Did you know that when they tested the first atomic bomb, those involved took bets on what they thought might happen? Mostly it was about the amount of kilotons the explosion would be, but there were also side bets such as whether or not it would kill all present, cause the fault line to collapse, knock the Earth off its axis, or blow up the entire planet. I’m not sure how the winner would have collected if the last option had won out, but it’s true and well documented, and only some of those bets were tongue-in-cheek. Smart guys who, truth be told, had no fucking clue what would happen. With some experiments, you can’t know until you push the button.
Scribendus attempts to combine Scrabble and Tetris. I’m sure this has been attempted before (someone steered me in the direction of a Tetris-craze era title called Wordtris) but I’ve never played one. It’s a concept that seems like it should work, but in this case, it doesn’t. The idea is two letters at a time drop from the ceiling and you have to stack them in a way that forms a word. You can build a word (minimum four letters) diagonally, horizontally, or vertically. The problem of course, is being given two random letters at a time doesn’t leave you a whole lot of room for strategy or versatility. I consider myself pretty dang good at word games, but I couldn’t make Scribendus work for me. The only strategy that seemed to work was trying to build one decent sized (six letter or so) word across the bottom and stacking all other blocks on the side, but even this didn’t work. I got my best score by completely ignoring the letters all together and just stacking the blocks randomly, spacing the vowels apart from each other. Using this technique, I scored big points and multiple combos. And I don’t even know what words I made.
I can’t really slam Scribendus too much. It looks good, sounds good, and controls good. It feels to me like a worthy experiment that failed. That will happen in the land of indies. While my enthusiastic fans might want to me to shred every game that isn’t good, now might be a good time to remind readers that it’s okay to try something new and not have it succeed. Sometimes you can’t know if something will work until you create it and market it. Look at Lexiv, the Scrabble-meets-Sim City game. That could have just as well been a disaster too. I admire creator Dave Turka for giving it a try. His particular Manhattan Project simply failed to detonate, and now he become derp, destroyer of words.
80 Microsoft Points noted that a man named Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Trinity test betting pool with a guess of 18 kilotons (actual explosion was 18.6 kilotons) in the making of this review. His opponents overbid, allowing him to take both showcases.
Other than a really annoying soundtrack, Arcade of Neon seems like it would have fit right at home on the Atari 2600. This is one of those “dodge most everything, except the stuff you’re not supposed to dodge” games. It’s loaded with play modes and can be addictive in a hypnotic “am I really having fun or am I being brainwashed into buying products I don’t need” kind of way. It reminds me of my parents while they watch the Vampire Diaries. Yes, my parents, ages 63 and 44, watch the Vampire Diaries. Shame of my life, obviously.
It’s not much to look at, but really, it can be fun.
The concept is you’re a circle that has to dodge other circles. Alternatively, you can absorb like-colored circles for points. In the main mode of play, switching which color you are is handled with the face buttons and their corresponding colors. So Y would be white, X is black, B is like a dark grey.. hey wait a second. Oh, that’s right. I have one of those controllers. Well if you have a normal controller, you can look down for reference. For whatever reason, my brain refused to retain that Green = A. The other colors I could use fine, but for whatever reason my personal wiring refused to allow me to adjust to green with quick reflexes. There’s probably some complex reason for that, but I’ll just save everyone some time and say that I’m an idiot.
There’s a ton of modes here that change-up the formula, including a game that I think was funded by SPECTRE with the aim of creating the ultimate weapon of boredom. It’s like Pong, only it’s single player, you can’t possibly hit the ball past the computer, and the object is to keep returning the volleys. Sometimes when the AI hits the ball back, it changes color, and you have to match the color with your paddle. The problem is, the paddles are huge and the ball NEVER GETS FASTER! I played it for like ten minutes and it was the most excruciatingly boring ten minutes of my entire life. That’s not hyperbolic. I’m dead serious. We need to get scientists off the Hadron Collider and have them study this thing. It’s the most remarkably bad game mode I’ve ever seen in my entire life and after ten minutes I was temporarily insane from it. I set off a small fire in my office and had an extended conversation with my coffee table. How does anyone come up with a game like this in 2013?
Avoid having sharp objects within reaching distance when attempting to play the Pong mode.
The rest of Arcade of Neon isn’t nearly that bad. In fact, it’s a perfectly acceptable waste of a few minutes and at times fun. But there’s a couple gigantic problems here. There are ten modes of play available, but only one hi-score slot is present. This is one of the biggest brain farts I’ve seen from a developer in a while. Ten unique modes, one hi-score space that they all share together. It’s really disappointing because I know the developer reads me and I figured I at least had enough influence (ha!) to make people second-guess such no-brainer choices. Apparently he got no feedback from people saying “you know, if there’s ten unique game modes, people might want to know what their best score in each mode is.” I’m so pissed about this that I’m banning him from further game development until he writes “I will use my head for something other than a hat rack” 100 times on a blackboard. I don’t think I actually have that authority, but I don’t know if he knows that.
Another problem is I sort of already played a game that’s very similar to this, called Dot Dash Episode 1. Although Arcade of Neon offers more play modes and a larger variety of objectives, Dot Dash had better graphics and play control for the same price. Considering that Dot Dash barely landed a spot on the Leaderboard, I guess Arcade of Neon ought to miss the cut. But my only real criteria is having fun, and I did have fun with Arcade of Neon. I’m into twitchy arcade-style games, and it offers that. It offers that in a no-frills, shitty package that doesn’t even offer more than one hi-score spot for ten modes of play, which I can’t stress enough is about as dumb as asking a narcotics officer for directions to the nearest opium den. So yea, I guess I do very, very, very mildly recommend Arcade of Neon. Just not the Pong mode. Seriously, don’t touch that thing. Don’t even think about it. The Chinese are replacing their infamous water torture with it. True story.
80 Microsoft Points heard Devil Blood and Send in Jimmy breathed a sigh of relief in the making of this review.
Arcade of Neon is Chick Approved, even though in its case the Seal is affixed with the rancid snot of a walrus with the flu, and it’s ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Barely.
Awesome Pirates seems to be designed primarily with multiplayer in mind. I had intended to use our holiday office party as an excuse to try it. Forgot that people go to that party to like, drink and open presents and shit, so the game got passed over. Well, a couple of days ago I had a chance to play it with three other people. Those people were ages 5 to 8 too, which is fine. It’s not the most complex title in the world. You’re a pirate ship. You shoot other pirate ships.
The kiddies grasped this just fine, and after a small learning curve with the controls, we had some nice sea battles. We put nearly an hour into this, and at one point I asked them what they thought. The reply probably should have been expected.
“Can we play your Wii U instead?”
Hmph.
“But this is an Indie game! You kids don’t understand! You’re supposed to appreciate the pluck and devil-may-care attitude of this whole new generation of game developers!”
“Oh. Hey, do you have Nintendo Land?”
At this point, I figured I had lost them. I was fine with that myself. Awesome Pirates isn’t really technically flawed, but it’s kind of boring. This type of game has been done so many times now that unless you have a really good twist on the formula, it won’t hold anyone’s attention for long. I did put an extra hour into single player, which is especially dull. Decent graphics, good play control, and again, nothing really wrong here. The game just isn’t fun. The kids didn’t like it either, and that’s only partially because there was a Wii U staring them down. The action is kind of slow, the power-ups pretty dull, and there’s just not a whole lot to this one. Props to the developers for making a fully functional game that’s only sin is being boring, but now you guys have to make something that anyone can enjoy.
Oh, and I totally kicked the shit out of those little kids in Mario Chase. Ha, yea, serves you little pricks right for making fun of me for not being able to throw a dragon punch!
Oh Lord. Where do I begin with this one? First off, how the FUCK is this chick not freezing to death?
That snowman started off life as her kid sister, Helga. Maybe you should put some more clothes on girl.
If I tried stepping outside in 1/10th the amount of snow as that, my body would have said “fuck it, that’s it’s. This bitch is nuts, and now we’re going to die.” Then I would have died. And I would have deserved it. Even in the Tomb Raider movie that was designed primarily as an excuse to give teen gamers a less blocky representation of Lara Croft to jerk off to, they had the decency to bundle poor Angelina Jolie up when they filmed in the snow.
There’s exactly one good thing I can say about Project Gert: Recon. The paintings featured in the game’s cutscenes are beautiful. So at least one person involved in this project has an amazing talent. Seriously, watch the trailer below. The actual in-game graphics are spoiled by awful animation and piss-poor collision detection, but the paintings are spectacular. I would totally commission this guy to do a portrait. But that’s where any complements end. Project Gert is yet another December entrant to the “potential worst game of the year” category.
See? Pretty cool. Even if any rational person would be thinking “I really should have put more thought into my attire.”
The idea behind Project Gert is it’s part platformer, part physics-puzzler. Neither part is done particularly well. The platforming sections are slippery. As mentioned above, the game is set in an ice world, and I have to wonder if that was done to excuse the poor control in this game. All movement is loose, to the point that you’ll inevitably slip off into pits and die. The funny part is, enemies are affected by this too. There were some machines on slopes that were slipping and sliding along with me. Actually, it’s not so funny, since a few times this led to cheap deaths where they would slide directly into me. And fighting back was sure an adventure unto itself. Collision detection is spotty as hell, so you practically have to be on top of an enemy to cause any damage to it. The line between where you can hit and enemy and where an enemy is hitting you is blurry, so I found just avoiding them seemed like the best strategy. Again, maybe the ice setting is the reason, and the poor girl is frozen numb and can’t properly swing a sword.
The main draw of Project Gert is supposed to be physics-based puzzles. The concept is “figure out a way to get a special block to sit on a special platform.” Solid idea. Shitty, glitchy physics. Once the special block starts moving, it slides like it’s sitting on a skateboard. Granted, the game has a habit of saying “good enough” when the block is barely on the platform and probably bound for falling off it. That’s generous of it, but sometimes it asks too much of the players, like a gas station offering 10¢ off a gallon but only if you siphon it by mouth. An example is requiring you to fire a stone to push a block one way, then resetting the crosshairs, lining it up, and firing it the other direction to push the block onto the special platform. Timing this is bad enough, but the physics for it are unstable and often it didn’t really push the block in the opposite direction. It just made it fall slower, which is remarkable considering how slow it was already going.
And then there’s the times when the game engine just said “fuck it” altogether. I would fail at a puzzle, restart it, and the blocks would not be stacked correctly. Once, a block was aligned too far to the right. This was one of those “fire the rock at it to move it” puzzles that presumably required pristine timing and placement, so having everything out of alignment from the start was aggravating. This happened more than once, and sometimes I couldn’t even restart the puzzle to get the blocks realigned properly. Or sometimes I would restart a puzzle and entire blocks would be missing. About the best thing I can say about the puzzle system here is that the game gives you the option to skip them. When being able to skip stuff in a game is the best thing it has going for it, it is a truly awful game indeed.
It really doesn’t look that bad in still pictures. Just watch the trailer.
Besides the still paintings, there’s nothing here remotely appealing. Bad platforming. Bad puzzles. Boring setting. Terrible writing. Awful animation. Glitchy physics. It’s not quite as bad as Halloween Pie or Sententia, but it’s close. Quite frankly, I’ve never been happier to see a game crash and dump me back to the dashboard. Which this one did. It was right after I cleared a pit after finding out there was a flimsy wall-jump in the game, which isn’t mentioned at all during the tutorial. Once I got past that, I encountered another glitchy puzzle that I ended up skipping. An explosion animation went off and then the Code 4 screen appeared. At this point, I did the only thing I could do: jump out of my chair and scream “I don’t have to play Gert anymore! Hallelujah, it’s a Christmas miracle!”
Yea, that really is the name of the game. I thought maybe some spaces were missing and that’s just how the game had to be listed on the marketplace due to length issues, but no. 8BitsRetroZSurvivals is the title. Not that it matters. The game could have been called Captain Bunghole’s Anal Cavity Shave Simulator and I wouldn’t give a shit as long as the game was good. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.
8BRZS looks like it might be a neo-retro take on Wolfenstein or Doom, but it’s not. It’s actually a wave shooter where enemies come at you from all directions and you have to unload clip after clip into them. Again, that could be fine if it was fun, but 8BRZS is a chore of the most boring order. A dish-washing simulator might have been more exciting. Nothing about this game is fun. Enemies soak up your shots like Chris Christie soaks up cholesterol. And here’s the weird part: the same enemies get spongier the further you are in the game. In the first level, enemies take three shots to kill. This was probably done to sucker people who play the trial into thinking the game wasn’t a total and complete piece of shit. During the second wave, the same enemies take seven shots to kill. Same enemies, same gun, but more than double the sponge.
It looks sweet. Do you know what else I hear is sweet? Antifreeze, but I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.
Weapons are sold in a couple of stores in each setting. In the second stage, I upgraded to the next highest gun, the rifle. It downed the first enemy I shot in two bullets, ending the second wave. For the third wave, enemies now took three bullets to kill with the rifle. I’m not sure how many it took with the starting pistol, because I only have nine bullets left and that wasn’t enough to kill one single enemy. The same enemy that I had killed with three shots in the first wave. The next wave, they took four. And these are head shots, mind you. If you don’t hit the head, it takes about triple that amount.
The real fun starts on the fifth wave. Here, the enemies are invisible, except for a pair of red eyeballs. These bastards take thirteen headshots with the rifle to bring down. Mind you, you have a limited supply of ammo and have to buy more with money earned from shooting enemies. Older weapons become obsolete quickly. That starter pistol that took seven shots to take an enemy down now takes twenty-four headshots by time you reach wave 7. This is bad game design. It would be like if Space Invaders replaced your turret with a super soaker filled with air while suddenly the aliens start throwing napalm down on you. And the aliens were invisible. Except their eyes, which are bright red. Only there’s a bunch of bright-red, eyeball-shaped things littering the scenery. Wave 10 brings dudes wearing cloaks that shoot fireballs at you. Wave 15 brings alien zombies who cause radioactive fogs when they die and require you to wear a gas mask. Wave 20 sends the invisible guys back. What, no zombie soldiers brandishing zombie guns that shoot zombies at you?
But the really, really weird part is, despite how slow the upgrades are and how absurdly spongy the enemies get, 8BrainCellBoringZComa is actually pretty fucking easy. Once you get the best weapon in the game, enemies are still spongy (on Wave 28 they took something like 9 bullets to the head to kill, give or take), but money was so plentiful (you get it just by landing a shot with any gun) that I was able to keep my health refilled, my gun fully loaded, my grenades stocked, and still have enough dough left over to stock up on Super Bombs which clear all enemies present and those still walking up their corridors. At this point, I only game-overed for two reasons.
#1 – I was afraid the game would crash and I would lose my high score. The game never did crash, or even hint that it would, but this is an XBLIG and you can never be too cautious.
#2 – I was so fucking bored by this point that I figured it was conceivable that observers would declare me clinically dead and start to arrange for my organs to be donated. I already woke up once in a bathtub full of ice with my left kidney missing and I’ll be damned if I allow that to happen again.
A game that stinks so bad you’ll have to wear a gas mask.
The real shame is 8BitsRetroZSurvivals looks good enough to get any fan of 3D 90s shooters excited. The graphics do an excellent job of aping that art style. It sounds good too, I guess. I mean, every time you clear a wave you hear what sounds like Dr. Claw saying “this is your worst nightmare!” What, being stuck in a shitty wave shooter? Yea, actually it is. It controls really well too. And it offers perks like a decently populated global leaderboard. This would all be great, but the gameplay itself is shallow and boring to the point of exhaustion. I finished 34th on that board out of about 240 people and I feel like I should donate for Red Cross relief to those 33 poor souls who put more time in this than I did.
$1 wondered how these fuckers became zombies in the first place? I mean, if a person took 40+ rounds worth of a pistol to the face to kill, presumably any zombie who attempted to bite them would break its teeth. Since when does becoming a zombie turn your skin into Kevlar in the making of this review?
Hey, there’s this game on XBLIG and it looks kind of neat and the demo was okay but I’m not sure if its worth the money. Would you review it?
Sure! Anything for my fans. What game is it?
It’s called Bleed.
Just Bleed?
Just Bleed.
Huh. No funny accents on the letters?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean they could call it BleƐd with a Latin style E. You know, to add a touch of class? Or perhaps Bl€€D with two Euro signs. You know, just to change things up?
Um, no. It’s just Bleed.
Oh. Okay. Seems like a generic name that’s about as memorable as a cup of instant soup, but whatever. I’m duty bound to review games when fans request them and OH SWEET JESUS it cost 400 Microsoft Points?
Yea.
Seriously?
Hey, why do you think we want you to review it?
And that’s where the conversation was left off at. I can see why so many of my readers were requesting a review of this one. The opening level, which I’m sure is as far as the demo goes, is a bit on the generic side. And although the game seems like it could be pretty good, there’s enough unanswered questions that Bleed really is a bit of a high-risk investment, at least as far as XBLIGs go. I mean, for the price of it you could get all five of the top games on my Leaderboard. Survey any number of people and ask them if they’re willing to buy a new product one-for-the-price-of-five with the five being the top five competing products in whatever field. People would look at you like your eyeballs just grew their own noses. They would bill you for the seven seconds of their life you just wasted. And if they’re going to do that, those seven seconds ought to be spent coming up with a better name for your fucking game, especially since you didn’t take seven whole seconds to think it through.
In short, the name sucks and the price sucks harder. Are we clear on that? Good.
Bleed is fucking awesome.
Update, November 20, 2018: Remember, context is everything. In 2012, Bleed was on Xbox Live Indie Games, where 90% of games were 80 Microsoft Points, or $1 each. Games that cost more, unless they were Minecraft clones, didn’t do well. I advocated for a universal $1 price for XBLIGs so as to complete with Xbox Live Arcade games and drive attention to the platform. My position on this has greatly evolved since 2012.
I almost didn’t get to play it. The lightning effects in the opening stage nearly put the kibosh on this review. Thankfully they weren’t as bad as Fez.
Seriously, this is one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games of the year. I didn’t get that vibe out of it at first. The opening stage is, maybe not exactly dull, but it’s not awe-inspiring either. The corny (but delightfully well-written) story centers around Wryn, a spunky pink-haired chick with dreams of being the biggest hero in gaming history. She decides the best way to go about becoming this is to go around killing all the previous top heroes. It’s funny, but it’s not as cool as it sounds. Obviously the guys at Bootdisk Revolution couldn’t use all the real biggest stars in gaming, nor did they even try to make close facsimiles. So you won’t see Wryn bust a cap in a fat Italian plumber named Angelo, or an elfish adventurer named Lenk. The actual bosses seem more like run-of-the-mill bosses that you would expect to encounter in a 2D platformer. It’s a bit disappointing, like hearing about an epic sounding movie and getting all excited only to find out it’s being broadcast on Syfy and starring Billy Zane or Tim Curry.
The first thing you notice about Bleed is movement is smooth and responsive, and that the jumping is going to be a bitch. It’s mapped to the right trigger, because shooting is done TwickS-style and thus having A jump would be impossible. Still, I kind of wish it had been mapped to the less bulky, more analog right-bumper. But what really is awkward about it is how double jumping works. Instead of just flinging yourself in the air a little higher, the character launches like a jet. You can do this twice before landing. It reminded me of Pikachu’s return-attack in Smash Bros. I could never do that fucking thing right either. It’s certainly not a deal breaker, as evidenced by the blow-job I’m about to bestow upon Bleed, but it never felt quite right at any point during the 90 minute main quest.
The jumping physics really are my only complaint. Everything else about Bleed is really astonishing. Levels are fast-paced, well designed, and full of twists and surprises. Retro-nerds will get their jollies from elements borrowed liberally from such games as Mega Man 2. The shooting really is so well done. You have unlimited ammo and no range-limits, giving your character full 360 degree control over firing upon enemies. The starting weapons, a pistol and a rocket launcher, are probably enough to finish the game with. However, you earn points in every level that you can spend in a shop to unlock alternative guns. For some reason, only two can be equipped at a time, which is lame. Also lame is the flame-thrower, which was the first weapon I bought. Go figure. It’s the only weapon of the lot that I found to be ineffectual. Everything else not only works, but experimenting with how to best use them is entertaining and rewarding. And there are just enough guns to unlock to stretch the play time without overly padding things out.
Ultimately, Bleed is a worthy purchase because it’s focused on generating fun. Levels never feel too long. Bosses never feel too spongy. Design never feels unfair. And there’s so many clever ideas at play here that it’s amazing they could keep them all so balanced. Even the writing is sharp, and the big plot twist towards the end was hilarious and awesome. Once you beat the game, extra play modes open that might squeeze more value for your 400MSP. I still think the price is a bit insane, but Bleed is unquestionably a cut above most XBLIGs. But seriously, what the fuck is up with that name? I could find no connection at all with the name and the game. Would it have been better if it had been called Adventures of Pink-Frizzy Haired Homicidal Crazy Chick? Yes, actually it would have. It’s sad that the awful name and prohibitive price will turn off most potential gamers who spot it on the marketplace. It’s enough to make you cry tears of blood.
In sports, Knicks beat the Warriors 103 to 95. Or possibly 99 to 93. In fact, we’re not even sure if the Knicks won. Carmelo Anthony had 31 points off 27 for 27 shooting from the field. That statistic is actually impossible, but we can only report on the numbers as they are given to us.
Thankfully, real life sports statistics tend to be fairly accurate, unlike the post-game stats that Null Battles spits out. Talking about the type of game it is (arena shooter), how it plays (kind of fun, kind of sloppy), and what makes it unique (strange gravity effects) is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I find that knowing who wins or loses arena shooters is a pretty big deal to most gamers. I’m the type of person who meticulously studies my post-game stats when I play Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty. If those games reported different scores and stats to each player, who would want to play them? I wouldn’t.
I tried reviewing Null Battles back in early September and this problem came up. When I took on my amigo Bryce online, this is the score that showed on their screen.
And this is what showed up on mine.
Same game, vastly different stats. My policy with online games is to give developers a chance to fix the problems before I post the proper review. I got notice that the game was finally ready a few weeks ago, but I got caught up in the latest batch of new releases and forgot to go back to Null Battles. As it turns out, there was no reason to rush. Again, here are the results from Bryce’s side of things.
And here are the results from mine.
Again, same game. We’re in agreement of the following things: #1, Bryce did NOT have 100% headshot percentage, and I didn’t have anywhere close to 70%. #2, none of the scores seemed to lineup with what was happening in the game, except the fact that I lost. #3, not knowing does negate the amount of fun you have leading up to it. Sorry, it just plain does. Maybe not for some (Brian for example) as much as it did so for me. But this is my blog and I have to say this problem renders Null Battles appeal null and void.
80 Microsoft Points have absolutely no interest in playing split-screen multiplayer in this day and age in the making of this review.
A review copy was provided by Techno Hermit Games for this review. The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The opinions of this review are her’s alone.
They still have a Second Chance with the Chick. If the scores were accurate, this game would have made the Leaderboard.
Well, this has never been done before. A review of a game done while simultaneously interviewing the developer. I almost didn’t review Three Dead Zed, which sponsors my review index. Sponsorship on my site is done by donating to charities (either Autism Speaks or the Epilepsy Foundation), so I don’t personally gain anything from it. Well, unless the $50 minimum that is contributed to the Epilepsy Foundation is exactly what they need at that very moment to cure epilepsy forever. And you never know, that might happen! Still, I didn’t want to be accused of a conflict of interest. If the game sucked, that’s fine. Nobody would accuse me of slamming a game because it sponsored my site. But, what if the game was good? What if it was the best XBLIG I’ve ever played? People would question whether it was legitimate or not.
Thankfully for me (and not so thankfully for the guys at Gentleman Squid), I don’t have to worry about it. Three Dead Zed is atrocious. The idea is you control three zombies, switching between them to make your way across platforms, shoving boxes, avoiding lasers, and killing people. The game looks great, but the controls are never responsive. The standard, default zombie feels sluggish and slow, and the jumping physics feel too heavy. This is the only zombie that can climb ladders or hit switches. On the flip side of this, there’s a quadrupedal that moves way too fast, jumps way too high, too far, and is a nightmare to control. It can’t climb ladders, operate switches, or do anything but jumping and wall jumping. Finally, there’s a giant, angry she-zombie that you use to break down walls and move heavy objects. This one is slower than death by starvation, can’t jump, and its attacks don’t feel like they have any oomph to them.
Basically, I didn’t like Three Dead Zed at all. Since I was due to interview developer Fabian Florez, I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and do the interview at the same time, and see what he had to say about some of the issues I had. All things considered, he was a good sport about it!
Cathy: Before I get to brow-beating you for the ungodly piece of shit that is the game you made, can you give me a little background on your team and how you guys came together?
Fabian Florez: Heh. Well we all work in the same main company. We normally make interactive training for things like online courses for schools or other technical related subjects. Well, the main business was getting slow, and rather than let us all go, I proposed that we take a crack at making games. We had all the primary people needed for a team right there: Artists, programmers, lover of games. So they took a chance on us. Now, with my review coming up, I think “Why would you make this piece of shit” might hurt my chances of a good review.
Cathy: If your job security was depended upon how likely your supervisor is able to hit one of the light switches in the game, would you just immediately start packing your desk?
Fabian: NEXT QUESTION PLEASE!
Cathy: Do you know pink slips typically aren’t pink? The ones I use are white. Even the rubber stamp isn’t pink. More like a crimson.
Fabian: I don’t even think they give slips at all. They just coral you into a room and just say, “Yea it’s been nice but you got to go.”
Cathy: Okay, okay, in all seriousness, why are the controls in Three Dead Zed so all over the place?
Fabian: We drink a lot. OK, *I* drink a lot. It seemed to make sense to me when I was playtesting…that one night…before release. Can you help clarify a specific point?
Cathy: I’ll start with the speedy dude that runs on all fours. It’s too easy to overshoot everything. He moves too fast, he jumps too far, and it’s too loose so it’s easy to over jump stuff. But the controls are also so loose that if you try self-correct mid-air, you’re just as likely to under-jump.
Fabian: He’s very debatable. Some people don’t mind him and adapt quickly. Others hate him outright. I do think it’s a bit of a failure on our part for tutorials and stage layout. For example, on the second tutorial stage after you unlock him, some people don’t just jump straight up. I’ve seen people play this on YouTube, streams, and in person. They always want to jump in a direction first. He jumps higher and you can have a control fall if you do that first. Or jump higher to stick to a higher part of the wall. Sometimes I’ve seen people always want to jump with him everywhere. Some of the jumping puzzles were meant to be played with the classic zombie, not the jumper, but it’s not obvious enough. That’s just a failure on us.
I could go more into it, but ultimately, a game should just be played without a “guide” so I think that’s why we get hot/cold responses.
Cathy: I get a lot of developers who want to send me a detailed analysis of how to play their game when they request a review. Always pisses me off and gets things off on the wrong foot. Doesn’t mean I am certain to hate a game (Hidden in Plain Sight’s developer did it and I ranked it), but it feels like developers know from the get-go there are problems and still release anyway. Do you think if you had held off on release you could have addressed these issues, or did the game pass the point of no return for salvation?
Fabian: That’s a great question. We initially released the game earlier in the year for Windows and we though we addressed a lot of those initial issues. Our tutorial section for example is longer and added things to what we though might be “second nature” had to be added. Like the area showing you how to drop down from floors. So unfortunately, it’s just that developer trap of “I think we got everything! Release it. OH NO not again!” Tried to touch all bases, but I think it’s really difficult.
But, I think there was also some confusion on our part because a lot of those comments did come from people playing with a keyboard. We did get feedback from people saying switching to a controller made things easier. So, porting to Xbox seemed like it would alleviate that since you can only play with a controller.
Cathy: There’s a lot of niggling control issues. Jumping off ladders with the default zombie, hitting switches, and some problems with collision detection. We’ll start with the switches first. I’m personally having problems lining up and pushing them correctly. Brian isn’t. His IQ is about 50 points lower than mine, so if your target audience is dumbass pseudo-gingers, mission accomplished, but wouldn’t larger area-detections be a no-brainer?
Fabian: Switches: It’s a pretty sizable hit detection. It was increased from the Windows to the Xbox build. The reason why it’s not even bigger, if I remember correctly, is because we didn’t want you activating things behind a wall on the other side on some scenarios. We’ll take a look at it again though.
Ladders is the new one that I did witness in our Peer Review. Never heard that until we ported it. It’s another one of those, “Probably include it in the tutorials?” Push left or right and jump. I saw Ryan (aka MasterBlud of VVGTV) playing the game and he was stating how he hated the ladders also. The problem there is we have areas where you are going to want to jump from ladder to ladder. If you just push left or right and he drops, you wont be able to jump to the ladder. Minus the actual jumping from ladder to ladder, this is very similar to Mega Man’s approach. Except once you push jump, Mega Man would drop.
Cathy: I get that you guys were trying to go for a Trine feel, but one of the other problems was the game couldn’t seem to decide what it should focus on: platforming or puzzling. Some games comfortably blend both, but this one seemed to jump from one to the other and it was jarring and killed the pace. I don’t really know how to word that into a question for you. First off, I assume Trine was inspiration for Three Dead Zed?
Fabian: We get Trine a lot and I swear, that was not our intent! It was one of those things that just happened that way. Although I owned it, I still haven’t played it. 3DZ was inspired by a mix of the C64 game Goonies and NES Batman (hence the wall cling). If you never played The Goonies, you controlled two people who need to do something to unlock a door. Tough as nails. Anyway, along the way, we dropped that because, hey, we’re new devs and that was biting off more than we can chew. So we combined them all together to be one “super zombie” and made it more of a traditional puzzle platformer. Nothing too crazy in the way of puzzles though simple things for the most part. The NES Batman was also a heavy influence on why the fast zombie sprints forward so quickly. Some like it. Some hate it. It was meant more for moving from wall to wall and that was it. “You are going this direction!”
(While this interview is going on, Bryce and my boyfriend Brian are playing through Three Dead Zed, enjoying it way more than I did, and start busting up laughing from chasing an old lady into a saw blade).
Cathy: Brian and Bryce just chased an old lady into a saw blade.
Fabian: Brian and Bryce, you are AWESOME. We wanted people to scare “innocents” into the hazards. We think it’s funny too. We almost had an award for scaring old ladies into buzz-saws but then pulled it.
Cathy: I guess this moves us into the art. It’s pretty good. It reminded me of the stuff by Behemoth (Castle Crashers, Alien Hominid). I find a lot of games on XBLIG that put a premium on audio-visuals tend to be mediocre or worse. You just became the poster child for that. Yay?
Fabian: *laughing* Well we tried! We thought, “Man if we could just make something so beautiful, it’ll be like a Greek Siren to Indie Gamer Chick and she’ll give us glowing reviews!”
Cathy: Good graphics do get my attention when it comes time to review a game, but once I start playing, gameplay is all that matters. However, your game does have appeal in other areas. The voice overs are great. Who did them?
Fabian: Awesome to hear! Get it?! Hear?
Cathy: ..
Fabian: Ahem.. Actually our star voice actor would love to read that. The two main voices you hear the most (intercom and shadowy figure) are actually the same guy. The intercom is inspired by Rick Moranis/Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. The Shadowy voice is…shadowy? The other voices are various people including the team. He also does the voice in the cut scene changing from zombie to zombie. He actually does professional voice over work, and he offered to help us out for free.
Cathy: Do you have any future plans for game development?
Fabian: After your review? No. Closing shop. Taking our ball home and doing lots of crying.
Cathy: Hang on one second, I need to add another check mark to my gun.
Fabian: Actually, yes. We’re working on another game. It’ll be our first multiplayer game. You can put the chisel down.
Cathy: Awwww.
Fabian: Hey, you killed our joy. Only fair we kill yours.
Cathy: Touché. What lessons did you learn from making Three Dead Zed that you’re going to apply to the development of.. what the fuck is it called anyway?
Fabian: It’s called 2012. Better late than never? Actually we have no name yet. Basically: Playtest, playtest, and playtest. You really can’t do enough. We did quite a bit for Three Dead Zed (Both online and in person) but you just really need to do more than you think. A BIG sample definitely helps you find trouble areas.
Cathy: Have anything to say in closing?
Fabian: I do thank you for trying out our game regardless! You’re tough as nails, we’ll hopefully win you over with the next game.
I hope so too. I would like to thank Fabian for being cool about this admittedly awkward situation. He’s a good guy, and he should be proud of his efforts. I still can’t recommend Three Dead Zed though. Great graphics, great concept, and its heart was in the right place. It’s just not beating.
What can I say about the Trailer Park King games that I haven’t already said here, here, or here? Nothing has changed for the third (or fourth) installment. Horrible voice acting. Ridiculous, nonsensical plot. Lack of actual gameplay. Humor so crude and forced that it would make Seth MacFarlane blush with shame. By all rights, these are games I should hate. So why do I keep coming back to them? More importantly, why do I keep adding them to my Leaderboard? Granted, not one game in the series is in the top 100, but still, shouldn’t I be lining them up against a wall and gunning them down like Al Capone? These are bad games. I’m known to clean and gut bad games and mount them on my wall. So what the fuck, Cathy?
Doctor House would diagnose the nurse with explosive jug syndrome. Or it could be lupus.
I think part of it is how much Trailer Park King revels in its subject matter. The characters are all so uncouth, shallow, and flat-out stupid that you can’t help but laugh at it. Another part of it is developer Sean Doherty is Canadian and it strikes me as a potentially offensive look at how our neighbors to the north view the poor of our country. It straddles the line between parody and socioeconomic bigotry, but it’s so damn absurd that nobody could possibly be offended. It’s also one of those “raunchy” games that other developers burn in effigy. I see where they’re coming from, but Trailer Park King doesn’t strike me as particularly sexy. The characters here are so.. well.. trashy, that I can’t believe anyone could get off on this stuff. If these were real people, you could probably get an STD just by thinking about them while jerking off. Never mind that the characters are grossly malnourished and their tits are obviously fake.
It’s rare that games on XBLIG are so bad that they’re good, but that’s the best way to summarize the Trailer Park King series. They’re guilty pleasures. The series might be running out of steam though. This time around, you have to prove that series antagonist Truck is not a zombie. How do you do this? Well, zombies can’t dance, can’t be hypnotized, eat brains, animals don’t like them, and most important, they can’t be anal probed. So you run down those things like a checklist and see if Truck takes the bait on any of them. It’s as dumb as it sounds, but it’s still funny in a self-aware “I’m playing a game where someone shoves a large anal prob up a dude’s ass to prove he’s not a zombie” sort of away.
The only minigame in Trailer Park King carries on the tradition of being needless and dull.
For the third (or fourth) episode in the series, there’s only one mini-game: a shooting gallery where you must fire on wanted posters that have descriptions like “skank” or “dumbass.” Prior knowledge of the series is probably required, or you can just wait for dumbass to pop up and shoot the posters of Truck like I did. It’s not the most well conceived, but it’s better than the sliding puzzle of Cherry Poke Prison. Otherwise, the game seemed like the shortest of the series (it took me about thirty minutes to finish) and the jokes are starting to wear a bit thin. I still enjoyed Trailer Park King 3, but I won’t be reviewing any more games in the series. Quite frankly, I’m running out of stuff to say about them. They are what they are. You’ll either hate them on principle, or you’ll enjoy them for being utterly bad, yet oddly compelling pieces of shit. And hey, white trash is totally an in thing right now. If Ted Nugent is looking for someone to make a video game about her life, she should ring up Sean.
Writing about a really bad game is easy. Writing about a really good game is easy. When a game is middling, neither that good nor that bad, I struggle with my goal to write an entertaining review. I’ve done a few first-person shooters on XBLIG. Of them, two are on my leaderboard: Send in Jimmy and Devil Blood. As of this writing, they occupy the very bottom two spots. I’ll fully admit, those games are both atrocious and could (some would argue “should”) be exorcised from the board. But at least they were playable and fun in a train-wreck sort of way. Others have either been glitchy, poorly conceived, or just plain boring. I previously noted that I was surprised at how few FPSs are on XBLIG, considering that the Xbox 360 is pretty much a dedicated shooter console for many of its owners. Sadly, every XBLIG FPS plays like it arrived to the party about fifteen years too late to be enjoyable. Demon House is not really different. It’s not horrible, but it’s not exceptional enough to make this a fun review to write. This will probably not be one of my better ones, so here’s a preemptive apology. For what it’s worth, I’m doing Trailer Park King 3 next!
Weapon design in Demon House ranges from inspired to predictable, and getting the really fun stuff takes too long for such a short game.
First off, yea, Demon House looks relatively good. I mean, it still looks archaic. It would have been just fine in 2000 as a Nintendo 64 or PlayStation title. In 2012? It falls into the dreaded “it looks good for an XBLIG” category. And that’s where it also falls in other areas. It’s designed well. You know, for a FPS on XBLIG. The controls are pretty good, at least for an FPS on XBLIG. I accept that a first-person shooter is an incredibly hard game to design and the guys behind Demon House should be commended for creating one of the better ones on the platform. But all I care about is how much fun I can have with a game, and fun is a fleeting commodity here.
It started good. Really good in fact. The game opens inside a haunted house. This is your stereotypical amusement-park style ghost mansion, with all the clichés. Piano playing itself? Check. Spooky shadows? Check. Lightning custom-designed to give me a seizure? Grumble, check. Baby carriage that rocks itself? Check, and fucking creepy. I wasn’t kidding about the amusement park feel of Demon House. Considering that the enemies are all robotic devices, I kind of figured the concept here was supposed to be something like Westworld, where the animatronics had simply started to run amok. That would be an interesting plot, but instead you’re dealing with a mad alchemist. That’s lame, but at least the haunted house setting is.. oh. Never mind, that’s only for the first half of the game. The second half takes place in an utterly generic cathedral/catacombs place thingie that looks like it was lifted from Quake and/or any of a trillion Quake mods out there. Good move Photonic Games. I was almost interested for a bit.
The only thing Demon House: FPS had going for it that made it stand out was the legitimately creepy haunted house setting. Once you’re removed from that and instead inserted into the boring, sterile, lifeless second act, the game becomes a chore. Oddly enough, after about thirty minutes in that section, I was hoping the game would just end. And then it did. That was very kind of it.
It’s not THAT complex. I’m pretty sure enemies that stand back and shoot at you instead of charging at you has been around since I was at least old enough to ride the Haunted Mansion ride.
Let’s be clear here: I had fun with Demon House and it is going on the leaderboard. I liked the opening act that much. While playing it, I figured it could be a top-fifty game. Despite dated gameplay, the shooting mechanics are fun, the enemy design is neat, and the floor layout with the multiple hidden nooks made this enjoyable. And then you leave the house and suddenly you’re transported back to 1996, which is not where I wanted to be. The placement of the game started to sink. Not like a rock, which would have been quick and relatively painless. It sinks more like a boat. You know that scene in Titanic where they watch as the ship breaks apart and the lifeboats (some filled to half-capacity) look on in horror? Yea, Demon House is the Titanic and you’re Kathy Bates watching on in horror. Not me though. I’m more like Kathy Bates from Misery, taking a sledge-hammer to the feet of Photonic Games. Out of love of course. 🙂
Scribendus was developed by Pygmalion’s Box
Indie Gamer Chick 
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