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?
Let it be said that I can be shallow. No matter how bad a game looks, I can be won over by cover art that warms my heart. And nothing is quite as heart warming as the cover to Arrow in the Knee.
Oh stop crying. Serves you right for running in front of a dude shooting arrows trying to protect your ass!
Beautiful, isn’t it? Of course, if you were actually encouraged to shoot those annoying bitches in the knee, the game would have been ten times better. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Arrow in the Knee is a wave shooter where you stand atop a castle, firing arrows at various baddies that charge you. The hook is that if you hit one of the basic enemies in the knee, they join your side and help you defend your castle. It’s an interesting concept, but failed by some sloppy execution. I could never quite get the hang of the aiming, and would have offered up the soul of my first-born (which I never plan on having, but it’s the thought that counts) for a cross-hair. Not offering one, even as a paid power-up in the game’s shop, seems like a gigantic oversight akin to a zookeeper leaving eucalyptus-flavored rat poison inside the Koala pen.
Knee in the Arrow really has the look of a bad XBLIG, but sometimes the really bad-looking stuff can surprise you. I’ve been caught off guard by the quality of games like Don’t Feed the Trolls, The Cannon, and Asphalt Jungle 2 in the past, and Arrow seems like it should join them in the “surprisingly fun” camp. It doesn’t, but it comes close. There’s a wide variety of enemies, items to purchase, and arrows to fire. So why didn’t I like it? Well, part of it is those bad graphics, which contribute to the difficulty in aiming, but also make it hard to distinguish between what type of arrow you’re firing. Some of the enemies get too spongy and attack too fast for you to reasonably defend yourself. The Dragons, for example, knock out one floor of your castle every time they attack. You’re supposed to use ice arrow to defend yourself, but their bullets move too fast and realistically you’ll only have one shot to actually hit the fireball. Because the aiming never feels quite right, it’s sort of a crap shoot to actually hit it, leaving you better off unloading arrows directly into the dragon and hoping you survive the round and can hire guys to fix your castle.
I didn’t get a chance to play this four players. It probably takes the sting out significantly. Having said that, try convincing YOUR friends to play an Xbox Live Indie Game called “Arrow in the Knee” that looks like THAT over Borderlands 2. It’s harder than it sounds.
If Arrow in the Knee was more aim-friendly, it would at best be a tolerable little wave shooter that you would forget about as soon as you shut off the console. Don’t get me wrong, there are things I like about it. The whole “kneecap an enemy to get them on your side” bit works. Well actually, you don’t even need to shoot them in the knee. The foot seems to work just fine, and thank God for that, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had anyone switch teams for me. But as a hook, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. As far as I could tell, only one type of baddie switches teams if you kneecap them. It’s not enough. The hook is a good hook! So why limit it to the most basic type of enemy? It’s really disappointing. Imagine if the Wright Brothers stopped at “let’s just put one wing on this thing and see what happens!” That’s what the developers of Arrow in the Knee did. They also gave me the false hope that kneecapping people really does get them to switch teams. My apologies to Miami Heat fans. I was hoping to get LeBron to join the Warriors.
Being coordinated is not among my attributes, so being able to play games at all is something of a small miracle. But some stuff is simply off-limits to me. Dancing games, for example. I once fell off the platform playing Dance Dance Revolution at a bowling alley and ended up with a small break in my ankle. On the XBLIG side of things, I could barely get through NYAN-TECH, which asked gamers to perform finger-yoga while playing a platformer. It’s something my brain is not wired for. I didn’t think a game could get any more demanding than that, but having just played Divided, I stand corrected.
I could have sworn I did this puzzle last month when I played Gateways. Not sure which way was the least intuitive.
Divided is part puzzler, part platformer, and part road sobriety test from hell. You play as a little blue blob of goo that has to get from point A to point B. The hook is at times you have to split apart your goo and control each bit independently. You move one with the left stick and jump it with the left bumper, while moving the other with the right stick and jumping with the right bumper. It might as well ask me to jump rope while playing the piano, because I’m not capable of it. I don’t know if it’s because of my autism or a natural lack of dexterity, but I have difficulty walking and breathing at the same time.
I can’t really fault Divided for my own personal hangups. When I would play and have to move the right-stick blob, I would inevitably fuck it up and instinctively try to move using the left stick. I couldn’t help it, even after hours I would do it again and again. I was quite embarrassed. Brian was laughing his ass off. My dog walked out of the room and got into the garbage. Probably not related, but it happened while I was playing Divided, so it seemed worth mentioning.
Where I can fault Divided is it’s just not a very well made game. Ignoring the pat-your-head-and-rub-your-belly design, the controls are unresponsive. Some areas of the game require precision platforming, but movement is loose, jumping feels lethargic, and the camera often doesn’t pull back far enough for you to get a clear picture of everything you’re required to do. Those are three major issues that have nothing to do with my own inability to play the game. On top of that, the level design is cruel, often requiring you to make timing-based precision jumps using two characters controlled by different sticks. What kind of freak would be good at this game? If you have the hand-eye coordination that Divided requires and you’re wasting it playing Divided instead of being a world champion athlete, you’re just a silly poop face. Yes, I can be childish.
I didn’t make it very far in Divided. I suppose I could have practiced at it, but I would have hated myself for doing so.
Co-op doesn’t work so hot either, because all the control and camera problems I talked about earlier. Sometimes the game wants you to make a jump, but requires one character to be too far away from the other. Because of the camera, that often turns into a blind jump. Otherwise, most of the problems come down to the controls being too fickle. Using the chains for climbing especially, which caused a lot of slippage. Ultimately, even if I had been capable of playing Divided the way it’s intended to be played, I don’t think I would have liked it. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Who knows, maybe I would be impressed if I saw someone who could maneuver both guys at the same time with total ease. I probably would give the person a round of applause, and then smack them upside the head for not using their super powers to fight crime or something more productive.
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.
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!”
Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank has sat on my to-do pile for a while. I’m not sure why it took me so long to review. It looked good. The trailer made it seem cool. Chalk it up to me being a scatterbrain, but it always slipped through the cracks. Well, yesterday I finally got around to playing it, because there had been a serious drought in new XBLIGs. The moment I finished the game about an hour later, I had three review requests. Today, I have seven total. It’s like a running gag with Indie Gamer Chick. The minute I start a game that was released over a year ago, the flood gates open and all the new releases hit. I’m onto you, XBLIG.
The graphics are nice. Almost Claymation-like.
The idea is you’re a tank that has to plow through a world, shooting enemies and innocent wildlife, rolling over things, and trying not to flip over. The game is physics based, and rolling over is the toughest thing you’ll have to deal with. The rolling over stuff is what got me killed the most. I rolled over more than a dead dog caught in a clothes dryer. If there was a hill, a crate, or a shell from the machine gun, you can bet I flipped the tank over trying to get past it. The physics and the terrain seem tailor-made for causing you to do your best beached-turtle impression. In fact, that seems to be the game’s sole goal, rather than be entertaining. I mentioned this to the developer, and he told me it was like Trials HD, only with a tank. I think he forgot the part where Trials HD is actually fun.
Along with bumpy hills, there are enemies. Guys who shoot guns at you, guys who shoot rockets at you, and landmines. To counter this, you have a minigun and the tank’s cannon. Neither of them are easy to line up and aim correctly, especially given how herky-jerky the physics are. Enemies also seem to fire at a rate faster than you, and are typically placed in a position where you’ll already have rolled over from trying to clear a hill with more divots in it than a driving range. Thankfully, they don’t respawn if you kill them and you die. I think. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s true because I experienced one of the most pleasant glitches I’ve ever encountered in a game.
Check this out: I’m playing the game and I get a phone call. So I pause things and answer that. The phone call ends and I pick the controller back up and press A expecting to continue. Only I don’t, because for some brain fart of a reason, when you pause the game it doesn’t highlight “Continue.” It highlights “Restart.” There’s also no “are you sure?” confirmation screen. So I had to restart from the beginning. I handled this about as well as you would expect me to, IE I lost my shit. Screaming, cussing, declaring my intent to assassinate the last surviving Time Lord, blot out the sun, club a baby seal, and cast every first-born male into the Nile.
“If only I had access to some kind of weapon, perhaps vehicle-based, that I could terrorize people with! Bah, like such a thing exists!”
But, before I could turn off the Xbox, I was reminded that I would give every game at least an hour before doing a rage quit. Well fuck, said I. So I decided to eat shit and restart the game. Only this time, there were no enemies. None. Every single living thing, even the birds and rabbits that you could shoot just for shits and giggles, were gone. No landmines either. Just me, some bumpy hills, a few checkpoints, and a silly ending that teased a sequel. No, please don’t. I think you’ve said all that needs to be said with this one.
Of course, the professional thing to do would have been to restart the game and play it again with all the enemies. I didn’t do that, but it would have been. I had encountered enemies in my first run. I didn’t think it was well conceived how they were used over the course of the first twenty minutes of playtime, and I can’t imagine it would have been better for the last twenty. Really, the problem with Tiny Tim’s Tremendous Tank is it’s just not fun. The only way to clear some of the hills without flipping over is to inch up them, and what’s fun about that? Enemies are too easily able to double up on you, and with poor aiming mechanics it’s kind of hard to fight back. I think somewhere along the lines, the developers had the right idea for a decent game, but the final product is dull, frustrating, and glitchy as hell. Ignoring the no-enemies thing, I had one instance where I was driving off a hill, barely caught my bumper on the back of a hill and the whole thing fell apart. I was boggled by how exactly that kind of damage could happen, but soon afterwards my tank fell apart again. Only that time, I was rolling along a flat piece of terrain. I hadn’t hit anything, or gone over a hill. It just sort of crumbled. Since I have no logical explanation for that, I’ll chalk it up to my tank being driven by Chief Quimby and one of his messages to Inspector Gadget detonated prematurely. It’s bound to happen once in a while, right?
Hell Yeah! comes to us from Arkedo, the guys who did the Arkedo Series of XBLIGs. As a quick recap of what I thought of those, they’re pretty games that were boring as hell, and vastly overrated by the community at large. All style, no substance. So let it be said to all aspiring developers: style must be all you need. That’s because Arkedo’s latest game just landed on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade and is being published by none other than Sega. So what does this mean? Well, obviously with a company that puts such a high premium of quality as Sega does, we can expect plenty of substance to go with the style here. Heh. Hehehe. Right. Oh, and being on PSN and XBLA bumps the sticker up on it to $15. Joy.
Don’t worry. Walking on this fire won’t burn you. Some fires in this game will, but this one won’t. Good luck keeping track of that!
You’re a rabbit that is the brutal ruler of Hell. And then he gets caught corn-holing a rubber ducky in his bathtub, photos of it circulate, and it ruins his reputation, thus forcing him to extract revenge. No, really. That’s the plot. Did I mention this game is Japanese? No? Well, it’s not. It’s French. That somehow makes it worse. You know how everyone has someone in their life that will do an obnoxiously racist impression of a Japanese person? Imagine if that person were French. Go ahead and do it. I’ll wait.
Cringe worthy, huh?
The bizarre story is complemented by some of the most painfully unfunny dialog and gags I’ve encountered in a game. Lots of cussing, lots of call backs to other games, and lots of random weirdness. All of which can be funny if it has a punchline, or some semblance of context. There is none of that in Hell Yeah.
At first glance, Hell Yeah looks like a typical platformer, only with some run-and-spray shooting mechanics thrown in. But there is a hook, and it could have been a neat one. There are several “large” enemies throughout the game that you have to track down and kill. This is done by draining their health bar, which then activates a Wario Ware-like quick-time event. If you complete the event successfully, the enemy is defeated in a spectacularly over-the-top pseudo cut scene. It sounds great, and at first it kept me slogging through the game, even though the amount of fun I was having would have to be measured in nano-fractions. For a while, every character died uniquely. After about three hours (or 30 odd creatures) in, that stopped. In a fire stage, I beat one enemy and a dude shaped like a piece of toast shouted “ROASTIE!” Ohhhhh, I get it. Like that guy in Mortal Kombat. The thing is, that joke is so over-played that it hasn’t been funny since long before I was even playing games. I felt bad for Arkedo, but then the very next guy I killed, the Roastie guy popped up again to do the same exact joke. Suddenly, I didn’t feel bad for them anymore. This is the equivalent of a drunk at a party telling a lame joke and then saying “get it?” You want to tell them with all sincerity and concern, “no really, you should stop.” But they’re still laughing at themselves, nodding their head and saying “no, GET IT?” Sigh. Yes, I get it. It just isn’t funny. And Hell Yeah is not funny at all. Not once. Not even on accident.
Boss fights are multi-staged events that take too long and have no check points. Are we having fun yet?
Meanwhile, the gameplay seems like it should be better than it is. The controls are mostly adequate. Your dude walks around, picking up an absurd amount of weapons, shooting things, wall jumping, double jumping, and cutting through enemies using a saw-blade/jetpack thing that you pick up right off the bat. With all this firepower, you would think it would be really fun to just run around and kill things. But it never is. And sometimes those adequate controls go off their meds and become unreasonable. Aiming is done with the right stick, but all movement is handled by the left stick, with no option for the directional pad. It makes it really awkward when an enemy’s only weak spot can be hit by jumping, aiming downwards and firing. I couldn’t help but take damage every time this was required. A dash attack later on gets mapped to the left trigger, at which point the controls officially cross the line from decent to cumbersome. Plus, you have too many weapons to juggle (and you get more as you go along), so sections of the game where everything is taken from you actually come as a startling relief. Oddly enough, those are the only parts of the game that I almost had a little bit of fun. Almost.
Hell Yeah is just a bad game. A directionless hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that often don’t work the way they should. The QTEs required to beat enemies don’t always offer enough time to set yourself and figure out what you’re supposed to do. If you fail one, you take damage and the enemy gets some of its life back. I would be shocked if a person was capable of doing most of these on their first try. It turns Hell Yeah into a serious of “gotcha” moments. Even worse is the checkpoint system. There’s quite a few checkpoints, but they’re not marked clearly enough. But the real crappy part is if you die and respawn, you come back with the same amount of life you had when you hit the check point. Imagine going into a difficult, bullet-hellish section with only a tiny fraction of health left. It forces you to backtrack to the last health refill station, which you can bet your ass is on the other side of the level, without taking damage. It also doesn’t help that the levels are sprawling and BORING. Even having beautiful graphics isn’t all that helpful. If you got lost wandering the Louvre for hours on end, you’re not going to finally walk out of the place saying “well, at least it was a good sight-seeing tour.”
The “each guy gets a gruesome death” stuff was good, until they started repeating themselves.
Arkedo continues to have the style-over-substance problem. This is the fourth game I’ve played of theirs and the fourth one that I decided to quit before the game was finished. I know people say that’s not very professional conduct. Thankfully, I’ve never claimed to be a professional, so I can stick out my tongue and blow a raspberry at them. I put about five hours into Hell Yeah! and was bored stiff by horrible level design, droning boss fights, and controls that started okay but got progressive worse as the game kept changing directions. It sure is pretty to look at, but that doesn’t take the edge off the tedium. I wouldn’t have liked Hell Yeah if it had been a $1 XBLIG. At $15, I’m pretty sure I’m now going to hell for murdering money. Ironically, once there I’ll probably be stuck playing Hell Yeah.
Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit was developed by Arkedo
$14.99 heard that Judas chose being chewed on by Satan over playing Sententiain the making of this review.
Ovary Overload is a twin-stick shooter where you take the role of an unfertilized egg that tries to defend itself from being inseminated. By sperm. I wish there was some wacky gameplay hook to go with this, but no, it really is just shooting slow-moving sperm with an unfertilized egg. Sure, the sperm comes in multiple colors, suggesting that the chick this egg belongs to got jiggy with the entire cast of Power Rangers, but that’s it. Shoot sperm. There’s a few weapons upgrades and large sperm boss (that presumably comes from Megazord), but there is nothing here that hasn’t been done so much better a million times before. When the entire hook of your game is “a slower, crappier version of Robotron, only you shoot sperm” you probably need to go back to the drawing board. Sorry for the short review, but there is nothing else to talk about.
Ovary Overload. Conception has never been this boring.
Wait, there’s another sperm-based XBLIG? Are you fucking kidding me?
Oh hey, actually this one isn’t bad at all. It’s called Spermatozoon. Here, you play as the sperm, shooting them at the egg. Surrounding the egg is a series of rotating walls, or “contraceptives.” The walls typically have gaps in them. While it begs the question as to who the fuck makes contraceptives with holes in them (probably diaper companies, the shady pricks), it actually makes for a really fun, old-time arcadey shooter. The hook is, you can’t actually move the sperms around yourself, nor select which one you want to fire. They surround the egg, and you fire them one-at-a-time. You only need one shot to get to the egg to win, while any shots that hit the walls punch a hole in them. Does sperm really do that? How come used condoms don’t look like they were attacked by millions of little termites every time someone finishes with one?
The gimmick is absurd, but the game is fun. There’s 53 levels, all with different twists to the formula. Sometimes the walls are unbreakable. Sometimes the sperm has to slowly pass through a wall of water. Sometimes the water carries it around the board. Another question: where the hell are these people having sex at where they’re getting destructible condoms with preexisting holes in them that have water spinning around in them? A spa? A hurricane? I thought for a second this might not be human sperm, but it makes a distinctive “YEE HAW!” when it penetrates the egg, so obviously we’re talking about Texan sperm here. I’m not sure what in Texas would encompass all the above. A semi-aquatic Swiss-cheese themed rodeo?
I have an alternate name for Spermatozoon: Hardon Collider.
Spermatozoon is certainly worth a look, but it’s got some pretty nasty flaws too. Difficulty doesn’t scale properly. Over the course of fifty-three levels, I had at least three instances where I would get stuck on a stage, go through multiple rounds of failure, then immediately finish the next stage or two in one single shot. Later in the game, the walls rotate so fast and are so dense that there’s no room for strategy or aiming. You just mash the buttons and wait for the miracle of life to play out. That’s disappointing, because the concept is so good, it should lend itself to more levels that allow you to carefully, patiently wait for the perfect shot. I also didn’t find the multiplayer very compelling. It’s the same game, only the sperm are divided up between two to four players. It didn’t really feel competitive or cooperative. It was just sort of there. I had more fun just playing by myself. I’m not sure if that counts as masturbation with a game like this. I probably should do a couple rosaries just in case.
Either way, Spermatozoon is really fun and I totally recommend it. Personally, it has got to be one of the biggest surprises I’ve come across on XBLIG. Even with a stupid, immature theme designed to appeal to the kind of twits that giggle when someone says “erect”, it’s a good game, and that’s all I’ve ever cared about. It could be a game themed around removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass, and I’ll still recommend it if it’s a good game. By the way, I hear their next game involves removing lint from the crack of a hippopotamus’ ass. I’m really excited for it.
Ignore the above name. Thanks to “retro” Atari 2600 style graphics, you can’t really see that you’re tossing adorable animals that explode on contact at your enemies. It actually looks more like Spider-Man throwing dried out dog turds at Lego figures. But, since that comes dangerously close to infringing on the plans for Traveller’s Tales next licensed schlock, Bungee Ferret Tossing it is!
One of my pet peeves is retro-looking games that only do it part-way. Bungee Ferret Tossing looks like an early 80s console game, but it doesn’t sound like one. At all. There’s full voice narration, a generic soundtrack that should have been chiptuned, and the most annoying sound effects in recorded history. I can’t stress enough how bad they are. Imagine a marching band made of bag-pipers and Fran Drecher operating a jackhammer. Actually, don’t. I don’t want that on my conscience. Just, trust me on this. It’s bad.
Ninjas are well-known for the ability to jump forty feet in the air.
So the “throwing explosive ferrets at enemies” gimmick is ruined because it doesn’t look like you’re doing that. That means the game has to stand on its own. Does it? Maybe a little bit. B.F.T. plays out like a wave shooter. You sway back and forth from a helicopter (hence the bungee part) lobbing grenades at enemies. If the enemies shoot you, or if a bird flies into your chopper, you lose health. Your health auto-refills, while the chopper has limited damage. Also, enemy fire causes you to swing more erratically, making it more difficult to aim your shots. Allegedly, at least. I could never quite get the hang of aiming while Spider-Man was swinging at a normal rate. The throwing physics don’t seem to line up with the laws of physics. At best, I could land a “ferret” somewhere in the general vicinity of an enemy and hope the generous blast radius would kill them. Generally it would, but then the game would pull a dick move by having me throw out timed grenades that seemed to only work if they stuck to a baddie. The really fun grenades, like ones that spread out or heat-seek enemies, don’t come until later on, and they’re so rare they might as well not be there. Once again, I found myself wishing that someone would follow Bird Assassin‘s lead and give you all the fun stuff early on, let you abuse the shit out of it, and have a good time for your dollar.
Don’t let this discourage you from getting Bungee Ferret Tossing. I actually did have fun with it. It’s a perfectly good waste of a half-hour. I just wish it did more. There’s a Survival mode that’s dull as dishwater, and a time-attack mode that basically makes a mess of the whole game. The enemies shoot at you non-stop, and even with “blinking” you have no chance of survival once you’re tagged. On top of that, the controls for that particular mode feel like they were dipped in road tar and then mummified. Why are the controls so stiff in it? I don’t know. Neurosyphilis perhaps, although that’s probably giving the developer way too much extracurricular credit. I keed.
Pictured: a black gentleman hanging from the end of a rope while a bunch of white guys fire guns into the air. This game will be HUGE in Alabama.
So here’s the deal: Bungee Ferret Tossing is stupid stupid stupid. Some of the modes don’t work. It’s a bit too repetitive and doesn’t offer enough variety of enemies or weapons. BUT, it’s a little fun. That’s what counts in my book. Strip away the bullshit premise, hit mute on the TV, and remove the gore and it would be exactly like an old school Atari 2600 game. One of oddball titles that doesn’t suck to play nearly forty years later. Of course, like the best games from that era, playing it today is only good for about twenty minutes to an hour, and you’ll forget completely about it as soon you turn it off. Hey, that’s good enough for me. It’s like watching a Dukes of Hazzard rerun.
I’m a pretty big fan of falling block puzzlers, with my preferences of which ones to play going in the following order: Puyo Puyo, Lumines, and Super Puzzle Fighter. My least favorite? Probably Columns, along with all its sequels and clones. Oddly enough, Columns is probably the smarter of the four games listed above. Setting up combos in it requires a level of focus and cognitive thinking that most of the games in its family don’t require. Personally, I would rather play the faster-paced stupid people stuff than the slow and boring smart people stuff. Besides, playing the smart people stuff doesn’t make me feel smarter. It makes me feel stupider for not spending my free time having fun like a smart person does.
Wait, I think that means Columns is in fact the stupid person game. Or the smart game for idiots. Which means Puyo Puyo is the stupid game for smart people. Ugh, I hate it when I do this. I have to get off this train of thought before my nose starts bleeding again.
Snore.
I was going somewhere with the above mess. Senoka is the smart idiot’s smart in a stupid way game. Excuse me, nose bleed.
Okay, so Senoka is like Columns, only instead of clearing colored blocks by matching them together, you clear them by matching them to the color in the background. God, that just sounds like the most boring thing since the World Championships of Coloring Books, and at least that had the drama of young Timmy Johnson being unable to stay in the lines due to a hand cramp. Senoka’s pace is snail-slow, and despite featuring a combo-based scoring system, doesn’t have the ease of actually setting up combos. Without that, the potential for addiction that a great falling blocks game needs is not there.
It’s not that Senoka is badly made. It works, at least when you figure out what you’re doing. There’s no tutorial, or any form of an explanation screen. I would call this a rookie mistake, since Senoka comes from a first-time developer, but come on! This is the type of mistake from someone who has never played games before. You’re thrown into the deep end right from the start. And that deep end is filled with sharks, because the AI is way over balanced. Even on easy mode, AI opponents move and think faster than you and are almost unbeatable. The demoralizing AI and the boring concept make for a game that is almost numbing in its dullness. Senoka is the boring game for boring people.
I once said Portal had ruined an entire generation, at least creatively. I was only half-serious when I said that. At the end of the day, I’ll still insist that Portal was worth all the lame test chamber settings, cake jokes, and sarcastic AI antagonists that indie gaming has used in lieu of creativity. But I’m not sure the same could be said about Super Meat Boy. Look, I kind of liked it. I wouldn’t give it a glowing recommendation or anything (at least not without a full psychological screening first), but I appreciated the fast-paced, devil-may-care attitude of it. Plus it’s one of the only punishers that made failure rewarding, by showing replays of all the little Meat Boys you sent to Hell while trying to clear the gaps filled with buzzsaws. When you finally beat a tough level and got to see all the dozens of ways you die play out, it was awesome. It was something other than a counter telling you how big a fuck-up you are, and I was grateful for that.
Now I know that not every punisher is trying to be a clone of Super Meat Boy. That would be ignorant to believe. But the connection between some games and SMB is undeniable. Take today’s game, Face-Plant Adventures, for example. It’s a character-themed punisher where you have to take an Audrey II like carnivorous plant across various stages where you have to jump over spikes. It’s pretty much all spikes, all the time in Face-Plant Adventures. I’m not sure I fully grasp the logic of why spikes are so dangerous. I mean, are they sharp on all ends, or just the pointy tip? Try thinking of a sword here. Now if you jump anus-first onto the blade of a sword, you’re going to be in for a world of pain. However, if lean the sword up against something and put some rails on it, it would make a slide safe enough for a children’s playground. Well, it would have to be a big sword. Like Cloud Strife’s.
Take my word for it: set the brightness to 150% in the options. The game is ridiculously dark in many sections, making spikes almost invisible.
Wow, off topic. Okay, so my point was that you can see Super Meat Boy influences all over Face-Plant Adventures. The character is acrobatic, with an emphasis on wall jumping. The game is designed around dying. A lot. When you die, you make a gooshy splat. There are stages where everything is obscured in darkness and you are in control of a silhouette, navigating around the silhouettes of spikes. Clearly there are SMB fans on Face-Plant’s team. But those elements that it borrows from, like most games that do this, ultimately feel muted. Less than the standards they’re aping set. Your character isn’t as nimble, as quick, and the controls aren’t as responsive. None of these aspects are bad, mind you. I felt the play control was mostly adequate, with only some aspects below acceptable. But again, a standard has already been set, and when you fail to live up to that standard, you’re not going to have a successful product. Let’s say that everyone’s first car they had was a Ferrari. And then someone comes along and offers you a Toyota Camry. The Camry isn’t a bad car, but you’ve already got a Ferrari. And you’ve already had something that is so much better than Face-Plant Adventure, at least in terms of how it plays.
To Face-Plant’s credit, it’s not just a by-the-numbers Super Meat Boy rip-off. I almost wish it had been. One thing I did love about Super Meat Boy was the level design. It was designed around harrowing jumps, near-misses, and “I can’t believe I did that!” moments. Face-Plant has those, but not as much. Instead, the game’s pace slows down to a crawl when you have to solve button puzzles. They’re not mind benders or anything. Really, some of them feel kind of like busy work. And some of the early levels of the game are sprawling, overly long, and dull in their design, with a big over-reliance on backtracking. The effort to be different is appreciated. I just feel in this case like one of those parents whose kid decides the best way to be different is to get a shooting star tattooed on their cheek.
I hated Face-Plant Adventures early on. It does not hook you in quickly. And I apparently wasn’t alone in that. The game has online leaderboards that track the time you take to complete the stage. The first stage had sixty names on it, including mine. For the second stage, it drops off to forty. Forty! One-third of the players had such a good time playing the first stage that they didn’t bother to finish the second. It doesn’t help that the first two stages, the ones that should be getting you excited, are so boring, and many of the elements of the game haven’t even been included in them yet. You can’t double jump. You can’t glide. And they’re too long as well. It would be like going to a Metallica concert and having to sit through Swan Lake as the opening act.
Alright, that’s it. Someone get the word out to Obama and Romney: the first one of them that pledges to outlaw water levels in platformers gets my vote. I’m not joking. Fuck the economy. Fuck foreign policy. I have my priorities.
But, BUT, it does get better. The stages actually get shorter as you go on, which completely eliminated the “oh God, please just be over with” feeling of the game. And there are some really fun levels, like one that centers around grinding on rails. It was unexpected, but it was also a blast! It almost made me forget about some of the nit-picky problems, like how sometimes you can’t tell the difference between a spike and a non-spike. Or how sometimes there’s a piece of flat-looking terrain on a cliff’s edge that counts as a spike for some reason. The graphics are good in a first-gen PlayStation 2D game kind of way, but sometimes Face-Plant Adventures puts more thought into being pretty than it does being playable.
By time I beat Face-Plant, I had gone from hating the game, to kind of enjoying it, and then back to hating it. There’s one final boss fight that is hugely annoying, both in the layout of the level you fight him on, the AI of the boss (the only character you “fight” in the game), and the collision detection of it. It flushed any remaining joy I felt out the window and I was just happy the game was over. I then spent the next few hours having an internal debate with myself over whether or not it would go on the Leaderboard. In its favor, Face-Plant Adventures has some genuinely wonderful moments, and does sometimes stand on its own, out of the shadow of Super Meat Boy. And against it? Most of the levels are boring, it’s too slow-paced (by the way, a game that challenges people to do speed-runs absolutely needs to have faster resets than Face-Plant does), the graphics obscure too much, and the last boss is so annoying that only eight people have ever bothered to finish it, on any difficulty setting. So ultimately, Face-Plant becomes the “close but no cigar” standard for XBLIGs. Almost worth it, but not quite. The “if you’re better than this, you’re on the Board” game. You know that poor schmuck who is the last cut of Spring Training? That’s Face-Plant Adventure. Has talent, but not good enough to ride the bench of the Houston Astros.
I had no idea my mother was modeling for indie game cover art.
80 Microsoft Points made it a whole review without making a Little Shop of Horrors joke in the making of this review. Which is weird, because when I asked my mom what I should be when I grow up, do you know what she said?
Lucky was developed by Twist-EdGames
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