If I were to go mad and rechristen Indie Gamer Chick as “XBLIG Zombie Game Chick” with the intent of reviewing games with a zombie theme, there are enough zombie games on XBLIG that I would be able to have a daily review of a different title for over two years. It strikes me as odd that, on a platform like XBLIG, where there’s almost no limitations on how you can theme your project, so many developers choose to regurgitate the same shit day after day. To some gamers, the over-saturation of zombie games (and this is hardly exclusive to XBLIG) is insulting and comes across as almost lazy. “Gamers are sheep. Shoehorn zombies in any game and they’ll line up to buy it.” It’s cynical. Does it generate sales? Yea, maybe. Does it generate respect? Probably not. Now if you put effort into your title and try to make it stand out, you can have both sales and acclaim. Look at The Walking Dead. If your game is just a generic shooter that was rushed through production to capitalize on a fad and generate sales off marketplace confusion, you might just get neither.
Cough.
Anyway, I thought of this while playing Zombie Compound on Xbox Live Indie Games today. It’s a twin-stick wave-shooter with upgradable stats that’s main selling point is “shoot zombies.” There are two notable things I can say about Zombie Compound. #1: The game is moderately fun. #2: Zombie Compound is more than moderately lazy. It could have been so much better than it turned out. I’ve played dozens of TwickS since starting Indie Gamer Chick, and my heart as grown cold towards the vast majority of them. They’re so samey and safe and commonplace, it’s hard to warm up to them. So I was shocked when I immediately started to enjoy Compound. The upgradable stats angle was a good move. It’s too bad that the developer didn’t take it further, giving the game a lifespan that even a mayfly would take pity on.
If my count was accurate, Compound has four enemies. None shoot projectiles, and the most advanced attack any possess is to split into three worms when they die. Of course, once the worms are present, they behave just like a normal zombie. The only way the game ramps up difficulty is by slightly increasing enemy speed and by shoving more and more enemies on screen. This is negated by how easy it is to upgrade your stats. By the tenth round of Compound, I had purchased and fully upgraded a ray gun, which can take out rows of enemies. I had also upgraded how much money I got from each kill, which allowed me to abuse the ammo refills. Any danger of me dying was completely lost before the game was halfway over. Then I bought the rocket launcher, and was clearing out waves of hundreds of dudes in under a minute. The game abruptly ends after wave 25. No ending, no reward, just “You Win!” And that’s where the real problem with Zombie Compound lies. There’s no real point to it. Each level is fighting the same four enemies over and over again with no reward to be found. There’s no high score leaderboards, no variety, no bosses, nothing.
Of course, it ends so quickly that you really don’t have too much time to get bored. You can also play it with up to four-players in local co-op. In this mode, buying upgrades is significantly slowed down, which might add to the challenge a bit more. I don’t know, because I rage quit on the idiots I was playing with. All players share lives here, and if you choose partners who don’t grasp the idea of trying to avoid enemies, it can be frustrating. Otherwise, I guess Zombie Compound is worth a buck. Barely. You’ll play it once, enjoy yourself for a bit, never touch it again, and only vaguely remember it a few days from now. That’s sad because talent was on display here. But the developer had the talent to make a great game and settled for making a tolerable one. I probably shouldn’t let that bug me so much, but I hate seeing the talented show a complete lack of ambition. Aim high, people. It’s better to aim high and miss than aim low and barely hit the target. Just ask this guy.
80 Microsoft Points said “why zombies and not clowns? They’re way scarier and they’re REAL” in the making of this review. No, seriously, I mean that. Why?
Zombie Compound is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. But, it could have easily been ranked much, much higher with just a couple more features. Shame.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to get to play Guacamelee! Many readers, aware that I have epilepsy, warned me that the game occasionally vomits flashy, eye-hurting rainbows. However, I was given assurances from readers that such effects only happen when you pick up an upgrade or immediately as you enter a boss battle. They were right, and I was able to play Guacamelee. Hooray for me!
Unfortunately, after a couple very promising opening hours, Guacamelee fell apart. For me at least. I felt the game had issues with padding, humor, and the occasional game-killing bug. Someone who I think is part of the development team assures me a patch is on the way for such bugs, which might be able to bump the game up to a Seal-of-Quality title. Despite all the bitching I’m about to do, there’s a pretty good game somewhere in this mess. A game that at times made me laugh, cheer, and occasional spit on my television.
They should have found someone else to be the hero. Juan slouches. Real heroes don’t slouch.
The idea is you’re a dude who was tragically born with his neck coming out of his chest. The president’s daughter is kidnapped by an evil undead bullfighter person. In the process, you’re murdered, but you come back as a super-powered luchador who must save the girl and the world from being merged with the realm of the dead. I appreciate how the guys behind this took a moldy-old game story and dressed it up with funny dialog and a couple twists along the way. Having said that, I wasn’t a big fan of the whole luchador thing. It seems like it was done more out of a desire to be quirky. The gag seems to be “luchadores are random and weird, get it?” Yea, I got it. I got it years ago when Killer 7 had a luchador in it. I got it when Jack Black played a luchador in a movie. I got it when WB had a Luchador-themed children’s cartoon and an accompanying awful Game Boy Advance game.
The luchador setting only serves a purpose to the game in the combat, which has a wrestling theme to it. You punch, you grapple, you throw, or you buy advanced moves like a suplex or a piledriver. Great. But why wasn’t the theme more incorporated into the plot or the humor? Juan becomes a luchador, and then he’s just a luchador for the rest of the game (except for when he’s a chicken. Don’t ask). They could have made gags or a plot that revolved around him having to avoid losing his mask, since that’s a central theme for luchadores. Or they could have made jokes about how wrestling is staged. Instead, it’s left at “he’s a luchador, and that in and of itself is quirky.” No, it’s not.
Other humor in the game comes in the form of referencing online memes, the joke being “it’s that thing you know of. We also know of it, and we made reference to it in our game!” That’s not a joke. If I go up to a stranger and say “did you ever see that video of a monkey that picks its ass, smells its finger, and then passes out?” that is not me performing stand-up comedy to that person. Guacamelee way over uses this, and that’s sad because there’s some characterizations and bits of dialog that don’t use the referential-humor crutch. Like the slutty demonic chick that hangs out with the bad guys and shakes her ass at you in an attempt to get her way. Which doesn’t work, making her pout. That’s funny. “Hey look, it’s Strong Bad!” or “Hey look, it’s Link!” is not funny. It’s just not. Retro City Rampage had the same problem, where the jokes were mostly “It’s funny because I too have seen the games you played or watched the movies and/or television programs you watched!” Some people enjoy this type of humor. There’s been eleven seasons of Family Guy and five installments of Scary Movie. I personally don’t get it, but I guess there is an audience that just wants assurance that, yes, other people remember the pop culture trivia that you remember.
Why does Juan have a championship belt on? That should have been something you get for beating the game. “He got it for beating death! Get it?” says Brian. I suppose.
Guacamelee is a 2D Metroidvania, something I probably should have mentioned early. I love this genre, and I really wanted to love Guacamelee. At first I did. The graphics are absolutely stunning, and the play controls seems like it will be pretty good. The world of Guacamelee is well designed, with vast dungeons to explore, towns to mingle in, and lots of hidden pathways to open up unlockables. However, I wasn’t thrilled with the combat. Many are considering it to be the game’s greatest attribute, so I think I could probably have trimmed this review down to “play the demo. If you like the combat, you’ll like the whole game.” I really didn’t mind fighting, for the most part. It’s actually fun to string together huge combos, throw enemies into each-other, or see how long you can keep yourself airborne while dishing out damage.
But then the game starts to lock-down for forced arena-style combat. This was presumably done to pad out the length. I came to dread these sections because it kills the pace of the game and makes the combat needlessly feel like busy work. The developers tried to keep it from stagnating by giving enemies shields which require a specific special move to break, or having enemies appear in one dimension and their shadows (which are still capable of causing you damage) in another. This forces you to switch from dimension to dimension (this is a thing you can do, I probably should have mentioned that too) to fight the baddies off. The intentions here were good, but the shields and the phasing-planes combat just adds to the tedium and makes fighting a chore when you’re locked in a single-screen. Worse yet, your dude dramatically flies back, Simon Belmont-style, when you get knocked down. Getting up is slow, and once up, your temporary-invincibility is too brief. Thus, enemies can and will juggle you. I went into a room late in the game with full health, got knocked down once, and never again had a real opening to fight back as multiple guys (some of whom fire projectiles) just endlessly pounded the crap out of me. You do have a dodge attack, but the window to use it is too brief. It also doesn’t help when a room has multiple enemies attacking just out-of-synch enough that, when one attack animation is ending, the other is beginning. Now admittedly, I have no sense of timing, but a quick look at a few YouTube videos confirms that other players are the victims of cheap hits as well.
By the way, most of those videos end with the players talking about how much they love the combat in Guacamelee. I guess some people are just wired to enjoy this type of shit. I really did like the combat, but there’s too many foibles associated with it that I couldn’t get over. Personally, if I wanted to get ganged up on with no opening to fight back, I’d book myself to go on the O’Reilly Factor.
I’m not so sure Juan would make a good wrestler. He spends most of the combat laying on his back.
Controls can be frustrating too. I had trouble hitting just the basic (press circle) headbutt on yellow-shielded enemies, as I would typically do some other form of attack. This became especially true after I opened up the blue “dash-forward” move. In order to throw those headbutts, I had to completely stop moving and set myself, as any forward momentum seemed to cause the wrong attack. This gets kind of difficult when you have multiple enemies ganging up on you and no pure method of blocking. The only way to avoid getting juggled is to move around, but the only way to break an enemy’s shield is to sit still. You can see how this might be a problem. It gets really swear-inducing when enemy shields reappear after you’ve broken them because you didn’t kill them fast enough. This all just makes the game so much more aggravating than it needs to be. Those locked in combat rooms too, only done to pad out the play time. Games don’t need to be long to be amazing or earn critical acclaim. Look at Journey. The average player takes barely three hours to finish it, and it won numerous Game of the Year awards over big-hitting contenders and multimillion dollar AAA titles. So would it have mattered if Guacamelee was an hour shorter and didn’t have those combat rooms? I don’t think it would have hurt its reputation at all.
I didn’t finish Guacamelee. Towards the end, it started to bug out on me. First, I couldn’t complete the training room because every time I got half-way through a combo, the screen would go completely black. I wasn’t sure if this was done intentionally to add challenge, but then I found out that wasn’t the case. Then the stuff with the yellow shields took over the combat and slowed the pace down even more. Finally, I got into one of those combat rooms. This one was especially annoying due to having nearly-out-of-reach bomb/enemy things that you have to kill before a timer ticks down, or they explode and claim a lot of your life. On top of those, there was a large pillar with a spike on top of it that you had to hop back and forth over. The controls were decent, but not so great that such actions could be completed smoothly every time. On top of those, there were projectile-throwing enemies who (along with the bombs) could phase between the two planes of existence. I did suck at the combat, quite frankly, and I had reached that point I sometimes get to where I just want a game to be over with. Well, after failing a couple of times at this room, I finally cleared it out. Only the game glitched out and the doors never unlocked. Thus I would be forced to exit to the title screen and start the room over. But, I don’t want to. I’m done. Seen enough. Satisfied that it’s not going to get better. Don’t want to risk this happening again. Get back to me when you’re patched. It will probably end with the stupid “A Winner Is You” line from Pro Wrestling on the NES anyway.
(spoiler alert, highlight: holy fuck, it does. Jesus Christ, I was fucking joking!)
Hello? Please let me out? Please?
There’s a ton to like about Guacamelee. It has personality. It has charm. It has an incredible map. It’s very beautiful to look at. Most people even like the music. I don’t. Personally, I think Mexican music must have been invented by an atheist to disprove the existence of God. Really, though, your like or dislike of Guacamelee will come down entirely towards whether or not you enjoy the combo-heavy combat of the game, cheapness and all. I liked it but couldn’t get past the cheapness. I would still barely recommend it despite that, but the game has issues with glitches and I really think those need to be cleaned up before I say “okay, now you can get it.” I’m told fixes are on the way, so if you have PlayStation Plus, get it now while it’s on sale and just wait to play it. Just don’t expect a game of the year contender. Expect yourself to say “what were they thinking, making you push this many buttons mid-air just to get across this one room? Were they fucking mad?”
I have to say, I’ve never been a fan of the “being chased by a gigantic monster” action beats in games.
Oh, and in closing, I know this wasn’t my funniest review (was my longest though). To make up for it, here’s a random sampling of games I’ve played and movies I’ve seen. Feel free to bust a gut if you’ve watched/played the same things. Remember, this qualifies as humor: Portal, Final Fantasy, Mario, Sudoku, Parcheesi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Seven Psychopaths, Se7en, Seven Samurai, Total Recall, Total Recall that sucks, the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination, and a video of a monkey that picks its butt, sniffs its finger, then passes out. Okay, you can stop laughing now. The review is over.
$11.99 ($14.99 for non PlayStation Plus members) said “it’s different when *I* make referential jokes because.. um.. hey look over there!” in the making of this review.
I have an idea for a children’s game. In it, you’ll play as a pre-pubescent lad who will wander the world making animals fight for sport and for fame. You’ll start with one enslaved creature (possibly an adorable mouse-lightning bolt thing, something that just oozes cuteness) and then randomly fight other adorable creatures along the countryside. During a fight, right at the moment before your huggable little animal buddy delivers a merciless death-blow to the creature it just beat into a pulp, you’ll capture the creature in a cage way too small for it to possibly live comfortably in. You’ll then force it to fight creatures that you wish to enslave, with your ultimate aim being to capture one of every creature like some deranged, asexual Noah.
And I’ve just been handed a cease and desist order, as apparently someone else already had this idea and has made billions off it. Huh. You know, I thought I paid a lot of attention to gaming. I’m not sure how that one slipped me by.
Actually, more than one person had this idea. Sort of. A wild XBLIG just appeared before me called Indiemon: Earth Nation. Quick thought: if you remove the word “Indiemon” from that name, would it not sound like a reality show you would expect to see on Discovery Channel? No? Just me? Okay, never mind.
Thank God they used up one of their four marketplace pics for a splash of the game. By the way, unless it looks different in an encounter, I don’t remember ever fighting the monster shown here. Unless it was one of the final two boss monsters the last guy you fight pulled out, both of which I killed in a single hit after about two seconds.
So Indiemon is just like my hypothetical game would have been, except you’re a dude dressed like a knight instead of a baseball cap and parachute pants wearing child. Well, that just saps the whimsy right out of the concept, does it not? I mean, why does a knight need to make animals fight his battles for him? Wouldn’t he have, like, something pointy and deadly? A sword perhaps? A spear? No? So this guy in his fancy armor and sequined cape is making animals fight his battles for him?
What an asshole.
Well, being a friend to animals (I make a point of eating under six a day), I decided I wouldn’t be a jerk about it. Instead, I would only keep one Indiemon, a fuzzy cute little rabbit thing called Bunnidusk in the game and “Peter Cottonmurder” by me. When I engaged in battles with Peter, I decided to forgo any unnecessary violence against those innocent creatures that I so cowardly refused to fight myself. So, instead of going through all the fancy attacks that Peter had acquired through the leveling up process (which happens roughly every three to four minutes), I would just spend every battle selecting attack from the menu, then selecting the most basic attack I had available. Of course, such a brazenly lazy tactic would lead to failure in my hypothetical cockfighting game for children, where battles would be based around a rock-scissors-paper style strategy, probably something incorporating elements or living environments. But, in Indiemon, it worked. I never once had to use any attack except the weakest one I had open to me. I never had to capture a creature. I never came close to dying. I never once had to use any item to save a fight. Eventually, Peter Cottonmurder evolved (totally stolen from my hypothetical cockfighting game for children concept) into a giant, muscular, humanoid rabbit thing, sort of like Bucky O’Hare’s roided up cousin, Stucky O’HGHare. Tougher, stronger, and probably now possessing erectile dysfunction.
That’s him on the left. Who’s a cute little blood thirsty slayer of God’s creatures?
Not that it changed the game much. I could still breeze past any encounter just by mashing the A button until the battle ended with me standing over the bloody, comatose body of some helpless animal. I was amused that the game took time to note that any animal you beat-up is not dead, but rather “unconscious.” Well, that’s a moralistic weight off my shoulder, I can tell you that. Otherwise, you just walk from town-to-town, then go through a cave, and then meet an old dude at a dock, then the game ends, presumably to be continued at some point in the future. Yep, there’s not even a proper ending here. It just ends.
And thank God for that. I sound like a broken record this week, but Indiemon is so awful that I am almost at a loss for words. Thankfully, I have a thesaurus, and shall now list every synonym for awful: abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, deplorable, depressing, dire, disgusting, distressing, dreadful, fearful, frightful, ghastly, grody, gross, gruesome, grungy, harrowing, hideous, horrendous, horrible, horrific, horrifying, nasty, offensive, raunchy, repulsive, shocking, stinking, synthetic, tough, ugly, unpleasant, and unsightly. Well, besides raunchy or synthetic, I think all of those work.
Really, the biggest sin of Indiemon is just how fucking dull it is. There’s no original ideas on display here, which gives the game a boredom handicap right out of the starting gate. But once some of the technical flaws of the game begin, it really starts to fall apart. While going through the cave at the end of the game, it took me about five to ten minutes to find the dude who I needed to launch me on a ship in what turned out to be the “wait, that’s it?” ending sequence. Once I got him, I think something in the game must have crapped out, because I got stuck in the cave for over an hour dealing with non-stop “random encounters.” For a while, every single step I took led to a battle. It took me over an hour to make my way to the exit of the cave. Considering that this was the end of the game, I figured this was done intentionally to be the big finale gauntlet. However, I talked to another player of Indiemon who experienced no-such diarrhea of the random encounter. Huh. You ever get the feeling a game was intentionally trolling you? Happens to me all the time.
No, I don’t know why the pictures are cropped this way.
So Indiemon is boring and unoriginal and technically problematic. That’s not even mentioning how loose and busted the movement controls are. Whatever you do, don’t use the analog stick to walk. You’ll zig-zag around like a drunken knight who makes animals fight his battles for him like a total pussy. Character design is, well, I suppose no more lazy or absurd than your average new Pokemon is these days. But, I can’t even recommend Indiemon as the cheap dollar store knock-off that I suppose it has positioned itself to be. It’s just too bland. It actually manages to completely miss the point of what made Pokemon work. Remove all strategy from that series, make the artwork more crude and amateurish, and take away the childlike sense of wonder, and you would have a game ill-suited towards teaching kids the kind of skills needed to be the starting quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.
Oopsie. Last night, I meant to download Rise of the Ravager by Gentleman Squid. Instead, I downloaded Seeds of Ralark. The reason for that was I wasn’t 100% sure what the title was, except it had the word “of” in it and the cover art looked a bit generic. You could see how I might make such a mistake.
Could be twins!
Well, I plunked down 80 Mystic Syrup Ponies for Seeds of Ralark, so I figure I might as well play it. Or attempt to at least. Seeds is the type of game where you almost wonder if it’s meant to be played at all. It’s a platformer without jumping. I think the aim of the developer was to be like Bionic Commando, because gameplay revolves around walking around as a gecko, moving from platform to platform by way of a grappling hook. Or, in the case of Seeds, a sticky tongue. Positive thing out-of-the-way first: the graphics are pretty. That’s the only nice thing I can say about Seeds. The play control is atrocious. Aiming the tongue is too loose, and the physics don’t want to cooperate. In a short play time, I even found some little quirks that make me wonder. Like, how come platforms don’t swing back and forth once you’ve moved them? You can use the tongue to grapple onto a platform, but move the platform you’re standing on by using sticky feet. However, when you let go with your tongue, the platform goes back to its starting position and locks into place. That’s just nonsensical.
I can’t really squeeze a full review out of Ralark because I didn’t even finish the tutorial. I put about thirty minutes into trying, but Seeds of Ralark had already become one of the most painful gaming sessions I had ever experienced. I guess this is being passed off as “difficult” by the developers, and I suppose that is the case. Of course, piecing together a broken statue with super glue might also be difficult, but even if you manage it, that doesn’t change the fact that the statue is broken. If Ralark handled better, it might be fun. Might. As it stands now, it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played.
Seeds of Ralark offended my platforming fandom, and also gave me a desire to dump Geico as my insurance carrier.
How does a game this bad come along, and how does a developer not realize it’s a problem? In the case of Seeds of Ralark, I’m guessing this is a simple case of a developer becoming the best at their own game, not realizing that others are going to find it to be a frustrating, joyless chore to play. After all, they had no problem with the controls. The ones they designed, and know all the stupid quirks of that nobody else in their right mind would take the time to learn. And then you have a game like Rise of the Ravager, where the difficulty spikes so dramatically that any lingering fun is sapped away.
Ravager is a decent concept. A gallery shooter sort of like Galaga, only with the colored-bullets gameplay of something like Ikaruga. Sounds good, and at first, it is. Of course, Ikaruga is insanely difficult with just two colors of bullets. Ravager has four colors to worry about. For the less coordinated of the populace (raises hand), that alone could be enough of a turnoff to make Ravager easily skippable. But, the action was decent enough and showed enough promise that I felt I should continue. This lasted until I encountered the first boss, which was too spongy for its own good. I tried reshuffling my experience points into other categories (by far the smartest move the guys at Gentleman Squid did here) but still struggled. After roughly a dozen attempts, I finally beat it. But, by this point, I was fatigued by this less-than-exciting sequence and was just anxious for the game to be over. I call this Steven Seagal Syndrome, because I feel the same way when watching his movies.
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with giant colored heads raining down from the sky. Just like the Mayans predicted.
My boyfriend would like me to note that I’m not this game’s target audience. I try to be as unbiased as possible, but I also generally dislike shmups and have a tough time warming up to them. Having said that, Ravager has problems that extend beyond its genre. The color system requires skills that are typically a cut above what an average gamer possesses. I can handle it up to a certain point, but when you have different-colored enemies coming at you from different sides, with a couple of waves following right behind them, it really can be a bit overwhelming, to the point of being demoralizing. I also thought there were a few flaws in the upgrade system. Some of the upgrades are too expensive. You also get upgrade points by not taking damage on levels. However, to do so often requires utter perfection. If you could go back to previous stages and attempt to earn those points you missed (just the missed points, so as to avoid mindless grinding), this would be a great feature to have. But you can’t go back. Thus, those upgrade points that the majority of the gaming population really could use will be unobtainable.
Put it this way: let’s say you put me in a foot race with Usain Bolt. He would absolutely smoke me the first race. Now let’s say that because he beat me, I have to run the next race with my shoelaces tied together. Hey wait, shouldn’t HE be the one running with his shoelaces tied together? That would make for a closer, more exciting race, and I, the person ill-equipped to do well in such a task, would have a better chance of staying competitive. And that’s what is wrong with Ravager. Those upgrade points are out of reach for those who are in need of them the most. Being able to go back and get those points would take the edge off, but the developers are worried that their game might get too easy. So I guess that’s that. If only gaming was a medium where, and I’m speaking hypothetically here, you could have adjustable difficulty levels to cater to players of all skill levels. I know, there I go again, spouting off pure fanciful crazy talk. I still hold out hope that my insanely absurd “adjustable difficulty” crap will become a reality. Maybe the 720 or PS4 will have the processing power to pull of such a radical space age innovation.
I probably should also put out there that the developer was anxious for Brian and I to experiment with the co-op stuff, so we did. Brian jumped in at level 13. Again, not wanting their game to be “too easy”, the game features what they claim to be “scaling difficulty” that increases with the number of players. Thus, once Brian jumped in, the game suddenly had what seemed like three times the amount of enemies you would normally encounter, and those enemies took more bullets to kill. The dudes at Gentleman Squid based this off Diablo 2. Which you’ll note is a dungeon crawling hack-and-slasher, not a single-screened gallery shooter with limited movement. Scaling difficulty they say? I say the amount of shit two people had to deal with seemed more in line with something meant for four players. I actually shudder how much shit could be in a four player game. This was not well thought out.
Rise of the Ravager didn’t do much for me, besides make me want to go back and watch Legends of the Hidden Temple. I’m partial to the Orange Iguanas myself, although the Silver Snakes were not without charm.
I’m sure there is an audience for Rise of the Ravager. It has decent enough play control, pretty graphics, and a nice hook. The fact that I came close to enjoying it might speak volumes of its quality. But, based on my own subjective opinions, I can’t recommend it. It’s just not for me, in the same way that hiring someone to tie me to a bed and beat me with a bullwhip isn’t for me. Some people are into that kind of shit.
80 Microsoft Points apiece noted that the Leaderboard’s ranked percentage is the lowest now that it’s ever been in the making of this review. Pick it up, guys.
It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed Retro Arcade Adventure, a hack-and-slasher that was sort of like Smash TV for the dark ages. I didn’t really like the game. It was short, repetitive, and boring. You could see potential in the developer, but the experience was tedious. So I was skeptical when I saw that they had decided to remake the title instead of patching the original. Ballsy for sure, since the first wasn’t very good. It would be like burning a steak and trying to correct it by throwing it back on the grill for ten minutes.
Right away, I noticed the game was somewhat improved. Enemies still come out you in boring, mindless waves, but they hack up pretty good. Levels felt shorter, power-ups more plentiful, and boss battles were fun if unspectacular.
And then I encountered this fucking thing.
It could very well be the most boring boss I’ve taken on in an indie game. It very much reminded me of the final boss in Sonic 4. Too spongy, takes too long to open itself up to attack, and made me question whether or not I had died in a horrific traffic accident and had gone to gaming hell. The first time I fought it, I was low on health (I seemed to be taking unaccountable damage in the stage leading up to it), but it took me a full ten minutes to slip up. The second time around, after over 15 minutes hitting presumably the weak spot on the boss, it still wasn’t dead. I was though. I paused the game, casually got up, turned the power off, and decided to go watch some TV. I think it was a documentary on tape worms. Vastly more entertaining than that boss was.
In short, this needs to be fixed. And it will be. The developer assured me of it, under penalty of torture by honey and fire ants. Until then, you can spend your time with the two minigames included. I just realized I never actually played them. Let me give them a shot.
(15 minutes later)
Oh dear God, what horrible shit. I’m not waiting. Break out the honey and fire ants. This developer needs a good torturing.
80 Microsoft Points liked Smash TV years ago but don’t think it’s possible to be good in this day and age so prove me wrong indie developers in the making of this review.
It’s been about a year since I reviewed Quiet, Please!, a pleasant little mix of puzzles and point-and-click adventures. I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t exactly the deepest game. It was also a shorty at around thirty minutes. To this day, I still get people complaining that I didn’t give a thumbs up to City Tuesday, yet a game like Quiet, Please! got my recommendation, even though they were similar in length and style. The difference between the two is Quiet felt finished and fully realized, while City Tuesday felt like it was just starting at the moment it ended, making the overall impact of the game unsatisfactory. It would be like going to a bakery and asking for a dozen cookies, six of them the Quiet cookies and six of them the Tuesday cookies. First you’re handed the Quiet cookies, and they’re decent, if not memorable. Then you anxiously await for the Tuesday cookies, only to have the baker throw the uncooked dough at your face. And then call you a cunt for not being happy with the dough. Even if the dough was delicious (it was), you can only imagine how good the finished cookie would have been.
Extending that analogy further, Quiet Christmas is an overcooked cookie. If it had been bundled with the original as a freebie, I could have appreciated it more and probably bumped up Quiet’s standing on the leaderboard. But it’s not, and I can’t. The real problem with Quiet Christmas is it’s very much the same game, only with a small handful of new puzzles. It takes place in the same house as the original, features the same cast, and the logic of the puzzles is largely the same as before. It would be like buying a DVD for $20 and being told that you can get the alternate ending for an additional $20. No, that should have been on the DVD in the first place.
Once again, my warped brain conceived horrible things to do to my family. I figured I would grease the floor with butter to cause my hyperactive brother to slip and knock himself unconscious. Not making that up. I watch too much YouTube.
If you played the first Quiet game, you’ll breeze through this expansion. I used a stopwatch. Ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds was my time. And, because it’s the same location, there’s no surprises here for players. I think this could possibly become a series of games, but not like this. Keep the family around (I suspect the parents are both drunks and the brother is hyperactive) but send them to new, exotic locations. That works! Look at Home Alone 2. Same movie. Same plot. Same characters. Different location. $360,000,000 at the box office. By the way, I didn’t actually know how much that flick made until just now. Wow. I think I’m going to start cutting myself.
On Monday, I reviewed Terraria for PlayStation Network/Xbox Live Arcade. I said that I did have fun playing the title, but I didn’t recommend it because it was too glitchy and unfinished. I also said that I had lost interest in the game. Since then, there hasn’t been a review up at my blog. Why? Because I’ve been busy playing Terraria. So allow me to eat some crow and do a 180 here. Terraria IS worth your time, glitches and all.
By the way, even more annoying glitches have popped up over the last few days. The game froze after we defeated the Eye of Cthulhu, crashed while I was harvesting meteor ore, and Brian got a really weird one that forced him to start a new map, then exit that map and reload the old one. Naturally, the one that required that was “our world.” The one we built together. The one that has all of our shit in it. We were seriously worried that we had lost access to it. Apparently, it has something to do with the placement of the bed in the house. Who knew this game was one of those weird “feng shui is real and you must obey it” weirdos?
Starting next year, you’ll be fighting pelicans instead of hornets.
But, despite dozens of bugs (some of them game-enders), I’ve been pressing on. I figured Terraria was a possible life-ender, and I was spot on. When a game like this owns me, my only choice is to “get it out of my system.” Brian’s heard that term before with me, but this is the only time I’ve dragged him along for the ride. It’s okay though. We’ve both made projects for ourselves. I’ve been focusing on exploring the sky. Brian is alternating between building our house and mining Hell itself. He also built an elaborate trap that we use in the event of a goblin army attacking. Of course, said attacks are rare. Mostly, his trap just kills innocent bunnies.
We named this “Rabbit Season, FIRE” after watching a dozen bunnies off-themselves using it.
It was sometime a couple of days ago that Brian asked me “do you want to reconsider your review?” After thinking it over, yes. Yes I do. I still stand by all the complaints I said in that review. Terraria is clearly not completely finished and needs a lot of work. But I can’t deny the sheer scope of things you can do in this title. It’s insanity. It’s consumed my thoughts and utterly devoured my free time. I had a seizure earlier this morning (completely unrelated to the game), and since then all I can think about is “I hope I feel good enough to play Terraria later.” It’s single-handedly crippled my productivity here at Indie Gamer Chick. It really says something about a game that, after forty hours, I’m still anxious to dive in. I make no apologies for it either. Look at this game I’m supposed to be writing a review of.
This is Short Circuit for XBLIG by developer Jason Yarber. Jason’s a cool dude, but his game is so fucking boring. I’ve always been bored silly by Lights Out, since the moment Santa Claus put one in my stocking when I was ten years old. And this version doesn’t look particularly engaging. It has that lazy XBLIG font that makes me break out into hives. Now, I can either spend hours trying to be snarky over this, or I can spend them fighting monsters and harvesting rare ore. Hmmmm.. sorry Jason. For what it’s worth, your game isn’t total shit or anything, but I can play Lights Out for free at any number of sites. I can also take a handful of sleeping pills and feel the same stimuli.
I haven’t really paid too much attention to recent XBLIG releases. Over the past couple days, a couple of titles have hit that will be reviewed over the next seven days. Well, maybe. When a game utterly owns me the way Terraria does, I can’t make promises. I don’t take back anything else I said about Terraria, except the part where I said I can’t recommend it. I can, and I do. Put it this way: I got the new Bioshock earlier this week and was enjoying what I was playing, until I started playing this. A little $15 indie game on PSN is completely dominating my game time. And now I’m like one of those evil drug pushers, encouraging players to just take one hit. Come on, one won’t kill you.
Update: I had second thoughts on Terraria, and you can read them here. Terraria is now Chick Approved.
Being primarily an Xbox Live Indie Game critic, I don’t get a whole ton of requests for XBLA/PSN titles. But, when I do, they usually come in droves. Terraria was such a game. Partially that’s because none of the major sites have a review up yet. Also because people are simply dying to know what I think of crafting games. Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask me about my opinion on Minecraft. I still haven’t played it. Not out of any moral or anti-bandwagon objection. It’s just one of those “I’ll get around to it at some point” type of deals. Plus I live in fear of the potential addiction factor. Time sinks like Minecraft have ruined my life in the past. Now that I work and have a boyfriend and shit, I’m not really up to risking that by playing a game with life-ruining potential.
But, I aim to please my readers, so I decided to go ahead and buy Terraria on PlayStation Network. And, just to be on the safe side, I brought my boyfriend along for the ride. If I’m going to destroy my life, I’m bringing him down with me. It’s the gaming version of the Days of Wine and Roses.
I guess Terraria is supposed to be Minecraft in 2D. Maybe that’s over simplifying things, but that’s the game in a nutshell. You have to mine for materials that you use to build shit to mine for more materials. There are enemies to fight, a huge (and I do mean fucking huge if you pick the largest map) world to explore, lots of different items, and a few twists along the way. Brian created the world, chose “large” because he’s a total clod who forgot that I needed to play the game as fast as possible so that I could crank out a review, and away we went.
My world started out in a snowy wasteland. Brian’s started out in a beautiful, serene forest. I think the game was trying to send me a message with that.
As a young couple that’s getting ready to buy a house, I figured this would be a good test to see how we do at the whole “co-habitation” thing. The weird thing is, we sort of fell into what our real life roles will be. Brian became the home maker. Literally. He built our house, while I set about bringing home the materials we would need to survive. For the first couple hours, Brian never ventured far outside of our home. He kept adding floors, furniture, basements, and buildings for NPCs to live in. Meanwhile, I was off fighting monsters and tunneling all over the Earth looking for shit to build us more shit with. It was quite fun, and very 21st century of us.
Finally, I think Brian got jealous of me constantly going “look at all this cool shit I’m finding!” and built a mineshaft, then proceeded to dig a hole straight to fucking China. That got me all jealous. Suddenly he was the one saying “hey Cathy, look at all this cool shit!” I responded to this in a completely rational way: I dug a tunnel to a lake and flooded his ass out. We’re going to make a great couple.
We put about fifteen hours into Terraria, but it felt like a lot less. Despite being a time sink without shame, gameplay is rewarding. Every piece of progress you make is exhilarating. And really, what else can you say about a game where at least once every thirty minutes, we looked at each other as if to say “can you believe how much fun this game is?”
So I recommend it right?
Well, no, actually. I don’t. Terraria is too unstable and glitchy in its current state. Over the course of fifteen hours, a laundry list of bugs popped up, grew, and frustrated the ever-loving shit out of me. Chief of which was the game had a tendency to crash at the worst possible times. It happened to me twice, and both times I had lost all the materials that I had harvested. To say I blew a gasket is an understatement. Who knew I was capable of crushing a controller with my bare hands?
How come our place didn’t look this nice, Brian? You suck at interior design. Suck suck suck at it!
I can’t stress how furious I was when this happened the second time with Brian. After hours of searching, I had stumbled upon a vein that was the mother lode of precious metals and rare gems. I stuffed my pockets and was about to head home with, poof, gone. Game crashed. Not for Brian, just for me. But all those metals that were in my pockets were gone. Gone permanently from my pockets and from his world. Ceased to exist. They can’t be replaced.
At this point, I was done with Terraria. This had already happened once and I was pretty pissed then, but I was having such a good time that I wanted to go back. After the second time? Fuck that. The game was a waste of my time. I begrudgingly played on my own just because it seemed like the professional thing to do, but the magic was gone. That took a lot of work to get those. Hours of gameplay. Am I bitter? Fuck yea, but with just cause. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a game that cost money should, you know, fucking work.
That crash also made a lot of the niggling little glitches that seemed minor before seem not so innocent. Such as:
Going to craft items and being told I didn’t have the materials. Even though I did. Right there, in my pocket. So I would have to exit out of the crafting menu and reenter it. Sometimes I would have to do this two or three times before the game would say “oh hey, look, you actually do have them. My bad!”
It had issues keeping track of how much money I had gathered. I would fight hoards of zombies, picking up coins from each one that died, then go to put my cash away in a chest at home only to find out that the dozens of coins I had picked up was now four or five. We never actually spent all that much money, so I wasn’t that annoyed by it. But still.
We had trouble picking up the shooting stars. It seemed to be a networking issue. Brian would see stars that I wouldn’t and vice-versa.
Offline, the game froze for me while it was loading up the world.
I had the music start to glitch out on me upon respawning more than once, making it sound like nails on a chalkboard.
It’s also worth mentioning that I had a couple reports on Twitter of XBLA owners also crashing their game.
While going through the screenshots on the official page for Terraria on the PlayStation Store, I realized how very little I had seen of Terraria, even after fifteen hours of gameplay. I want to keep playing. But I won’t, because I don’t want to get burned again.
As far as the non-glitchy elements go, movement physics are fairly smooth. Jumping is decent. But, the interface is so cumbersome and clunky that, even after over ten hours, it never feels intuitive. When we finally got organized and created a room that was nothing but chests to keep all of the stuff we’d dug up, we could spend fifteen or more minutes just fumbling to empty our pockets into them. Brian got more used to it than I did. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. Have you ever been stuck in line at a supermarket while some asshole has to get a price check on a pack of gum, then decides to pay for it with his card instead of the quarter you just fucking know is collecting lint in his pocket? Every single menu in Terraria feels like that.
I sure hope that patches are on the way for Terraria. I can’t stress enough: this game is fun. Very, very fun. But it’s not worth getting right now. Simply put: it’s not finished. Hopefully it will be someday soon. If you’re one of those types who can put up with great games rendered too buggy to enjoy, have at it. For me, Terraria can be fun, but it’s too unstable to recommend. Funny, because that’s exactly how my parents described me to possible suitors.
$14.99 briefly thought about taking hostages and demanding that the 73 Gold Ore, 103 Silver Ore, 17 Demeteor Ore, 15 emeralds, 7 Topaz, 8 sapphire, and Skeleton Statue that I lost when the game crashed were returned to me, but Brian said “honey, the cops made it clear, no more hostage situations” in the making of this review. Well fuck.
Correction: There are apparently more than six questions in this “game”. I played through this four times and got the same six questions in the same order, than I played again to make sure and again got the same six questions in the same order, so you can see how I would think there are only six questions. But, I’ve heard from playtesters that there are apparently more than six questions. Does that make the game better? Um, no.
The bible thumping wackos are right: the only thing keeping me, a well-adjusted heterosexual that is very much in love with a member of the opposite sex, from engaging in full-fledged lesbian orgies straight out of Caligula, is shit like the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop 8. Really, I’m only as straight as the law forces me to be. Of course, I’m a plan-ahead type of chick, and if the Supreme Court rules that I can marry anyone, including a fellow toilet-sitter, I’m going to need tips on how to court them properly. Thank God for How to Get a Girlfriend. Which is ironic when you think about it, because it basically spits on His divine plan. Just think, for the low price of 80 Microsoft Points, someone like me, an introverted autistic girl who took 20 years to get her first boyfriend, can learn the secrets that only the most debonair of ladies men would know. This will certainly give me a leg up on all those house wives that will almost assuredly leave their husbands as society as we know it crumbles around us.
How to Get a Girlfriend presents players (and I sure plan on being a player if you catch my classy drift) with six questions related to picking up women. And it is the same six questions every time, because men who seek dating advice from Xbox Live Indie Games featuring malformed anime girls on the cover art are notoriously slow learners.
The first question asked what you do if you see a cute girl in a bar. I went with the option that most suited me: look really thirsty so that she would buy me a drink.
Shows what I know.
Of course! It all makes sense. So women are parasitic beings whose love, attention, and affection needs to be bought? Oh my God. I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME! I can’t tell you what it means to find out that we’re all really this simplistic and shallow.
The next question hypothesized that you would encounter a girl dancing, but you yourself are not a good dancer. Wow. This game really knows me. Well, I’m an American and I was on Xbox Live at the time, so I figured I would call her a loser and tell her dancing sucks. Wrong again. As it turns out, dancing is vital, because if you can’t dance, you won’t know what to do with a girl in your arms. Duly noted. It would have been nice if it had been more specific about the type of dance you need to learn. The closest I could find was square dancing lessons at the local Y. Chicks dig that, right?
Next up, what do you do if you have a crush on a girl but she only considers you a friend? I admit, this was a head scratcher. Ultimately, I figured the right thing to do would be hit on her best friend to make her jealous. But no, as it turns out, you should instead keep a distance on her.
That.. makes sense to me. I mean, mysterious is way in vogue right now. Think about it. Those Twilight movies grossed like a bagillion dollars! Sure, I’m not a hundred-plus-year-old-pedophile on the prowl for subservient chicks who can’t think or act for themselves, so those movies weren’t all that educational. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers. I’m not sure how the whole “mysterious” thing works with someone you’re already good friends with, but I guess that’s why I’m not the dating expert.
Next up: where do you take a girl on a first date? I decided not to go with carnival. Worst case is the girl really doesn’t like me and tells them I escaped from their sideshow. Next thing you know, I’m stuck on the road, going to places like Sheboygan, watching meth producers pay two bits a gander to see the Amazingly Ugly Girl. No thanks. As it turns out, coffee is a good first date. Not the movies. Or ice skating. Oh thank God. So a first date won’t involve me falling on my ass repeatedly. Weird, because if I met the chick at a bar, she would already be used to seeing that.
The next question deals with a subject matter important to all people in the hypothetical end of civilization homosexual apocalypse dating scenario:
With no option for “hire a hitman and have that bitch whacked”, I decided to go with the laxatives. Not only was I wrong, but as it turns out I’ve been using the totally wrong descriptive language towards the women I’ve been courting.
I admit it. I wouldn’t have thought to call (or even think of) any women I was trying to pick up “broads.” But this is 2013. Maybe it’s time we all embrace aggressive, obnoxious flirtation.
Finally, what do you do if a girl comes up to you and tells you she’s not really interested? I actually know the answer to this, but my lawyer has advised me against going into detail here. At least before the jury comes back with a verdict.
Final score? 0 for 6. Well fuck, I guess I really did buy the right Xbox Live Indie Game dating guide, because I had a lot to learn. With the knowledge I have acquired, I’m in an even better position now to commit a crime against nature. Which I sort of already did when I paid $1 for this absolutely unfunny, unlikable, useless, sexist piece of shit game that was developed by a douchebag who wouldn’t know pussy if it sat on his mouth and queefed.
80 Microsoft Points are waiting for the Supreme Court to legalize working on the sabbath so that I can do that without fear of being put to dea.. wait, what do you mean you can already do that? But the Bible says not to! You’re all a bunch of sinners and you’re going to Hell in the making of this review!
Imagine a game centered around quick-time events where pressing the correct button doesn’t always work. Sounds fucking terrible, right? But wait, what if I told you that if you fail (or if the game determines you fail even when you don’t), the load times can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds before you get a chance at restarting? Or what if I told you the frame-rate can stutter right as the enemy that will touch-off the quick time event draws near you, causing the quick-time-event to only appear on-screen for a small fraction of a second? What if the graphics are choppy and the enemies have issues clipping when interacting with your character? What if your character moves as slow as a snail encased in liquid nitrogen? What if the text was so small that you have to physically get out of your chair to read it, even when you possess a television large enough to cover an active volcano? What can you say about a game where nothing seems to have gone right?
It’s really strange because the first Dead Sea was not God awful or anything. I ultimately didn’t recommend it, because the gameplay was boring and repetitive. But I think with some work, the concept of being stuck in the middle of the ocean with sharks out to turn you into the catch-of-the-day might be a good one. When I heard the guys at Brave Men Games were working on a sequel, I was hoping they would try to mend the concept, which I think is salvageable. The developers seemed to disagree with that assessment, because Dead Sea II is completely different from the original, with no real connection besides starring the same chick. Actually, I think the “mutation” part refers to the girl, because that’s the only explanation for why she has the spray-on-tan from Hell, making her look like the love child of Courtney Stodden and Hulk Hogan. How did she get that tan? Didn’t she just spend, like, days bobbing around the ocean? That wouldn’t have bronzed her. That would have had her peeling a human onion. A pickled human onion.
It’s also possible she’s in need a liver transplant. In which case, I’m sorry.
My biggest disappointment with Dead Sea 2 is that the original was a bad game merely because the mechanics were not fun. It did give me hope that the developers were on the right track. Instead, the sequel is broken to the point of being nearly unplayable. Being attacked by giant mutant-shark-people-things might not be the worst idea, but the execution here is awful. I searched around for viable pathways to make stealth kills on the enemies, but couldn’t find any without being detected. When an enemy charges you, you have to perform a quick-time-event to escape. However, sometimes I would push the correct button almost immediately and still die. It seemed completely random when it would work. Combine this with excruciating load times and I didn’t really feel the urge to press on. I tried to finish one floor that had two mutant dudes for a good solid hour, but a combination of stuttering frame rate, broken quick-time-events, and demoralizing load times made me give up. Maybe without technical hangups, Dead Sea 2 could have been decent. Instead, it’s dead in the water. Ba-ba-baaaaaaa.
Zombie Compound was developed by Smoodlez
80 Microsoft Points said “why zombies and not clowns? They’re way scarier and they’re REAL” in the making of this review. No, seriously, I mean that. Why?
Indie Gamer Chick 
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