Today’s game is called 一>◇. No seriously, that’s the name. 一>◇. It’s a name that search engines and headers will not put up with, so for the purposes of today’s review, I’ll be calling this game the Strange Japanese Game. Not that anyone would actually want to Google it or see it on YouTube. It kind of sucks. Which is a shame because the concept is original and quirky, but a horrible control scheme fails the vision.
Strange Japanese Game is a God Game where you play a giant green hand. There’s little sentient beans walking around, reminiscent of Pikmin. They even grow little spouts on their head. When they have a sprout, you can poke them into the ground. Then, you grab a handful of water from the lake that is the main focal point of the game’s challenge and dump it on the sprout. The sprout then grows into a tree. You can flick the tree with your finger to knock more Pikmin-like-things out of it, but ultimately you want to masturbate the tree (I’m not joking) to shape it into a spaceship. Once you’ve beaten your bush into the shape of a shuttle, you have to load it with the Pikmin-like-things. Doing this will make the ship blast off, scoring points. The object of the game is to score as many points as you can.
After beating your bush, the tree becomes a rocket that blasts off in a shaft of fire and two black balls of smoke. Sickening thought: someone, somewhere is getting horny thinking about this.
First off, props to the developers for taking the God genre and trying to make a quick actiony arcade game out of it. That took a creative spark and balls, and I appreciate that. Having said that: why on Green Skinned God’s blue Earth did they map every action to the X button? The Xbox controller has four face buttons (six if count the clickable analog sticks) and four shoulder buttons. Strange Japanese Game only uses ten percent of the total available buttons, but the actions performed are very different from one another and possibly consequential. For example, flicking. You have to move the hand and press X to flick. If you stop moving and press X, it becomes grab instead. Except there’s a problem: there’s a slight delay in the game recognizing that you’ve stopped moving, even if you release the stick. Thus, there were times when I let go up the stick and pressed X in an attempt to grab a not-a-Pikmin and instead flicked it into the water, killing it. This isn’t the fucking Atari 2600. Why couldn’t grab had been one of the different available buttons?
There’s also no way to separate the little not-a-Pikmins from each-other. When they bunch up, even an action as simple as planting one in the ground can likely result in killing ones next to it. This gets really frustrating when the creatures turn evil if you let them sit around too long (perhaps they ate something after midnight when I wasn’t looking) and start to attack the good ones. If you let THOSE linger too long, they become tentacles (it’s Japanese, OF COURSE they become tentacles). In order to prevent that, you need to flick the critters into the water. Of course, that typically will result in killing a bunch of innocents. Really, imprecision is Strange Japanese Game’s biggest sin. If you grab a handful of not-a-Pikmins to drop them in the spaceship, it’s hard to line it up in such a way where all of them fall into the ship. Any that don’t die upon hitting the ground, even though they fall the same distance and land safely when you knock them out of the trees you grow.
There’s a really cool and quirky concept at play here. Again, an arcadey God game? Madness! But the slow pace, awful play control, and imprecision of the action kills all potential it had. I truly do feel that the groundwork for something fun and addictive has been laid with this strange Japanese game. With fine-tuning to the controls and something added to the gameplay that would speed up the pace, I think this could be a sleeper hit. Maybe. I should probably note that all the gameplay mechanics above are left up to the player to figure out on their own. There are no instructions in the game, and no on-screen indicators of what to do or how to do it. The only instructions are found on the game’s marketplace page, and in Japanese. I’m a fan of quirk, but being quirky doesn’t have to mean leaving a player to figure out stuff on their own. Then again, this is a game that involves jerking off trees. I imagine writing instructions for such things is a crime in many countries.
$1 was warned by their father that if they kept doing that, their hand would turn green in the making of this review.
Seriously: horrible name for a game. Horrible. If the game had been good, the name would have doomed it. It’s a game whose title cannot be spread by word of mouth. Sigh.
I’m baffled when unambitious games come along that strive only to look and play kind of, sort of like the classics of ye olden days. All I can think of is: why? Why not make them better, or at least give them a different hook? Especially since those old games already fucking exist and have been played to death. Hey, not everyone is creative. But even if you’re uncreative, you must have actually played the games and know what works in them and what doesn’t. I don’t expect perfection from an indie developer, but I also expect that, as gamers, they know the difference between fun and boring.
Mechanician Alex, a game from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that 80s PC gaming fans would have shit on.
Then you get into the realm of pure raving insanity, where you try to ape a gameplay style that wasn’t all that good to begin with. Mechanician Alex wants to be one of those old-timey, single-screened platformers from the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum era. I know a lot of my readers are still gaga over them. When I reviewed the official XBLIG port of one of the all-time cherished members of that genre, Manic Miner, the old farts that read me were less than receptive to my take on it. Fine.
But would those gamers be receptive to a game that looks like it could have been a lost game in that series, and plays almost like them, only everything is a little worse? I’m guessing not. Strip away the attempt at making a player nostalgic, and Mechanician Alex is simply a bad game. The controls are atrocious. Unresponsive controls are a signature of these type of games, and getting used to the wacky delayed timing is supposed to be part of the charm. I guess if you’re playing a game legitimately made in that era, that’s acceptable. Well, at least if you’re a child of that era looking to reclaim your youth. But fans of those games aren’t in denial about the controls being shit. Why the FUCK would a game made in 2013 try to emulate that? Manic Miner fans aren’t going to Tweet each other saying “Oh my God, this game controls even worse than Manic Miner. IT’S FUCKING AWESOME!!”
Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik’s Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)
And the levels are poorly designed too. The game has a real issue with height. For example, on one stage you’ll be walking on a cloud that is bumpy, like clouds tend to be. There’s almost no clearance, and an enemy is scooting back and forth above your head. Unfortunately, the collision detection is spotty enough that you’re bound to burn lives just trying to get a feel for it, and there’s so many variables on the height that never seem right. It immediately stinks of a stage that was rushed through production. Beyond that, if you slip off the cloud, you can’t finish the level regardless of whether you land on a platform or not. This is really fundamental level design stuff and I shouldn’t have to have explained to you why its bad. It’s a worst game of the year contender.
Sadly, the same developer recently went on a release spree, and they also brought out a side-scrolling platformer called Pablo’s Fruit, and it’s even worse. Taking it a step further than Mechanician Alex, it’s a contender for worst XBLIG ever made. Every gameplay aspect of Pablo’s Fruit is terrible. Here, the idea is you have to collect all of the fruit in a level to open up an exit. Movement is slow and jumping is floaty, which makes playing through the levels a tedious chore. And then you get to the technical issues. When you take damage, you don’t recoil from it, and you don’t get much (if any) invincibility to prevent further damage. Thus, it’s conceivable that you could go from 5 “lives” to 0 in a second just from getting pinned next to an enemy. That’s just utterly lazy, sloppy programming. This is coupled with poor level design. In one stage, the level opens with a fruit above your head, out of reach. At the end of the stage, by the exit, there’s a teleporter that drops you back at the start. You collect the fruit, but you have to walk all the way back to the exit. All enemies you’ve taken out are still gone, which begs the question: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE SOMEONE DO SOMETHING SO FUCKING BORING? Didn’t it occur to anyone making this piece of shit?
And it’s got dumb logic too. Enemies are beaten by jumping on their heads. But it’s not always clear which enemies will die when you do it and which ones you’ll pass-through, taking damage along the way. I made a video to demonstrate.
What the fuck? By the way, that vulture that’s flying back and forth? You die from jumping on it too. Why the hell does a ghost (hypothetically a transparent, dimensional being) die from being crushed but not an insect or a bird? Is this some kind of PETA subliminal message?
An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that continuously fly around. They’re supposed to be in the background, but it’s done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.
If I sound too negative, please keep in mind that I actively, for days, tried to think of something nice to say about these games. I came up completely empty. The sad thing is, both these games are courtesy of the developer of Naoki Tales. I didn’t like it either, but really, its only true sin was being boring. These games represent a gigantic step backwards. Pablo’s Fruit came out a day after Mechanician Alex, and those came out a few days after another game by the same guys, Paper Galactica. I’m not doing a full review on that (click the link, because Tim Hurley did), but it was pretty fucking boring as well. Three games, all released in one week. If I had to ask these guys a question besides “have you ever actually played a video game?” it would be “why didn’t you guys focus on one project?” Granted, it’s possible that all three games sat in peer review purgatory until the community came out of a coma and put them through to the market.
Actually, I would have one more question, and this is the most obvious one: would you actually want to play these games if you hadn’t made them? Would you pay money for them? Hell, would you play them if they were free? Yea, that’s three questions, not one, but all of them are valid. Look, these games suck. You’re not going to make a lot of money on them. They don’t even have the absurdity or the charm of Silver Dollar’s low-end, quick cash stuff. Bad games DO make money on XBLIG, but your stuff isn’t falling into those niches that have such potential. So don’t rush your games out. Polish up your work. Do something wild and creative. I’ve played four of your games. Not one of them managed to entertain me or any of my colleagues for a single second, nor did any of them display the slightest bit of creativity. If I had to guess, I would guess the developers were bored silly making these. Their existence seems almost cynical. Both are trying to capitalize on nostalgic memories. But unless it’s a port of something, you’re not going to lure in day-dreamy nostalgic types. Being primitive shouldn’t be confused with being a classic, and these games are so primitive that they sacrifice virgins to the sun gods.
UPDATE: Magicians & Looters received a Second Chance with the Chick. To say it improved the game is an understatement. I now consider this to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Click here for my updated thoughts.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Xbox Live Indie Games, where expectations are so low that there’s not sufficient clearance for microbes to hang themselves from it. Because of this, sometimes games that are just not that good end up getting elevated beyond their actual value. Take Magicians & Looters. Here’s a really ambitious first effort by a group of developers with not a whole lot of experience, and it’s not terrible. It also has, for my money, the best comedic writing ever seen on an XBLIG.
M&L is a Metroidvania. I fucking love those, but XBLIG hasn’t been the best source for them. LaserCat is my favorite. It was the original #1 game on the old, ten-games-only Leaderboard. But it’s a different breed of Metroidvania. There’s no combat in it, only avoidance. It’s also easier than boxing a newborn paraplegic orangutang . But that was pretty much the cream of the crop. Other attempts were nowhere near as successful. There was Astroman, a Metroid-inspired adventure that came very close to hitting the mark, but wasn’t quite there. Still, this is probably the genre that, if done right, I like the most.
To get the good out of the way first: Magicians & Looters isn’t broken or glitchy or likely to physically materialize like that spooky chick from The Ring and murder you after seven days. In fact, all the ingredients seem to be here, fully functional, and primed to present one of the best values a game could have. But, for me at least, it just never came together. By far the best aspect of Magicians & Looters is the writing. The story is a sort of spoof of Harry Potter. You play as three teenagers enrolled in a wizard’s school. It gets overrun by evildoers and you must band together and save the day. They’re also all, to put it politely, type-A personalities. They spew out non-stop sarcasm, have endless disdain for one-another, and almost seem to speak in the language of a sitcom. I always hate games like that. It’s one of the things that turned me off of musical RPG Sequence. Here? It works. Even better, the jokes don’t rely on referential humor. No callbacks to bad game dialog. No “remember that movie you’ve seen? We’ve seen it too, and we’ll demonstrate that by quoting it verbatim, but you should laugh because we’re going to do it in an unexpected way” type of stuff. Hell, they don’t even directly reference Harry Potter, and the game is a send-up of it. I mean, damn. Standing ovation right here.
The sharp writing is the ONLY thing that kept me playing, though. Mechanically speaking, I just found Magicians & Looters to be boring. Mostly because of the combat. I give them props for wanting to do something different. Here, touching enemies doesn’t inflict damage on you. Everything is handled by actual hand-to-hand fighting. You attack a few times, then hold block, wait for them to miss, and then continue on. That sounds great, but there’s a reason why 2D games typically don’t do that: because it’s slow and it makes combat a plodding chore. Of course, there’s no real reason to fight enemies. The leveling-up system is handled entirely by finding hidden trinkets, which was another dumb idea. For almost any game, combat will stagnate after X amount of hours. The grind of leveling up could very well be the only thing that keeps your average player from just running past enemies. In M&L, they do drop money that you can use to buy better weapons, but progress on that is too slow as well.
The main hook is switching between three characters, each with their own unique abilities. Unfortunately, this also is bungled, because two of the characters (the guy and one of the girls) are too slow. For a game that already has severe pacing issues, this one really got to me. Most of the time, I wanted to be playing as the near-naked chick, who was faster in movement and could jump significantly higher than the other two. But she was especially crappy at combat. So, you have to switch between the three to open up the map, but playing as the other chick, who was so slow that I was wondering if she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, was torturous. Also, in order to switch characters, you need to go back to a save-station. They’re liberally scattered throughout the world, but the needless backtracking when a Castlevania III like on-the-fly switcheroo would have been so much more preferable and obvious just adds to the dullness factor.
Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn’t make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night’s combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.
My dislike for M&L has nothing to do with the hype I got from my buddies. If anything, I spent more time with it than I would done with any other game because I was trying to find the game they both loved so much. If you hear something unequivocally called better than one of the best games ever made, it catches your attention. I also wasn’t looking for reasons why it’s not. That’s what lifeless fanboys do. No, I wanted to see what they saw. I looked hard for it. Instead, I found dull combat, bland level layouts, and just an overall slowness that I couldn’t get into. I tip my hat to the guys at Morgopolis Studios. I typically discourage first efforts from being this ambitious. Ambition wasn’t what went wrong with Magicians & Looters. Truth be told, it’s a well designed game. Results will not be typical, I guess, considering that my colleagues are shaking their fist in anger that it’s a digital-download game and not on disc, meaning there is no hole for (remaining review censored by Brian for the sake of Cathy’s parents. I don’t want them to know I taught her what THAT is)
Lots of XBLIGs look like they’ll be fun. Then you play them, and they make you actively question whether the concept of fun is something you’ve been hallucinating this whole time. That’s what The Last Fortune made me ponder. I took a peek at the screen shots of it and thought it looked kind of like Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a retro gem that I picked up for $1 on PSN that was just swell. Then I picked up Dragons Curse (which I guess is Wonder Boy 3, or possibly 4.. then again, I’m not sure which one Monster Land is either) on Wii’s Virtual Console and thought that was even better, until I hit a brick wall about halfway through and gave up in shame. Still, fun series It’s about time someone tried to make a tribute for them on XBLIG. It’s just too bad this one turned out a bit warped.
It really does have a bit of a Sega Master System look to it. There was no problem with the graphics, besides item pick-ups being too small and samey.
The game starts with a village full of peaceable folks getting ransacked by evil doers that burn it to the ground. Choosing to play as either a boy or a girl from the village, you seek out revenge. Because the language of the option menu suggested that The Last Fortune might be, ahem, difficult, I decided to forgo the medium setting (my typical starting point for most reviews here) and play on casual. But even on sissy mode, I still had a tough time with Last Fortune, because the mechanics of the game kind of suck. Like the developers fundamentally had a good idea of what to do, but didn’t take the time to polish anything up. The controls have issues with unresponsiveness, which makes movement a chore, especially when you get to sections of the game with long jumps and an emphasis on platforming. I was practically praying that the game wouldn’t go nutso with jumping elements. So naturally, there’s a boss fight that takes place during a vertical auto-scrolling section. It’s like being on an airplane that just lost an engine, so you pray for safety and get rewarded by having a wing break off.
The Last Fortune simply doesn’t do a whole lot to entertain. Progression is straight forward. Get from point A to point B while stabbing everything in-between. Combat is the focus of Last Fortune, which is unfortunate (pun fully intended) because the combat is shit. The range of your attack is limited, and thus you’ll have to do most of your fighting up close. You have no dodge, counterattack, or block. Thus, most of the time you’ll be forced to trade damage with the enemy in a way that gets downright maddening later in the game. I especially hated these giant red knights that looked more like a spartan from Halo brandishing a Halloween novelty sword. You have to get too close to attack them, and they’re spongy enough and fast enough that you will take damage. Well, unless you unload your special moves on them, assuming you have a good one. For some reason, you can only have one type of spell at a time. The item-picks for these are tough to distinguish from one-another, even if you’re on a TV big enough to double as an ark with two of every creature. You can buy a charge attack that shoots a Zelda-ish beam across the room, but it’s as weak as a watered down Martini. All the purchasable upgrades are overpriced and money is scarce even if you go out of your way to slay every enemy. Plus, you can only access the store between levels, which are too long and boring for anyone to reasonably endure.
The Last Fortune was only one dodge or block move away from being a decent game. Alas, it was not to be, making all combat an exercise in frustration and annoyance. The only way to safely fight these flying bastards is to hit once, run away, and wait for another opening. Also known as Zzzzzzword Play.
There’s just no hook to keep you going. In fact, the game seems to go out of its way to make you want to quit. The asinine continue system forces you to spend your coins (which again, you aren’t provided enough of to make shopping enjoyable) to continue from the beginning of whatever stage you’re on. To salt the wounds, you have to pay extra to start midway through the stage. Lives systems are obsolete anyway. A continue system this punishing for a game that isn’t very fun to begin with will not add incentive or replay value to it. It will just make people quit and find something better to play.
That’s what aggravated me the most about Last Fortune. It looks good enough that obvious care was put into it. The developers just forgot to bring the fun. Gameplay is bare-bones. Enemies are cheap. Damage is often unavoidable. The level design is basic and boring. The dialog is soul-crushingly long and dull. I truly believe the building blocks for a good game are somewhere in this mess, but Last Fortune never puts it together. It’s like the developers were given multiple paths for each mechanic: the fun way and the boring way. They fully intended to go down the fun way, but couldn’t read the map properly and ended up in the boring capital of the world. And that’s a shame. Bad game or not, nobody should be stuck in Sacramento.
80 Microsoft Points have friends that live in Roseville, which is right next to Sacramento and thus is a like a satellite of boredom in the making of this review.
I’m a dumbass. I attempted to play One Finger Death Punch, the final Dream-Build-Play winner. Both the developer and my boyfriend had declared the game off-limits to me due to my epilepsy. However, that didn’t stop me from playing Charlie Murder, and I still had all the equipment I used to make it through that game (an older, fading projection TV and extra lighting in the room, in addition to sunglasses I was wearing), so why not?
Well, because it still wasn’t safe for me. That’s why. One Finger Death Punch was much more intense in its effects than Charlie Murder was. I was only able to play a little past the first world before a flickery background made me feel a little off and it was decided I shouldn’t play any further. Rats, I say. Rats, because I was really enjoying it up to that point. The basic concept is using only two buttons, you kung-fu your way through wave after wave of stick figures. You don’t even move your character. All the action in the game is done using only the X and B buttons. When an enemy enters your attack range, you hit them. The violence is over the top, but really, One Finger Death Punch reminded me of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line of titles. It’s just about timing and patterns. Gameplay boiled down to its purest core. Yet, OFDP is a total reinvention of some extremely old concepts, and it works well.
Theory #1 on why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say “we’ll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game!” Yeesh. That goes double for all you iPhone developers.
At least it did until I got to the part that simply wasn’t compatible with my medical condition. So I can’t vouch for the game completely. That wouldn’t be fair. I can say this: it seemed good enough that I think I would have ultimately awarded it the Seal of Quality. I mean, you never know. I really did suck at what little I got to play. Once enemies started to come in different colors (green enemies take two hits, blue ones dodge your first hit and jump into the other button’s range, and I’m sure more colors were coming) I started to fail with more consistency. I also was downright embarrassing against the first boss, losing three times before getting it right. But I was enjoying my mediocrity. I wish I could have played further.
Either way, One Finger Death Punch is, according to developer Silver Dollar Games (yep, those guys), a total bust in sales. What sucks about that is this was their most expensive production, and their most critically acclaimed title. These guys have been lambasted by the community, including me, and yet in the end they proved that they were real artists with real talent. Let it be said, even though I couldn’t finish their game, Silver Dollar today made me proud that I’m Indie Gamer Chick. Perhaps they’ll be the final reminder of how Xbox Live Indie Games cultivated talent. These guys went from being demonized for their, how shall we say it, less than play-value-chalked titles to being demoralized by their best game doing poorly at the point of sale. It’s almost like a microcosm of the XBLIG community as a whole. Don’t let this get you down, guys. You made a believer in me. Stand up, lick your wounds, and go make something else spectacular. I have no doubt you can do it.
Oh, and that spectacular thing you’re going to make? Yea, can you do me a solid and try to make it something that won’t potentially kill me? Thanks.
Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don’t screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.
80 Microsoft Points are really bummed about this because the thing that made me feel ill was a darker, wavy-pulsing background effect. Not my typical trigger. Shows how unpredictable this shit can be in the making of this non-review review.
Ever heard of something called “The Impressive Monkey Test?” Probably not. I invented it just now. But I think the Impressive Monkey Test could be a valuable tool in judging how much raw brainpower a game requires to play. You see, I would be impressed if a monkey could be trained to beat Super Mario Bros. I would be very impressed if a monkey could be trained to play Tetris. Brawlers, on the other hand, I would so not be impressed if a monkey could be trained to play them. They’re games designed for apes, where slapping buttons without finesse is as valid a strategy for winning as mastering combos. Don’t get me wrong: games for apes can be fun. But generally, games that can be played just as well by both humans and primates tend to get boring pretty quickly.
Charlie Murder is a brawler that probably couldn’t be enjoyed by our simian cousins. It has a lot more going for it than just randomly mashing buttons and moving to the right. There’s a fairly complex item system, leveling up, special skills, lots of hidden stuff, and a quirky punk rock story that kept me interested until the end. But what really sets Charlie Murder apart is that it’s a brawler that’s more about the adventure than the fisticuffs. Yea, I know. Some other brawlers have been doing that lately too. Recent XBLIG/PC title Fist Puncher certainly aimed to be more about the story than the action, but after playing just a little bit of Charlie Murder, I felt Fist Puncher was positively antiquated. The funny thing is, I’ve met people who feel the same way about Charlie Murder after playing Dragon’s Crown.
Yea, this was a tough one for me to play, and inspired my most passed around editorial ever. Then again, I Made a Game with Zombies was also pretty bad for me. The only explanation: SKA Studios wants me dead. After this review, I don’t blame them.
Actually, these last two weeks have been eye-opening to say the least. I figured fans of brawlers would be all for things like experience and level-up systems. In fact, a whole lot of them are not. That’s weird, because having a sense of advancement is pretty much the only thing that kept me going once Charlie Murder grew teeth and became difficult to work with. I guess SKA Studios, the guys behind I Made a Game with Zombies In It, are infamous for games that cross the line from enjoyable to infuriating. I would think such a reputation wouldn’t be a badge of honor. Any moron can frustrate people, a fact I demonstrate on a daily basis with my boyfriend and parents. Being able to hold someone’s attention by means other than a sense of obligation? That takes talent. SKA undoubtedly has talent. I just question whether they’re more interested in their poop-stained “we make hard games” badge.
Early on, Charlie Murder is a joy to play. The enemies are well-balanced and the stages are fun to explore. But it doesn’t take too long to realize that there’s going to be some major problems here. Chief amongst them: Charlie Murder is designed with multiplayer in mind. In solo play, the game ramps up in toughness faster than you can level up. I had to replay multiple stages. That didn’t annoy me so much, because I was stockpiling the best clothing and hocking all the rest for cash. But then I would get to bosses that, without hyperbole, I would spend an hour or longer fighting and making no progress. There was one that had a parasite growing out of his head that spawned a full battalion of little worm things. You couldn’t possibly kill the little fuckers fast enough before more would arise to devour you. This forced me to take a smack and run approach with the boss, all the while drip-feeding myself health refills. After a while, I had finally whittled him down to his last tick of health. To beat this boss (and a few others), you have to finish him with a button-mashing quick time event. For the next ten minutes (felt like much longer), every time i went to do the move, one of the minions would grapple on to me, breaking the killing blow and forcing me to mash a different button to shake it off. Of course, when there’s a small army of baddies that can do that attack, you can shake one off and get caught by another. Bosses become such a clusterfuck because of this. One boss has infinitely respawning enemies that can refill its health from across the room. Kill one and another appears within seconds. Just to be clear, Charlie Murder, you want to be enjoyed, right?
No? Only on your terms you say? Those terms being four-players or bust?
Well what if your terms aren’t an option?
No, I don’t particularly feel like going and fucking myself right now.
Grind? That’s your solution? Grind up my stats to have a fighting chance? That’s a shitty deal. I haven’t avoided a single baddie, and I’ve varied my fighting style to try to win over supporters on your in-game Twitter thing (seriously, that’s how leveling up works). Why is the game not progressing with me? Why am I encountering boss fights where I have to practically carry a buffet with me to avoid dying? Why does it take me several minutes to fight normal baddies? Why on earth would you make your end-game such a tedious, boring, repetitive chore?
There’s a few minigames to break up the same old shit, like a few rhythm games. The last of which lagged on me (single player offline play, mind you), got skippy, and cost me a perfect score.
Fine. I’ll jump on Xbox Live and play with friends and ohhhhh right. We tried that and the connection kept lagging out. And it wasn’t just on me. I tried it with different partners, at home and at my office. During certain fights, it just stopped working. I’m sure this will get patched, but it didn’t help my cause here. Instead, I tried to play local. This was fun. In fact, Charlie Murder is always fun with a party, provided that party isn’t lagging out. But this introduced new problems. I had spent time building up my Chick’s stats and I was NOT going to give that up for anyone. Thus, my friends would jump in and out from the ground floor while I walked around like a fucking super hero. They had no remote shot of playing the levels I hadn’t finished. This forced me to go back and start from the beginning with them. Still fun, but significantly less so. I watched them maliciously brawl with the opening baddies, while I could kill any of them with a single punch. I imagine this is how major leaguers must feel when they attend their children’s tee-ball games.
Oh, there was one funny bit in all this. In order to open up the real final level of Charlie Murder and achieve the “good” ending of the game, you have to gather the parts of an evil Dracula thing. His heart, his eye, his finger nail, his.. this really sounds familiar. Anyway, once you do, you have to equip all five parts before entering the final boss fight. Problem: the ability to get this is dependent fully on you picking the right level-up skill upgrades that allow you to equip more buttons. After reaching level 25, I was able to equip four buttons at most. This was the most offered to me, by the way. If it had given me a chance to have a fifth slot, I would have taken it.
So I cheated: I turned on another controller, gave it the eye (which provided the attributes I figured I would need the least for this fight), and opened up a harder boss fight. Then the unused character got killed while I fought the boss. As he laid there waiting for me to come shock him back to life, he leveled up three times (while dead, mind you) as I spent the next thirty minutes fighting this double-boss thing. Okay, so maybe it’s not that funny, but I thought it was hilarious.
I have two pieces of advice for Charlie Murder. #1: Don’t go into it alone, at all. If friends are not going to be available to you, do not buy this game. The frustration of single player outweighs the fun in a huge way. No thought seems to have been given to balance, to pacing, or to scaling the amount of enemies back to accommodate solo play. #2: If you have friends who you’ll be able to play the game with from start to finish, get this game. For all the bitching I did above, Charlie Murder is an extremely satisfying game.
Despite all the whining above, Charlie Murder is my favorite brawler ever. Nothing remotely close.
It’s like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of games. Well, I mean, no it’s not. There’s already one of those. But you know what I mean. The contrast between the multiplayer experience and the solo game are startling. Alone, Charlie Murder is a sadistically brutal punisher-brawler with bad pacing, unfair design, and frustration from hour two onwards. The end game especially is anything but fun. With friends, it’s a still-difficult but not quite as frustrating romp with charming characters, fun set pieces, and enough variation to keep anyone from getting bored. A few years ago, I would have hated Charlie Murder. I quite enjoyed it now, flaws and all, on account of having friends. And to think, I used to believe the Care Bears were full of shit. It only took a game chalked full of violence, bloodshed, dismemberment, and cannibalism to show that Tenderheart Bear knew what he was talking about all along.
800 Microsoft Points would make a video of the most horribly violent Charlie Murder four player moments with this song playing in the background if I had such talent in the making of this review.
Review copies of Charlie Murder were provided to Indie Gamer Chick. One was provided to a friend that had no feedback in this review. The other was cashed in by Cathy. At Indie Gamer Chick, we buy our own games. When a game is reviewed before release, a review copy is accepted and a full copy of the game is purchased on release date whether the game is enjoyed or not. For more on this policy, read the FAQ.
Team 2Bit stands up and takes a bow. Tsutomu Yamaguchi rips up his program and walks out of the auditorium in disgust.
You see, I think Fist Puncher is probably better than your run of the mill brawler. Think of it as Castle Crashers without having to equip weapons. You level up. There are a variety of special moves and combos you can pull off, and you can earn more as you make progress. Levels aren’t always about smacking some twats around, walking ten feet to the right, then smacking more twats. Sometimes you’re in a poisoned subway. Sometimes you’re riding motorcycles. This is all set in a decidedly mature world with adult themes and occasional voice-over narration.
Sadly, it’s hard for me to get excited about this when I started playing upcoming Xbox Live Arcade brawler Charlie Murder about an hour before trying this. I haven’t yet formed an option on that game, but playing it undoubtedly soured me on Fist Puncher. Both games intend to take brawlers in a more progressive, modern direction. It’s as if they’re both in a race, and Fist Puncher is running at a pretty decent pace. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Charlie Murder is using quantum time displacement magic to have already finished the race, give Fist Puncher a wedgie, and sleep with its wife.
Oh shit, it’s Scientologists!
All games should stand on their own. I still believe that. But, I really am having trouble separating these two games from the same genre which released this close together. One of which is extremely modernized and the other of which is still has some firm roots in tradition. If I hadn’t just played Charlie Murder, I think I would have liked Fist Puncher a whole lot more. Not too much more. I hate brawlers and I can’t hide my contempt for them. One of the worst times I’ve had as Indie Gamer Chick was playing the Simpsons Arcade Game with my boyfriend. It wasn’t even an indie, but I had never played it and figured I could get a decent review out of it. Then I dragged Brian along for the ride. I hated every moment of it, but I thought Brian was enjoying it. Then after we finished, he said “well, that sucked.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“When was I supposed to say something? You haven’t stopped complaining this entire time. I’m actually surprised you could complain that much without stopping to breathe.”
The thing with 2D brawlers is, most feel like the same game with different skins. Even popular ones. Look, I played Streets of Rage and its sequels when they were in Ultimate Genesis Collection. I played Final Fight on Capcom Classics Collection. I’m happy you old school gamers still enjoy them, but I don’t get it. It’s just button mashing the same guys, walking to the right a few feet, then button mashing more of the same guys. Repeat this until you run into a boss with an unfair attack pattern and button mash him. Then maybe you watch a static cut scene before repeating the whole process for seven to eight levels. It’s boring. Having a variety of fighting styles doesn’t take the edge off either, because usually there’s one attack that just plain works better than everything else, of which you’ll use it so much that you’ll wear out the buttons you have to hit to activate it.
Fist Puncher, God bless it, does its very best to break up the monotony by including different objectives, branching paths, and fairly short levels. There’s also an upgrade system that, in the tradition of Indie Gamer Chick, I attempted to abuse by simply putting all my stats into strength. Didn’t work, because enemies become downright cheap. I encountered a boss that has a murder of crows surround you. If you’re unable to run away, those damn crows will stun lock you and utterly drain your health. At this point, I had maybe two points spent on defense and I didn’t last too long. Of course, that’s my fault and not the developer’s, but I was still pretty peeved at the cheapness of it. Not to mention that some of the levels are clearly designed with four players in mind, like a subway that fills with poison. You have 90 seconds to clear a few waves of bad guys and a boss. Now, by the time I played this stage, I had nearly filled my strength meter to the brim. It didn’t matter. Enemies were spongy as hell, and there was only one of me to finish a stage meant to be played with friends. The amount of enemies probably should have been scaled back a bit to accommodate solo play.
Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored toilet seat covers shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin’ words!
When you play with friends, it does take the edge off. But while the fighting style consists of more than punches and kicks, Fist Puncher still has a relatively low ceiling before combat gets too repetitive. And while occasional minigames (such as a batting cage where I swear to Christ I could not line up to hit the fucking balls correctly) or hidden keys do try to make this something more, I just found Fist Puncher to be the type of generic brawler that has been done hundreds of times before and will continue to be done until the end of time. Plus, the XBLIG port of the PC title is loaded with some awful glitches. I died during one section of play and had to be brought back to life by being given CPR, which is done by hitting button prompts. Once I was brought back to life, Brian was still bent over in the CPR position, unable to stand up. This was not by design. Weirdly, he eventually stood up, but none of the action buttons would work. He had to intentionally let an enemy knock him down before anything would work again. In addition to all of this, the sound effects (including the voice over narration after the first stage) would cut in and out, sometimes leading to playing whole stages without the satisfaction of hearing your fist smack against some asshole’s face.
I’m not scoring against the glitches (unacceptable as they are), because I didn’t like Fist Puncher regardless. Indie Gamer Guy did, and it would seem many long-term fans of the genre disagree with me as well. Having played through it, I do admit that Fist Puncher is a well crafted tribute to one of the industry’s most revered game types that does try to do a little bit more than they did. But I never liked brawlers to begin with, so I was not who this game was aimed at, and Fist Puncher does absolutely nothing to try to convince people like me that we have it all wrong. Its only ambition was to satisfy fans of games like Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it seems to do that well. I’ll never understand why games like this are still popular when gaming has come so very far since the mid 90s. If anything, brawlers are having a revival, and not one of those ironic ones like people watching movies on VHS or pretending to like My Little Pony. I’m talking honest-to-God elation. I don’t get it. A lot of people my age don’t get it. Then again, people of their age don’t get how we could convince our parents to murder each-other on Black Friday to score the last booster pack of Pokemon cards for Christmas. It’s a generational thing.
400 Microsoft Points have no opinion of Charlie Murder yet, except that it does try to do more with brawlers, and that’s a step in the right direction in the making of this review.
Sony just started its annual Play event, where some of the top indies (and one random licensed title) get put on PlayStation Network, complete with PlayStation Plus discounts and a special bonus if you buy all the games in the event. DO NOT FALL is not one of those games. It just happened to come out the day the event started, alongside actual participant Stealth Inc. It’s also not really an indie, per se. It’s by developers XPEC Entertainment. I get it. Heh. XPEC. That’s like expect. They’re saying “expect entertainment, like, from the games we’re making.” As opposed to what? I expect every game to be entertaining. It’s only when they don’t that I get pissy about it.
I didn’t do the five seconds of research on Google that would have alerted me to these guys’ non-indie status. They’ve handled such franchises as Shrek, Hello Kitty, and Kung-Fu Panda. That got me briefly excited, because I thought Kung Fu Panda was a pretty underrated little game. Then I got unexcited when I found out they only developed the Wii and PS2 version, not the pretty decent Xbox 360 port. Okay, so I totally screwed the pooch in selecting this game for review. Unless it doesn’t suck. Shockingly, it doesn’t. DO NOT FALL is not bad at all. It’s not much better than decent either, but at least I found a game that nobody is talking about to review. Still counts.
Behold: the least controversial screenshot any game I’ve reviewed will ever have. That’s what I get for accidentally reviewing a non-indie.
So the basic idea is DO NOT FALL is a maze-like platformer, with the hook being the ground crumbles beneath you as you run along it. Most of the time it eventually respawns. Occasionally it doesn’t. Neat hook. Original. The crumbling floor thing is a common theme in games, but never has a game outright centered around it. At first, I didn’t really care all that much. DO NOT FALL gets off to a horribly sluggish start. The opening tutorial stages show off the cutesy animal themes and cheerful music that just beat you over the head with adorableness so much that I wanted to kill myself.
But, it does get better. In fact, once the game grows some teeth and the difficult ramps up, DO NOT FALL is actually a bit exciting. Because of the crumbling block hook, you’ll sometimes go long stretches of a level without having a moment to pause, set yourself, and plan out your next move. Thinking on your feet is the focus here. Once you reach the third world, level design really takes off. Worlds become more sprawling, keys get spread further apart, and having to lure enemies to their deaths by crumbling the floors underneath them while still having room to get where you need to go is actually a lot of fun. When DO NOT FALL does right by its own idea, good times are had.
Unfortunately, numerous problems hold it back. My biggest issue was perception. When levels go from being flat to having height and depth, I had trouble lining up jumps, because it really looked like the blocks I was leaping towards were straight across from the one I was on. Or at least they did when I had about a second to glance over at them while plotting the course I was taking. This issue comes up a lot from the third world onwards, and it never failed to frustrate. It also doesn’t help that you can’t rotate the camera. You can move it slightly left or slightly right, and you can zoom it out, but you can’t rotate it. This was apparently done so that they could occasionally hide hidden trinkets behind objects. I’m fine with that, if the amount of fun from that concept outweighs the amount of frustration not having a better camera option causes. Not only is that not the case here, but the stuff hidden behind scenery glows so that you can’t possibly miss it. I hate it when games screw up their concept and are condescending about it.
Controls are an issue too. DO NOT FALL uses a full 3D game engine, but all the action should hypothetically take place one block at a time. Because of that, I would think the D-Pad would be the preferable control option. It’s not an option at all. Thus, movement is imprecise and too loose to fully be comfortable while maneuvering the stages. Often, the platforms you’re running across only have a width of one block. This left me a frequent victim of simply walking off a ledge. I can’t help but wonder if it would have played better if movement is was handled one full block at a time. I honestly don’t know if it would have worked better or not, but the current scheme is problematic. It was never a deal breaker, mind you. Once you get over the learning curve of the physics (could take a while) and get a feel for distance, you’ll be zipping through levels with the only fusses being those there by design.
I can’t help but think this was designed more with the phone market, or possibly Nintendo 3DS, in mind. Not that phones would have been suitable for DO NOT FALL. I’m pretty sure this game combined with fake touch-screen buttons would have been a complete disaster. 3DS, on the other hand, would have probably been a better fit. It might have helped with the depth-perception problems.
There’s a lot not to like about DO NOT FALL, and I focused on the negatives perhaps a little too strongly here. Trust me, there’s a lot more I left out, like the generic setting, the shop where items are far too expensive, and the difficulty going absolutely bonkers about two-thirds of the way through. So I would like to close out by saying, DO NOT FALL is worth your money, because it does a lot right. Level design isn’t always perfect, but when it’s at its most inspired, DO NOT FALL is a lot fun. Plus, I really dug the concept here. It took something that is so common a hazard in platformers that it’s practically a cliché and successfully built an entire game around it. You don’t see that very often at all. To make a mechanic that has existed and been stale since before I was born fresh and exciting is something to be admired.
Really, what DO NOT FALL could have used was polish. Instead of fine tuning the campaign, the developers seemed to have spent their free time making an utterly boring series of online-enabled, multiplayer minigames. None of them are fun. All of them feel like rejected Mario Party fare with no connection to the main game. That’s a shame. If they insisted on including multiplayer support, a co-op mode with levels tailored for that would have been much more preferable. I guess. I mean, going off the family-friendly characters and environments, you would forgive me for assuming that DO NOT FALL is designed with the kiddie set in mind. I’m thinking children will like this more than I did. Considering that I did like DO NOT FALL, that might be significant. So if you have kids, this might be a good purchase for them that you won’t get bored with yourself. And if I’m wrong and they don’t like it at all, do me a solid and tell your kids the guys at PSNStores.com gave you the idea and not me.
$9.99 thinks this is an almost certain nominee for the First Annual Indie Gamer Chick Award for Mediocrity in the Field of Generic Character Design in the making of this review.
DO NOT FALL is Chick Approved but not Leaderboard-eligible (non-Indie)
A review copy of DO NOT FALL was provided to Indie Gamer Chick to test online multiplayer. If I had known what the online multiplayer would be like, I would have turned it down. Another thing I didn’t research properly. Anyway, the review copy was provided to a friend who had no input in this review. The copy played by me was paid for by me with my own money. For more on this policy, check my FAQ.
I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming. I thought Mega Man 9 was alright. I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so. I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid. And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider. I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing. I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.
With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well. Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about. With platformers, it gets especially difficult. Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it. And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice. Vintage Hero doesn’t have that. It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy. Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.
Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.
Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play. Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms. The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man. It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets. His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s. When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man. Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret. If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.
But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there. Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles. Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system. As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out. Of course, it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title. There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush. Is it too short? Perhaps. It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be. If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate. Me? I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.
Vintage Hero isn’t flawless. I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own. I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses. It all felt a bit generic. The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal. It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody. Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged. Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design. Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen. But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.
You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out. And it does. It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more. Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own. Its gameplay is fine-tuned. Its levels inspired. It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did. But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy. By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed. Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review. Pure, unbridled love of gaming did. And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.
(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)
80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review. Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff. It was all about the color swapping.
Back in April, as the gaming landscape was preparing for a next-gen level shakeup, I was only thinking about one thing: XBLIG is almost done. I mean, there would be indies on Xbox One of course, but the community that I’ve come to know and love would change. It might be better. It might be worse. But it would certainly not be the same. I’ve thought about how my previous reviews would lose their relevance once those games were no longer available. I’ve thought about the types of games the hundreds of developers I’ve come to know and befriend will create in the future. Change is scary. I’ve spent two years trying to be the best (if not, the loudest) advocate for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Tough Sell
Has my blog actually done anything? Maybe, but not as much as I would have liked. Some developers have credited positive reviews from me for causing a brief sales spike, but nothing significant. On the flip side, I’ve had developers of games I absolutely cremated credit me with a bump in demo downloads.
LaserCat
But then I get down to the sad truth of the matter. There are games on my Leaderboard that have sold under 1,000 copies. Hell, there are games on it that have sold under 500 copies. There are games on XBLIG where I am literally the only person that bought it. I’ve played amazing games that sold so poorly that the developers became demoralized and quit. Being Indie Gamer Chick has been the privilege of my life, but sometimes the tales of woe from developers can be downright heartbreaking.
With the sun setting on this generation, I wanted to try to make one last big push for Xbox Live Indie Games. The community has come together in the past and done their best to promote the platform. There has been three promotions called the Indie Games Uprising that tried to showcase the best new XBLIGs. Unfortunately, the quality of those games was a mixed bag of some genuine gems to go with some unpolished, unfinished turds. The last Uprising was particularly devastating. Microsoft didn’t promote it until long after it had already ended, and when they finally did, the main game featured was Sententia. A well-meaning title that was almost universally recognized as being one of the most abysmal games the platform had seen. To have a game of its quality be the focus of an event designed to promote the best of XBLIGs only served to cement the unfair reputation XBLIG has of being nothing but low quality games that aren’t worth the average one dollar price tag.
I believed the reputation myself before I stated my blog. From the time XBLIG launched until the time that I started Indie Gamer Chick, I bought two games for it. Breath of Death VII was the first. I Made a Game with Zombies in It was the second. I enjoyed both, but attempts at finding more titles of their quality didn’t seem worth the effort. Mostly, I found a lot of demos of stuff that felt like they were developed over the course of a week, devoid of passion, and aimed at entertaining nobody. When I finally started my blog, it didn’t take me too long to find out that there are some really good games on the platform. But the sheer number of awful games drowns out the good.
Beyond that, XBLIG also got a reputation of being nothing but clones of popular games, particularly Minecraft. I’ve played the two most famous of those, Castleminer Z and FortressCraft. I didn’t like them, but I wasn’t really interested in Minecraft either. After playing them, I will say that they are quality games, if you’re into that sort of thing. But there are also a lot of similar games on the platform that weren’t as well produced as those two. At the same time, people would say things like “the top two Minecraft clones weren’t as good as Minecraft was.” Well, of course not (though I’ve heard from some Minecraft fans that actually prefer the XBLIG clones). But their popularity was directly tied to the fact that Minecraft wasn’t available on Xbox. Unfortunately, having clones top the sales charts unfairly painted the platform to look like it was only good for clones. Or if not clones, games featuring Avatars. Regardless of the quality of those games (admittedly, most games centered around Avatars are horrid, but not all of them), most regular gamers don’t like Avatars to begin with, and that turned them off the platform. Then you have non-gaming apps such as Rumble Massage, which is actually the #29 best-selling XBLIG of all-time as of this writing. When there are thousands of titles on the platform and an app that turns your controller into a vibrating dildo has sold better than 99.999% of them, people are just not going to associate that platform with quality video games.
Smooth Operators
So that is the handicap that myself, along with dozens of other advocates of XBLIG, have dealt with. I certainly wasn’t the first critic to focus on XBLIG. I’m just the most successful. But that success is only in comparison to other sites with an XBLIG focus. Your average moderately popular indie gaming site does multiples of what I do on my best day. It’s just plain hard to get gamers excited about good titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. It carries too much baggage. It’s also hard to get someone to take another look at something they’ve long since dismissed. That’s just human nature. In the case of XBLIG, most of what was wrong with it before is still problematic today, so anyone glancing would be likely to assume that nothing has changed. And they’re right, because nothing really has changed. That’s because there were very good games on the service all along. You just had to look closely to find them.
I had two ideas for trying to get a new audience exposed to XBLIG before the new consoles launched. The first was to do a bundle of PC ports for XBLIG. The problem with that was the odds on being able to get one off the ground were probably slim. Even good XBLIGs are a tough sell because of the stigma the brand carries. The other option was to do a massive giveaway of the best XBLIGs over the course of a single day. Well, you know how it played out.
Surprise! We Like Your Idea!
I sent an email off to the guys at Indie Royale sheepishly explaining my idea for a bundle centered around Xbox Live Indie Games. I couldn’t pitch them on the merits of sales potential, because there is no denying that the whole idea was a long shot at best. Thus, I did exactly what I advise people not to do when seeking investments from venture capitalists, or crowd funding, or angel investors: I pitched to them from the heart. I explained to them how the XBLIG/XNA community “adopted” me and what they’ve meant to my life. I was frank about why XBLIG’s reputation was fair, but the fogging effect it created caused the majority of gamers to miss out on some of the best indies of this generation. Finally, I basically said that these developers deserve a break, and that exposure on Indie Royale would not just benefit those with games in the bundle, but could open up the doors for greater recognition for the hundreds of talented developers whose games have sat unloved on XBLIG.
Little Racers STREET
Graeme, one of the main guys at Indie Royale, did respond to me. Which is awesome considering that I’m ultimately small potatoes on the indie scene. Not only did he respond, but I had caught his interest. We discussed the types of games I would include, and how we could set this apart from other bundles. Then, things went quiet for a while. So quiet that I was sure I got the blow off. So, I turned my attention to my alternative plan: a huge giveaway of the best PC ports for XBLIG. The idea was, the developers would have their games free for one day only: July 1, for Indie Gamer Chick’s Second Anniversary. After lining up over a dozen top-notch games, many of which I had planned to include in the bundle (plus other games that would be discounted), I thought I had organized a pretty good little event.
Then I heard back from Graeme. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was officially on. I just had to round up the games.
I changed my underwear and started contacting developers.
Rounding up Games
Your typical bundle usually has five games. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle has eight. The reason for that is simple: I wanted gamers to get the best value for their money as possible. Many of these games sell for between $1 to $3 on Xbox Live right now, not to mention that some would have been featured on previous bundles. But most importantly, I wanted people to see that there is a huge variety of very good games on the platform that they had been missing out on.
If I could have, I would have included every single developer who wanted in. But that wasn’t an option. I’ve made tons of friends who develop XBLIGs since starting my site. I wish I could have included those I was closest with. But the concept of the bundle was that it was supposed to represent the tippy-top of XBLIG quality. After coming up with several variations, I ultimately decided to go off my leaderboard and pick the first eight games that were available in sequential order.
For those new to Indie Gamer Chick, the Leaderboard is a concept I adapted from BBC’s automotive show Top Gear. The idea I had was I would rank every game that I enjoyed in the exact order I would prefer to play them. The method is actually very simple. Whenever a new game receives my Seal of Approval, I start at the bottom of my list and ask myself if I would rather play the new game or the old one. If it’s the new one I prefer, I go up to the next game on the list. I do this until I reach an old game that I prefer over the new one. The new game is then placed below that title on the board. It’s been a fun idea that works really well. It’s interactive. My readers get to debate placement. It also gives developers something to aim for. Just having it made the selection process for this bundle pretty easy. Or so I thought.
Right off the bat, the #3 game on my site, We Are Cubes, was eliminated. It has no PC port, and there wasn’t enough time to get one up and running. The #2 ranked game, Gateways, was not available because the developer already had plans to be in an upcoming bundle. #9, Bleed, was only recently listed on Steam and the timing wasn’t right, but I have no doubt they’ll be in a future bundle. Games like Miner Dig Deep (#11) and Star Ninja (#13) also have no PC ports, while Cthulhu Saves the World (#12) has been in more bundles than I can count. That was cool, because everything in my Top-25 I would proudly stand by as the cream of the XBLIG crop.
But this was a bundle that was about the XBLIGs. So I considered putting some games that were well received by everyone but me in the bundle, with Apple Jack being the game that I felt would probably be the most well received. The problem there was Apple Jack isn’t out on PC yet. It will be soon, and for fans of punishers, you’ll probably like it a hell of a lot more than I did. I thought about including the most popular game on XBLIG that I’m incapable of playing due to my epilepsy: Score Rush by Xona Games. That wasn’t an option because they already had a bundle planned out. Finally, I almost went completely nepotism corrupt and including Aeternum by Brooks Bishop, who is one of my better friends I’ve made through Indie Gamer Chick, not to mention the man who designed my mascot. But that just plain wouldn’t have been right. His game was well received by fans of Bullet Hells, but I absolutely hated it. I get along with bullet hells about as well as I imagine Michael Vick will get along with Cerberus.
So my lineup was set. And then I lost Escape Goat. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong. He wanted in, but he had already committed to other bundles and deals and had to pull out. This was pretty devastating, because Escape Goat is the #1 ranked game on the Leaderboard. I consider it to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made, and I’ve reviewed nearly 400 of them. I also lost Chompy Chomp Chomp, the #5 game on my board, which I consider to be the best party game of this entire gaming generation, indie or otherwise. I was counting on its inclusion because pure party games are quite rare in these kind of bundles, and I wanted it to set this bundle apart from the rest. The developers at Utopian World of Sandwiches were besides themselves when they had to drop out. They wanted in, but a miscommunication forced them out. That sucks. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking about it. Chompy Chomp Chomp is a game that didn’t sell extremely well on XBLIG, but it’s worth your time. Gather up your friends, because you’ll never have a better party for $1, I promise you.
So I went back to the list. Again, many games were just not options based on being too recently featured in other bundles. Penny Arcade Part 3 was out. DLC Quest was out. A couple of my favorite puzzlers, Pixel Blocked! and Aesop’s Garden had no PC ports. Thankfully, the vastly overlooked SpyLeaks was available. Finally, I went to Orbitron, one of my personal favorite games on XBLIG that, I admit, got a mixed-reception elsewhere. Though to be frank, I’m disappointed that ArcadeCraft, which was created by Orbitron developers Firebase Industries, had no PC port. This is thanks to its use of avatars as characters. Yea, ArcadeCraft ranks two spots below Orbitron on the Leaderboard, but there’s no questioning that is has a larger appeal. Seriously guys, get cracking on that PC port. No XBLIG screams “this would be a PC megahit” quite like ArcadeCraft does.
Orbitron: Revolution
The eight games confirmed for real, I had one last thing to do. I really did want to include as many developers as I could, but the problem was, the more games, the smaller the piece of the pie each would get. Indie Royale had never had a bundle with eight separate developers. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle isn’t the largest in terms of total games, but it is the largest in terms of total developers. It also complicates things more from legal and logistical points of view. But I really wanted everyone who had earned my Seal of Approval and genuinely wanted in to have a shot at being in. The only way to do that was to ask if they wanted to simply donate their games to the bundle. A shit deal for them perhaps, but it was all I could do.
Guess what? As always, the XBLIG community stepped up, and I had volunteers. That mystery game? I’m not even sure what it is, but it will come from one of those games, and it will be a game off my Leaderboard. Incredible. Those who did step up are artists. They also have future projects that are coming very soon to both XBLIG and to PC, and they wanted to show that they’re here, they have talent, and you can trust that they can make good games.
Naming Your Bundle of Joy
When I started Indie Gamer Chick, it was totally on a whim. My boyfriend (along with my parents, coworkers, and the ghost of Jacob Marley) all said I needed a hobby. We were going through my Xbox hard drive and stumbled upon Breath of Death VII and I Made a Game With Zombies, the two XBLIGs I owned before starting my blog. Brian, like many gamers, had honestly never heard of XBLIGs. I had previously considered doing a movie related blog, but Brian suggested that I should do XBLIG reviews instead, since gaming was basically all I did with my free time. The name came about after just a couple of minutes of brain storming. I’m a fan of online movie reviews from sources like Red Letter Media and That Guy with the Glasses. TGWTG included the Nostalgia Chick, whose reviews I had come to enjoy quite a bit. So I thought, hey, Indie Gamer Chick. Done and done.
The name is good and catchy, but I didn’t stop to think about the negative aspects of it. Namely, the whole GURL GAMER thing. Besides the very rare joke, I’ve never played up the girl card here. It takes about five minutes worth of reading my blog to see that I’m not playing the “I’m quirky because I’m a girl and I play games” tit-shaking stereotype. So while the name might land curiosity seekers, I would hope my writing and coverage of games that don’t typically get a lot of attention would be the draw of my site. And for the most part, it is. In two years, the amount of times someone ripped me for having “Chick” in my site’s name was minimum. It was a non-factor, and I’m proud of that.
Chester
And then I attached a teaser to the bundle at the end of my review for Penny Arcade 4, and the response was overwhelmingly negative, but in silly ways. Maybe a bit mean-spirited, but mostly the jokes you would expect. Menstruation jokes. Boob jokes. Jokes about casual games that girls play, or games starring girls. That didn’t bother me so much. I mean, if I can’t take that shit (and obviously some people can’t, hence some recent controversies) I should crawl under my bed and never come out because that’s just how people talk. It’s dumb. It’s juvenile. But I’m a critic who liberally uses dick and fart jokes, so I can’t say anything against low brow humor.
The problem is, for the name of a gaming blog, Indie Gamer Chick is perfect. For the name of a bundle? I’ll admit, it’s not so perfect. First off, people unfamiliar with my site (which includes the whole world, give or take a couple thousand people) have no point of reference to why the bundle was called that. None of the games feature girls as the protagonist. Thus, the bundle might seem like Indie Royale was marketing directly to girls in a way that could be considered sexist. This at a time when gender-related tensions in gaming are at an all-time high. Granted, their site and their press release make it clear who Indie Gamer Chick is (raises hand) and that I hand-selected the games. Which is fine, if everyone reads it. They didn’t. The name “Indie Gamer Chick Bundle” appeared on Twitter and across message boards and people lost their shit over it. For most of those people, their anger/outrage was defused when they found out the context of the name. Others moved on to being pissed that my blog had the name “Chick” in it. The rule I guess being that girls that play games are not allowed to say they are girls. I’m not sure if the rule applies to other forms of entertainment. I’ll ask Lady Gaga is she gets shit for her stage name.
The second part is the whole girl gamer thing carries with it the jokes that are such layups that even Kwame Brown couldn’t blow it. “It’s Indie Gamer Chick so of course Bleed will be in the bundle.” Not only does that not bother me, but I laughed. I mean, they’re easy jokes for a reason. Because more than one person thinks of it. Not clever, but hey, funny. And there was no actual malice behind them. Yea, there were a few douchey comments, but the internet has a few douchey people. You know what? The internet is not made up mostly of assholes and misogynists. I know this because I spent two years working with the XBLIG community, which is made up almost entirely of men and they treated me amazing. By the way: making a random girl gamer joke doesn’t make a guy a misogynist or an asshole. Not every joke has malice behind it, and those with malice only seem more represented because they never.. shut.. up!
Should the bundle have been called something else? Maybe. My friend Matt played the devil’s advocate role as we tossed around the merits and detriments of having the bundle carry my name. He floated the idea that calling it the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle would take the attention away from the XBLIG concept. He wasn’t totally wrong about that. Of course, there was no name available that could hammer home that this was an XBLIG themed bundle. Legally, we couldn’t even call it the Xbox Live Indie Game Bundle. The alternative name considered was the XNA Showcase Bundle. XNA is the free gaming development tool set provided by Microsoft upon which all XBLIGs (and some spectacular Xbox Live Arcade games such as Bastion) were built with. XNA was recently discontinued by Microsoft, so having that name for the bundle as a final tribute made sense. Better sense than my friend George Clingerman, who got XNA tattooed on his arm. Though I believe he was merely pining to be Peter Moore’s heir at Microsoft when he did that. Probably while drunk.
Of course, XNA doesn’t mean a whole lot to people outside the development community. And, unlike indies, which will have some future on Xbox as a platform, XNA is done. People will still continue to use it to create PC games, and tools such as MonoGame could potentially lead to some games for next-gen platforms being started on XNA. But it won’t ever again be a major factor in indie development.
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was the name to go with. I know it works at catching attention. If I had to go back to July of 2011, the day I started the site, would I have called it something else? Perhaps CathyPlaysIndies.com or something like that? Again, maybe. If I had known I would eventually end up doing one of these bundles, I probably would have come up with something less controversial. I mean, who knew? I figured nobody would read me. But, I’m not ashamed of the name. I’m proud that Indie Gamer Chick has caught on. I’m proud that I am Indie Gamer Chick. I never thought I would catch on enough to be the recipient of backlash.
And it’s not just me, but the guys at Indie Royale who are getting it. Again, they’ve done everything they could to make it clear that the bundle was handpicked by me, but the name is all most people see, and they find the name sexist. I’m getting a small minority of gamers upset by being yet another female gamer who has to call attention to her gender. That was never my intention. I just thought the name sounded cool. It had a ring to it. Now the name is getting me labeled as an anti-feminist. It’s true that I don’t give a flying fuck about feminism. It’s 2013, and despite the best efforts of some politicians, I don’t feel like a second class citizen, nor have I ever. And yet, based purely on gender, I’m supposed to automatically side on every single point made by professional feminists like Anita Sarkeesian. Isn’t the whole idea that I must side with a professional feminist actually sexist in and of itself? So yea, I do regret that the name in the sense that it brings the gender debate (and all accompanying jokes) onto the table. It’s totally fair, because it’s the name I chose.
SpyLeaks
I’ve always thought what most set me apart from other bloggers and critics was my age and inexperience. I was about two weeks away from turning 22 when I started Indie Gamer Chick. I didn’t grow up with an Atari 2600 or an NES or even the 16-bit platforms. My first console was the original PlayStation. My average reader tends to be about ten years older than me. It’s having that totally different perspective that sets me apart. This is the first time I’ve really talked about the gender issue, but I sort of have to. Would I have gotten it regardless if I had named my blog Random Game Crap, which was seriously what I almost called it? Probably a little, but not as much. Thankfully, some of the people who were like “what the fuck is an Indie Gamer Chick” took the time to read my blog and realize that I’m not a stereotype.
And, of course, my review style sets me apart. I’m certainly not the only critic who is known for being harsh. It’s just that indies are typically spared from scorn. I admit. I knew almost nothing about the indie scene before starting Indie Gamer Chick. I had played indie games, mostly through promotions like Xbox’s Summer of Arcade, or various random PSN releases. But, when I went to check on reviews for Xbox Live Indie Games, there were slim pickings. And what little reviews I could find seemed like they were written by cheerleaders. Absolutely nothing negative discussed about the game. Just praise and positivity, as if the developer were a delicate flower who would wilt and die if anything resembling constructive feedback was spoken. Yea, fuck that. If I was going to do this thing, I would just say exactly what I thought. And that’s what I did.
It’s exactly what quality developers want. I mean, they want to get positive reviews, but they want to earn them. They’re meaningless if they’re handed out like candy to trick-or-treaters. Indie developers desire to improve, and the only way they can do that is through honest feedback. And honest feedback is something they couldn’t count on from friends or family or fellow developers. They should have been able to count on it from critics, but the critics failed to actually criticize anything. When the XBLIG community finally discovered my blog, they were briefly mortified by my review style. But community leaders embraced me and my style. Now, developers use my reviews to help them improve. They aspire to be better. To be what they use as a guidepost for improvement is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever accomplished. It’s especially touching because they’re the ones with the real talent. I’m just someone who plays games. But they treat me special, and that feels amazing.
Let’s Do Launch
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle launched yesterday. The response across message boards was generally negative, I admit. But, aside from a handful of people who just plain loath the idea of my name, most of the feedback is centered around game selection. It’s not that the games are bad. The consensus seems to be that these are good games. It’s that there’s too many repeats from previous bundles, or that only one of the games (Dead Pixels) has Steam keys as an option. These criticisms are absolutely fair and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
Centering a bundle around XBLIGs doesn’t exactly give one the widest range of game selection. There are a lot of solid titles, but stuff I felt worked as a proper showcase for the platform that was available and not completely over-bundled limited my choices. Do I regret not getting Escape Goat? Sure. Am I ashamed that my bundle instead has SpyLeaks? Absolutely not. It’s a wonderful game. I wouldn’t have settled for a selection that wasn’t representative of the best of what XBLIG has to offer. I’m proud that I got to present these eight games to a community that might have overlooked them.
I do admit, not having Steam be an option for seven out of the eight games does suck. Not having Mac as an option for any of the games sucks too. Part of that is that games developed on XNA are tougher to transition to Mac, not to mention costly. You have to remember, with the exception of Dead Pixels (which would qualify as a modest hit), none of these titles were best sellers, and getting the games on Mac could very well have been cost prohibitive. As far as Steam, it again comes down to these games not having the biggest following, and the Greenlight process being slow. Four of the games are going through Greenlight now, and if you enjoyed playing them, give them your vote please. They’ve earned it.
Antipole
So who was this bundle aimed at? I really wanted this to reach gamers who ignored XBLIG, or long since dismissed it. I wanted to show that this is what XBLIG was capable of. One gentlemen offered the following feedback: “I haven’t heard of any of these games.” He meant that as a negative. I was thinking “wait, if you’ve never heard of them, isn’t this exactly the kind of bundle you should be looking at Indie Royale for?” Most XBLIGs have no name recognition. That doesn’t mean they have no value to you as a gamer. If ever there was a platform that should have thrived on sleeper hits, it would be Xbox Live Indie Games.
I think the bundle is probably being better received in terms of sales than people expected from an XBLIG-themed bundle selected by a nobody critic. Is it going to break sales records? Probably not. But is it succeeding at exposing a new group of gamers to XBLIG? Thankfully, the answer to that is yes. People are using my Leaderboard to discover some great games that flew under the radar. That a wonderful market full of hidden gems was right there on their Xbox all along. Even if it only creates a handful of new XBLIG fans, it’s still totally worth it.
It’s ironic that Microsoft announced their plans for self-publishing on Xbox One the same day that my bundle launched. The same bundle I wanted to use to create new fans for my beloved XBLIG. The term “better late than never” comes to mind. That applies to new customers for XBLIG as well. And even for those who think the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle stinks, I hope you will at least tip your hat to this development community, because they will factor into your future in gaming. With their amount of talent, crossing paths with them will be unavoidable. If you have an Xbox and you haven’t checked out the indie channel in quite some time, if not ever, I truly hope you fire it up. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. It’s not perfect, and many of its games downright suck. But the good stuff? The really good stuff? It’s there, and when you find it, it will make your day.
一>◇ was developed by Hitmark Brothers
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