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.
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.
Boob games. They’re all over Xbox. They make more money than most of the top-ranked games on my Leaderboard do. Other XBLIG developers hate them. I’m tolerate of them, and sometimes even award them my Seal of Approval. All I want to do is be entertained, which isn’t as hard as people think. Take the Trailer Park King series. The three main releases (Trailer Park King 1, 2, and 3) all made the Leaderboard. The first spin-off, Cherry Poke Prison, did not. In part, because of burnout on the, ahem, humor, which is exactly what hurt Trailer Park King 3 as well. DERP of Duty is the second spin-off, and now I’m so burned out that I need a fucking skin-graft.
Ha, BB! That’s a gun too! Brilliant! And the place has Bazookas in the name! That’s a euphemism for tits! I haven’t seen this many plays on words since I last played Scrabble!
DERP of Duty was developed by Freelance Games (80 Microsoft Points still think Trailer Park King is begging to be made into an animated series in the making of this review)
I want to say something in defense of Sean Doherty, the developer of the TPK games: he’s a genuinely cool dude. He was the first developer I ever talked directly with as Indie Gamer Chick. I also think he’s probably as burned out on this series as well. DERP of Duty feels like it’s trying too hard. As cringe-inducing and skin-crawly as the dialog could be in the early TPK games, at least it felt somewhat organic. Maybe Sean felt the need to top those efforts with even more shocking banter, but this time it feels hollow. Without a compelling narrative, the overly-simple pointing and clicking simply can’t carry the game. I think even the most staunch fans of Trailer Park King will be letdown by DERP of Duty. It’s time to retire this series. Sean has established he has the talent to make, ahem, interesting characters and accompanying mythology. Now, I want to see him apply all this towards a more involved game.
And I don’t mean more involved as in getting guys to spank their monkeys harder than they already do. XBLIG has enough games that do that, as seen in this collage by Mount Your Friends developer Daniel Steger. Which I’m sure he compiled for market research and not as part of his newest cardio-vascular workout routine.
But, the real question is: how well do they sell? Really, boobs seems like no more a sure bet than recent Minecraft clones do. Judging by the success of Mount Your Friends, it would seem there’s an emerging market for penis-themed games that you guys are missing out on. So stop being boobs and start dicking around.
And while I’m on the subject of boob games, Team Shuriken is back. The guys behind such classics as Temple of Dogolrak and Mystic Forest return with a game that has, gasp, actual gameplay! I know they’ve tried that in the past with Dream Divers, but I still thought the gameplay felt sloppy in execution. Here, Team Shuriken took no risks. Uncraft Me ! is a bare-bones punisher with the hook being instead of just jumping, you use a jetpack to thrust around. And this is Team Shuriken we’re talking about, so beating levels means unlocking risque anime girls with breasts so large I believe they’re medically considered cancerous.
It’s also their first game to win my Seal of Approval and get ranked on the Leaderboard.
Yea.
Pretty sure this was spoken of in Revelations.
Or maybe it’s not a jetpack and the main guysis hovering around using highly-pressurized urine. Which I’m sure is another fetish but I’m too cowardly to Google it.
Look, all I’ve ever cared about is being entertained. If a game is 50.000001% entertaining and 49.999999% shit, it wins my seal of approval. On balance, I had more fun with Uncraft Me ! than not, so it gets it. Sometimes the levels have clever design. Other times they go for precision-platforming involving, simultaneously mind you: buzz saws, missiles, and timed-barriers that stay closed permanently if you’re not fast enough. There’s no margin of error for these sections, and the controls aren’t exactly perfect enough to validate their existence. I had Uncraft Me penciled in as yet another Team Shuriken failure when I played it last week. As often is the case when I dislike a game by a razor-thin margin, I boot it up one last time just to make sure. And, what do you know, I was able to finish the nearly-impossible stages. Barely. My amigo from TheXBLIG.com Tim didn’t like it it, but I thought overall it was Shuriken’s first decent game. Not spectacular, mind you. I could probably name thirty better platformers for XBLIG off the top of my head. But your money isn’t totally wasted here, nor is Team Shuriken’s talent.
Uncraft Mewas developed by Team Shuriken (80 Microsoft Points recommend these girls get a mammogram ASAP in the making of this review)
I guess that’s the most gratifying part. Yes, they have talent. Not just talent to lure in the horny teenage demographic. Actual game design talent. They’re like Larry Flint. Peel away the filthy exterior that makes you feel like you need a shower and you discover something downright decent in them. Do I expect them to focus on gameplay instead of mammary glands? No. Then again, I don’t expect to get struck by lightning while holding the holy grail in one hand and a winning lottery ticket in the other.
Do you know what the very toughest thing I have to do as Indie Gamer Chick is? Find people to play XBLIGs with or against. It’s my fault. My friends.. well Brian’s friends actually.. have had to deal with nearly two years of complaining. They have bad timing. They never bump into me when I’m playing really awesome games. Oh no, they run into me when I’m playing stuff that would better be used during enhanced interrogation. So when the time comes to say “hey guys, I have a shiny new XBLIG party game” they all seem to have better stuff to do. Wash the car. Run a marathon. Return over-due library books. It’s total bullshit of course. None of my friends read books.
But, sometimes I can wrangle them together. The results aren’t always pretty, but every once in a while a game provides us with a level of entertainment that we can’t get from a movie or, quite frankly, some mainstream games. Take Chompy Chomp Chomp. It was a smash hit last year during a Memorial Day party, and since then, has been on the top ten in my leaderboard. But it wasn’t without issue. The game could spawn players unfairly, and some of the maps were poorly conceived. It’s been a year since I last sat down with it. I know the game got patched, but I never got around to trying it again. Well, on Sunday I had the chance. And guess what? Chompy Chomp Chomp is better than ever. It is, unquestionably, the best party game on Xbox 360, indie or otherwise.
Pictured: absolute multiplayer bliss.
First off, go check out my original review. Nothing has changed with the core gameplay. What’s different is nearly every complaint has been fixed. For starters, spawns are significantly more fair. Before, it wasn’t rare for you to spawn too close to someone that’s designated to eat you. In a couple hours of playtime, that never once happened. Nor did the game ever spawn me or anyone else playing into a live trap. That alone makes Chompy Chomp Chomp so much more fun to play. In our previous play sessions, fits of laughter and general happy chatter would occasionally be interrupted by the random scream of “that’s bullshit!” when the game would screw you with a shitty spawn. Now, it’s all happiness all the time. The only other way that could have been accomplished was with laughing gas, but that wouldn’t have been cost efficient. Fixing it was much easier.
Chompy Chomp Chomp was developed by Utopian World of Sandwiches (80 Microsoft Points admit that the Xbox 360 hasn’t exactly been the best platform for party games, but regardless, this is still the best on it in the making of this review.)
Yea, there’s still some really horrible levels where you can get cornered with no hope of escape. The guys at Utopian World of Sandwiches insist that there are people who swear those are the best stages. They’re not. They’re unfair and stupid. Thankfully, they made up for their continued existence by throwing in more stages. These new levels, based on classic gaming themes, are fricking awesome. Finally, some of the dumber traps, such as gaseous time bombs that drain your score away, can outright be turned off. Previously, turning off items was an all or nothing type of deal. Now, you can select which ones you want to use. That’s perfect. The online play was totally hiccup-free as well. I can’t stress how amazing this game is. You simply have to play it, whether you do it locally or online. Make sure you’re playing with real players though. The AI goes from being too easy to too hard. When I was playing with my buddies, it was probably the single best multiplayer experience I’ve had since I’ve known them all. Chompy Chomp Chomp is Fuckity Fuck Fuck excellent.
But, if the whole “no shooting, cutesy characters” stuff is an affront to your heterosexuality (seriously, at least one moron on Twitter said of Chompy Chomp Chomp that it “looked like gay children’s shit”. How this guy is an expert in gay children’s shit is beyond me), you can try Blocks and Tanks instead. In a way, it’s getting a bad shake here, because I’m comparing it directly to Chompy Chomp Chomp. Both are simple party games for XBLIG with online play. But while Chompy’s gameplay reminds me of old school arcade games, Blocks is more like a Nintendo 64 era arena-shooter. Not a whole lot to it. Aim and shoot, one shot kills (with the cannon), most kills wins. The fact that it revels in its simplicity is part of the charm. It’s a shooter stripped down to its purest, most refined fun.
Of course, Blocks and Tanks is also a voxel game. When I announced that this game was on deck and next to be reviewed, people immediately dismissed it as yet another Minecraft clone. It’s not. But, the voxel angle is a neat one, as the environments are destructible and it opens some pretty neat strategies. In addition to the tank shells and machine gun, you can shoot blocks from your turret, which immediately cling to the environment and change colors to fit that. In a way, this crippled one versus one multiplayer, as whoever was able to get the first kill could immediately burrow a hole and fill it in to remain hidden until time ran out. Of course, only a total coward would do that.
Don’t shake your head at me, Brian. You’re only mad because you didn’t think of it first.
Pictured: the developers of games I was less than kind to waiting for my car to get within range. It’s a Honda Fit! Do your worst!
Blocks and Tanks is a lot of fun and does a lot right. The controls are very responsive. There is a bit of a learning curve to aiming, but once you get over it, it does the trick. It also has some very well designed arenas, many of which take after famous locations. It handles eight players online. I was never once able to get into an eight player game, but when I had six players going, it was super fast-paced and very enjoyable. But, the game has more problems than an algebra book.
We’ll start with the spawns. They’re among the most unfair I’ve ever seen. Sometimes the game will respawn you right in front of someone else. You’ll literally die immediately upon respawning. More often than not, you’ll be put back to life in the thick of a battle. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. The game needs to place you away from the action. Movement speed is decent, and maps are not that big, so there’s no reason to have to drop people in the middle of a firefight. It gives the game an unpolished feel.
But the biggest problem, as of this writing, is online stability. The developer is aware of the issues and asked me to go forward with this review, as long as I note that he will continue to improve the game. Duly noted. Over the course of seven play sessions and about three hours of total play, I experienced a magnitude of connectivity problems. Players would be dumped at random. Brian got a rare “code 3” error on his Xbox, while mine simply froze solid. Again, the developers are on top of it, and the current build is easily the most stable yet. The first time I played, we had problems with synchronization, where shots would register as a hit and a kill on my end, but on my opponent’s side of things, they would still be alive and actively fighting. This is no longer a problem. Actually, the weirdest problem is totally out of the hands of the developer. It’s the type of people playing. I kept finding myself in sessions where players were not trying to kill each other, but instead building stuff. When I would go in to attack, they would boot me out. Huh. I mean, sure. It’s not like there are different, more appropriate voxel-based games on XBLIG that cater to that type of gameplay.
We had a ton of fun on stages that had cliffs, trying to blow the ground out from underneath each-other. What would have been really neat is if the game had to rely on structural integrity and you could cause massive cave-ins. Hint hint Maximinus Games.
Blocks and Tanks was developed by Maximinus Games(*NOW DELISTED* 80 Microsoft Points wish the build-gun worked better on water in the making of this review. Yea, that’s not a joke, but I had to squeeze that in somewhere.)
Having said that, if you look around enough, you should be able to find a real game where people have the courtesy to kill each other like civilized people. It’s not as supported as, say, Shark Attack Deathmatch, but Blocks and Tanks does seem to have a growing community. There’s a reason for that. It’s quite good. I feel bad for the guys behind it, that it’s going to be ignored by a lot of people who feel it’s just another generic Minecraft clone. It’s almost unbelievable that such an art style can now be considered a handicap on XBLIG, but that’s what it is now. If Blocks and Tanks had come out three years ago, it would probably be one of the biggest sellers on the platform. Talk about bad timing. It’s a genuinely good game that is worth your time and money. Unless you want to use it to build stuff. It’s not made for that you block heads. Tanks for nothing.
Blocks and Tanks is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Chompy Chomp Chomp already was, but hey, it moved up five spots!
Review copies were provided for both games by the developers. The copies played by Cathy were paid for by her with her own money. The review copies were given to a friend to test online play. That person had no feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.
Update: Mount Your Friends received a Second Chance with the Chick. Click here for my updated thoughts. Consider this review to be for the XBLIG version and the Second Chance to be for the Steam version.
Okay, so the name is as absurd and juvenile as a title can possibly get. But, we are talking about a game by Daniel Steger here. His previous hits include a game called Baby Maker Extreme (the ninth all-time selling XBLIG), This is Hard, and Blow Me Up. But the really weird part is, his games tend to be pretty decent. Blow Me Up and Lots of Guns both are Chick Approved and ranked on my Leaderboard. And now we have this, a game about building a human pyramid. In keeping with Steg’s tendency towards gratuitousness, it features Team Ninja-like jiggle physics.. for penises. This is a game tailor-made to generate scorn and ridicule from the XBLIG scene.
It’s also Daniel Steger’s best game by far.
Schwing!
This is exactly the type of weird, experimental game that I had in mind when I started Indie Gamer Chick. Okay, maybe I didn’t picture those games having dicks that behave like bobbleheads. But I figured I would play a lot of games unlike anything I’ve seen before. Mount Your Friends does that. It’s like a video game version of the popular Catalonian pastime known as Castell. In other words, people climbing on each other to build the tallest human-building they can make. Only here, there’s no worries about the laws of physics or structural integrity.
The way you go about moving at first seemed like it would be overly complicated. Each limb is controlled by a separate button. You move one limb at a time, with limbs automatically clinging to the bodies already placed. Each turn, you must climb higher than the highest body on the stack. Once you’ve above the line, you can press start to end the turn and start from the bottom with a new body. In the normal mode, you have 60 seconds to get above the line. It sounds dull, but it can be exhilarating. Especially when time is running short. There were multiple situations where the timer was nearing zero and I just barely got my hand over the line. This always resulted in hooting and hollering. Well, just from me, while my friends told me to sit down and shut up. But hey, I was excited!
Simpsons already did it!
Where Mount Your Friends really shines is in the multiplayer mode. Here, each player takes a turn trying to cross the bar at the highest point in the stack. Play continues until one player can’t make it to the top in the time limit. I’m shocked to say this, but this is one of the best multiplayer experiences to ever hit XBLIG. It even has online play that went off without a hitch. My biggest overall complaints relate to the movement physics. Flinging yourself instead of moving one hand at a time feels loose in terms of gravity and imprecise. I also had issues keeping limbs I didn’t want to use from going limp and getting stuck to one of the guys on the stack. I mean, wait, probably shouldn’t use the term limp in relation to this game. I mean they had trouble staying stiff. NO, erect. NO! God damn, this is tough to write about.
Okay, so the Mount Your Friends might be embarrassing to pull out to show friends and.. FUCK!! See what I mean?
Stegs, I fucking hate you. You make this really awesome game that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen or played before, but it’s almost impossible to describe without receiving an awkward stare. You know what? I don’t care. Mount Your Friends is fun, plain and simple. It’s not very deep. The best concepts rarely are. But you simply have to try it, because there’s nothing else like it. I’m not the most athletic person in the world, and I’m afraid of heights, so this is probably the closest I can come to climbing a rock wall. Well actually, this is probably more like one of those walls where you hold a peg in each hand.
Don’t do that Cathy. Just don’t give him any more ideas. He’s incorrigible enough as is.
When I first saw the cover art and heard the name, I figured it was going to be a professional wrestling game.
$1 (Steam version $3.99) asked if you heard the one about three guys laying in the same bed? They wake up in the morning and the guy on the left says “I had the best dream! I dreamed I was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy on the right says “that’s weird, *I* dreamed *I* was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy in the middle goes “I dreamed I was skiing!” in the making of this review.
A review copy of Mount Your Friends was provided to Indie Gamer Chick to test online functions. The copy purchased by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test out online components. The person receiving it had no feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.
I wasn’t very nice to Hop Til You Drop when I briefly covered it a couple of weeks ago. It’s a twitchy single-screen punisher that involves dodging random hazards the game spits at you. I immediately grasped what the game’s schtick would be and thought “this could be addictive.” But then I died and found out that replaying the game meant going through a seemingly endless series of menus. After just a couple more plays, I decided my time would better be spent brow beating the developer for being such a dummy. My hopes were that he would fix his game. He did. Good thing too, because SWAT was closing in on my house. I admit, taking his family hostage might have been going too far, but at Indie Gamer Chick, we like to take that extra step towards improving the game industry.
None of these screens will make sense. Just look at Aaron the Splazer’s video at the end of this review.
A lot of developers seem to take my advice on aspects of game design, which I have to say is more fucking cool than you can imagine. But a lot of the advice I give them is stuff that they should have come up with on their own. In that spirit, I’m going to offer makers of punishers the biggest no-brainer advice you’ll ever get.
Make your game addictive.
Sure, addictive gameplay varies from person to person. But there are steps you can take to maximum the potency of a game’s addictive potential. It all boils down to the speed and downtime. If you’re making a game where players will die a lot, keep the time between death and rebirth at a minimum. Look at some of the most successful punishers in recent years. In Super Meat Boy, when you die, BAM, you’re back to life. It’s a game that could offer a lot of frustration, but because the game skips theatrics and bullshit in favor of gameplay, you don’t notice it. Who has time to be frustrated when that giant saw you’ve been trying to jump over for the last ten minutes is right fucking there? Spelunky did this too. When you die in it, restarting the game is done with a single button press. The lack of downtime is what gives those games their hypnotic “just one more try” quality.
Now imagine if Super Meat Boy’s failures resulted in theatrical death animations followed by a menu. It would have been relegated to gaming purgatory. Nobody would remember it today. Super Meat Boy is famous for many things. It’s art style, historical gaming references, and challenge. But its success probably hinged on how accessible it was. It’s a game that wanted to be played, and so it cut the bullshit out. Gameplay was continuous with minimal interruptions. This is something all punishers should have. And yet it’s among the most common things bad punishers have wrong with them. I know you guys have all played these games. So how do you miss such an obvious thing? It’s not about the insane challenge. It never was. Those games succeeded because they were addictive. When a person can lose time to a game and not realize it, that’s a game that is more likely to spread by word-of-mouth.
In a way, it sucks that I won’t have Hop Til You Drop to point to as the poster child for that particular problem. But I’m happy this simple problem was fixed. Now, the game is genuinely fun. Controls might be a bit too loose, and sometimes the random traps are just plain not fair. The biggest problem by far with Hop Til You Drop is that it’s on the wrong platform. It’s the perfect micro-session game, suited more for playing on Vita via PlayStation Mobile. Because it requires precision movement, I wouldn’t want to play it on a touch device like iPhone. But on Vita? This would be the perfect game to bust out on a break. It doesn’t lend itself well to extended play sessions, which is what a platform like XBLIG is better suited for.
But fun is fun, and Hop Til You Drop is fun. There’s even a couple nifty new additions like bullet-time effects that kick in when you have a close call with an enemy. Or a moderately amusing time attack mode. So I do recommend Hop Til You Drop. It won’t have a lasting effect on you. Without online leaderboards, there won’t be a lot to keep you coming back. But it’s a worthy waste of a dollar and probably fifteen to thirty minutes on your Xbox. Congratulations go out to Chris Outen for saving his game. By the way, your mother’s pinky finger should arrive by Fed-Ex tomorrow.
80 Microsoft Points said this game was one “S” away from being a video game version of a gameshow I watched as a kid in the making of this review. Though I usually only watched it because I was too lazy to change the channel after Supermarket Sweep.
Hop Til You Drop is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. On July 1, the Leaderboard will go multi-platform to include indies from all consoles and handhelds.
H.i.v.e. is a digital version of a moderately popular, award-winning tabletop game. It’s also one of those rare Xbox Live Indie Games that is officially licensed. You can think of H.i… you know what, fuck it, I’m not using the periods. Think of Hive as a cross between chess and dominoes. You’re given a collection of hexagonal tiles, each with its own movement properties. One of the tiles is a queen bee. You have to place the queen on the board within your first four turns. Gameplay continues until one queen bee has been completely surrounded on all sides, whether the titles belong to you or your opponent. In addition to the bee, there’s also ants, grasshoppers, spiders, and beetles. Ants can move to any free space as long as there is a path to get to it. Spiders must move three spaces at a time. Beetles can walk over and cover other tiles. And grasshoppers can only move by jumping over pieces. If you want to read the full rules, you can click here. You probably should too. Our first game didn’t involve any rule reading, because Bryce thinks rules are for squares. We didn’t know fuck all what we were doing, which explains why I lost to.. sorry Bryce.. a FUCKING MORON!
Of course, that doesn’t explain why I lost eight straight games to Brian immediately following that, but you shouldn’t dwell on that. I certainly haven’t. Sniffle.
Because there is no board, the camera sometimes has to pull pretty far back. But, worry not, because all the tiles are easy to see and distinctive from each-other.
H.i.v.e. is a lot of fun. I’ve never played the board game that it’s based on, but the interface created by BlueLine Games is well handled. I’ve always questioned the existence of video-board games that only strive to recreate the exact experience of the corporeal version. But actually, I think in the case of games like H.i.v.e., they serve a purpose of making complex games easier to learn. It lays out for you exactly what moves are legal, what pieces can be moved, where they can be moved, etc. It takes the edge off the learning curve to a huge degree. But, it still is a no-frills video game version of a board game. I firmly believe that the best video board game do things that only can be done in the realm of games, and that doesn’t apply to Hive.
Hive is also not without faults. As of this writing, online play is unstable. In thirty attempts at playing online, only eight games successfully connected. If both players are able to make an opening move, the connection won’t drop, but that barely happens a quarter of the time. The developers are aware of this issue, but I’m actually not grading against it. I preferred playing locally against human opponents sitting right next to me. You can play against the AI, which actually isn’t that bad as far as video game AI from a first-time developer goes. Early on at this site, I played Avatar Chess, which had genius-level AI even on the easiest settings. While the AI in Hive can lean towards the fierce side on medium, the easy setting is a good way to break into the game, but not so dumb that you’re embarrassed to play it. I can’t tell you how good the hard mode is, because I didn’t really try it. I had enough difficulty beating Brian, who isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. Not that I’m obsessed with the fact that I couldn’t beat such a simpleton. I’m not. Really. DAMN YOUR ACCUSING EYES, STOP LOOKING AT ME!!
So let it be said that Hive, a simple adaption of a cult board game, is the game that ended the Leaderboard’s losing streak. Despite having no apparent talent for it, I had a great time playing it. I even played a few rounds against my father, and it was very fun to bond over. I mean, he wiped the floor with me too, but I still had fun in my failure. I liked H.i.v.e. so much that I ordered the actual game off Amazon. So while it doesn’t really need to exist as a video game, I’m happy it does. And by the way, Brian can’t even remotely come close to beating me at chess, so obviously I’m better than him. I think that’s how it works.
A review copy of H.i.v.e. was provided to Indie Gamer Chick by BlueLine Game Studios. The version played by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was provided to a friend just to help test online functions. That person had no feedback in this review. Consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ for how this policy works.
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