Ninja Crash

November 13, 2012 by 5 Comments

Note: this review originally said that Ninja Crash was 80MSP.  The actual price is 240MSP. Sorry for the mistake.

Being lazy, I prefer to sum up the Xbox Live Indie Game market by saying a game is just XBLIG’s version of an existing game.  It saves a lot of time.  So I can say Gateways is XBLIG’s version of Portal.  Doom & Destiny is XBLIG’s version of Final Fantasy.  Sushi Castle is XBLIG’s version of Binding of Isaac.  It’s easy!  Frees up my time to watch reruns of House with my boyfriend.

Today’s game is Ninja Crash, which I’ll call XBLIG’s version of Balloon Fight.  Which was Nintendo’s version of Joust.  Which was Williams’ version of mixing tequila and LSD and translating it to a video game.  To be perfectly honest, I never played Joust.  I’ve played Balloon Fight, because I got it for my birthday on Animal Crossing.  Played it for about fifteen minutes, thought it was okay, wish my gift had been bamboo flooring for my house instead.  Haven’t really thought much of it since.  Well, now it’s back as an XBLIG, only with more features, modern graphics, and somewhat shoddier gameplay.

I’ve shown this game to five people and they all said “wow, looks like Smash Bros.!” And then they see it in motion and are like “oh, it’s Balloon Fight.” And then they make a sad face.

One of the reasons why I never got into Balloon Fight was the slow, plodding controls combined with the unforgiving inertia that seemed designed to inspire new curse words being invented.  Sadly for me, those controls are faithfully recreated here.  It’s not that the game controls like shit.  It controls just like the 1984 Nintendo game it was inspired by.  My problem is, gaming has come far in the last 28 years.  All that progress is ignored in Ninja Crash.  Maybe that’s what fans of the original want.  When I tweeted that I was playing a Balloon Fight clone, I had several people do the Dance of Joy and demand that I release the name of the game I was playing to them.  Guess what?  I’m sure they’ll love it.

I didn’t though.  I might have, if their attempts at improving the formula didn’t fail.  But they did.  Here’s a common problem they tried to fix: enemies hanging out near the ceiling.  Happened in Balloon Fight.  As I just learned, happened in Joust too.  Unlike a lot of attempts at improving games, this is a real thing that did require improvement, so I applaud them for giving it a try.  It just didn’t work.  When you or enemies hover too close to the ceiling, a finger comes down from the sky and pushes you back towards the ground.  And I’ll be damned if it’s not the most annoying thing in gaming since Baby Mario’s cry in Yoshi’s Island.  It also pushes the enemies down, often right into you.  I appreciate the effort, but wouldn’t a better idea have been to line the ceiling with barbed wire or something?  Hell, they actually did do that in later levels, and it worked.  The finger thing is like trying to stop people from speeding by putting a brick wall up every five feet.

The other big problem is popping guys doesn’t result in their death.  It didn’t in Balloon Fight either, but at least if they landed on the ground, you had a few seconds to kick them off the edge before they inflated another balloon and took off.  You don’t even have a full second in Ninja Crash.  Once a dude lands, they immediately begin inflating a new balloon and take to the skies before you can even collect yourself.  And unlike Balloon Fight, simply touching them while they’re grounded does not defeat them.  You have to land on them again.  Because you don’t so much control your character as you do aim him and hope for the best, this feature serves to multiply the frustration factor.  Granted, they did make it so if you pop a dude and he falls too great a distance before hitting the floor, he dies (or crashes, if you will), but I almost never did kill a dude that way.  I either had to pop them above the water or hope like hell I could pop them close enough to land that I could double-tap them.  What was so wrong with the way it was done in Balloon Fight?

The screenshots don’t do the game justice. It does look really good in motion.  Oh, and see those spears in the corner?  They kill you.

Team Devil Games had their heart in the right place with Ninja Crash, and some additions to the formula (environmental hazards, weapons) are a welcome change of pace.  But every step forward is followedby a bigger step backwards.  Ninja Crash has an audience out there that will enjoy its take on the classic Joust formula, but I didn’t like it at all and I can’t recommend it.  I also didn’t get a chance to give this a try in competitive four-player mode.  Sorry Team Devil Games, but you did sort of release right in the middle of the holiday gaming season.  Trying to tear my friends away from Borderlands 2, Halo 4, or Black Ops 2 is an act of futility not seen since the time I watched Brian attempt to break the world record for most live bees fit into a mouth.

Ninja Crash was developed by Team Devil Games

240 Microsoft Points said this game is further proof the judges of Dream-Build-Play don’t actually play video games in the making of this review.

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Slick (Second Chance with the Chick)

November 9, 2012 by 4 Comments

It’s been a while since I did one of these.  I really wish developers would take me up on the Second Chance with the Chick offer more often.  I know a lot of games I bust on here get patched up later, but developers are gun-shy about having me “go after” their games again.  Even if Second Chances are typically lighter and focus on the changes to the game, with less emphasis on smacking games down.  Or sometimes they patch the game and expect me to just Second Chance it on my own.  I don’t keep track of what games have been patched (XboxIndies.com has a sidebar that lets you know what games have been updated).  It’s up to developers to let me know.  And then just wait while I drag my feet to write the review.  Speaking of which, hi there Halcyon Softworks!  I didn’t forget you!

We’re in Hell already?

I reviewed Slick, a punisher with Game Boy-like visuals back in July and I hated it because I felt it was too brutal.  People say I have a bias against punishers, and I say “guilty as charged.”  I don’t understand the appeal in them.  I don’t understand why they keep getting made, especially when they consistently sell like shit on XBLIG (only 2 out of the top 100 best-selling XBLIGs are punishers).  The market as a whole doesn’t want them.  They’ll earn you fans among a very small niche of “retro” gamers, and they might even earn you fans among the development community if they are well designed and bear and uncanny resemblance to vintage games of yesteryear.  But if you are capable of doing a very well made, yet overly difficult platformer, you should be capable of making a game that everyone can enjoy.  Who knows?  It might even sell in greater numbers.

I think everyone agrees that the Apple Jack games are the pinnacle of design among punishers on XBLIG.  I don’t even like them, but I tip my hat to them for audio-visual design, play control, and charm.  Especially the sequel.  Among the closed-off XBLIG community, they’re highly regarded.  But when you get down to the cold, hard facts, the original Apple Jack isn’t one of the top 300 selling games.  Apple Jack 2 isn’t even in the top 900.  Mind you, Apple Jack 2 made the rounds on mainstream gaming sites, including full reviews at IGN and Kotaku.  And it’s already been passed on the top seller list by such recent fare as Lucky.  Fans of the game don’t understand it.  Hell, I don’t even totally understand it, but I’ll make a guess: punishers don’t lend themselves to word-of-mouth sales.  I’m guessing not many people say “this game is damn near impossible to play and makes me feel like an inadequate twat.  GO BUY IT!”

Where was I?

Slick.  So in my original review, I did a step-by-step diagram of why one of the stages didn’t work so well.  The game asked for perfect precision from players, while dealing with shaky controls and insanely unfair collision detection.  The guys behind it have tightened these issues up.  Collision detection more closely resembles the outlines of the enemies, and controls seem to be tightened, but that might be a perception thing.  I still don’t like the level design, or the art style.  Then again, I never owned an original Game Boy, so this does nothing to tickle my nostalgia rib.  I do actively question why anyone would do a Game Boyish game these days.  With the possible exception of Donkey Kong (aka Donkey Kong ’94), most of the games on that platform have aged with the grace and dignity of an unembalmed corpse.

Slick is either pretty or Joan Rivers-esq grotesque, depending on how old you are.

Slick really is no better or worse than your average hateful platform.  With the corrections made to it, Slick can now stand on its own and be reviewed on the merit of level design.  In that regard, it’s a total bastard that hates you and all things sunny and innocent.  If this is what you’re looking for in a game, you’ll enjoy it.  It’s not what I’m looking for, so I didn’t.  Hopefully the skilled dudes at Halcyon Softworks can apply their talent towards something with more mass-market appeal next time.  You guys proved you can blow up a bullfrog with a firecracker.  Now show me you can take that frog and make delicious frog legs with it.

Slick was developed by Halcyon Softworks

80 Microsoft points actually hate frog legs in the making of this review.

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Alien Siege

November 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

Alien Siege is a clone of the 1980 Atari classic Missile Command, a game that predates my birth by almost a decade.  Yet, it’s one of those rare games from that time frame that I can actually enjoy today.  It’s frantic, scoring driven, and a lot of fun.  And that’s coming from someone who never has had the privilege of playing a proper game of it using the trackball.  I’ve played lots of clones of iconic arcade classics on XBLIG, and most of them are honestly not that good.  Alien Siege is one of those rare exceptions.  It’s a lot of fun!  No, really!  What, I can’t enjoy knock-offs of ancient games just because I’m me?  Hey, I can if they don’t suck.

My latest XBLIG review or the Republican reaction to the recent election?

So what can you do with a modern take on a classic game that appeals to fans of the original while appeasing people of my generation that don’t give two squirts about nostalgia?  Well, improving the formula is a good place to start.  Alien Siege does that, by giving you upgrade points you can spend to improve the launch speed of your rockets, the firing rate of them, or to improve your gun.  Instead of just intercepting missiles, you also have to fire on UFOs and meteors.  Missiles don’t work on them, so you have to split your time between intercepting enemy missiles with one button and fighting everything else with another button.  It sounds like it would be too much to juggle, and it is.  But in a good, old-time arcadey way.

There’s even a co-op mode, and I had enough fun playing it by myself that I actually wanted to play it as more than an afterthought.  Now sure, I could use Brian.  He’s 29 and thus the right age to have played something similar to this as a kid.  But Brian was one of those odd kids who never owned a console and played outside like a savage.  What I need to test this thing is someone old enough to have played the original but decrepit enough that they’ll barely remember it.

Ohhhhh Dadddddddyyyyyyy!!

Thirty Minutes Later

Ugh, so here’s where things like my killjoy label come from.  Daddy thought it was okay, but liked the original better because of the trackball.  Seems to be a common theme.  I showed this to the oldest, most GET OFF MY LAWNish gamer I know, and he responded with “no shoes, no shirt, no track ball, no service.”  Exact quote, which I think was a joke, but it also shows that games like this start with more ground to make up.  It seems almost unfair that something that’s mostly well made, like Alien Siege, could be the victim of its own legacy.  But it happens.  For the record, it controls better than any console version of Missile Command I’ve seen, but that won’t be enough to win over your average geriatric gamer.

And I’m not giving Alien Siege a free pass either.  No online scoreboards, bad sound design, mediocre graphics, and backgrounds that often unintentionally hide missiles.  Check out this screen:

Notice how the color of the missiles matches the color of the mountains.  Annoying?  Oh yea.  But that’s the only major complaint that have, because all the other stuff takes a backseat to gameplay.  Alien Siege is a lot of fun, and worth your time and money.  It’s a great example of taking something old and making it new and fresh again.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit Craigslist and find a vintage Missile Command coin-op for my Daddy.  It’s either that or super glue his mouth shut.

Alien Siege was developed by Lost World Creations

80 Microsoft Points want to know why aliens were firing ICBMs at cities.  They’re fucking ALIENS!!  Shouldn’t they have better technology?  I know they had to stick with the theme, but the guys at Lost World Creations should have come up with something else and I’ll shut up now in the making of this review. 

Alien Siege is Chick Approved and ranks pretty high on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Perhaps the developers should cue up some Myra before checking it.

No trailer, no game footage.  Sorry 🙁

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Halloween Scream

October 30, 2012 by 4 Comments

Halloween Scream is a text-based adventure where you play as a young man who inherits a haunted house. Yea, these things always end well. I’ve done text-based games before on here and they usually leave me wanting to lop off my wrists and replace my hands with sabres to stab myself with. But, every game I play starts off with a clean slate, so I plugged my nose and dove in. Then I forgot that being a text-based adventure, this would be a bit shallow and I brained myself on the cement bottom. Smooth, Cathy.

So many options, I don’t know what to do with myself.

There’s no play control to talk about, or graphics, or sound, or level design, or anything remotely resembling a game. That leaves me to just talk about the writing, which I have a major problem with. It’s the tone. It’s all over the place. The game sets a dark and somber mood, but then will randomly spit out lines or gags that break the atmosphere with more ease than NASA. For example, you’ll be examining the servant’s quarters and come across a magazine titled “Repressed Servants Monthly.” Huh, well that’s both not funny and grossly against the tone I thought they were going for here. There are lots of moments like that, but the overall story never goes the humor route. Then again, it doesn’t go the scary route, or the Halloween route either. I kind of figured a game named “Halloween Scream” would either be scary, be themed around Halloween activities, or both. Here you get a story involving vampires and it takes place on Halloween, but otherwise, nothing. What’s the scary thing? “They brought an awful, long forgotten genre back from the dead!! AHHHHHHHHH!”

Writing isn’t the only problem. The game has another consistency problem, this time involving back-tracking. Being an adventure game, you’ll occasionally pick up trinkets that you’ll need to use along the way. Sometimes, the game lets you pick up stuff that you have no idea what you’ll be using it for. Other times, the game will have a “wait, didn’t you see something like this earlier? Maybe you should go back and get it” moment. It’s saddest attempt at padding I’ve seen since I stuffed my bra with water balloons at age 12.

My maps were way better. Sure, they were practically illegible, but.. never mind.

Halloween Scream has its moments, like a couple of maze-sections that required me to draw my own maps. I wish the game had stuck to these, because the writing and exploration are dull, and the false-ending only aggravated me because at that point I was ready for the game to be over with. Shockingly, I didn’t outright hate Halloween Scream, but I didn’t like it either. What would be really cool is if someone could do a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark type of game along the lines of this. Something genuinely spooky, with morbid artwork and a haunting soundtrack. Otherwise, this genre remains dead. I’m not sure if that technically makes this a zombie game or not.

Halloween Scream was developed by Bandana Games

80 Microsoft Points forgot to fill the balloons with water in the making of this review. I told you it was sad.

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Hypotenuse

October 28, 2012 by 3 Comments

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!

Hypotenuse was developed by Iamrece

80 Microsoft Points said the game should have thrown in trapezoids just to really flex its developmental chops in the making of this review.

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Lucky

October 25, 2012 by 4 Comments

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 mean in a game.

Lucky was developed by Twist-EdGames

80 Microsoft Points told the lead character to go fuck himself, but wasn’t expecting THAT in the making of this review.

Lucky is Chick Approved.  Barely.  Check out the Leaderboard to see how many asses it’s sniffing. 

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Piz-ong

October 24, 2012 by 25 Comments

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.

Piz-ong was developed by Dave Voyles

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.

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Divided

October 22, 2012 by 4 Comments

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.

Divided was developed by Angler Games

80 Microsoft Points stand united in Divided fail in the making of this review.  That sounded lot more clever in my head. 

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Avatar Snowboarding and A Snowy Slalom

October 20, 2012 by 17 Comments

Winter is upon us, and with it comes a strange fixation with some members of the population to freeze their butts off and throw themselves down a mountain.  It sounds like something primitives would do to virgins to appease their Gods, but no, it’s actually considered a recreational sport.  Weirdly, it also translates well to video games.  The first ever sporting game I played was 1080° Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64, and I was completely addicted to it for a while.  Its Gamecube counterpart?  Not so much.  However, I never did get into SSX, and winter sports games haven’t sniffed my consoles in well over a decade.  Can a couple of XBLIGs win me back?

No.

But one came close.

The guy on the right is demonstrating the position known as “about to get slaughtered by Indie Gamer Chick.”

Avatar Snowboarding is first, and it might be the worst Xbox Live Indie Game of the year.  I’m having trouble deciding if being utterly pointless and boring is worse than being Sententia.  At least Sententia has a goal and a plot.  Avatar Snowboarding basically puts you in a randomly generated sandbox of a stage and says “okay, move around.”  That’s it.  Yea, stages have an “exit” but there’s no real reward for getting to it.  There’s also no interesting scenery or outlandish things to jump off of.  Just a sterile field of snow, a few trees, and invisible walls to brain yourself to death on.  What’s really remarkable is the game allows you to fly through the air and gain speed using an infinite amount of turbo boost, and it’s STILL the most boring video game I’ve ever played in my entire life, and that’s not hyperbole.  Games don’t NEED to have goals.  Flight Adventure 2 had no point outside “here’s a plane, fly it, try not to crash!”  But it still managed to be compelling.  Avatar Snowboarding is dull to the point of being excruciating.

Pretty lifeless, huh?  Video credit to Aaron the Splazer

A Snowy Slalom is a much better experience.  It’s still not quite Leaderboard material, but compared to Avatar Snowboarding, it’s game of the year material.  Here, you traverse 32 pre-made hills, or enjoy randomly generated ones.  The controls are more responsive, the gameplay is streamlined, and there’s an actual point to it.  Plus, the sense of speed you generate at times is awesome.

Snowy Slalom comes from the developer of the Merball Tournament, a game that had a neat concept but felt more like an unfinished prototype.  Unfortunately, Slalom retains that not-quite-done feel at times.  Everything worked fine until around the 8th course, at which point making sharp turns routinely led to me getting stuck in the scenery and being forced to restart.  Other times, I would just hit the walls and lose all my speed, causing time to run out.  Often, there’s not strong enough indication of when you’re going to have to turn on a course, causing you to have to trial-and-error your way down a slope multiple times to get it right.  This is reason #842 why video skiing is superior to real skiing.  Because trial and error in real skiing means “see that tree with Sonny Bono’s blood all over it?  Yea, try not to die on it.”

I’m having flashbacks to Cool Boarders. Which is weird, because that’s not a skiing game.

Ultimately, I’m not putting A Snowy Slalom on the leaderboard because it’s just not fun.  It does represent a step in the right direction for a new developer who is easing his way into game development, but the ultimate goal of a video game is to be entertaining, and Slalom just isn’t.  It’s dull to look at and not all that amusing to play.  I certainly didn’t hate it, and at times I was blown away by how the game moved at lightning speed, but I wouldn’t want to play it again.  I’m happy it exists, because it’s proof that developers can get better.  I went back and tried Merball Tournament again, then played A Snowy Slalom.  You can see progress being made.  Manuel, don’t give up.  Stick with it.  And since I’m in such a loving mood, I’ll tell the Avatar Snowboarding team “hey, look on the bright side!  You can’t possibly do worse!”

Avatar Snowboarding was developed by Squimball Studios (I so want to play a game called Squimball)

A Snowy Slalom was developed by Tarh Ik

80 Microsoft Points each haven’t seen this much white powder since they got back from Hollywood in the making of this review.

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Nessie

October 18, 2012 by 7 Comments

It might surprise you to hear that I actually quite enjoyed those old Game & Watch Gallery collections they put out on Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance back in the day.  Most people perceive me as having some kind of bias against old school games.  I don’t.  I just don’t think they hold up today as well as many will claim.  Game & Watches are kind of exempt from that, because even back in the day, they were probably only good for fifteen minutes before getting boring.  Even those Game & Watch collections that I really enjoyed as a kid didn’t get a whole lot of playtime from me.  Still, they had their place.  As my buddy Cyril of Defunct Games said to me, “in a time before Game Boys and cell phones, they were the Fruit Ninja of their day.”  You know, that guy is pretty smart when he’s not reviewing magazine covers.

Having said that, it’s really weird that someone would make an original G&W today, in 2012.  I know nostalgia is trendy right now, but that’s a bizarre choice.  You know how some stores started carrying turntables and vinyl records a few years ago to cash in on the long-faded memories of old people who smell like aspirin and bath salts?  Yea, well this would be like someone cashing in on that craze by bringing back typewriters.  Some people might genuinely long for them, but it’s probably not a viable commercial idea.  Even if they work.

In a way, this is a picture of the Loch Ness Monster AND a zombie.

And Nessie, today’s attempt at bringing back Game & Watch, does work.  As far as I can tell, it’s an original concept.  You play as the Loch Ness Monster (last seen playing The Last Guardian with Jimmy Hoffa), and you score points by not being seen by a guy on a boat and a guy on shore with a telescope.  As you play, your air supply starts to run out and you have to surface without being seen by either guy.  It’s tricky, takes some getting used to, settles into a groove, provides a worthy challenge, and then gets dull all in the span of fifteen minutes.  Not a bad fifteen minutes by any means.  And it really does look and sound like a Game & Watch, so mission accomplished there.  I got about as much playtime with it as I got with the Game & Watch: Ball replica I got from Club Nintendo by spending 1200 points, or the two Game & Watch collections on Nintendo DS that I paid 800 points for apiece.  If my math is accurate, that’s about $8,942,104 I had to spend to get those.  80 Microsoft Points (roughly $256.31, although my calculator seems to be broken so disregard all dollar amounts in this review) is obviously a much better deal for a gaming’s version of the butterfly: fun to look at, but once you start interacting with it, it dies in about fifteen minutes.

Nessie was developed by Those 30 Ninjas

80 Microsoft Points had a feeling this game would be good for cranking out a quickie review in the making of this review.

Nessie is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Yea, I’m fucking shocked by that too.

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