor shoves his mop up your ass.

Brand was developed by Nine Dot Studios

80 Microsoft Points said “yes, mop side first” in the making of this review.

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Ocean Drive Challenge

January 24, 2012 by 11 Comments

I should probably preface this review by noting that I don’t have my drivers license.  Apparently the state of California thinks that I would be a danger to others on the account of my epilepsy.  And yet they still let Mel Gibson drive.  Hmmph.  Well, no matter.  I can still play racing games.  I play them very poorly, but I can still play them!  Over the next three reviews, I’ll be taking a look at some recent racing titles to hit Xbox Live Indie Games.  It might sound redundant to do three like-minded games, but actually all three are very different.  This is because all three picked an entirely different series to shameless copy, or “pay homage to” if you’re all googly-eyed nostalgic for this sort of stuff.

The first one is Ocean Drive Challenge.  It’s a street-racer that borrows from the Sega classic Out Run in the same way that a pick pocket borrows from you.  You choose one of three cars and try to get from point A to point B before time runs out.  That’s pretty much it.  Honestly, the game is a fairly good tribute if you’re into this sort of thing.  It’s not uncommon for an XBLIG clone of a cherished 80s coin-op to be kind of shit, but Ocean Drive Challenge really is pretty damn close to Out Run.  The cars handle the same way, the sense of speed is about the same, and the graphics are light and cartoony.  You even select what kind of music you want playing before the race begins.

All the annoyances of Out Run are here too.  Like being stuck on a two-lane stretch of road and having the left lane contain a gas tanker and the right lane be occupied by a comatose grandmother.  Or the cars interpreting your control movements as polite suggestions that can be gracefully ignored.  There’s also no modes of play besides the main arcade race.  It’s probably beatable but I was never good at these sort of games and could only make it halfway through the course.  Whether you call it Out Run or San Francisco Rush or Cruis’n USA, the time you get back for clearing a checkpoint never seems like it’s enough, at least for me.

Really though, there’s not a whole lot I can complain about here.  I can’t even bitch about this being a game that only nostalgic cocknuggets could find delight in, because it’s actually a well made game.  The cocknugget crowd that sometimes has to shut down parts of their brain to convince themselves that a bad clone is just like the childhood game they remember will probably have their heads explode when they play Ocean Drive Challenge, because it really IS just like the childhood game they remember.  Having said that, if you’re a really big fan of Out Run, why would you need this game?  Wouldn’t you already own it?  Maybe as part of a compilation disc, or on an emulator, or maybe you own the actual arcade cabinet.  Ocean Drive Challenge is close enough to Out Run to be impressive, but also close enough to be useless.  It actually makes me wonder what exactly the developer was thinking.  Making a really accurate clone of a twenty-five year old arcade game on an entirely different platform using completely different tools does take a lot of skill.  Imagine if they had taken that skill and applied it to a new concept.  The results could have been really amazing.  Instead, they did the video game equivalent of spending six years at MIT just to take a job in photocopy machine repair.

Ocean Drive Challenge was developed by need1D

80 Microsoft Points once caused a seven-car, multiple-fatality pileup on a slot car racing track in the making of this review. 

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The Cusp: January 2012

January 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

The Cusp is a monthly highlighting of three Xbox Live Indie Games that came up just short of the leaderboard here at Indie Gamer Chick.

Welcome to the first installment of The Cusp!  For the last few months, Brian and I have kicked around the idea that there should be some “runner-up” list to complement the Leaderboard.  We implemented the first idea, that former Leaderboard games should receive recognition, and while this idea has worked, maybe it’s not enough.

So we came up with The Cusp.  Three games that will be featured over a 30 day period on the sidebar here, and a post explaining why they made it.  Or almost made it, depending on how you look at things.  In addition, The Cusp gives the developers of the selected games a chance to talk about their game and their plans for the future.

In the future, The Cusp will likely include monthly themes, like three games of the same genre or maybe even same developer.  The one thing every game featured on the Cusp will have in common is they are all good games that are worth your money.  If you missed them before, don’t miss out on them again.

For this opening month, we went with a variety pack.  Three games with absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they went overlooked, both at this site and on the marketplace as a whole.  I would also like to point out that the inclusion of a game by Bionic Thumbs has nothing to do with paying them back for trashing their recent game Plugemons: Part 1.  The Cusp has been in the works for a while and Starzzle was always one of the games that I had planned to include.

Read more of this post

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Hypership Out of Control (iOS) and Hypership Still Out of Control (XBLIG)

January 21, 2012 by 12 Comments

I think the thing that disappointed me most about VolChaos is that I know Fun Infused Games has talent.  I know this because I was hooked on Hypership Out of Control for the iPhone and iPad.  If that doesn’t impress you, it should.  If there’s one genre I dislike more than anything else, its vertical space shooters.  Yet Hypership was fast-paced, twitchy, high-score based, and loads of fun.

The idea is that you’re a ship with a hyperdrive set permanently in the “on” position.  With no way to brake, you have to clear gates and shoot any debris in your way, all while scrolling forward at break-neck speed.  There are some items that will slow you down, but for the most part you have to rely on quick reflexes and digital dexterity to survive.  You have a cannon but it fires automatically, so all you have  to worry about is using your finger to slide your ship back and forth.

Hypership on iOS is THE Hypershit!

There’s online leaderboards and multiple modes of play.  Usually when a game like this hits, one or more of the modes are total stinkers.  Here, every mode has its merits.  “Hardcore” mode is exactly the same as normal, except you only have one life, creating an awesome sense of tension.  In “Coin Down” the coins you collect on the course act as your fuel.  In SuperSpeed, you take the role of an albino hamster who is strapped to a rocket car and attempts to beat the land speed record for a rodent on the Bonneville Salt Flats, the previous record holder being Richard Hammond.  Actually, it’s just normal mode with more speed.  But I’m sure I just gave someone an idea for a bitchin’ new game.

Hypership on iPhone (or iPad if you’re a snoot) is one of the few games I’ve come across that I don’t have a whole lot of complain about.  Thankfully a vastly inferior port was just launched on Xbox Live Indie Games that I can gleefully murder.  Well I guess technically the iPhone version is the port while the new XBLIG game is a remake of the original.  It’s called Hypership Still Out of Control, and it actively sucks with all the might of a whirlpool stuck inside a black hole.

Hypership Still Out of Control has all the play modes of the iOS version, and even includes local multiplayer.  But I found the game nearly unplayable because it lacks the precision of touch control that I had grown so accustomed to on my iPhone.  Regardless of whether you’re using the D-pad or the analog stick, movement is too loose.  This is a major problem when trying to navigate past gates with narrow openings.  The whole point of the game is that your ship is moving at unreasonably dangerous speeds, so anything less than absolute flawless control is simply not going to cut it.

Another thing that I had grown fond of on the iOS port was not having to do anything to make the ship fire.  On iPhone, the ship never stops firing.  It’s pretty convenient because there’s never really a point where you won’t want it to be shooting.  On XBLIG, you have to manually fire.  It’s not really a deal breaker, because lots of games do that.  I guess it’s matter of comfort.  It’s like going from laying on a comfy mattress made of clouds to laying on a bed of nails.

Local multiplayer would be fun if the controls weren’t so loose.

And finally, there’s no online leaderboards.  Yea, the only option on XBLIG is ghettoized peer-to-peer ones that are hard to implement, but the only reason to own this game is to try posting high scores.  There’s actually an explanation screen where it’s explained that it wasn’t worth the effort and you should buy the iOS or Windows Phone 7 (ha, as if) ports if you’re into this sort of thing.  So I’ll just go by the same advice the developers themselves gave.  If you have a dollar to spare, there are few things as fun or addictive at that price as Hypership out of Control for iPhone/iPad/iPod/iPacemaker (coming in October).  If, however, you only have XBLIG, you might as well spend those 80 points on a shinny new sombrero for your avatar because Hypership on it is Hyper-shit. I knew I could work that line in there somewhere.

Hypership out of Control and Hypership Still Out of Control were developed by Fun Infused Games

IGC_Approved99¢ and 80 Microsoft Points heard Apple fanboys are now eating bacon three meals a day in anticipation of the iPacemaker in the making of this review.

Hypership Out of Control is also available for Windows Phone for $0.99 or free with ads.  These versions are unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The iOS version is Chick Approved.  The XBLIG version is not. 

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Plugemons: Part 1

January 15, 2012 by 54 Comments

As is normal when an XBLIG game is horrible but pretty, I have to start my review of horrible game Plugemons: Part 1 by noting that this horrible game has beautiful graphics.  Really, really beautiful.  That gets you really far in gaming.  It’s the reason I skipped some other review requests and went straight to it.  My exact words to Brian when I saw this on the marketplace were “holy shit, look at this one!”  Even though my instinct told me that Xbox Live Indie Games with insanely good graphics are typically quite bad (Orbitron being one of the few exceptions), I latched onto it, like a sailor caught in the call of a Siren.  Within ten seconds of playing the game, I realized I’d been had.  Again.  Who would have ever thought the XBLIG marketplace could double as Sirenum scopuli?

Plugemon is a puzzle game, not a platformer or a punisher.  This was a source of confusion for me.  You see, in Plugemon you jump from ledge to ledge, swing off of other ledges, jump on enemies heads, and try to acquire various lightning bolts scattered throughout stages like coins in a Mario game.  The game’s own description, presumably written by the Plugemon’s developer, doesn’t mention the word “puzzle” until it notes things like jumping, running, and dying a lot.

See?

So when I tweeted that the game sucked, the developer took exception to this and demanded an explanation.  I gave him a few.  “The controls are horrible and very unresponsive. Scrolling is jerky. There are issues with enemy visibility.”  Now, I expect a developer to defend their product.  It’s their baby after all.  What I normally don’t expect is for a developer to claim their product is something that it is not.  Which is what the Plugemon developer did.  He noted that the game is not a platformer, but a puzzler.

You can see why I’m so confused.  It’s true that a couple of the levels featured the ability to switch from your main character to other members of its species.  Using them, you hit switches.  That’s it.  There’s no real puzzle element that I noticed.  Granted, I only made it to world 1-8 before I finally quit because the game is an unplayable piece of shit, but still.  By the way, the switching element was only in half the stages to that point.  If you’re going to claim to be a puzzle game, step one should be having puzzles.  Instead, Plugemon has fetch quests.  You have to acquire a certain amount of red lightning bolts scattered throughout each stage to activate an exit portal.  This involves searching a level for them.  That’s not really a puzzle.  That’s just a typical convention of platforming games.

Regardless of what genre you call it, bad controls will ruin any game.  Plugemons: Part 1 has terrible play control.  Your guy moves like he just took a bath in honey.  His mobility is severely limited, and he’s not all that responsive to the directions you give him.  Despite being a puzzler that is barely a platformer at all, Plugemon primarily deals with jumping from platform to platform.  The jumping physics are completely broken.  Your character feels like he’s leaping through wet cement.  It’s slow and clumsy.  There’s also some sort of issue with landing.  Sometimes, I would land on the edge of a ledge and then slip off it for no apparent reason.  This happened a lot.  The only way to avoid it is to land dead center in the middle of the platform, but that’s not always an option.

Collision detection with the baddies is a problem too.  The main enemies are spider-like thingies that do electrical charges when you get near them.  This doesn’t actually seem to kill you as long as you land on them properly.  The problem is the actual spot to kill them is too small and more often than not, I would jump on them, only to miss that microscopic hit-point and die.  Later in the game, miniature spiders appear and they are damn near impossible to land on properly.

It’s such a shame because, once again, the game is really good-looking.  And the characters have an actual personality, unlike, say, Oozi.  But the game is unplayable because of both the control issues and the overall level design.  I finally quit on level 1-8.  The idea in it is the level is shrouded almost completely in darkness.  So you have to trial-and-error your way through it.  Which is kind of a far-fetched goal because you can’t see the springs you need to get to platforms, the cannons you need to get to others, the ledges you need to stand on, or any of the traps that can kill you.  This is “GOTCHA!” gameplay.  You walked into a spike that you couldn’t see.  GOTCHA!  You tried to walk to a platform and fell to your death.  GOTCHA!  You jump down off a cliff and into a buzzsaw hidden in total darkness.  GOTCHA!  You land on a platform and an invisible enemy kills you.  GOTCHA!

When the game’s own description notes you die a lot, you would be right to assume that the game tried to be a punisher.  The developer denied this, but there was a very telling moment in our little tweet-off.  When I brought up the bad play control, this is how they responded.

I never brought up Super Meat Boy.  Nor do I ever bring up Super Meat Boy when talking with developers of punishers.  It’s just not a game that I care to invoke.  It’s alright, if a tad bit overrated, but my experience playing it is not high on my cherished gaming memories list.  It just sort of exists.  Yet, whenever I bitch about a platforming game having shitty controls, as sure as the tide comes in, the developer will bring up Super Meat Boy.  The VolChaos guy did it too.  “Your game has shitty control.”  “Blah blah blah Super Meat Boy, blah blah blah, blah blah.”

Look, just because your game is hard to beat doesn’t make it Super Meat Boy.  In some cases, people think it’s a fair comparison just because of the difficulty level.  In the case of Plugemon, it’s clear they were actually trying to be close to Super Meat Boy.  Let’s review.  Advertising that you die a lot?  Check.  Levels shrouded in darkness?  Check.  A stage where you’re being chased by a giant-sized boss?  Check.  Buzzsaws as one of the primary obstacles?  Check.  Hey, I didn’t invite comparison.  They did.  I’m just pointing out the obvious.  The Twitter message is a classic example of projection.  I say the controls suck, they say I expected Super Meat Boy, a game that is nothing wink like the puzzle game nudge they made, elbow.

Insanely Shitty Shadow Planet

I do expect a game to control well though, and I could control Super Meat Boy, a far more complicated game.  In it, you had to wall jump, clear large gaps, and make precision landings on platforms.  I could do all that just fine.  In Plugemons: Part 1, it’s difficult to even leap a small gap, or correctly hit the weak spot of an enemy that’s pretty large in size.  Super Meat Boy also had smaller levels designed around its punisher style.  Here, the levels can be sprawling, yet there are no checkpoints.  If you die, you have to wait while the overly-long death animation takes over before respawning at the start of the level.  This is especially annoying in a game where most of your deaths are going to be the fault of the busted controls and not due to your lack of skills.

Overall, Plugemons: Part 1 is without any redeeming quality.  Yes, it’s pretty, which I’m sure will lead to some very thick people saying “it’s worth it just for the art.”  No it’s not.  What kind of simpleton plays games for their graphics anymore?  It’s 2012 for God’s sake!  Good graphics are everywhere.  If it’s worth it just for the graphics, that presumably that means you’re willing to pay a dollar to watch someone else play it.  Say, that gives me an idea.  Party at my house!  One dollar a head cover charge.  Watch me play this shitty game.  Bring your own beverages.  No fatties.

Oh yea, this is totally a puzzle game, not a punisher. The art work makes that very, very clear.

Plugemons: Part 1 was developed by Bionic Thumbs

80 Microsoft Points think those simpletons are the guys who run Dream Build Play in the making of this review.

By the way, how the fuck did Bionic Thumbs confuse their own game as being a puzzler?  They made a puzzler, Starzzle, and it was not bad. 

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Microsoft Announces Changes for Xbox Live Indie Games

January 4, 2012 by 13 Comments

I normally don’t post news items here at Indie Gamer Chick, but today Microsoft announced three major changes to Xbox Live Indie Game development policy.  They are as follows.

  • Xbox Live Indie Games can now be 500MB in size.
  • The minimum price of 240MSP now applies to games 150MB in size or higher.  Games at under 150MB can (AND PROBABLY SHOULD!!) be priced at 80MSP.
  • Developers can now publish twenty games a year.

As people know from my previous article about pricing, I have no patience or tolerance for developers that over price their games.  It’s not reflection of quality.  It’s how the market works.  Microsoft made this move so developers could be more competitive.  And for the record, this is not a race to the bottom.  Your games are only worth what consumers are willing to pay for them.  If you price higher without being forced to on some misguided principle, you’re just being silly.

Any developers who wish to use my site as a forum to announce you’ve dropped the prices of your games, you got it.  Tweet me the title of your game and I’ll note it in a daily update every day for the rest of the month.  The guys at Zeboyd Games have already done so with Cthulhu Saves the World, which is now priced at 80MSP.

I’m also interested to hear what you developers plan to do with all the added space you now have at your disposal.  You can e-mail me or let me know in the comments section of this post, and I’ll include it in those daily updates.  I applaud Microsoft for this decision in helping developers compete better with wireless gaming apps and against their own Xbox Live Arcade platform.  Well done chaps.  Now stop being assholes and get games a better place in the dashboard.

UPDATE: Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard member Antipole is now also 80MSP, down from its original price of 400MSP.  Outstanding move.  You absolutely have got to get this game right now.

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Game Type

December 29, 2011 by 16 Comments

I sympathize with Xbox Live Indie Game developers. I really do. It’s a tough little market you guys are trying to conquer. Only a select few have been truly successful in their attempts at it. It’s mostly because your games suck. But if your game is good, it’s probably because Xbox Live Indie Games are sort of buried in the dashboard. People who were hoping that the winter update would fix the issue had good news and bad news. The good news was that Xbox Live Indie Games were now on equal footing with Xbox Live Arcade Games.

The bad news was they were both kind of buried. And the worst news is how many of the new, highly touted features of Xbox Live do not work for XBLIGs.

Mommy’s Best Games wanted to express the frustration of everyone involved and created Game Type. It’s part dashboard parody, part shoot-em-up, and completely useless rubbish. If DLC Quest restored my faith that developers were able to successfully parody the gaming industry, Game Type reminds me why most shouldn’t bother. It has nothing to do with my dislike of shooters or my somewhat indifference to the whole dashboard situation. Game Type is just not funny.

So the idea is you start in a mock-up of the Xbox dashboard. You have to “find” the actual game here. Along the way you’re bombarded by stuff not related to gaming at all. Which is what Microsoft intended the Xbox to be from day one. It was Microsoft’s Trojan Horse. Gaming was just the entry point, because making a console was cheaper than acquiring a cable provider, or a telecom company. No, really! That was the point.

Oh my God, a cat! LULZ or something.

Gamers who feel “betrayed” by the new Xbox dashboard don’t get it. Gaming was just part one of their strategy of getting a consumer item into the living room. It happened to be the cheapest way to get there. And by cheapest, I still mean they took a bath somewhere in billions to get it up and running.  It’s not easy to launch a consumer product. It will probably be another decade or more before they’re not taking on any losses with the Xbox brand. But that’s how it works, and they knew that. It’s a long-term project, something most gamers didn’t realize. They just happened to be the conduit for this expansion.

The time has arrived for Microsoft to start rolling out all the other plans for Xbox, and that rubs Xbox fanboys the wrong way. I guess that’s why Game Type exists. It might aim to take the piss out of the dashboard, but it doesn’t do so very successfully. That’s mostly because they were so lazy in implementing it. There’s only a small handful of things in the fake dashboard to click on, and most of them just offer the same non-gags many times. For example, on the TV page, if you click something it takes you to a crude picture of a football player. Click something else on that page, and you get the same picture.  Um, hilarious? And why does the football player also appear in the movies part of the dash? Is this some kind of Friday Night Lights tribute?

It also doesn’t help that there are ads for other Xbox Live Indie Games all over the fake dashboard. Now wait a second. If this thing is supposed to be lampooning the actual dashboard, why on Earth are XBLIGs everywhere here? I get that these guys are all friends and that Mommy’s Best is just trying to throw some of its chums a bone here,  but you can’t rally against something for not doing something and then show the thing you’re making fun of doing exactly that!

Once you get to the actual game, the entire joke, gag, and purpose of this whole thing falls completely on its face. The game is fucking horrible. It’s a shoot-em-up where you play as the hoodie-wearing girl who occupies the actual GAME TYPE option on the real dashboard. You scroll her up and down, shooting at various guys, collecting the stuff they drop, and going for a high score on the global leaderboard.

Here’s the trick to it: hold down X. A semen geyser will erupt from the hoodie girl, destroying everything it touches. There’s no limit to the amount you can use this, so grab some duct tape and enjoy the ride. It ain’t much of a ride. There’s only one stage that repeats at a faster speed when you clear it. It says it adds some baddies too, but if it does the amount is negligible. Anyway, the game is a total piece of shit. And then once I finally died with a score close to four-million points, it didn’t record it. It recorded my previous efforts, but not that one. Bull. Shit. I had four million points, and I want my four million mother fucking points.

So in a nutshell, Game Type wanted to poke fun at the plight of all XBLIG developers. To do so, Mommy’s Best Games made an unfunny dashboard parody and then a game that would be embarrassing to own if it was a free iPhone app. Take that, Microsoft! I guess it was supposed to be a winking nod to other developers, but it still falls flat. Most of the XBLIG developers I know have practically been in a funeral-like mindset ever since the dashboard update took place. If that’s the case, Game Type is like eulogizing your best friend by walking up and farting in the widow’s face.

Game Type was developed by Mommy’s Best Games

80 Microsoft Points are really truly honestly going to post a World Wars II review this week in the making of this review. 

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I’ll be back.

December 12, 2011 by 3 Comments

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days.  As many of you are aware, I suffer from epilepsy.  Most of the time, I have my condition under control.  I usually have a degree of awareness when I’m about to have a seizure.  But, sometimes they happen with no warning and it’s not always at the most opportune of times.  On Saturday afternoon, while I was walking across my living room, I suffered a seizure and collapsed.  Although I don’t know exactly what happened, it’s believed I struck my head on the leg of a table.

Although I haven’t yet been released from the hospital, I’m expected to make a full recovery.  I admit that I’m quickly losing patience here, but the doctors and nurses are being totally awesome and doing a wonderful job with me.  And, they’re letting me have my Xbox!  So I might be able to try reviewing games soon.  There’s a chance that the reviews might end up being shorter than normal, so I’m making requests that my readers or the community give me some ideas of Xbox Live Indie Games that are short in length, taking well under an hour to complete.  Alternatively, I might review some stuff for iPhone, Android, Nintendo 3DS, and PSP until I’m released, depending on how difficult it is to play my Xbox here.

I expect to start doing some new game reviews soon.  Until then, there are going to be one or two guest columns, starting in just a few minutes when I post a guest article by Ian Stocker, the creator of Escape Goat.  To all those developers that have asked, yes, I want your columns.  In fact, I kind of need them for a few days.  It would be awesome.  Just hit me up on Twitter and we can discuss it.

I want to thank everybody who has been offering their well wishes and prayers over the last few days.  Someone up there must have heard you, because I’m expected to fully recover from this.  Since the moment I started Indie Gamer Chick, I was accepted by the community you guys have made.  It’s been touch and go at times, and I know not everyone likes me a whole lot, but the vast majority of you have gone out of your way to not only offer your support, but to treat me like a rock star.  Thank you for that.  I love you all, the Xbox Live Indie Game community, and I hope I’m back on the beat soon.

-Catherine “Kairi Vice”

The Indie Gamer Chick

PS: I can still tell whether a game sucks or not so don’t think I’m going to go soft because of this.  Offer you suggestions for shorter XBLIGs in the comments.

UPDATE: Not even a full hour after I posted this, they let me come home, provided that I carefully follow the doctor’s instructions and take it extremely easy.  Yea!  I’m home!

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Blocky

October 28, 2011 by 1 Comment

In some ways, this review is a Second Chance with the Chick.  I first played Blocky a few weeks back when it’s developer challenged me.  And I actually liked what I played.  It’s got an old school reflex-testing vibe to it, with small bits of action and experience upgrades peppered in.  And then it all went to hell with one of the most infuriating boss fights I’ve ever come across.  I was so pissed off I didn’t even bother to write the review.  Instead, I took to e-mail and gave the developer holy hell for it.  But then, being the benevolent goddess that I am, I told them I would hold off on my review until this one little bitty issue was patched up.  See, I’m nice.  Modest too.

Blocky feels like the type of casual game that would be developed by PopCap Games.  Hey, don’t scoff at them until someone buys you for $650,000,000.  You play as a square that has to avoid making contact with various baddies that move randomly around a static play field.  There’s a wide variety of goals present.  In some levels you have no offensive options and just have to try avoiding the enemies.  In some, you have to destroy the enemies using power-ups that spawn in random intervals, or by causing them to get sucked up in whirlpools.  In some levels you’re expected to collect as many coins as possible or gather a high score.  Not all levels are equally as fun.  I personally found the whirlpool levels to be the low point.  In them, you’re supposed to use the magnetic power-ups to repel enemies to their deaths.  However, the magnet power isn’t very strong, nor is it easy to steer the enemies.  Having said that, if you just wait a while the baddies usually end up killing themselves.  Maybe this is the evil spiky circle-block thingie way of committing Seppuku for failure to kill me in thirty seconds or less.  Hell, I don’t know.

Blocky isn’t easy on the eyes, but the enemies are distinctive, even if the backgrounds have this psychedelic quality that can be a bit distracting.  But overall the game is pretty fun, and at times a bit intense.  In later levels, enemies spawn faster than mutant babies in a village full of moonshine-plied hillbillies.  For the most part, you have to simply avoid them.  You do have hope in the form of a handful of power-ups.  I already mentioned the utterly useless magnet, but there’s also a fork that allows you to eat enemies for a few seconds.  There’s a shield that allows you to bump into a single enemy.  There’s a flashing thingie that slows enemies down.  And finally there’s a hammer, which pauses the game to allow you to select a small radius of enemies to destroy, but it’s pretty rare to get.  In fact, up until the boss fight, I had only gotten one via random spawning, but certainly that wouldn’t factor in later, right?

Oh, and there are experience upgrades.  They seem really out-of-place in a game like this, and they’re really not all that helpful either.  One of them increased the radius of the hammer, which again, I had only seen once over the entire length of the game.  Hell, I’ve seen Sasquatch more times in my life.  Another option increases your character’s speed.  I never did this one because it seems like a recipe for disaster.  In a game where dexterity and precision are so important, why on Earth would I want to make my character move faster?  Maybe it does actually work, but I’m going off of nearly 20 years of gaming experience that says the faster anything moves, the harder it is to control.  So I ended up pouring all my points into things that increase the amount of money you collect, and to my character’s gravitational pull for sucking money towards him when I’m too lazy to go grab it myself, in what I call the “Merrill Lynch Effect.”  You can spend the money in a shop between stages to buy extra shields if you’re smart like me, or on stuff like the hammer that will kill one small cluster of enemies that will respawn anyway.  There’s also stuff that slows baddies down or creates an escape portal for you, but I stuck with just the shields because I accept that I’m a total failure who will bounce off more enemies than Tiger Woods parachuting into a monogamy enthusiast convention.

I really did like Blocky.  And then I got to the boss.  There’s actually two bosses that you fight at the same time (later there are even more).  Each has a symbol of a power-up inside of them.  Once you get that symbol, you touch the boss and then mash the A button on them to inflict damage.  Simple enough.  The first boss I took down fairly easily.  The second boss had a hammer symbol on him.  Again, up to this point, I had only gotten one hammer in the entire play-through.  “But surely since this is a boss that requires the hammer, they will appear more often, right?”

The game’s answer was “Fuck you, and don’t call me Shirley.”

TWENTY MINUTES!  That’s how long it took me to get my very first hammer while “fighting” a boss that required a hammer to beat it.  That’s not an exaggeration.  Twenty minutes.  And that hammer did so little damage that I figured it would take several hours to beat the damn thing.  No thanks.  So after thirty minutes of nothingness against a boss that has no attack, in a big room where all I had to do was avoid it, I decided to quit out to the menu and purchase some hammers.  Only once I exited, I found out I would have to play the entire sixth world over again, only without shields I used to get there in the first place.  After all, I had just spent all my money on hammers.  World six was very difficult.  I would have to play it again.

What followed I believe is known as a “conniption.”  I absolutely blew my stack.  I’ve seen a lot of good games with questionable design choices, but this was the absolute worst yet.  First off, the game didn’t need a boss.  Second, WHAT THE PISS GUZZLING HELL WAS THE DEVELOPER THINKING?  So I sent off a calm, completely rational e-mail to him explaining to him that he had murdered fun and was going to jail for it.

This is a picture of the boss fight that drove me crazy and NOT a trip caused by the peyote you just took.

Actually, he took it really well and corrected the problem.  So now if you play it the boss is so easy to beat that it’s laughable.  Not that I’m complaining about that.  Again, I think the entire concept of a boss in this kind of game is dumb.  And it wasn’t difficult in the slightest bit to begin with.  Tedium and difficulty should not be confused, and something that simply takes a long time to complete doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to do.  Unless it’s running a marathon.  That actually is long and difficult.  But my point still stands.  Also, I was able to directly enter the boss room this time.  I’m not sure how that happened, but it did.

With the boss issue corrected, Blocky is now an overall pretty good game.  Hell, there were more levels after I beat the boss, and I wanted to keep playing them.  It’s been a bad month for Xbox Live Indie Games, so maybe I’m just all for anything that offers me even the slightest amount of stimulation.  I don’t think that’s the case though.  Blocky has some really good twitchy-gameplay and I genuinely had a fun time playing it.  It’s not mind-blowing by any stretch, and the added “retro” mode where you just go for a high score is useless without online leaderboards, but I do give the game my official seal of approval.  And now that the boss battles are fixed, I won’t even be pinning it to the developer’s chest using a rusty nail and a sledge-hammer.

Blocky was developed by Think Flow Games

80 Microsoft Points actually aren’t sure if it was Sasquatch that they saw or Robin Williams in the making of this review.

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Milie & Telly

October 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

Milie & Telly is one part TwickS, one part shump, and 100% horrible.  I hesitate to call it the worst Xbox Live Indie Game I’ve yet played, because I’ve used that one a couple of times and I don’t want to sound like a person prone to hyperbole.  Still, I put about 90 minutes into Milie & Telly and I’m hard-pressed to think of even the slightest complement to pay towards it.

It’s a shump.  One that, for the most part, only had a couple of enemies on screen at a time.  All of which are total bullet-sponges.  They come in either a red or yellow variety and you have to shoot them with the correct bullet, like Ikaruga.  It’s also a TwickS, so you in theory should have precision aiming.  Instead, your gun fires one or two flimsy bullets at a rate so slow that it makes killing even the basic enemies such a slow process that it will sap your will to live.  It certainly made me contemplate whether I could successfully bludgeon myself to death with my own controller.

The levels are long too, but that’s not a point in the game’s favor.  There is no variety, and there are no power-ups.  Just shoot a couple bullet-sponges, wait for more to appear, and start shooting them.  Oh, and you have shields too.  There are bosses, but I never successfully beat one, even on easy.  I’m really trying here to say something positive about Milie & Telly just so I don’t come across like a negative meanie.  The graphics are wretched, like they were lifted straight out of an animated banner ad from ten years ago, and the sound effects are more invasive to your senses than being skull-fucked by a rusty jack hammer.  You know what, fuck it.  Milie & Telly is weaponized boredom and should be subjected to sanctions under the Geneva Convention.

Milie & Telly was developed by Nitama Naishin

80 Microsoft Points took some Advil and said “no, it’s not possible to bludgeon yourself to death with a controller” in the making of this review. 

Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org

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