Lots of XBLIGs look like they’ll be fun. Then you play them, and they make you actively question whether the concept of fun is something you’ve been hallucinating this whole time. That’s what The Last Fortune made me ponder. I took a peek at the screen shots of it and thought it looked kind of like Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a retro gem that I picked up for $1 on PSN that was just swell. Then I picked up Dragons Curse (which I guess is Wonder Boy 3, or possibly 4.. then again, I’m not sure which one Monster Land is either) on Wii’s Virtual Console and thought that was even better, until I hit a brick wall about halfway through and gave up in shame. Still, fun series It’s about time someone tried to make a tribute for them on XBLIG. It’s just too bad this one turned out a bit warped.
It really does have a bit of a Sega Master System look to it. There was no problem with the graphics, besides item pick-ups being too small and samey.
The game starts with a village full of peaceable folks getting ransacked by evil doers that burn it to the ground. Choosing to play as either a boy or a girl from the village, you seek out revenge. Because the language of the option menu suggested that The Last Fortune might be, ahem, difficult, I decided to forgo the medium setting (my typical starting point for most reviews here) and play on casual. But even on sissy mode, I still had a tough time with Last Fortune, because the mechanics of the game kind of suck. Like the developers fundamentally had a good idea of what to do, but didn’t take the time to polish anything up. The controls have issues with unresponsiveness, which makes movement a chore, especially when you get to sections of the game with long jumps and an emphasis on platforming. I was practically praying that the game wouldn’t go nutso with jumping elements. So naturally, there’s a boss fight that takes place during a vertical auto-scrolling section. It’s like being on an airplane that just lost an engine, so you pray for safety and get rewarded by having a wing break off.
The Last Fortune simply doesn’t do a whole lot to entertain. Progression is straight forward. Get from point A to point B while stabbing everything in-between. Combat is the focus of Last Fortune, which is unfortunate (pun fully intended) because the combat is shit. The range of your attack is limited, and thus you’ll have to do most of your fighting up close. You have no dodge, counterattack, or block. Thus, most of the time you’ll be forced to trade damage with the enemy in a way that gets downright maddening later in the game. I especially hated these giant red knights that looked more like a spartan from Halo brandishing a Halloween novelty sword. You have to get too close to attack them, and they’re spongy enough and fast enough that you will take damage. Well, unless you unload your special moves on them, assuming you have a good one. For some reason, you can only have one type of spell at a time. The item-picks for these are tough to distinguish from one-another, even if you’re on a TV big enough to double as an ark with two of every creature. You can buy a charge attack that shoots a Zelda-ish beam across the room, but it’s as weak as a watered down Martini. All the purchasable upgrades are overpriced and money is scarce even if you go out of your way to slay every enemy. Plus, you can only access the store between levels, which are too long and boring for anyone to reasonably endure.
The Last Fortune was only one dodge or block move away from being a decent game. Alas, it was not to be, making all combat an exercise in frustration and annoyance. The only way to safely fight these flying bastards is to hit once, run away, and wait for another opening. Also known as Zzzzzzword Play.
There’s just no hook to keep you going. In fact, the game seems to go out of its way to make you want to quit. The asinine continue system forces you to spend your coins (which again, you aren’t provided enough of to make shopping enjoyable) to continue from the beginning of whatever stage you’re on. To salt the wounds, you have to pay extra to start midway through the stage. Lives systems are obsolete anyway. A continue system this punishing for a game that isn’t very fun to begin with will not add incentive or replay value to it. It will just make people quit and find something better to play.
That’s what aggravated me the most about Last Fortune. It looks good enough that obvious care was put into it. The developers just forgot to bring the fun. Gameplay is bare-bones. Enemies are cheap. Damage is often unavoidable. The level design is basic and boring. The dialog is soul-crushingly long and dull. I truly believe the building blocks for a good game are somewhere in this mess, but Last Fortune never puts it together. It’s like the developers were given multiple paths for each mechanic: the fun way and the boring way. They fully intended to go down the fun way, but couldn’t read the map properly and ended up in the boring capital of the world. And that’s a shame. Bad game or not, nobody should be stuck in Sacramento.
80 Microsoft Points have friends that live in Roseville, which is right next to Sacramento and thus is a like a satellite of boredom in the making of this review.
I’m a dumbass. I attempted to play One Finger Death Punch, the final Dream-Build-Play winner. Both the developer and my boyfriend had declared the game off-limits to me due to my epilepsy. However, that didn’t stop me from playing Charlie Murder, and I still had all the equipment I used to make it through that game (an older, fading projection TV and extra lighting in the room, in addition to sunglasses I was wearing), so why not?
Well, because it still wasn’t safe for me. That’s why. One Finger Death Punch was much more intense in its effects than Charlie Murder was. I was only able to play a little past the first world before a flickery background made me feel a little off and it was decided I shouldn’t play any further. Rats, I say. Rats, because I was really enjoying it up to that point. The basic concept is using only two buttons, you kung-fu your way through wave after wave of stick figures. You don’t even move your character. All the action in the game is done using only the X and B buttons. When an enemy enters your attack range, you hit them. The violence is over the top, but really, One Finger Death Punch reminded me of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line of titles. It’s just about timing and patterns. Gameplay boiled down to its purest core. Yet, OFDP is a total reinvention of some extremely old concepts, and it works well.
Theory #1 on why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say “we’ll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game!” Yeesh. That goes double for all you iPhone developers.
At least it did until I got to the part that simply wasn’t compatible with my medical condition. So I can’t vouch for the game completely. That wouldn’t be fair. I can say this: it seemed good enough that I think I would have ultimately awarded it the Seal of Quality. I mean, you never know. I really did suck at what little I got to play. Once enemies started to come in different colors (green enemies take two hits, blue ones dodge your first hit and jump into the other button’s range, and I’m sure more colors were coming) I started to fail with more consistency. I also was downright embarrassing against the first boss, losing three times before getting it right. But I was enjoying my mediocrity. I wish I could have played further.
Either way, One Finger Death Punch is, according to developer Silver Dollar Games (yep, those guys), a total bust in sales. What sucks about that is this was their most expensive production, and their most critically acclaimed title. These guys have been lambasted by the community, including me, and yet in the end they proved that they were real artists with real talent. Let it be said, even though I couldn’t finish their game, Silver Dollar today made me proud that I’m Indie Gamer Chick. Perhaps they’ll be the final reminder of how Xbox Live Indie Games cultivated talent. These guys went from being demonized for their, how shall we say it, less than play-value-chalked titles to being demoralized by their best game doing poorly at the point of sale. It’s almost like a microcosm of the XBLIG community as a whole. Don’t let this get you down, guys. You made a believer in me. Stand up, lick your wounds, and go make something else spectacular. I have no doubt you can do it.
Oh, and that spectacular thing you’re going to make? Yea, can you do me a solid and try to make it something that won’t potentially kill me? Thanks.
Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don’t screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.
80 Microsoft Points are really bummed about this because the thing that made me feel ill was a darker, wavy-pulsing background effect. Not my typical trigger. Shows how unpredictable this shit can be in the making of this non-review review.
Team 2Bit stands up and takes a bow. Tsutomu Yamaguchi rips up his program and walks out of the auditorium in disgust.
You see, I think Fist Puncher is probably better than your run of the mill brawler. Think of it as Castle Crashers without having to equip weapons. You level up. There are a variety of special moves and combos you can pull off, and you can earn more as you make progress. Levels aren’t always about smacking some twats around, walking ten feet to the right, then smacking more twats. Sometimes you’re in a poisoned subway. Sometimes you’re riding motorcycles. This is all set in a decidedly mature world with adult themes and occasional voice-over narration.
Sadly, it’s hard for me to get excited about this when I started playing upcoming Xbox Live Arcade brawler Charlie Murder about an hour before trying this. I haven’t yet formed an option on that game, but playing it undoubtedly soured me on Fist Puncher. Both games intend to take brawlers in a more progressive, modern direction. It’s as if they’re both in a race, and Fist Puncher is running at a pretty decent pace. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Charlie Murder is using quantum time displacement magic to have already finished the race, give Fist Puncher a wedgie, and sleep with its wife.
Oh shit, it’s Scientologists!
All games should stand on their own. I still believe that. But, I really am having trouble separating these two games from the same genre which released this close together. One of which is extremely modernized and the other of which is still has some firm roots in tradition. If I hadn’t just played Charlie Murder, I think I would have liked Fist Puncher a whole lot more. Not too much more. I hate brawlers and I can’t hide my contempt for them. One of the worst times I’ve had as Indie Gamer Chick was playing the Simpsons Arcade Game with my boyfriend. It wasn’t even an indie, but I had never played it and figured I could get a decent review out of it. Then I dragged Brian along for the ride. I hated every moment of it, but I thought Brian was enjoying it. Then after we finished, he said “well, that sucked.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“When was I supposed to say something? You haven’t stopped complaining this entire time. I’m actually surprised you could complain that much without stopping to breathe.”
The thing with 2D brawlers is, most feel like the same game with different skins. Even popular ones. Look, I played Streets of Rage and its sequels when they were in Ultimate Genesis Collection. I played Final Fight on Capcom Classics Collection. I’m happy you old school gamers still enjoy them, but I don’t get it. It’s just button mashing the same guys, walking to the right a few feet, then button mashing more of the same guys. Repeat this until you run into a boss with an unfair attack pattern and button mash him. Then maybe you watch a static cut scene before repeating the whole process for seven to eight levels. It’s boring. Having a variety of fighting styles doesn’t take the edge off either, because usually there’s one attack that just plain works better than everything else, of which you’ll use it so much that you’ll wear out the buttons you have to hit to activate it.
Fist Puncher, God bless it, does its very best to break up the monotony by including different objectives, branching paths, and fairly short levels. There’s also an upgrade system that, in the tradition of Indie Gamer Chick, I attempted to abuse by simply putting all my stats into strength. Didn’t work, because enemies become downright cheap. I encountered a boss that has a murder of crows surround you. If you’re unable to run away, those damn crows will stun lock you and utterly drain your health. At this point, I had maybe two points spent on defense and I didn’t last too long. Of course, that’s my fault and not the developer’s, but I was still pretty peeved at the cheapness of it. Not to mention that some of the levels are clearly designed with four players in mind, like a subway that fills with poison. You have 90 seconds to clear a few waves of bad guys and a boss. Now, by the time I played this stage, I had nearly filled my strength meter to the brim. It didn’t matter. Enemies were spongy as hell, and there was only one of me to finish a stage meant to be played with friends. The amount of enemies probably should have been scaled back a bit to accommodate solo play.
Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored toilet seat covers shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin’ words!
When you play with friends, it does take the edge off. But while the fighting style consists of more than punches and kicks, Fist Puncher still has a relatively low ceiling before combat gets too repetitive. And while occasional minigames (such as a batting cage where I swear to Christ I could not line up to hit the fucking balls correctly) or hidden keys do try to make this something more, I just found Fist Puncher to be the type of generic brawler that has been done hundreds of times before and will continue to be done until the end of time. Plus, the XBLIG port of the PC title is loaded with some awful glitches. I died during one section of play and had to be brought back to life by being given CPR, which is done by hitting button prompts. Once I was brought back to life, Brian was still bent over in the CPR position, unable to stand up. This was not by design. Weirdly, he eventually stood up, but none of the action buttons would work. He had to intentionally let an enemy knock him down before anything would work again. In addition to all of this, the sound effects (including the voice over narration after the first stage) would cut in and out, sometimes leading to playing whole stages without the satisfaction of hearing your fist smack against some asshole’s face.
I’m not scoring against the glitches (unacceptable as they are), because I didn’t like Fist Puncher regardless. Indie Gamer Guy did, and it would seem many long-term fans of the genre disagree with me as well. Having played through it, I do admit that Fist Puncher is a well crafted tribute to one of the industry’s most revered game types that does try to do a little bit more than they did. But I never liked brawlers to begin with, so I was not who this game was aimed at, and Fist Puncher does absolutely nothing to try to convince people like me that we have it all wrong. Its only ambition was to satisfy fans of games like Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it seems to do that well. I’ll never understand why games like this are still popular when gaming has come so very far since the mid 90s. If anything, brawlers are having a revival, and not one of those ironic ones like people watching movies on VHS or pretending to like My Little Pony. I’m talking honest-to-God elation. I don’t get it. A lot of people my age don’t get it. Then again, people of their age don’t get how we could convince our parents to murder each-other on Black Friday to score the last booster pack of Pokemon cards for Christmas. It’s a generational thing.
400 Microsoft Points have no opinion of Charlie Murder yet, except that it does try to do more with brawlers, and that’s a step in the right direction in the making of this review.
I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming. I thought Mega Man 9 was alright. I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so. I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid. And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider. I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing. I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.
With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well. Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about. With platformers, it gets especially difficult. Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it. And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice. Vintage Hero doesn’t have that. It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy. Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.
Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.
Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play. Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms. The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man. It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets. His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s. When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man. Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret. If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.
But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there. Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles. Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system. As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out. Of course, it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title. There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush. Is it too short? Perhaps. It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be. If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate. Me? I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.
Vintage Hero isn’t flawless. I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own. I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses. It all felt a bit generic. The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal. It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody. Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged. Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design. Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen. But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.
You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out. And it does. It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more. Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own. Its gameplay is fine-tuned. Its levels inspired. It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did. But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy. By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed. Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review. Pure, unbridled love of gaming did. And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.
(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)
80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review. Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff. It was all about the color swapping.
Back in April, as the gaming landscape was preparing for a next-gen level shakeup, I was only thinking about one thing: XBLIG is almost done. I mean, there would be indies on Xbox One of course, but the community that I’ve come to know and love would change. It might be better. It might be worse. But it would certainly not be the same. I’ve thought about how my previous reviews would lose their relevance once those games were no longer available. I’ve thought about the types of games the hundreds of developers I’ve come to know and befriend will create in the future. Change is scary. I’ve spent two years trying to be the best (if not, the loudest) advocate for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Tough Sell
Has my blog actually done anything? Maybe, but not as much as I would have liked. Some developers have credited positive reviews from me for causing a brief sales spike, but nothing significant. On the flip side, I’ve had developers of games I absolutely cremated credit me with a bump in demo downloads.
LaserCat
But then I get down to the sad truth of the matter. There are games on my Leaderboard that have sold under 1,000 copies. Hell, there are games on it that have sold under 500 copies. There are games on XBLIG where I am literally the only person that bought it. I’ve played amazing games that sold so poorly that the developers became demoralized and quit. Being Indie Gamer Chick has been the privilege of my life, but sometimes the tales of woe from developers can be downright heartbreaking.
With the sun setting on this generation, I wanted to try to make one last big push for Xbox Live Indie Games. The community has come together in the past and done their best to promote the platform. There has been three promotions called the Indie Games Uprising that tried to showcase the best new XBLIGs. Unfortunately, the quality of those games was a mixed bag of some genuine gems to go with some unpolished, unfinished turds. The last Uprising was particularly devastating. Microsoft didn’t promote it until long after it had already ended, and when they finally did, the main game featured was Sententia. A well-meaning title that was almost universally recognized as being one of the most abysmal games the platform had seen. To have a game of its quality be the focus of an event designed to promote the best of XBLIGs only served to cement the unfair reputation XBLIG has of being nothing but low quality games that aren’t worth the average one dollar price tag.
I believed the reputation myself before I stated my blog. From the time XBLIG launched until the time that I started Indie Gamer Chick, I bought two games for it. Breath of Death VII was the first. I Made a Game with Zombies in It was the second. I enjoyed both, but attempts at finding more titles of their quality didn’t seem worth the effort. Mostly, I found a lot of demos of stuff that felt like they were developed over the course of a week, devoid of passion, and aimed at entertaining nobody. When I finally started my blog, it didn’t take me too long to find out that there are some really good games on the platform. But the sheer number of awful games drowns out the good.
Beyond that, XBLIG also got a reputation of being nothing but clones of popular games, particularly Minecraft. I’ve played the two most famous of those, Castleminer Z and FortressCraft. I didn’t like them, but I wasn’t really interested in Minecraft either. After playing them, I will say that they are quality games, if you’re into that sort of thing. But there are also a lot of similar games on the platform that weren’t as well produced as those two. At the same time, people would say things like “the top two Minecraft clones weren’t as good as Minecraft was.” Well, of course not (though I’ve heard from some Minecraft fans that actually prefer the XBLIG clones). But their popularity was directly tied to the fact that Minecraft wasn’t available on Xbox. Unfortunately, having clones top the sales charts unfairly painted the platform to look like it was only good for clones. Or if not clones, games featuring Avatars. Regardless of the quality of those games (admittedly, most games centered around Avatars are horrid, but not all of them), most regular gamers don’t like Avatars to begin with, and that turned them off the platform. Then you have non-gaming apps such as Rumble Massage, which is actually the #29 best-selling XBLIG of all-time as of this writing. When there are thousands of titles on the platform and an app that turns your controller into a vibrating dildo has sold better than 99.999% of them, people are just not going to associate that platform with quality video games.
Smooth Operators
So that is the handicap that myself, along with dozens of other advocates of XBLIG, have dealt with. I certainly wasn’t the first critic to focus on XBLIG. I’m just the most successful. But that success is only in comparison to other sites with an XBLIG focus. Your average moderately popular indie gaming site does multiples of what I do on my best day. It’s just plain hard to get gamers excited about good titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. It carries too much baggage. It’s also hard to get someone to take another look at something they’ve long since dismissed. That’s just human nature. In the case of XBLIG, most of what was wrong with it before is still problematic today, so anyone glancing would be likely to assume that nothing has changed. And they’re right, because nothing really has changed. That’s because there were very good games on the service all along. You just had to look closely to find them.
I had two ideas for trying to get a new audience exposed to XBLIG before the new consoles launched. The first was to do a bundle of PC ports for XBLIG. The problem with that was the odds on being able to get one off the ground were probably slim. Even good XBLIGs are a tough sell because of the stigma the brand carries. The other option was to do a massive giveaway of the best XBLIGs over the course of a single day. Well, you know how it played out.
Surprise! We Like Your Idea!
I sent an email off to the guys at Indie Royale sheepishly explaining my idea for a bundle centered around Xbox Live Indie Games. I couldn’t pitch them on the merits of sales potential, because there is no denying that the whole idea was a long shot at best. Thus, I did exactly what I advise people not to do when seeking investments from venture capitalists, or crowd funding, or angel investors: I pitched to them from the heart. I explained to them how the XBLIG/XNA community “adopted” me and what they’ve meant to my life. I was frank about why XBLIG’s reputation was fair, but the fogging effect it created caused the majority of gamers to miss out on some of the best indies of this generation. Finally, I basically said that these developers deserve a break, and that exposure on Indie Royale would not just benefit those with games in the bundle, but could open up the doors for greater recognition for the hundreds of talented developers whose games have sat unloved on XBLIG.
Little Racers STREET
Graeme, one of the main guys at Indie Royale, did respond to me. Which is awesome considering that I’m ultimately small potatoes on the indie scene. Not only did he respond, but I had caught his interest. We discussed the types of games I would include, and how we could set this apart from other bundles. Then, things went quiet for a while. So quiet that I was sure I got the blow off. So, I turned my attention to my alternative plan: a huge giveaway of the best PC ports for XBLIG. The idea was, the developers would have their games free for one day only: July 1, for Indie Gamer Chick’s Second Anniversary. After lining up over a dozen top-notch games, many of which I had planned to include in the bundle (plus other games that would be discounted), I thought I had organized a pretty good little event.
Then I heard back from Graeme. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was officially on. I just had to round up the games.
I changed my underwear and started contacting developers.
Rounding up Games
Your typical bundle usually has five games. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle has eight. The reason for that is simple: I wanted gamers to get the best value for their money as possible. Many of these games sell for between $1 to $3 on Xbox Live right now, not to mention that some would have been featured on previous bundles. But most importantly, I wanted people to see that there is a huge variety of very good games on the platform that they had been missing out on.
If I could have, I would have included every single developer who wanted in. But that wasn’t an option. I’ve made tons of friends who develop XBLIGs since starting my site. I wish I could have included those I was closest with. But the concept of the bundle was that it was supposed to represent the tippy-top of XBLIG quality. After coming up with several variations, I ultimately decided to go off my leaderboard and pick the first eight games that were available in sequential order.
For those new to Indie Gamer Chick, the Leaderboard is a concept I adapted from BBC’s automotive show Top Gear. The idea I had was I would rank every game that I enjoyed in the exact order I would prefer to play them. The method is actually very simple. Whenever a new game receives my Seal of Approval, I start at the bottom of my list and ask myself if I would rather play the new game or the old one. If it’s the new one I prefer, I go up to the next game on the list. I do this until I reach an old game that I prefer over the new one. The new game is then placed below that title on the board. It’s been a fun idea that works really well. It’s interactive. My readers get to debate placement. It also gives developers something to aim for. Just having it made the selection process for this bundle pretty easy. Or so I thought.
Right off the bat, the #3 game on my site, We Are Cubes, was eliminated. It has no PC port, and there wasn’t enough time to get one up and running. The #2 ranked game, Gateways, was not available because the developer already had plans to be in an upcoming bundle. #9, Bleed, was only recently listed on Steam and the timing wasn’t right, but I have no doubt they’ll be in a future bundle. Games like Miner Dig Deep (#11) and Star Ninja (#13) also have no PC ports, while Cthulhu Saves the World (#12) has been in more bundles than I can count. That was cool, because everything in my Top-25 I would proudly stand by as the cream of the XBLIG crop.
But this was a bundle that was about the XBLIGs. So I considered putting some games that were well received by everyone but me in the bundle, with Apple Jack being the game that I felt would probably be the most well received. The problem there was Apple Jack isn’t out on PC yet. It will be soon, and for fans of punishers, you’ll probably like it a hell of a lot more than I did. I thought about including the most popular game on XBLIG that I’m incapable of playing due to my epilepsy: Score Rush by Xona Games. That wasn’t an option because they already had a bundle planned out. Finally, I almost went completely nepotism corrupt and including Aeternum by Brooks Bishop, who is one of my better friends I’ve made through Indie Gamer Chick, not to mention the man who designed my mascot. But that just plain wouldn’t have been right. His game was well received by fans of Bullet Hells, but I absolutely hated it. I get along with bullet hells about as well as I imagine Michael Vick will get along with Cerberus.
So my lineup was set. And then I lost Escape Goat. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong. He wanted in, but he had already committed to other bundles and deals and had to pull out. This was pretty devastating, because Escape Goat is the #1 ranked game on the Leaderboard. I consider it to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made, and I’ve reviewed nearly 400 of them. I also lost Chompy Chomp Chomp, the #5 game on my board, which I consider to be the best party game of this entire gaming generation, indie or otherwise. I was counting on its inclusion because pure party games are quite rare in these kind of bundles, and I wanted it to set this bundle apart from the rest. The developers at Utopian World of Sandwiches were besides themselves when they had to drop out. They wanted in, but a miscommunication forced them out. That sucks. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking about it. Chompy Chomp Chomp is a game that didn’t sell extremely well on XBLIG, but it’s worth your time. Gather up your friends, because you’ll never have a better party for $1, I promise you.
So I went back to the list. Again, many games were just not options based on being too recently featured in other bundles. Penny Arcade Part 3 was out. DLC Quest was out. A couple of my favorite puzzlers, Pixel Blocked! and Aesop’s Garden had no PC ports. Thankfully, the vastly overlooked SpyLeaks was available. Finally, I went to Orbitron, one of my personal favorite games on XBLIG that, I admit, got a mixed-reception elsewhere. Though to be frank, I’m disappointed that ArcadeCraft, which was created by Orbitron developers Firebase Industries, had no PC port. This is thanks to its use of avatars as characters. Yea, ArcadeCraft ranks two spots below Orbitron on the Leaderboard, but there’s no questioning that is has a larger appeal. Seriously guys, get cracking on that PC port. No XBLIG screams “this would be a PC megahit” quite like ArcadeCraft does.
Orbitron: Revolution
The eight games confirmed for real, I had one last thing to do. I really did want to include as many developers as I could, but the problem was, the more games, the smaller the piece of the pie each would get. Indie Royale had never had a bundle with eight separate developers. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle isn’t the largest in terms of total games, but it is the largest in terms of total developers. It also complicates things more from legal and logistical points of view. But I really wanted everyone who had earned my Seal of Approval and genuinely wanted in to have a shot at being in. The only way to do that was to ask if they wanted to simply donate their games to the bundle. A shit deal for them perhaps, but it was all I could do.
Guess what? As always, the XBLIG community stepped up, and I had volunteers. That mystery game? I’m not even sure what it is, but it will come from one of those games, and it will be a game off my Leaderboard. Incredible. Those who did step up are artists. They also have future projects that are coming very soon to both XBLIG and to PC, and they wanted to show that they’re here, they have talent, and you can trust that they can make good games.
Naming Your Bundle of Joy
When I started Indie Gamer Chick, it was totally on a whim. My boyfriend (along with my parents, coworkers, and the ghost of Jacob Marley) all said I needed a hobby. We were going through my Xbox hard drive and stumbled upon Breath of Death VII and I Made a Game With Zombies, the two XBLIGs I owned before starting my blog. Brian, like many gamers, had honestly never heard of XBLIGs. I had previously considered doing a movie related blog, but Brian suggested that I should do XBLIG reviews instead, since gaming was basically all I did with my free time. The name came about after just a couple of minutes of brain storming. I’m a fan of online movie reviews from sources like Red Letter Media and That Guy with the Glasses. TGWTG included the Nostalgia Chick, whose reviews I had come to enjoy quite a bit. So I thought, hey, Indie Gamer Chick. Done and done.
The name is good and catchy, but I didn’t stop to think about the negative aspects of it. Namely, the whole GURL GAMER thing. Besides the very rare joke, I’ve never played up the girl card here. It takes about five minutes worth of reading my blog to see that I’m not playing the “I’m quirky because I’m a girl and I play games” tit-shaking stereotype. So while the name might land curiosity seekers, I would hope my writing and coverage of games that don’t typically get a lot of attention would be the draw of my site. And for the most part, it is. In two years, the amount of times someone ripped me for having “Chick” in my site’s name was minimum. It was a non-factor, and I’m proud of that.
Chester
And then I attached a teaser to the bundle at the end of my review for Penny Arcade 4, and the response was overwhelmingly negative, but in silly ways. Maybe a bit mean-spirited, but mostly the jokes you would expect. Menstruation jokes. Boob jokes. Jokes about casual games that girls play, or games starring girls. That didn’t bother me so much. I mean, if I can’t take that shit (and obviously some people can’t, hence some recent controversies) I should crawl under my bed and never come out because that’s just how people talk. It’s dumb. It’s juvenile. But I’m a critic who liberally uses dick and fart jokes, so I can’t say anything against low brow humor.
The problem is, for the name of a gaming blog, Indie Gamer Chick is perfect. For the name of a bundle? I’ll admit, it’s not so perfect. First off, people unfamiliar with my site (which includes the whole world, give or take a couple thousand people) have no point of reference to why the bundle was called that. None of the games feature girls as the protagonist. Thus, the bundle might seem like Indie Royale was marketing directly to girls in a way that could be considered sexist. This at a time when gender-related tensions in gaming are at an all-time high. Granted, their site and their press release make it clear who Indie Gamer Chick is (raises hand) and that I hand-selected the games. Which is fine, if everyone reads it. They didn’t. The name “Indie Gamer Chick Bundle” appeared on Twitter and across message boards and people lost their shit over it. For most of those people, their anger/outrage was defused when they found out the context of the name. Others moved on to being pissed that my blog had the name “Chick” in it. The rule I guess being that girls that play games are not allowed to say they are girls. I’m not sure if the rule applies to other forms of entertainment. I’ll ask Lady Gaga is she gets shit for her stage name.
The second part is the whole girl gamer thing carries with it the jokes that are such layups that even Kwame Brown couldn’t blow it. “It’s Indie Gamer Chick so of course Bleed will be in the bundle.” Not only does that not bother me, but I laughed. I mean, they’re easy jokes for a reason. Because more than one person thinks of it. Not clever, but hey, funny. And there was no actual malice behind them. Yea, there were a few douchey comments, but the internet has a few douchey people. You know what? The internet is not made up mostly of assholes and misogynists. I know this because I spent two years working with the XBLIG community, which is made up almost entirely of men and they treated me amazing. By the way: making a random girl gamer joke doesn’t make a guy a misogynist or an asshole. Not every joke has malice behind it, and those with malice only seem more represented because they never.. shut.. up!
Should the bundle have been called something else? Maybe. My friend Matt played the devil’s advocate role as we tossed around the merits and detriments of having the bundle carry my name. He floated the idea that calling it the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle would take the attention away from the XBLIG concept. He wasn’t totally wrong about that. Of course, there was no name available that could hammer home that this was an XBLIG themed bundle. Legally, we couldn’t even call it the Xbox Live Indie Game Bundle. The alternative name considered was the XNA Showcase Bundle. XNA is the free gaming development tool set provided by Microsoft upon which all XBLIGs (and some spectacular Xbox Live Arcade games such as Bastion) were built with. XNA was recently discontinued by Microsoft, so having that name for the bundle as a final tribute made sense. Better sense than my friend George Clingerman, who got XNA tattooed on his arm. Though I believe he was merely pining to be Peter Moore’s heir at Microsoft when he did that. Probably while drunk.
Of course, XNA doesn’t mean a whole lot to people outside the development community. And, unlike indies, which will have some future on Xbox as a platform, XNA is done. People will still continue to use it to create PC games, and tools such as MonoGame could potentially lead to some games for next-gen platforms being started on XNA. But it won’t ever again be a major factor in indie development.
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was the name to go with. I know it works at catching attention. If I had to go back to July of 2011, the day I started the site, would I have called it something else? Perhaps CathyPlaysIndies.com or something like that? Again, maybe. If I had known I would eventually end up doing one of these bundles, I probably would have come up with something less controversial. I mean, who knew? I figured nobody would read me. But, I’m not ashamed of the name. I’m proud that Indie Gamer Chick has caught on. I’m proud that I am Indie Gamer Chick. I never thought I would catch on enough to be the recipient of backlash.
And it’s not just me, but the guys at Indie Royale who are getting it. Again, they’ve done everything they could to make it clear that the bundle was handpicked by me, but the name is all most people see, and they find the name sexist. I’m getting a small minority of gamers upset by being yet another female gamer who has to call attention to her gender. That was never my intention. I just thought the name sounded cool. It had a ring to it. Now the name is getting me labeled as an anti-feminist. It’s true that I don’t give a flying fuck about feminism. It’s 2013, and despite the best efforts of some politicians, I don’t feel like a second class citizen, nor have I ever. And yet, based purely on gender, I’m supposed to automatically side on every single point made by professional feminists like Anita Sarkeesian. Isn’t the whole idea that I must side with a professional feminist actually sexist in and of itself? So yea, I do regret that the name in the sense that it brings the gender debate (and all accompanying jokes) onto the table. It’s totally fair, because it’s the name I chose.
SpyLeaks
I’ve always thought what most set me apart from other bloggers and critics was my age and inexperience. I was about two weeks away from turning 22 when I started Indie Gamer Chick. I didn’t grow up with an Atari 2600 or an NES or even the 16-bit platforms. My first console was the original PlayStation. My average reader tends to be about ten years older than me. It’s having that totally different perspective that sets me apart. This is the first time I’ve really talked about the gender issue, but I sort of have to. Would I have gotten it regardless if I had named my blog Random Game Crap, which was seriously what I almost called it? Probably a little, but not as much. Thankfully, some of the people who were like “what the fuck is an Indie Gamer Chick” took the time to read my blog and realize that I’m not a stereotype.
And, of course, my review style sets me apart. I’m certainly not the only critic who is known for being harsh. It’s just that indies are typically spared from scorn. I admit. I knew almost nothing about the indie scene before starting Indie Gamer Chick. I had played indie games, mostly through promotions like Xbox’s Summer of Arcade, or various random PSN releases. But, when I went to check on reviews for Xbox Live Indie Games, there were slim pickings. And what little reviews I could find seemed like they were written by cheerleaders. Absolutely nothing negative discussed about the game. Just praise and positivity, as if the developer were a delicate flower who would wilt and die if anything resembling constructive feedback was spoken. Yea, fuck that. If I was going to do this thing, I would just say exactly what I thought. And that’s what I did.
It’s exactly what quality developers want. I mean, they want to get positive reviews, but they want to earn them. They’re meaningless if they’re handed out like candy to trick-or-treaters. Indie developers desire to improve, and the only way they can do that is through honest feedback. And honest feedback is something they couldn’t count on from friends or family or fellow developers. They should have been able to count on it from critics, but the critics failed to actually criticize anything. When the XBLIG community finally discovered my blog, they were briefly mortified by my review style. But community leaders embraced me and my style. Now, developers use my reviews to help them improve. They aspire to be better. To be what they use as a guidepost for improvement is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever accomplished. It’s especially touching because they’re the ones with the real talent. I’m just someone who plays games. But they treat me special, and that feels amazing.
Let’s Do Launch
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle launched yesterday. The response across message boards was generally negative, I admit. But, aside from a handful of people who just plain loath the idea of my name, most of the feedback is centered around game selection. It’s not that the games are bad. The consensus seems to be that these are good games. It’s that there’s too many repeats from previous bundles, or that only one of the games (Dead Pixels) has Steam keys as an option. These criticisms are absolutely fair and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
Centering a bundle around XBLIGs doesn’t exactly give one the widest range of game selection. There are a lot of solid titles, but stuff I felt worked as a proper showcase for the platform that was available and not completely over-bundled limited my choices. Do I regret not getting Escape Goat? Sure. Am I ashamed that my bundle instead has SpyLeaks? Absolutely not. It’s a wonderful game. I wouldn’t have settled for a selection that wasn’t representative of the best of what XBLIG has to offer. I’m proud that I got to present these eight games to a community that might have overlooked them.
I do admit, not having Steam be an option for seven out of the eight games does suck. Not having Mac as an option for any of the games sucks too. Part of that is that games developed on XNA are tougher to transition to Mac, not to mention costly. You have to remember, with the exception of Dead Pixels (which would qualify as a modest hit), none of these titles were best sellers, and getting the games on Mac could very well have been cost prohibitive. As far as Steam, it again comes down to these games not having the biggest following, and the Greenlight process being slow. Four of the games are going through Greenlight now, and if you enjoyed playing them, give them your vote please. They’ve earned it.
Antipole
So who was this bundle aimed at? I really wanted this to reach gamers who ignored XBLIG, or long since dismissed it. I wanted to show that this is what XBLIG was capable of. One gentlemen offered the following feedback: “I haven’t heard of any of these games.” He meant that as a negative. I was thinking “wait, if you’ve never heard of them, isn’t this exactly the kind of bundle you should be looking at Indie Royale for?” Most XBLIGs have no name recognition. That doesn’t mean they have no value to you as a gamer. If ever there was a platform that should have thrived on sleeper hits, it would be Xbox Live Indie Games.
I think the bundle is probably being better received in terms of sales than people expected from an XBLIG-themed bundle selected by a nobody critic. Is it going to break sales records? Probably not. But is it succeeding at exposing a new group of gamers to XBLIG? Thankfully, the answer to that is yes. People are using my Leaderboard to discover some great games that flew under the radar. That a wonderful market full of hidden gems was right there on their Xbox all along. Even if it only creates a handful of new XBLIG fans, it’s still totally worth it.
It’s ironic that Microsoft announced their plans for self-publishing on Xbox One the same day that my bundle launched. The same bundle I wanted to use to create new fans for my beloved XBLIG. The term “better late than never” comes to mind. That applies to new customers for XBLIG as well. And even for those who think the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle stinks, I hope you will at least tip your hat to this development community, because they will factor into your future in gaming. With their amount of talent, crossing paths with them will be unavoidable. If you have an Xbox and you haven’t checked out the indie channel in quite some time, if not ever, I truly hope you fire it up. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. It’s not perfect, and many of its games downright suck. But the good stuff? The really good stuff? It’s there, and when you find it, it will make your day.
If I pulled out a gun and shot myself right now, then reincarnated, I’m pretty sure I would be running in my new body faster than I would as my Xbox Avatar if I just stayed alive and kept trying at Avatar Physics: Running. Based on the popular (and free, and slightly less impossible) flash-based game QWOP, Running is a simple 100 meter dash, only you have to manually work the legs of your avatar to get there. Of course, doing so is complicated in a way that makes the Impossible Game look like a preschool admission test. After over thirty minutes of playing, the furthest I had made it was a little over two meters past the starting line. Mostly, my character just stiffened up and fell down, like she had simultaneously suffered a stroke while catching a glimpse of Medusa. Take a look at this video from my amigo Splazer Productions.
Splazer did better than I did. Hell, I typically ran further backwards than I did forwards. The only value Avatar Physics: Running has is bemusement at your own failures. This is obviously meant to be the primary draw of the game, as evidenced by the one and only marketplace picture featuring an avatar that has cocked things up about as bad as you can. The problem is, laughing at how hard this game is only lasts about, oh, two minutes. After that, it’s just frustration and tedium. I’m certain someone out there can finish the full 100 meters. I’m also certain someone out there knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. It doesn’t make him any less dead.
Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance. The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other. The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw). You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today. I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen. I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today. Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.
Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness. It looks ugly. There’s no multiplayer. The AI is brain-dead. The gameplay is boring. The upgrades are dull. The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag. All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with. You’re on one side of a screen. Your AI opponent is on the other. You shoot until one of you is dead. Then you upgrade your ship and do it again. The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit. Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship. After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller. So I did. Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved). At which point, it instakilled me again. Grumble.
This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.
Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games. But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare. The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint. The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see. The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot. That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing. Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare. Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care. I don’t know what else to say. Boring. Bad. Overpriced. You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser. And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.
240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review. I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.
Dark Quest is based on the early 90s cult board game hit HeroQuest. I’ve never played the game, but after asking around on Twitter, I had a few fans of it confirm that it’s a very close facsimile of the real thing. If that’s what you’ve been looking for over the last twenty years, this review is irrelevant to you. Go get it. This review is for those who missed out on it when it was played using cheap plastic characters, dice, and cardboard.
In the interest of professionalism, I looked up the original rules to the game. And by that, I mean I watched a four-minute long video by the Angry Video Game Nerd that kind of, sort of explained the rules. I thought “ugh, looks complicated. Well, at least I’ll be able to learn how the game plays in the tutorial they no doubt took the time to meticulously craft.” Which again proves that the whole Cuban women having clairvoyance thing is hogwash. There is no tutorial for Dark Quest. You’re thrown into the first dungeon immediately, which offers things that are sort of pointers, but not really. Fighting enemies, discovering hidden traps, and using various weapons are mechanics the player is left to discover on their own. I suppose if you’re familiar with HeroQuest, this might not be so bad. For people like me, it’s clear that we’re unwelcome guests at the Dark Quest party.
Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.
After somehow stumbling through the first dungeon and picking up a couple secondary characters, I shamefully succumbed to boredom and ignorance in the second level. Here, you have to find hidden jewels, insert them into statues to activate a door, and then fight roughly five million skeletons, give or take. The problem here was my previously established “worst random luck in gaming” status was confirmed about ten fold. I would swing at the skeletons with my barbarian and miss. Then my dwarf and miss. Then my wizard and miss. Or, if I didn’t miss, something would pop up that said “CHEAT DEATH” which I think is basically a fancy way of saying “missed.” Then, the room full of skeletons would attack. Funny enough, they would also miss more often than hit, no matter which of the characters they attacked. But, they had numbers on me, and slowly I would drain away until I was reduced to a pile of bones. I either was killed by the skeletons or I died of boredom. Not sure which.
I tried this level a few times. There is a small instruction card, which noted that the dwarf was the best defender. So, on my second attempt, when I would enter a room that I knew was filled with baddies, I would lead with him. Which made sense, since he has the largest movement. Now, here’s where it gets weird: the dwarf, the guy with the alleged best defense, was the character that the enemies missed the least. It was un-fucking-canny. I’m not blaming the developers for me being unlucky, but I would ask them “are you sure this guy has extra points of defense?” What am I missing here? Besides 3 out of 4 of my attempts at attacks? To make matters worse, every once in a while the dungeon master would spit out a random effect, which includes such things as “lose some gold” or “lose your turn.” What did he hit most often? “Lose one health.” Of course that’s what he did. Meanwhile, I was getting my will to go on sapped by the game’s snail-like pace and unintuitive control scheme. After giving that second dungeon a fourth go and dying in the same fucking room, I’d had enough. Yep, I couldn’t even complete the second stage. Shame on me, I suck as a gamer, yada yada yada.
You know what? In this case, I don’t think it was just me. I’ve heard from at least one other player that they were the victim of missing far too often when they went to attack. Or sometimes a character can be next to an enemy and they can spend multiple turns swinging at each other and missing every time. Each stage has a time limit in the form of a limited number of turns the player can take. I never came close to the limit, but the sheer number of turns that a battle can drag out could be problematic in later levels. Maybe.
Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!
I know I’m not who this game was made for, and that’s fine with me. It looks good. It sounds good. I know HeroQuest fans are satisfied with it. Although they’re a little puzzled by the lack of dice. However, non-fans will find a slow, newb-hating dungeon crawler in board-game form that is about as exciting a watching paint dry. On top of that, I also think fans of HeroQuest will find things to be disappointed in it. There’s no multiplayer. Granted, eliminating a player controlling the enemies is probably a logical and reasonable thing to hand off to the AI. But, not having the option for four players to take control of the heroes is kind of silly, especially since board games such as this are built entirely around social interaction. I guess you could hypothetically just pass the controller off to other players after making your move. It’s not really convenient, but hey, it’s a chance to play a moderately popular game twenty years after it dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, it wasn’t popular enough to last more than a couple of years on store shelves. And you would think fans of the game would still own the corporeal board and game pieces. Okay, so I have no fucking clue at all why this game exists, since it takes almost no advantage of things that can only be done in the realm of video games. H.i.v.e. demonstrated they can at least be used to ease people into learning a new game, but Dark Quest doesn’t even do that. Nor does it have online support. This was a weird one to review. A really well produced homage to some vintage thing that I’d never heard of. I can’t recommend it to non-fans of the thing it’s based on, but even fans might find little to get excited about. Don’t get me wrong: there’s an audience for Dark Quest. Twitter already confirmed that for me. What I’m saying is, if you want to properly pay tribute to a classic gaming property, here’s a thought: use some of this space-age technology we have these days and make the original concept better. Otherwise, it’s less a tribute and more like grave robbery.
80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind some kind of version of Don’t Break the Ice for Wii U, but only if it involves using the touch screen and an actual mallet in the making of this review.
Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick. It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined. This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows. And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers. Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions. I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.
This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off. The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck. But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions. The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here. The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them. Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it. The other two are looking for profits. And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.
For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.
There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs. His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it. Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio. Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one. If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible. This is rubbing people the wrong way.
Guys, come on. This is clearly a satire. And I’m not joking about that either. I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here. This was obviously a joke. And, in a way, it might be brilliant. I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick. Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character. Jaded. Bitter. Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit. The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with. It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.
As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys. You can’t be that thick. It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community. The kind that nobody really should take seriously. I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it. The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting. It’s uncanny. And it’s also clearly parody. The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog. They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game. Get it? This was spot on. Perhaps too deadpan though. There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die. They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.
Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it. I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes. No, really. There are multiple endings of course. I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls. This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game. Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me. Yea, go figure. I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it. My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.
After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.
The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present. When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog. You have to start from the beginning. Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason. The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls. Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game! You know what? I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought. I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have. It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.
240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review. You know what? It’s an RPG that actually looks good!
You can file Monkey Poo Flinger.. again, no really.. under novelty games. It has no real value as a game. On my most generous day, I would call its gameplay mediocre. On a less than generous day, I would probably just flip the bird and make fart noises with my mouth. But seriously, you don’t buy a game called Monkey Poo Flinger expecting the next Spec Ops – The Line. You get it because monkeys are hilarious, poo is hilarious, and monkeys throwing poo is the greatest comedy goldmine of all time.
BUT, if your game is going to be themed around a monkey throwing poo at people, it has to at least look good. Covering some gawking human with feces should be a visually satisfying experience. That’s not the case here. The graphics look crude, so any successful shot doesn’t have any zing to it. I mean, you just absolutely plastered some asshole in the face with a handful of shit. When I do that to Brian, it’s the highlight of my day. Here, it’s just hollow. I mean, look at it.
It looks horrible. It’s actually not as bad as it appears from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still not fun. Monkey Poo Flinger is a pretty basic gallery shooter. Press the right trigger to shoot. Targets walk in front of you and you shoot them. Sometimes there are barriers between you and then. Sometimes they throw stuff back. Sometimes the game forgets to take its brain pills and takes away your ability to shoot altogether in a level that is, I shit you not, themed around being constipated. Not that I’m offended. I’ve played games where you have to feed cows prune juice to give them diarrhea and games where you use yellow snowballs as weapons. Do you know what all those games have in common? The novelty wore thin pretty fast, and you’re left with a game that was average at best (Conker) or pretty terrible (South Park 64). The novelty is a non-factor in Monkey Poo Flinger because the graphics just don’t do the concept justice. Thus, it’s boring right from the get-go.
I’ll say this: I thought I would be playing something utterly broken, and that’s not the case. There’s a real game here. It’s just not fun at all. There’s other problems too, like projectiles (especially from the seagulls) being too hard to see, or the targets not being large enough. Probably the best thing about the game is the dialog, which is like saying the best part about getting hypothermia is you get a souvenir blanket. The between-the-levels banter offers, at best, a smirk and a shake of the head. But you have to play a dull as dirt game to get those meager crumbs of entertainment. So I can’t really recommend Monkey Poo Flinger. I also have to ask a couple of questions that really ought to be addressed: where the hell is that monkey getting all that shit from? Does his anus contain a fucking zip-drive? And why does the zoo leave this monkey in such a high foot-trafficked area? I think a better concept would have been a mad monkey won’t stop throwing shit at people and we have to stop it, with the ultimate goal of dropping it off at the state department so that we can send it to North Korea as a, ahem, diplomatic gift.
The Last Fortune was developed by Misty Day Games
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