Entropy was part of the third Indie Games Uprising. Like other members belonging to the second week of the event, it was one of the weaker games. Graphically, it was head-and-shoulders above the rest, but the gameplay was clunky and boring. The developers, even knowing that I wasn’t likely to upgrade the status of their creation to Chick Approved, still asked me to play around with it some more today to show the progress they’ve made. Guess what? They were right. The game is improved, but my personal seal of quality is out of reach.
I would make a Jerry Lee Lewis joke, but there’s nothing great about Entropy. Not even the balls of fire.
Before going any further, you should probably check out my write-up on Entropy. So what’s changed? Well, thankfully I didn’t offer up my immortal soul for the ability to pick up the balls. The guys at Autotivity Games added such a feature in. It’s not perfect by any means. In fact, the learning curve for it is almost as steep as figuring out the best way to slowly push the balls around using your body. It’s still a step in the right direction, even if they got a little dog doo on their shoes. They also cut out some of the more tedious bits in the opening section of the game. Again, smart move.
Thankfully there’s no cake joke.
Sadly, the choppy frame-rate is not only still intact, but it’s actually a bit skippier. So now when you chase around the little pink ball of light designed to point you in the right direction to go, you might not even see where it’s going. One step forward in dog poo, one step backwards into a bear trap. It sucks because Entropy really did go all out with clever puzzles and beautiful scenery, but the biggest problem still remains: Entropy is boring. I’m not encouraging the guys at Autotivity to call it quits. But they need to stop mending this snoozer and start work on something that can capture people’s imaginations. Start by giving it a name less depressing. What is the opposite of Entropy? I don’t know. Euphoric Kangaroos Dancing the Polka? Feel free to steal that one. It has to be good enough to sell at least 100 copies.
Hypotenuse is a geometry term meaning quack quack quack moooooooooooooo. I lost all my readers four words into this review, so I might as well have fun. But bringing math terms into a video game? Not such a good idea. Imagine if the recent apple of my eye Dishonored had been called “Spleen ÷ Sword = Corpse”. I don’t think I could have gotten behind it. Maybe I’m wrong. I suppose the popularity of Geometry Wars proves me wrong. Quick though, show of hands: how many people heard that name and pictured JFK calling up Khrushchev and yelling “A square has an area of sixteen square centimeters. What is the length of each of its sides?” into the phone?
Just me huh?
Awkward.
It almost looks like a Salvador Dalí painting, does it not?
By the way, the above paragraph was a total waste of time. Hypotenuse is just a hack & slasher where waves of katana-brandishing baddies run at you and try to perform subtraction on your body, with the apparent hook being that everything is a rectangle. Enemies run at you, swing at you or throw a ninja star. The animation is smooth, the play control is good, and overall Hypotenuse is a well made game.
So why can’t I recommend it to you? Because there’s just nothing to it. Enemies run at you. You kill them, and then more come at you. I have no problems with games being repetitive if they’re fun. Most golden age arcade games do only one thing over and over again until you die or get bored. The difference is when the gameplay is so fun that you don’t notice it. It’s not always clear what makes one game rise above the curse of repetition while others don’t. I can’t tell you why I like Ms. Pac-Man but don’t give a shit about Lock ‘n’ Chase, or why I can lose myself in a game of Galaga but would rather be suffocated by Ralphie May’s ass than spend a minute playing Phoenix. I guess in Hypotenuse’s case, it just never shakes the feeling of being a tech demo. If this had been something thrown together to show off the hardware of, say, the original Xbox in 2001, maybe I would have walked away from it with fond memories of the slashy rectangle game. But it’s not that. It gets boring quickly, and has nothing to keep you going. There’s no variety of enemies, no variety in combat, and no variety in weapons. There’s only one play mode. There’s no multiplayer. There’s no hook at all. Hell, the game’s entire point is to see how many dudes you can kill, but there’s no online or even local leaderboards to give you a reason to try.
No, this is not the same picture. When a game is this limited, so are the options for getting screens of it.
Hypotenuse is not terrible, but it’s not fun. Again, all the props in the world to the developer for making a game that has few (if any) technical flaws. Plus, he put in the option to turn off flashing effects, and I’m always sincerely grateful for that. Games that offer less than Hypotenuse does have been amazing, and games that offer much more have been horrible. It’s not about the amount of content, and it never has been. It’s about the quality of that content and how much entertainment you get from it. I can’t imagine anyone getting more out of the full copy than they do from the demo, and that’s why I say nay to purchasing Hypotenuse. Perhaps a sequel with more options would go over well. Maybe one where you fight rectangles AND circles. Variety!
Lucky comes to us from the developers of Bureau: Shattered Slipper. That was an odd game that I wasn’t in love with, but enjoyed it enough to allow it to chum the bottom of the Leaderboard. Well, they’re back with a game that exists outside of their Bureau series. Here, you play as a stock broker who has a one night stand with a random chick. The next morning, he wakes up and she predicts doom and gloom for him. No, she didn’t secretly video tape the whole deal so that she can sell it to TMZ. No, she doesn’t have a STD. No, she wasn’t lying about being on the pill. Her oddly specific prediction is that he will die while jogging less than an hour later of a brain aneurysm. He shrugs it off, then immediately goes jogging. Seems like it’s tempting the fates a little. If someone came up to me and said “Cathy, you’ll die later today after getting mauled by an albino tiger” believe me, I’m cancelling that reservation to see Siegfried & Roy.
“What, you’ve never heard of hyper-super-syphilis? Well, you better Google it fast, because you’ve got it.”
Actually, the chick is your guide through the afterlife. Thus, you begin a quest of personal self-discovery. One that involves a lot of pointing, clicking, and being lectured on how rich people only got there by being lucky. The moral message is pretty heavy-handed and often disagreeable, but the overall game isn’t so bad. Think of it as a sweary, sexy After School Special with an utterly bullshit lesson to be learned. Lucky can be finished in less than an hour and starting your average pull-cord lawnmower will provide you more difficulty. But while the story is a bit on a the ultra-liberal side for my tastes and the dialog is clumsy, Lucky has charm about it.
I don’t really have a lot to say about Lucky. There’s not a whole lot of objectives to it. There’s only one real puzzle, and I’m not even sure how I solved it. It involved lining up rows of numbers and hitting a button to spin them around. I fumbled around with it for a bit and it seemed to have solved itself. After that, you have to answer moral questions. The first ones deal with how your father got his wealth. Unless I missed a clue or something, it never actually tells you. Don’t worry, the penalty for missing is watching a quick cut-scene of the dude dying, then you just go back to the choice. Later, you’re placed in a giant maze to get further lectured on how lucky you are and how you’re not as smart as you think you are and OH FUCKING COME ON! Look, I know that hating rich people is the flavor of the month, but not all rich people are evil, stupid, and lucky. Some of them corrupt too!
♫ Dance Magic Dance Magic Dance Magic ♫
Anyway, after being punked out by a “spot the pattern” quiz that isn’t really a spot the pattern quiz, and being told to choose whether people with talent got rich via skill or luck, you’re freed from the afterlife and presumably go to heaven, which is full of self-loathing fat-cats and poor people, or so this game will have you believe. So why did I like it? Because it’s short, it’s silly, and I actually cared about how the story would play out. That counts for something in my book. I just wish we would leave politics out of gaming. Gaming is my escape from politics. My place where I don’t have to get hammered over the head by two groups of people talking about foreign policy, gun violence, the auto industry, and so forth. Can’t a girl just mow down Russians while driving a stolen car and shooting hookers in peace?
I’ve made a lot of friends since starting Indie Gamer Chick. Like, a lot. You probably can’t even grasp what a turnaround that is for my life. Growing up as an awkward child with autism who still to this day can’t even hold eye-contact with my own parents, having so many people call me their friend is pretty fucking sweet. It’s been life changing to say the least. And funny enough, some of those friends I met by saying their game was rancid fecal matter on this very site. It’s like one of those things you read about where someone meets their soul mate by mowing them down at an intersection, only not as fun and/or crunchy.
One of the cooler guys I can call my friend is Dave Voyles. He’s a dude who I actually knew in a past life, when I was a poor sport on Dreamcast and would rage-quit games of NBA 2K1 on him (the Knicks cheated, I swear it). When I showed up on the XBLIG scene, he made me feel welcome and got me involved with developers. I then shit on his creation, the 2011 Summer Uprising, but he still put up with me. Or at least he did after the car bomb he planted didn’t go off. It turns out that make of car had an iron plate under the seat and nobody outside the factory knew about it. So after determining that I’m unkillable and bad with continuity, he’s actually been a pretty good friend to me. And so that’s why I’m going to talk about his game.
It’s called Piz-ong. Not Pez-ong, sadly. Pez is something I like. Or at least I used to. Not the dispensers. God no. I could never get the damn things loaded right, and there’s something disconcerting taking candy after it had been in Chewbacca’s mouth. Actually, it doesn’t really come out of their mouth, does it? It comes out of their neck. That’s just sick. It’s like they had some kind of tracheotomy performed by Willy Wonka.
Oompa Loompa Doopy Dool, Hello Kitty smoked too many Kools.
But the candy? Oh that stuff was good. Was being the key word. For all I know, it still might be. My problem is I can never find the fucking things, or at least the flavors I like. The only packages I see is for stuff like the Cola flavored ones. I drink a lot of cola. That shit does NOT taste like cola. It taste like motor oil filtered through the jock strap of someone with the clap. All I want is Strawberry and Lemon. Maybe I’ll settle for Cherry flavored, but that’s it. I don’t want Strawberry-Vanilla, which tastes like the byproduct of some kind of industrial paint thinner. I don’t want Orange, which always seems to be brittle. I don’t want Grape, which has a disgusting aftertaste. I sure as shit don’t want Raspberry, which some states now offer as an alternative to lethal injection. What’s really a shame is they now offer a putrid Lemon-Raspberry mixture. So wrong. It would be like offering filet mignon that’s been seasoned with anthrax.
Sure, I could order it online. But then I’m getting bled for shipping & handling. Why should I have to deal with that? Why can’t they just put the refill packs in stores and stop sticking those unholy flavors spawned from the hemorrhoidal ass of Satan himself in the package? Look, I’ll even put up with Orange and Grape if I have to. Just don’t fucking stick Raspberry, Cola, or any mutli-flavored combination in the package. Nobody in their right mind can possibly want them. If you actually do, go grab a vacuum cleaner and stick the hose up your ass. With a little luck, it might just unclog your head from it.
What was I talking about?
This, you attention-span deficient bitch.
Oh yea, Dave’s Pong game. It fucking sucks. Not as bad as Cola-flavored Pez does, but then again, what does suck that bad? If they mixed Hitler’s DNA with a dinosaur to create an army of Hitlersaurus Rexs, it wouldn’t suck as bad as Cola flavored Pez. And by the way, Piz-ong isn’t a Hitlersaurus Rex. It’s not even a TriStalintops. It’s just a really bad idea. A single-player only Pong game with no frills in 2012? I believe my good buddy has gone raving mad. It’s not that the game is broken or unplayable. It’s just so bleh that I can’t believe he actually put it on the marketplace. What’s really sad is that for the second straight review, the best part about a game is the cover art. That’s like saying the best thing about Pez is the foil wrapper. In the case of Raspberry flavored Pez, that’s actually true.
80 Microsoft Points can’t believe Armless Octopus has only been updated once over the last month because he was working on this piece of shit in the making of this review.
Love ya, Dave.
Brian says I’m not allowed to sell out my principles and offer a Chick Seal of Approval to the first developer who buys me 5lbs of Pez off of Amazon. It’s just as well. Knowing my luck, it would probably be full of Raspberry and I would have to kill myself then.
Let it be said that I can be shallow. No matter how bad a game looks, I can be won over by cover art that warms my heart. And nothing is quite as heart warming as the cover to Arrow in the Knee.
Oh stop crying. Serves you right for running in front of a dude shooting arrows trying to protect your ass!
Beautiful, isn’t it? Of course, if you were actually encouraged to shoot those annoying bitches in the knee, the game would have been ten times better. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Arrow in the Knee is a wave shooter where you stand atop a castle, firing arrows at various baddies that charge you. The hook is that if you hit one of the basic enemies in the knee, they join your side and help you defend your castle. It’s an interesting concept, but failed by some sloppy execution. I could never quite get the hang of the aiming, and would have offered up the soul of my first-born (which I never plan on having, but it’s the thought that counts) for a cross-hair. Not offering one, even as a paid power-up in the game’s shop, seems like a gigantic oversight akin to a zookeeper leaving eucalyptus-flavored rat poison inside the Koala pen.
Knee in the Arrow really has the look of a bad XBLIG, but sometimes the really bad-looking stuff can surprise you. I’ve been caught off guard by the quality of games like Don’t Feed the Trolls, The Cannon, and Asphalt Jungle 2 in the past, and Arrow seems like it should join them in the “surprisingly fun” camp. It doesn’t, but it comes close. There’s a wide variety of enemies, items to purchase, and arrows to fire. So why didn’t I like it? Well, part of it is those bad graphics, which contribute to the difficulty in aiming, but also make it hard to distinguish between what type of arrow you’re firing. Some of the enemies get too spongy and attack too fast for you to reasonably defend yourself. The Dragons, for example, knock out one floor of your castle every time they attack. You’re supposed to use ice arrow to defend yourself, but their bullets move too fast and realistically you’ll only have one shot to actually hit the fireball. Because the aiming never feels quite right, it’s sort of a crap shoot to actually hit it, leaving you better off unloading arrows directly into the dragon and hoping you survive the round and can hire guys to fix your castle.
I didn’t get a chance to play this four players. It probably takes the sting out significantly. Having said that, try convincing YOUR friends to play an Xbox Live Indie Game called “Arrow in the Knee” that looks like THAT over Borderlands 2. It’s harder than it sounds.
If Arrow in the Knee was more aim-friendly, it would at best be a tolerable little wave shooter that you would forget about as soon as you shut off the console. Don’t get me wrong, there are things I like about it. The whole “kneecap an enemy to get them on your side” bit works. Well actually, you don’t even need to shoot them in the knee. The foot seems to work just fine, and thank God for that, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had anyone switch teams for me. But as a hook, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. As far as I could tell, only one type of baddie switches teams if you kneecap them. It’s not enough. The hook is a good hook! So why limit it to the most basic type of enemy? It’s really disappointing. Imagine if the Wright Brothers stopped at “let’s just put one wing on this thing and see what happens!” That’s what the developers of Arrow in the Knee did. They also gave me the false hope that kneecapping people really does get them to switch teams. My apologies to Miami Heat fans. I was hoping to get LeBron to join the Warriors.
Being coordinated is not among my attributes, so being able to play games at all is something of a small miracle. But some stuff is simply off-limits to me. Dancing games, for example. I once fell off the platform playing Dance Dance Revolution at a bowling alley and ended up with a small break in my ankle. On the XBLIG side of things, I could barely get through NYAN-TECH, which asked gamers to perform finger-yoga while playing a platformer. It’s something my brain is not wired for. I didn’t think a game could get any more demanding than that, but having just played Divided, I stand corrected.
I could have sworn I did this puzzle last month when I played Gateways. Not sure which way was the least intuitive.
Divided is part puzzler, part platformer, and part road sobriety test from hell. You play as a little blue blob of goo that has to get from point A to point B. The hook is at times you have to split apart your goo and control each bit independently. You move one with the left stick and jump it with the left bumper, while moving the other with the right stick and jumping with the right bumper. It might as well ask me to jump rope while playing the piano, because I’m not capable of it. I don’t know if it’s because of my autism or a natural lack of dexterity, but I have difficulty walking and breathing at the same time.
I can’t really fault Divided for my own personal hangups. When I would play and have to move the right-stick blob, I would inevitably fuck it up and instinctively try to move using the left stick. I couldn’t help it, even after hours I would do it again and again. I was quite embarrassed. Brian was laughing his ass off. My dog walked out of the room and got into the garbage. Probably not related, but it happened while I was playing Divided, so it seemed worth mentioning.
Where I can fault Divided is it’s just not a very well made game. Ignoring the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly design, the controls are unresponsive. Some areas of the game require precision platforming, but movement is loose, jumping feels lethargic, and the camera often doesn’t pull back far enough for you to get a clear picture of everything you’re required to do. Those are three major issues that have nothing to do with my own inability to play the game. On top of that, the level design is cruel, often requiring you to make timing-based precision jumps using two characters controlled by different sticks. What kind of freak would be good at this game? If you have the hand-eye coordination that Divided requires and you’re wasting it playing Divided instead of being a world champion athlete, you’re just a silly poop face. Yes, I can be childish.
I didn’t make it very far in Divided. I suppose I could have practiced at it, but I would have hated myself for doing so.
Co-op doesn’t work so hot either, because all the control and camera problems I talked about earlier. Sometimes the game wants you to make a jump, but requires one character to be too far away from the other. Because of the camera, that often turns into a blind jump. Otherwise, most of the problems come down to the controls being too fickle. Using the chains for climbing especially, which caused a lot of slippage. Ultimately, even if I had been capable of playing Divided the way it’s intended to be played, I don’t think I would have liked it. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Who knows, maybe I would be impressed if I saw someone who could maneuver both guys at the same time with total ease. I probably would give the person a round of applause, and then smack them upside the head for not using their super powers to fight crime or something more productive.
Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank has sat on my to-do pile for a while. I’m not sure why it took me so long to review. It looked good. The trailer made it seem cool. Chalk it up to me being a scatterbrain, but it always slipped through the cracks. Well, yesterday I finally got around to playing it, because there had been a serious drought in new XBLIGs. The moment I finished the game about an hour later, I had three review requests. Today, I have seven total. It’s like a running gag with Indie Gamer Chick. The minute I start a game that was released over a year ago, the flood gates open and all the new releases hit. I’m onto you, XBLIG.
The graphics are nice. Almost Claymation-like.
The idea is you’re a tank that has to plow through a world, shooting enemies and innocent wildlife, rolling over things, and trying not to flip over. The game is physics based, and rolling over is the toughest thing you’ll have to deal with. The rolling over stuff is what got me killed the most. I rolled over more than a dead dog caught in a clothes dryer. If there was a hill, a crate, or a shell from the machine gun, you can bet I flipped the tank over trying to get past it. The physics and the terrain seem tailor-made for causing you to do your best beached-turtle impression. In fact, that seems to be the game’s sole goal, rather than be entertaining. I mentioned this to the developer, and he told me it was like Trials HD, only with a tank. I think he forgot the part where Trials HD is actually fun.
Along with bumpy hills, there are enemies. Guys who shoot guns at you, guys who shoot rockets at you, and landmines. To counter this, you have a minigun and the tank’s cannon. Neither of them are easy to line up and aim correctly, especially given how herky-jerky the physics are. Enemies also seem to fire at a rate faster than you, and are typically placed in a position where you’ll already have rolled over from trying to clear a hill with more divots in it than a driving range. Thankfully, they don’t respawn if you kill them and you die. I think. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s true because I experienced one of the most pleasant glitches I’ve ever encountered in a game.
Check this out: I’m playing the game and I get a phone call. So I pause things and answer that. The phone call ends and I pick the controller back up and press A expecting to continue. Only I don’t, because for some brain fart of a reason, when you pause the game it doesn’t highlight “Continue.” It highlights “Restart.” There’s also no “are you sure?” confirmation screen. So I had to restart from the beginning. I handled this about as well as you would expect me to, IE I lost my shit. Screaming, cussing, declaring my intent to assassinate the last surviving Time Lord, blot out the sun, club a baby seal, and cast every first-born male into the Nile.
“If only I had access to some kind of weapon, perhaps vehicle-based, that I could terrorize people with! Bah, like such a thing exists!”
But, before I could turn off the Xbox, I was reminded that I would give every game at least an hour before doing a rage quit. Well fuck, said I. So I decided to eat shit and restart the game. Only this time, there were no enemies. None. Every single living thing, even the birds and rabbits that you could shoot just for shits and giggles, were gone. No landmines either. Just me, some bumpy hills, a few checkpoints, and a silly ending that teased a sequel. No, please don’t. I think you’ve said all that needs to be said with this one.
Of course, the professional thing to do would have been to restart the game and play it again with all the enemies. I didn’t do that, but it would have been. I had encountered enemies in my first run. I didn’t think it was well conceived how they were used over the course of the first twenty minutes of playtime, and I can’t imagine it would have been better for the last twenty. Really, the problem with Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank is it’s just not fun. The only way to clear some of the hills without flipping over is to inch up them, and what’s fun about that? Enemies are too easily able to double up on you, and with poor aiming mechanics it’s kind of hard to fight back. I think somewhere along the lines, the developers had the right idea for a decent game, but the final product is dull, frustrating, and glitchy as hell. Ignoring the no-enemies thing, I had one instance where I was driving off a hill, barely caught my bumper on the back of a hill and the whole thing fell apart. I was boggled by how exactly that kind of damage could happen, but soon afterwards my tank fell apart again. Only that time, I was rolling along a flat piece of terrain. I hadn’t hit anything, or gone over a hill. It just sort of crumbled. Since I have no logical explanation for that, I’ll chalk it up to my tank being driven by Chief Quimby and one of his messages to Inspector Gadget detonated prematurely. It’s bound to happen once in a while, right?
Ovary Overload is a twin-stick shooter where you take the role of an unfertilized egg that tries to defend itself from being inseminated. By sperm. I wish there was some wacky gameplay hook to go with this, but no, it really is just shooting slow-moving sperm with an unfertilized egg. Sure, the sperm comes in multiple colors, suggesting that the chick this egg belongs to got jiggy with the entire cast of Power Rangers, but that’s it. Shoot sperm. There’s a few weapons upgrades and large sperm boss (that presumably comes from Megazord), but there is nothing here that hasn’t been done so much better a million times before. When the entire hook of your game is “a slower, crappier version of Robotron, only you shoot sperm” you probably need to go back to the drawing board. Sorry for the short review, but there is nothing else to talk about.
Ovary Overload. Conception has never been this boring.
Wait, there’s another sperm-based XBLIG? Are you fucking kidding me?
Oh hey, actually this one isn’t bad at all. It’s called Spermatozoon. Here, you play as the sperm, shooting them at the egg. Surrounding the egg is a series of rotating walls, or “contraceptives.” The walls typically have gaps in them. While it begs the question as to who the fuck makes contraceptives with holes in them (probably diaper companies, the shady pricks), it actually makes for a really fun, old-time arcadey shooter. The hook is, you can’t actually move the sperms around yourself, nor select which one you want to fire. They surround the egg, and you fire them one-at-a-time. You only need one shot to get to the egg to win, while any shots that hit the walls punch a hole in them. Does sperm really do that? How come used condoms don’t look like they were attacked by millions of little termites every time someone finishes with one?
The gimmick is absurd, but the game is fun. There’s 53 levels, all with different twists to the formula. Sometimes the walls are unbreakable. Sometimes the sperm has to slowly pass through a wall of water. Sometimes the water carries it around the board. Another question: where the hell are these people having sex at where they’re getting destructible condoms with preexisting holes in them that have water spinning around in them? A spa? A hurricane? I thought for a second this might not be human sperm, but it makes a distinctive “YEE HAW!” when it penetrates the egg, so obviously we’re talking about Texan sperm here. I’m not sure what in Texas would encompass all the above. A semi-aquatic Swiss-cheese themed rodeo?
I have an alternate name for Spermatozoon: Hardon Collider.
Spermatozoon is certainly worth a look, but it’s got some pretty nasty flaws too. Difficulty doesn’t scale properly. Over the course of fifty-three levels, I had at least three instances where I would get stuck on a stage, go through multiple rounds of failure, then immediately finish the next stage or two in one single shot. Later in the game, the walls rotate so fast and are so dense that there’s no room for strategy or aiming. You just mash the buttons and wait for the miracle of life to play out. That’s disappointing, because the concept is so good, it should lend itself to more levels that allow you to carefully, patiently wait for the perfect shot. I also didn’t find the multiplayer very compelling. It’s the same game, only the sperm are divided up between two to four players. It didn’t really feel competitive or cooperative. It was just sort of there. I had more fun just playing by myself. I’m not sure if that counts as masturbation with a game like this. I probably should do a couple rosaries just in case.
Either way, Spermatozoon is really fun and I totally recommend it. Personally, it has got to be one of the biggest surprises I’ve come across on XBLIG. Even with a stupid, immature theme designed to appeal to the kind of twits that giggle when someone says “erect”, it’s a good game, and that’s all I’ve ever cared about. It could be a game themed around removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass, and I’ll still recommend it if it’s a good game. By the way, I hear their next game involves removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass. I’m really excited for it.
Ignore the above name. Thanks to “retro” Atari 2600 style graphics, you can’t really see that you’re tossing adorable animals that explode on contact at your enemies. It actually looks more like Spider-Man throwing dried out dog turds at Lego figures. But, since that comes dangerously close to infringing on the plans for Traveller’s Tales next licensed schlock, Bungee Ferret Tossing it is!
One of my pet peeves is retro-looking games that only do it part-way. Bungee Ferret Tossing looks like an early 80s console game, but it doesn’t sound like one. At all. There’s full voice narration, a generic soundtrack that should have been chiptuned, and the most annoying sound effects in recorded history. I can’t stress enough how bad they are. Imagine a marching band made of bag-pipers and Fran Drecher operating a jackhammer. Actually, don’t. I don’t want that on my conscience. Just, trust me on this. It’s bad.
Ninjas are well-known for the ability to jump forty feet in the air.
So the “throwing explosive ferrets at enemies” gimmick is ruined because it doesn’t look like you’re doing that. That means the game has to stand on its own. Does it? Maybe a little bit. B.F.T. plays out like a wave shooter. You sway back and forth from a helicopter (hence the bungee part) lobbing grenades at enemies. If the enemies shoot you, or if a bird flies into your chopper, you lose health. Your health auto-refills, while the chopper has limited damage. Also, enemy fire causes you to swing more erratically, making it more difficult to aim your shots. Allegedly, at least. I could never quite get the hang of aiming while Spider-Man was swinging at a normal rate. The throwing physics don’t seem to line up with the laws of physics. At best, I could land a “ferret” somewhere in the general vicinity of an enemy and hope the generous blast radius would kill them. Generally it would, but then the game would pull a dick move by having me throw out timed grenades that seemed to only work if they stuck to a baddie. The really fun grenades, like ones that spread out or heat-seek enemies, don’t come until later on, and they’re so rare they might as well not be there. Once again, I found myself wishing that someone would follow Bird Assassin‘s lead and give you all the fun stuff early on, let you abuse the shit out of it, and have a good time for your dollar.
Don’t let this discourage you from getting Bungee Ferret Tossing. I actually did have fun with it. It’s a perfectly good waste of a half-hour. I just wish it did more. There’s a Survival mode that’s dull as dishwater, and a time-attack mode that basically makes a mess of the whole game. The enemies shoot at you non-stop, and even with “blinking” you have no chance of survival once you’re tagged. On top of that, the controls for that particular mode feel like they were dipped in road tar and then mummified. Why are the controls so stiff in it? I don’t know. Neurosyphilis perhaps, although that’s probably giving the developer way too much extracurricular credit. I keed.
Pictured: a black gentleman hanging from the end of a rope while a bunch of white guys fire guns into the air. This game will be HUGE in Alabama.
So here’s the deal: Bungee Ferret Tossing is stupid stupid stupid. Some of the modes don’t work. It’s a bit too repetitive and doesn’t offer enough variety of enemies or weapons. BUT, it’s a little fun. That’s what counts in my book. Strip away the bullshit premise, hit mute on the TV, and remove the gore and it would be exactly like an old school Atari 2600 game. One of oddball titles that doesn’t suck to play nearly forty years later. Of course, like the best games from that era, playing it today is only good for about twenty minutes to an hour, and you’ll forget completely about it as soon you turn it off. Hey, that’s good enough for me. It’s like watching a Dukes of Hazzard rerun.
Once I checked Miner Dig Deep off my “things to do” list, my most requested review became Little Racers STREET by Milkstone Studios. I got at least one email a week and a tweet or two telling me how good it was. I wasn’t convinced, because we’re talking about Milkstone here. They’re probably the most productive XBLIG studio that doesn’t release text-based adventures or games about swatting a cat away from your food. Their games typically play well and have high production values. And yet, they haven’t been without their fair share of controversy. Their recent title Sushi Castle received a, ahem, lukewarm response from Binding of Isaac fans (check the comments). I personally don’t give a shit about that. Good games get cloned. That’s how the industry has always worked, and that’s how it will continue to work long after we’re all rotting in the ground. So what if their games aren’t original? I like to think of them as being like one of those really cool guys with a weird quirk. In this case, it’s like having a moderately amusing friend who has a problem with Kleptomania.
Not included: Paul Walker or Vin Diesel.
What irks me about Milkstone is their games are always just sort of there. Despite the occasional hiccup, like AvatAAAH!!! or Raventhrone, most Milkstone games seem to strive for little more than being decent. I’ve rated three previous titles by them on my leaderboard, but as of this writing they sat at #83 (Sushi Castle), #95 (MotorHEAT), and #100 (Avatar Panic). It’s frustrating for me as a fan of XBLIGs, because I fucking KNOW they’re capable of better. I just needed proof of that. People assured me that Little Racers STREET was that proof. I put off playing it for months, because I’m not a huge racing fan, nor did I believe the hype.
Believe it. Little Street RACERS is very good.
Depending on which camera angle you use, RACERS is a Sprint-like top-down racer, or a 3D one if you use the neat (but significantly more difficult to play) chase camera. Brian actually stumbled upon that while we were playing it, and I have to say, damn. Smooth animation, impressive use of 3D for an XBLIG, and it controls relatively well. I still preferred the top-down view, because you can see the turns coming sooner and you need every edge you can get. Whether playing online or off, you earn money from races which you use to buy and upgrade cars. You then use those to race to earn more money to buy more cars to upgrade. You then use those to race to earn more money to buy more EGAD!! I do believe this game might be a time sink.
You really can’t appreciate how good Racers plays until you put about fifteen minutes worth of grinding a car’s stats into it. The controls? Silky smooth. The course layouts? Very well done. The difficulty is adjustable, progress is continuously made so the grind never feels like a grind, and buying the cars and upgrades feels surprisingly rewarding. By time I was finished with Little Racers STREET, my only complaint was that your car doesn’t stay highlighted throughout a race. Even with custom paint jobs, if you’re playing an online game with a lot of different racers that tend to bunch up, it’s easy to lose track of which car is yours. However, there’s a good chance that by time you read this, that might not be the case. Milkstone immediately agreed that I was right and promised to fix it during the next update. And then they stole my wallet.
The highlight of my play session was an online match that included my boyfriend Brian, my best XBLIG buddy Alan, and grammar-deficient XBLIG critic Jimmy Page. Brian kicked ass, winning a few races. I didn’t do so hot, probably because I had “the cornering ability of an arthritic bison.” Well, I never. Actually, the truth is I was trying to cause Brian to wreck. Kind of hard to do considering that he was typically way ahead of me, but every time I had an opening, I tried smashing into him. It never worked, and I kept hitting the walls while he repeatedly asked me if I was drunk. No, I wasn’t. Just stupid. And then I had to play it cool and act like I sucked (yes.. act), because I didn’t want to get the look. Like that look. The one I’m getting now. Oh crap, I think he’s reading over my shoulder. Woogity Boogity Boo! Yep, he’s reading over my shoulder. Well, in closing, Little Racers STREET is awesome and now I have to go try to claim that I was merely practicing “defensive driving.” I think he’ll buy it.
Crap, I think he’s still reading over my shoulder.
Entropy was developed by Autotivity Games
Indie Gamer Chick 
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