Project Gert: Recon

December 23, 2012 by 60 Comments

Oh Lord.  Where do I begin with this one?  First off, how the FUCK is this chick not freezing to death?

That snowman started off life as her sister, Helga. Maybe you should put some more clothes on girl. Hint hint.

That snowman started off life as her kid sister, Helga. Maybe you should put some more clothes on girl.

If I tried stepping outside in 1/10th the amount of snow as that, my body would have said “fuck it, that’s it’s.  This bitch is nuts, and now we’re going to die.”  Then I would have died.  And I would have deserved it.  Even in the Tomb Raider movie that was designed primarily as an excuse to give teen gamers a less blocky representation of Lara Croft to jerk off to, they had the decency to bundle poor Angelina Jolie up when they filmed in the snow.

There’s exactly one good thing I can say about Project Gert: Recon.  The paintings featured in the game’s cutscenes are beautiful.  So at least one person involved in this project has an amazing talent.  Seriously, watch the trailer below.  The actual in-game graphics are spoiled by awful animation and piss-poor collision detection, but the paintings are spectacular.  I would totally commission this guy to do a portrait.  But that’s where any complements end.  Project Gert is yet another December entrant to the “potential worst game of the year” category.

See? Pretty cool.

See? Pretty cool.  Even if any rational person would be thinking “I really should have put more thought into my attire.”

The idea behind Project Gert is it’s part platformer, part physics-puzzler.  Neither part is done particularly well.    The platforming sections are slippery.  As mentioned above, the game is set in an ice world, and I have to wonder if that was done to excuse the poor control in this game.  All movement is loose, to the point that you’ll inevitably slip off into pits and die.  The funny part is, enemies are affected by this too.  There were some machines on slopes that were slipping and sliding along with me.  Actually, it’s not so funny, since a few times this led to cheap deaths where they would slide directly into me.  And fighting back was sure an adventure unto itself.  Collision detection is spotty as hell, so you practically have to be on top of an enemy to cause any damage to it.  The line between where you can hit and enemy and where an enemy is hitting you is blurry, so I found just avoiding them seemed like the best strategy.  Again, maybe the ice setting is the reason, and the poor girl is frozen numb and can’t properly swing a sword.

The main draw of Project Gert is supposed to be physics-based puzzles.  The concept is “figure out a way to get a special block to sit on a special platform.”  Solid idea.  Shitty, glitchy physics.  Once the special block starts moving, it slides like it’s sitting on a skateboard.  Granted, the game has a habit of saying “good enough” when the block is barely on the platform and probably bound for falling off it.  That’s generous of it, but sometimes it asks too much of the players, like a gas station offering 10¢ off a gallon but only if you siphon it by mouth.  An example is requiring you to fire a stone to push a block one way, then resetting the crosshairs, lining it up, and firing it the other direction to push the block onto the special platform.  Timing this is bad enough, but the physics for it are unstable and often it didn’t really push the block in the opposite direction.  It just made it fall slower, which is remarkable considering how slow it was already going.

And then there’s the times when the game engine just said “fuck it” altogether.  I would fail at a puzzle, restart it, and the blocks would not be stacked correctly.  Once, a block was aligned too far to the right.  This was one of those “fire the rock at it to move it” puzzles that presumably required pristine timing and placement, so having everything out of alignment from the start was aggravating.  This happened more than once, and sometimes I couldn’t even restart the puzzle to get the blocks realigned properly.  Or sometimes I would restart a puzzle and entire blocks would be missing.   About the best thing I can say about the puzzle system here is that the game gives you the option to skip them.  When being able to skip stuff in a game is the best thing it has going for it, it is a truly awful game indeed.

It really doesn't look that bad in still pictures. Just watch the trailer.

It really doesn’t look that bad in still pictures. Just watch the trailer.

Besides the still paintings, there’s nothing here remotely appealing.  Bad platforming.  Bad puzzles.  Boring setting.  Terrible writing.  Awful animation.  Glitchy physics.  It’s not quite as bad as Halloween Pie or Sententia, but it’s close.  Quite frankly, I’ve never been happier to see a game crash and dump me back to the dashboard.  Which this one did.  It was right after I cleared a pit after finding out there was a flimsy wall-jump in the game, which isn’t mentioned at all during the tutorial.  Once I got past that, I encountered another glitchy puzzle that I ended up skipping.  An explosion animation went off and then the Code 4 screen appeared.  At this point, I did the only thing I could do: jump out of my chair and scream “I don’t have to play Gert anymore!  Hallelujah, it’s a Christmas miracle!”

xboxboxartProject Gert: Recon was developed by Modern Intrigues

80 Microsoft Points were so excited, they had to sing!

♫Hark the imperiled Gamer Chick sings:

Glory for the Code 4 screen!

Piece of shit that boils my bile.

Gert and physics won’t reconcile.

Joyless crap with cheap ways to die.

Puzzles can be skipped so why should I try?

Like Tom Selleck’s agent proclaimed:

It’s over dude, this shit is dead.♫

Um, in the making of this review.

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8BitsRetroZSurvivals

December 21, 2012 by 7 Comments

Yea, that really is the name of the game.  I thought maybe some spaces were missing and that’s just how the game had to be listed on the marketplace due to length issues, but no.  8BitsRetroZSurvivals is the title.  Not that it matters.  The game could have been called Captain Bunghole’s Anal Cavity Shave Simulator and I wouldn’t give a shit as long as the game was good.  Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.

8BRZS looks like it might be a neo-retro take on Wolfenstein or Doom, but it’s not.  It’s actually a wave shooter where enemies come at you from all directions and you have to unload clip after clip into them.  Again, that could be fine if it was fun, but 8BRZS is a chore of the most boring order.  A dish-washing simulator might have been more exciting.  Nothing about this game is fun.  Enemies soak up your shots like Chris Christie soaks up cholesterol.  And here’s the weird part: the same enemies get spongier the further you are in the game.  In the first level, enemies take three shots to kill.  This was probably done to sucker people who play the trial into thinking the game wasn’t a total and complete piece of shit.  During the second wave, the same enemies take seven shots to kill.  Same enemies, same gun, but more than double the sponge.

It looks sweet. Do you know what else I hear is sweet? Antifreeze, but I wouldn't recommend you drink it.

It looks sweet. Do you know what else I hear is sweet? Antifreeze, but I wouldn’t recommend you drink it.

Weapons are sold in a couple of stores in each setting.  In the second stage, I upgraded to the next highest gun, the rifle.  It downed the first enemy I shot in two bullets, ending the second wave.  For the third wave, enemies now took three bullets to kill with the rifle.  I’m not sure how many it took with the starting pistol, because I only have nine bullets left and that wasn’t enough to kill one single enemy.  The same enemy that I had killed with three shots in the first wave.  The next wave, they took four.  And these are head shots, mind you.  If you don’t hit the head, it takes about triple that amount.

The real fun starts on the fifth wave.  Here, the enemies are invisible, except for a pair of red eyeballs.  These bastards take thirteen headshots with the rifle to bring down.  Mind you, you have a limited supply of ammo and have to buy more with money earned from shooting enemies.  Older weapons become obsolete quickly.  That starter pistol that took seven shots to take an enemy down now takes twenty-four headshots by time you reach wave 7.  This is bad game design.  It would be like if Space Invaders replaced your turret with a super soaker filled with air while suddenly the aliens start throwing napalm down on you.  And the aliens were invisible.  Except their eyes, which are bright red.  Only there’s a bunch of bright-red, eyeball-shaped things littering the scenery.  Wave 10 brings dudes wearing cloaks that shoot fireballs at you.  Wave 15 brings alien zombies who cause radioactive fogs when they die and require you to wear a gas mask.  Wave 20 sends the invisible guys back.  What, no zombie soldiers brandishing zombie guns that shoot zombies at you?

But the really, really weird part is, despite how slow the upgrades are and how absurdly spongy the enemies get, 8BrainCellBoringZComa is actually pretty fucking easy.  Once you get the best weapon in the game, enemies are still spongy (on Wave 28 they took something like 9 bullets to the head to kill, give or take), but money was so plentiful (you get it just by landing a shot with any gun) that I was able to keep my health refilled, my gun fully loaded, my grenades stocked, and still have enough dough left over to stock up on Super Bombs which clear all enemies present and those still walking up their corridors.  At this point, I only game-overed for two reasons.

#1 – I was afraid the game would crash and I would lose my high score.  The game never did crash, or even hint that it would, but this is an XBLIG and you can never be too cautious.

#2 – I was so fucking bored by this point that I figured it was conceivable that observers would declare me clinically dead and start to arrange for my organs to be donated.  I already woke up once in a bathtub full of ice with my left kidney missing and I’ll be damned if I allow that to happen again.

screen4

A game that stinks so bad you’ll have to wear a gas mask.

The real shame is 8BitsRetroZSurvivals looks good enough to get any fan of 3D 90s shooters excited.  The graphics do an excellent job of aping that art style.  It sounds good too, I guess.  I mean, every time you clear a wave you hear what sounds like Dr. Claw saying “this is your worst nightmare!”  What, being stuck in a shitty wave shooter?  Yea, actually it is.  It controls really well too.  And it offers perks like a decently populated global leaderboard.  This would all be great, but the gameplay itself is shallow and boring to the point of exhaustion.  I finished 34th on that board out of about 240 people and I feel like I should donate for Red Cross relief to those 33 poor souls who put more time in this than I did.

xboxboxart8BitsRetroZSurvivals was developed by Games Brothers

Point of Sale: Xbox Live Indie Games

$1 wondered how these fuckers became zombies in the first place?  I mean, if a person took 40+ rounds worth of a pistol to the face to kill, presumably any zombie who attempted to bite them would break its teeth.  Since when does becoming a zombie turn your skin into Kevlar in the making of this review?

Gameplay footage via Aaron the Splazer

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Heavy Recoil

December 20, 2012 by 5 Comments

Heavy Recoil harkens back to the good ‘ole days when games would kick your ass with a steel-toed boot.  This is also known as the period before I was born, so the nostalgic value of Heavy Recoil does absolutely nothing for me.  And yet, when I see a game that does a pretty convincing job of looking like an 8 or 16 bit era title, I usually get excited.  That’s typically because such games seem to go that extra mile towards having good level design and awesome play control.  So does Heavy Recoil succeed?  Yes, at least when it comes to looking like a Super Nintendo game.  If I hadn’t known it was on XBLIG and saw a trailer for it, I would have thought for sure it was an SNES title that I had never heard of.  And after playing it, I would have guessed I had never heard of it because it was shit.

Heavy Recoil really does look the part, which is commendable. But the gameplay is boring, limited, and frustrating. Retro doesn't have to mean shallow.

Heavy Recoil really does look the part, which is commendable. But the gameplay is boring, limited, and frustrating. Retro doesn’t have to mean shallow.

Heavy Recoil is a 2D platformer/shooter where you play as a robot that must shoot other robots.  While I’ve recently developed a love for robot-on-robot violence (courtesy of Brian introducing me to reruns of Robot Wars), I question the logic of building a weapon that is so damn limited or worse than what the enemy is using.  The protagonist robot can only shoot whatever is straight ahead of it.  I’ve had a lot of people say “some games were like that!  Would you call Mega Man shit?”  Apples and oranges, people.  Mega Man was more nimble than the robot you play as here, which wasn’t given a name or any back story at all so I’ll just call it “Phil” because that’s about the most boring name I could think of on five seconds notice.  Phil can barely jump, unless you get a power up that allows him to do it.  Given the fact that many valuable items are placed well above your normal jumping range (along with plenty of enemies), this was a bit of a dick move.

In order to get jumping, you have to pick it up in an item drop.  This in and of itself is a problem.  The item that has it rotates between it and a useless dash upgrade, requiring you to time when to pick it up.  Typically, that’s not too hard, but sometimes it’s obscured by something in the foreground and you can’t see it.  It’s frustrating enough that the game considers decent jumping to be a bonus that players have to pick up without having to deal with blind-man’s bluff.  I had the same problem with the secondary weapon upgrades.  There’s four: grenades, lasers, homing missiles, and rockets.  No matter which you have, they’re weak.  They can’t even break apart the barrels that you pluck them from.  Grenades are probably the most useless of the bunch.  They’re good at blowing up annoying landmines, but otherwise everything they can kill is already right in front of your gun anyway.  Of course, your bullets can only travel about four or five character-lengths in front of you.  Why?  I have no fucking clue.  I can fire rubber bands further with my thumb-and-index finger pistol than Phil can shoot ballistic weapons.  To fix this mistake which should have been corrected out of the fucking gate, you can pick up a laser that shoots all the way across the screen.  Well la dee dah!

Rockets and homing missiles are more useful, because they can attack things above you.  They still mostly suck on account of them doing about as much damage as popping an inflated paper-bag next to your target.  What really sucks is, like the jump-or-dash upgrade, you can only have one.  Why?  I don’t know.  Using these items doesn’t require a special button press.  They just fire when you shoot your gun, which has to be repeatedly mashed because holding down the button would be too convenient.

I get that games like this used to be a big deal and people long for the days when you had three lives and if you lost them you got to start all the way back at the beginning.  But even then, sometimes those games could be fun.  Contra for example.  I could never quite put my finger on what exactly made Contra fun, but now I’m guessing being able to shoot upwards might have something to do with it.  And mind you, Contra had that whole “shoot in directions other than straight forward” innovation down three fucking years before I was born, so Heavy Recoil can’t really claim the retro-mandate for pretending that upward mobility doesn’t exist.

The two boss fights that I encountered were downright easy. I didn't encounter more because I got sick of single-hit deaths, no continues, bad jumping, lame items, and dick-move level layouts. Over an hour put into Heavy Recoil and not once did I have any fun. Unless the game has a magical "get better" section, I'm guessing that wouldn't have changed.

The two boss fights that I encountered were downright easy. I didn’t encounter more because I got sick of single-hit deaths that take away all your weapons, no continues, bad jumping, lame items, and dick-move level layouts. Over an hour put into Heavy Recoil and not once did I have any fun. Unless the game has a magical “get better” section, I’m guessing that wouldn’t have changed.

But even if you could, it wouldn’t be very fun.  Everything here is just so bland.  The levels, the enemy design, Phil.  That’s why I said Heavy Recoil would be remembered as a bad lost game from a bygone era.  I’m not saying I expect neo-retro games to be better than the classics they were inspired by.  What I’m saying is don’t make a retro game in a retro costume.  Make a modern game in a retro costume.  Take advantage of what we’ve learned over the last twenty-five years of consoles.  Some concepts are more popular than others.  Firing in more than one direction is such a concept.  Do you know what happens when you forgo technological innovations in favor of rehashing old shit that nobody cares about?  That’s right: you sell 400,000 units of your latest hardware on launch day.

Okay, bad example.

xboxboxartHeavy Recoil was developed by Wide Pixel Games

80 Microsoft Points admit Heavy Recoil is an awesome name for a game in the making of this review. 

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Footboholics

December 18, 2012 by 3 Comments

I’ve never understood why we turn the suffix “holics” into a catch-all for addicts.  It only applies to alcohol, people!  See the whole “H-O-L” part?  That comes from alcohol, just like babies and broken sports cars.  If you eat way too much chocolate, you’re not a chocaholic.  You’re just a glutton.  Smokers are not called Smokeaholics.  When you get down to it, the term “alcoholic” is a recent development coined by someone who couldn’t pronounce “dipsomaniac”.   Probably because they were drunk.  So the name of today’s game makes no sense unless they were addicted to a substance called Footbohol.  And for all I know, maybe they are.  It would explain why the dude doesn’t shit his pants and run away screaming when he encounters the living dead.

Thankfully they used "Footbohlics" instead of the working title: "Concussion Magnets!"

Thankfully they used “Footbohlics” instead of the working title: “Concussion Magnets!”

The concept of Footboholics is you’re a dude who must carry a football through four different themed worlds.  I would like to note for my non-North American readers that I’m talking about American Football here, which Alan C reminds me is called “rugby for pussies” by the rest of the world.  For some reason, our version of football predominately involves using your hands.  I know.  I can’t explain it either.  Hey, we got basketball right.  That involves a ball and a basket, so gold star for us.

Footboholics is sort of like one of those dodge-everything-in-your-way endless runners, only there are levels here.  Forty to be exact, plus endless modes for each stage, which I guess means there technically is an endless runner in this not-quite-endless runner.  You start out on a football field and various tackling dummies show up that you must avoid.  If you run into them, your dude drops the ball.  Drop the ball three times and its game over.  Seriously, if you’re a football player and you fumble the ball just from bouncing off a tackling dummy, maybe you should rethink your choice of sports.

Other traps are thrown at you, such as actual football players that run in preset patterns, roadblocks to jump over, and machines that fling footballs at you.  The real challenge is trying to get a feel for depth and where you have to move your dude in a way that you don’t make contact.  When I first started playing, I couldn’t quite get the hang of it.  It would sure look like I should have enough clearance to run past a barrage of tackling dummies, but I would be a pixel or two off and take damage.  After a little bit of experimenting, I started paying attention to only my dude’s feet and whether or not they were on the same plane as whatever I was trying to run past.  Once I got used to that, Footboholics became downright easy.  Especially once I bought two extra health points from the store for a measly five points each.  Sure, there were a couple of stages that I did kick the bucket on, but I breezed past the rest of the game in an hour or so with minimal fuss.

The only time I died was when I hit one of the item generators and it gave me a controller-killing trap instead.  I hate it when games do this.  When is it ever a good idea for an item box to randomly shit in your mouth?  Footboholics is very much a skill-tester, so luck should not factor into things.  You can buy better luck from the store, but of course I being me, the minute I pumped up my luck to maximum level, the next three items I got were all traps.  The same thing happened to me when I played Sequence, which led to the perplexed developer admitting that the chance percentages in the game were not accurate and you actually have more luck than it says you do.  To which I say, I have an uncanny knack for beating the odds.  Or, more accurately, having the odds beat me.

Christ! I knew the Raiders were in bad shape but I had no idea it was this bad!

Christ! I knew the Raiders were in bad shape but I had no idea it was this bad!

There’s four stage types, but really, the enemies in the other stages are just reskinned versions of the same ones you already encountered.  And even that doesn’t last.   In the park scene, there’s tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you.  In the next stage, set in a graveyard, the tackling dummies are now thorny stumps, the football players are now skeletons, and the tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you are tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you.  Why weren’t they reskinned too?  Not that it matters, because Footboholics starts to wear thin by this point.  A lot of attack patterns start to repeat throughout the game, or stages go on too long.  I still found $1 worth of entertainment here.  It might sound like damning praise, but at best Footbolholics is adequate time-waster that probably should have been on iPhone instead.  Yea, it’s kind of too easy, but I’ve always insisted that too easy is preferable to being too hard.  Would you rather have company with the village slut or the village Viagra addict?  Excuse me, Viagraholic.

xboxboxartIGC_ApprovedFootboholics was developed by Silent Union

80 Microsoft Points’ team would be playing for the National Championship if the zebras hadn’t fucked us against Notre Dame in the making of this review.  THAT WAS A FUCKING TOUCHDOWN!!

Footboholics is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  If you’re an XBLIGholic, you should check it out.  Personally, I’m not a fan of XBLIGholic.  I like the term XBLIGer myself, even if it sounds like some kind of misguided racial slur.

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Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains

December 15, 2012 by 14 Comments

Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains sounds like a joke. And it is. Just not a very funny one. This is one of the most glitchy, broken games on XBLIG. But it has the word “Strippers” in it, so it will get attention. It’s transparent and shameful, but that’s how the market works. I played it for about thirty minutes and noticed the following things.

  • No matter how centered a zombie is in your cross-hairs, bullets can and will completely miss their targets. Even from a distance of two inches away from you, with your gun centered completely on the enemy, bullets might miss. It seems completely random. This includes times when I shot zombies I wasn’t pointing at. That happened a few times as well. As in, I shot at a zombie that was two inches away from me, and the bullet hit a zombie twenty feet behind me and three feet to the right.
  • Assuming you get lucky and manage to shoot a lot of zombies, you still have to deal with limited ammo. It does respawn, but not fast enough. When your bullets only work by random chance, being conservative with your ammo isn’t helpful.
  • All the guns that look like they might be fun to play with are locked, leaving you with a weak starting pistol that hits a target maybe one in four times.

screen1

I didn’t put much time into this one, but it doesn’t seem the developer did either. Zombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains is the worst first person shooter on XBLIG (and, thanks to the option menu, the worst third-person shooter as well) and the guys behind this should hang their heads in collective shame. There are no excuses for making games this bad.

xboxboxartZombie Strippers Stole My Heart Then Ate My Brains was developed by Strange Games

80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend who, in a state of confusion, resented being called a Zombie Stripper when I told him the title of this game in the making of this review.

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Bleed

December 15, 2012 by 40 Comments

Hey, there’s this game on XBLIG and it looks kind of neat and the demo was okay but I’m not sure if its worth the money. Would you review it?

Sure! Anything for my fans. What game is it?

It’s called Bleed.

Just Bleed?

Just Bleed.

Huh. No funny accents on the letters?

What do you mean?

Well, I mean they could call it BleƐd with a Latin style E. You know, to add a touch of class? Or perhaps Bl€€D with two Euro signs. You know, just to change things up?

Um, no. It’s just Bleed.

Oh. Okay. Seems like a generic name that’s about as memorable as a cup of instant soup, but whatever. I’m duty bound to review games when fans request them and OH SWEET JESUS it cost 400 Microsoft Points?

Yea.

Seriously?

Hey, why do you think we want you to review it?

And that’s where the conversation was left off at. I can see why so many of my readers were requesting a review of this one. The opening level, which I’m sure is as far as the demo goes, is a bit on the generic side. And although the game seems like it could be pretty good, there’s enough unanswered questions that Bleed really is a bit of a high-risk investment, at least as far as XBLIGs go. I mean, for the price of it you could get all five of the top games on my Leaderboard. Survey any number of people and ask them if they’re willing to buy a new product one-for-the-price-of-five with the five being the top five competing products in whatever field. People would look at you like your eyeballs just grew their own noses. They would bill you for the seven seconds of their life you just wasted. And if they’re going to do that, those seven seconds ought to be spent coming up with a better name for your fucking game, especially since you didn’t take seven whole seconds to think it through.

In short, the name sucks and the price sucks harder.  Are we clear on that?  Good.

Bleed is fucking awesome.

Update, November 20, 2018: Remember, context is everything. In 2012, Bleed was on Xbox Live Indie Games, where 90% of games were 80 Microsoft Points, or $1 each. Games that cost more, unless they were Minecraft clones, didn’t do well. I advocated for a universal $1 price for XBLIGs so as to complete with Xbox Live Arcade games and drive attention to the platform. My position on this has greatly evolved since 2012.

I almost didn't get to play it. The lightning effects in the opening stage nearly put the kibosh on this review. Thankfully they weren't as bad as Fez.

I almost didn’t get to play it. The lightning effects in the opening stage nearly put the kibosh on this review. Thankfully they weren’t as bad as Fez.

Seriously, this is one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games of the year. I didn’t get that vibe out of it at first. The opening stage is, maybe not exactly dull, but it’s not awe-inspiring either. The corny (but delightfully well-written) story centers around Wryn, a spunky pink-haired chick with dreams of being the biggest hero in gaming history. She decides the best way to go about becoming this is to go around killing all the previous top heroes. It’s funny, but it’s not as cool as it sounds. Obviously the guys at Bootdisk Revolution couldn’t use all the real biggest stars in gaming, nor did they even try to make close facsimiles. So you won’t see Wryn bust a cap in a fat Italian plumber named Angelo, or an elfish adventurer named Lenk. The actual bosses seem more like run-of-the-mill bosses that you would expect to encounter in a 2D platformer. It’s a bit disappointing, like hearing about an epic sounding movie and getting all excited only to find out it’s being broadcast on Syfy and starring Billy Zane or Tim Curry.

The first thing you notice about Bleed is movement is smooth and responsive, and that the jumping is going to be a bitch. It’s mapped to the right trigger, because shooting is done TwickS-style and thus having A jump would be impossible. Still, I kind of wish it had been mapped to the less bulky, more analog right-bumper. But what really is awkward about it is how double jumping works. Instead of just flinging yourself in the air a little higher, the character launches like a jet. You can do this twice before landing.  It reminded me of Pikachu’s return-attack in Smash Bros. I could never do that fucking thing right either. It’s certainly not a deal breaker, as evidenced by the blow-job I’m about to bestow upon Bleed, but it never felt quite right at any point during the 90 minute main quest.

screen4

The jumping physics really are my only complaint. Everything else about Bleed is really astonishing. Levels are fast-paced, well designed, and full of twists and surprises. Retro-nerds will get their jollies from elements borrowed liberally from such games as Mega Man 2. The shooting really is so well done. You have unlimited ammo and no range-limits, giving your character full 360 degree control over firing upon enemies. The starting weapons, a pistol and a rocket launcher, are probably enough to finish the game with. However, you earn points in every level that you can spend in a shop to unlock alternative guns. For some reason, only two can be equipped at a time, which is lame. Also lame is the flame-thrower, which was the first weapon I bought.  Go figure.  It’s the only weapon of the lot that I found to be ineffectual. Everything else not only works, but experimenting with how to best use them is entertaining and rewarding. And there are just enough guns to unlock to stretch the play time without overly padding things out.

Ultimately, Bleed is a worthy purchase because it’s focused on generating fun. Levels never feel too long. Bosses never feel too spongy. Design never feels unfair. And there’s so many clever ideas at play here that it’s amazing they could keep them all so balanced. Even the writing is sharp, and the big plot twist towards the end was hilarious and awesome. Once you beat the game, extra play modes open that might squeeze more value for your 400MSP. I still think the price is a bit insane, but Bleed is unquestionably a cut above most XBLIGs. But seriously, what the fuck is up with that name? I could find no connection at all with the name and the game. Would it have been better if it had been called Adventures of Pink-Frizzy Haired Homicidal Crazy Chick? Yes, actually it would have. It’s sad that the awful name and prohibitive price will turn off most potential gamers who spot it on the marketplace. It’s enough to make you cry tears of blood.

Ohhhhhhhhhh. So that’s where the name comes from.

IGC_ApprovedxboxboxartBleed was developed by Bootdisk Revolution

400 Microsoft Points said “shave 160 MSP off the price and it might have had a chance” in the making of this review.

Bleed is very much Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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March to the Moon

December 12, 2012 by 2 Comments

March to the Moon is a shooter with RPG-style leveling up and attribute upgrades.  The whole shmup genre typically makes blood dribble out my ears.  It’s just not my thing.  On the other hand, the whole upgradable stats thing I usually have a lot of fun with at Indie Gamer Chick.  That’s because my first instinct with any upgrade system is to try to abuse it.  Pour all points into one stat, over power it, and see where it gets me.  People say “that’s naughty of you, Catherine!  You should play XBLIGs the same way you play non-indie games.”  To which I say, this is how I play non-indies.  It’s also probably why I finish about half the RPGs that I start.

All text is presented on the stage, with you walking over it. There's not a lot, but what is there is sometimes funny, in a "listen to what that crazy drunk is saying" sort of way.

All text is presented on the stage, with you walking over it. There’s not a lot, but what is there is sometimes funny, in a “listen to what that crazy drunk is saying” sort of way.

I suppose I see their point of view.  When I’m just playing games on my own time, fine, abuse the shit out of them.  Play Call of Duty with your feet.  Play Uncharted underwater.  Play Dishonored while listening to right-wing radio.  Whatever floats my boat.  But treating small, simple, single-manned XBLIGs that way is grossly unfair.  To which I say this: boo hoo.  If I can break the game and turn my character into an unkillable human panzer tank, not only is it my journalistic duty to do so, but I typically like those games more when I can do that.

And I could do that with March to the Moon.  Oh lordy, could I.  The concept here is you’re a dude who wants to get to the moon to, um, shoot pigs and cows and stuff.  The plot is a completely incomprehensible mind-fuck that is so transparently weird just for the sake of being weird that it’s almost sad.  However, I did often giggle at the absurdity of it all, which I’m guessing was the point.  Mostly, it just serves to move along the 80s shooter that accompanies it.  Level design is extremely straight forward.  There’s four worlds, each with eight levels, all of which are just auto-scrolling shooters.  Some of them last a minute or less.  In theory, you could probably beat the whole thing in under an hour.

Me?  I had planned on just running through it as fast as I could.  But then I got to the second world, which featured a variety of goblins that shoot at you.  And I noticed something: the goblins gave off a very generous amount of experience when you killed them.  “Ah-ha!” I exclaimed, “abuse ahoy!”  An hour of grinding later, my character went from a low-ranking hunter to high-ranking hunter-slash-“spirit” that ate enemies for breakfast and shit bones for lunch, which it presumably then fed to the attack dogs I had acquired.  I then finished the rest of the game in approximately thirty minutes.

And you know what?  I had a good time doing it.  Despite having an experience system that is very exploitable, March to the Moon is actually really fun.  Like with Bird Assassin, the brief time I spent grinding my stats up was worth it just to plow through the game and enjoy being an invincible super hero.  If there’s a problem here, it’s that March to the Moon is too basic for its own good.  The levels have nothing to bother the player besides enemies, many of which you can take down with just a couple of shots.  The variety of enemies is also a little lacking.  A lot of the enemies don’t even move.  They just sort of linger there, shooting straight ahead.  Because I had upgraded my hunting skills to fire arrows in five directions, I was able to clear whole stages without moving my character.  If the stages didn’t fly by so quickly, that might have gotten boring.

If they were aiming for graphics that pay tribute to truly ugly early 80s computer games, mission accomplished.

If they were aiming for graphics that pay tribute to truly ugly early 80s computer games, mission accomplished.

I never even died until the last level.  When I got there, I was like “oh shit, maybe I should have built up my stats more evenly.”  But then, it turns out that you can remove points from some attributes and reapply them towards stuff that’s more helpful.  For example, I had put a lot of XP into useless attack dogs.  They weren’t so helpful against the final onslaught of evil space pigs.  So I completely sacked the dogs and re-applied them towards helper spirits that I could spawn faster than they blinked out of existence.  With them, I had a bigger barnyard body-count than Outback Steakhouse, and the final boss (or bosses) were dead before they knew what hit them.

March to the Moon is shockingly shallow for a game with so many upgradable stats.  Sure, there’s extra difficulty modes after you beat the game once, and some people might enjoy those.  However, I was bummed that I couldn’t put more than 13 points into a stat.  Actually, that’s probably a good thing.  If I could have,  my “human panzer tank” would have been firing the gaming equivalent of nuclear warheads and the game would have crossed the line from “too easy” to “you could beat it by taping down the fire button.”  But, I still recommend it because fun is fun, and March to the Moon is unquestionably fun.  I would also recommend that its developer send the game to PETA for free outrage marketing ethical approval.

xboxboxartMarch to the Moon was developed by Califer Games

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points said “isn’t Califer what people in Texas call California?” in the making of this review.

March to the Moon is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Find out where it’s roosting!

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Zomp 3: The Quest for Z’s

December 6, 2012 by 1 Comment

Pro Tip: using “Z’s” in the title of your already tough-sale XBLIG is probably not a good idea.  Especially when the visuals for your game look like they belong in an advertisement for sleep medication.  Zomp 3 is the latest Lolo clone to hit the Xbox Live Indie Game scene.  It’s the fourth one I’ve tackled here at Indie Gamer Chick.  The previous three all rank in the top 30 on my Leaderboard as of this writing.  It’s weird, because Lolo as a franchise has been dead for twenty years.  Hell, Lolo can’t get any love from Nintendo these days, even though one of the main guys behind the series is now the fucking president of the company!  Pretty shitty that they’ve blue balled fans of the, ahem, blue ball.

Why is everyone so sleepy?

Why is everyone so sleepy?  Even the trees are on Ambien here.

Zomp 3 gets the spirit of Lolo right.  There’s 100 puzzles that are structured fairly similar.  Instead of collecting hearts, you collect Z’s.  Once you get all of the Z’s in a room, the door opens up.  Enemies are similar to Lolo too.  There’s guys who give chase, guys who pin you in, and guys that shoot and kill you if you cross in front of their line of sight.  The only real twist to the enemies formula is little slug things that don’t kill you directly, but if you cross their slime trail you pass away.  I don’t expect every game to tinker too much with the source material, but after Aesop’s Garden and Spy Leaks, this is a huge step backwards.

It’s still fun, and the puzzles are still clever, but it’s all bundled in a very ugly, very clunky package.  I try to avoid talking about bad graphics as long as they’re not detrimental towards gameplay.  Zomp 3 doesn’t fall into that category, but the graphics are pug-fuggly, to the point of being painful to look at.  Everything is very rudimentary looking.  On a platform like XBLIG, that is expected from time to time.  Still, maybe I’m just a little too in love with some of the previous games that aped Lolo.  Spyleaks looked amazing.  Aesop’s Garden looked like an NES game.  Even Crystal Hunters looked sort of cool.  Zomp looks cheap, rushed, and unfinished.  And some ideas that aimed to change-up the backdrops, like having stages underwater, just make it look like your TV blew a color tube.

This is one of the underwater levels I'm talking about. All it did was make an ugly game uglier. That's like adding a garage to your house by driving your car through your living room.

This is one of the underwater levels I’m talking about. All it did was make an ugly game uglier. That’s like adding a garage to your house by driving your car through your living room.

There’s also an issue with the controls, as in, they suck.  Every Lolo game has been a bit stiff on the controls, but Zomp 3 takes it to a new extreme.  Imagine playing a game like Lolo if Lolo controlled like Frogger.  It’s a comparison the developer reluctantly agreed with when I brought it up.  It doesn’t break the game by any means, but it will lead to cheap deaths and many moments of repetition.  XBLIG developers, you have got to work harder on controls.  People won’t quit out of a demo of a game because the graphics suck, especially if they’ve gone that far into the sampling process.  But if the controls are bad, they might.  And once they have, you’ve lost them forever.

I want to stress that I still really enjoyed Zomp.  It’s not easy on the eyes and it handles like shit, but there’s still a well designed game here.  It’s probably the easiest of the Lolo clones on XBLIG, and veterans of the series should be able to breeze past the 100 stages in a couple of hours.  But, it’s still a smart game.  The puzzles here are actually more accessible than some of the stuff I’ve dealt with on Indie Gamer Chick.  Some of the ones in Spy Leaks made me sit back and say “what kind of fucking egghead decided to make this instead of spending their time curing cancer?”  And puzzles in Gateways made me weep for the Nobel Prize that was lost by its creator.  No doubt something involving dimensional string theories.  That’s what I like about Zomp 3.  It has puzzles that anyone can solve without getting a headache, but still get a feeling of accomplishment.  For all its problems, talent is on display here.  I feel like I should take some kind of role as an XBLIG development match maker.  Pair the Zomp 3 guy with someone who can make better graphics, and hopefully the game will sell.  No, not one of the XBLIG boobie game guys.  I’m looking for a smart puzzler, not Titris.

 

xboxboxartZomp 3 was developed by Skelman Software

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points said the dude even looks like Lolo in the making of this review. 

Zomp 3 is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Feel free to slam me for ranking four Lolo clones but ignoring City Tuesday.  You’re only strengthening my resolve. 

I was interviewed by Alexander Hinkley for the Examiner.  Click here to read my thoughts on XBLIGs, their future, and indie gaming in general.

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Aeternum

November 28, 2012 by 18 Comments

Once upon a time, I had friends who did XBLIG reviews right alongside me.  There was Two Fedoras, Gear-Fish, and Armless Octopus.  Then my friends all left writing game reviews to making games, leaving me all alone to fend off titles about sperm by myself.  Well, now their games have all hit.  First was Dave’s horrid Pong clone, a game so bad it has now taken a place on the Wong-Baker pain scale.

“I don’t know doctor. This pick axe lodged in my skull hurts a lot, but I don’t think its quite as bad as Piz-ong.”

And now we have Aeternum, designed by Brooks Bishop of Two Fedoras, with an assist in writing from Nate Graves of Gear-Fish.  What is Aeternum?  Why, it’s a bullet hell!  See though, there’s a difference between this game and the Pong game that Dave made.  That difference is this is the type of game Brooks has always wanted to make.  My gut tells me that Dave never dreamed of making a Pong game.  As a kid, he probably did imagine making a game with rocking Genesis box art, but I’m sure his vision probably involved Mega Man fighting Saddam Hussein or something.

Personally, I hate bullet hells.  I know I’ve said that I don’t have any biases against any particular genres, but that was what can politely be described as a fib.  I just don’t get the damn things.  A challenge is one thing, but bullet hells typically cross the line over into digital self-mutilation.  Part of my disdain for them comes from the fact that I totally missed the 2D shooter era.  I didn’t grow up with Gradius, R-Type, or Raiden.  Maybe if I had spent my formative years hunkering down on those, I would have the skills necessary to make it more than five minutes in a bullet hell.   Alas, no.  I did have Ikaruga for the GameCube, but its a soul-crushing bastard that I barely spent enough time with to form an opinion at all.  Then I developed epilepsy at sixteen and had an excuse to never touch a bullet hell ever again, proof that every cloud has a silver lining.

So here’s the awkward moment: Nate and Brooks are my friends.  Nate and me have shared many amazing, emotional conversations.  Brooks designed my Sweetie character, a variation of which now graces a few games on the marketplace as my Seal of Approval.  I don’t necessarily want to hurt their feelings.  Then again, they wanted to hurt my pride and make me question my skills as a gamer.  How else do you explain them making a bullet hell?  Besides, I was so pissed at Dave for Piz-ong that I sent him to his room to think about what he had done.  And that was just for a bad Pong clone.  For a bullet hell, I think I’m legally entitled to water-board Nate & Brooks.

The dialog by Nate Graves is, um, hey look, a kitty!

Aeternum (Latin for “Eternal”, the amount of torment one can expect from this fucker) is a loving tribute to evil games with badly translated Japanese.  You play as some anime thing that has to shoot bullets at other anime things, such as things that look like strawberry milkshakes, or giant squids that go by names like Archibald the Cat Wrangler.  It’s quirky!  It’s Japanese!  It’s.. fucking impossible.  I’m sorry, but I put two separate one-hour sessions into this and I couldn’t get past the first stage.  I could get as far as a fight with some other flying anime chick thing, but she spams the screen with fast-moving bullets.  I’m going to be the laughing-stock of hardcore gamers everywhere, but I couldn’t make any progress at all.  And this was the normal difficulty!  But then again, I couldn’t even past her on practice mode.  I’m just not wired for this shit.

Here’s what I did observe: the controls seem responsive.  The graphics are well done.  And every screen-wide spamming is allegedly survivable.  I’m not personally willing to put in the time to learn how to survive them, but if you’re into this sort of thing, enjoy.  It’s not friendly towards people who don’t like the genre, and I outright didn’t get things like the focus mode, which slows you down but not the bullets.  I went through the tutorial a couple of times trying to figure out what benefit there was to it, or to grazing bullets, but the game fails to properly articulate it.

What I’m depressed about is there are now two games out by my former colleagues and I hated them both.  They’re my friends, you know?  I want them to do well.  When we talk about their games, I want to be able to do so lovingly, without having to change the conversation to a more pleasant subject.  Like whether or not they think this mole growing on the back of my hand is cancerous or not.

This is as far as I could make it. Shameful? Um, hey look, a puppy!

Props to them though.  I couldn’t make a game.  Nor am I likely to, say, hypothetically pay someone to make a game for me.  A broken one, designed to test how much effort is put into the peer-testing system.  A game that has at least one crash, one major play control issue, one major collision detection issue, two other evil checklist violations, and various spelling and grammar errors, which I would then submit for peer review just to see how much you dipshits actually try to find this stuff.  Yea, I wouldn’t even consider doing that.  See this —> 🙂 That’s a smiley face.  And it would not lie to you.

Oh, and Aeternum can put a gun to its own temple and send itself to bullet hell Hell.  Which I imagine is where bad bullets go, like the one that killed Bambi’s mother.

Aeternum was developed by Wasted Brilliance

80 Microsoft Points could be in peer review as we speak right now for all you guys know in the making of this review.

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Null Battles

November 26, 2012 by Leave a comment

In sports, Knicks beat the Warriors 103 to 95.  Or possibly 99 to 93.  In fact, we’re not even sure if the Knicks won.  Carmelo Anthony had 31 points off 27 for 27 shooting from the field.  That statistic is actually impossible, but we can only report on the numbers as they are given to us.

Thankfully, real life sports statistics tend to be fairly accurate, unlike the post-game stats that Null Battles spits out.  Talking about the type of game it is (arena shooter), how it plays (kind of fun, kind of sloppy), and what makes it unique (strange gravity effects) is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I find that knowing who wins or loses arena shooters is a pretty big deal to most gamers.  I’m the type of person who meticulously studies my post-game stats when I play Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty.   If those games reported different scores and stats to each player, who would want to play them?  I wouldn’t.

I tried reviewing Null Battles back in early September and this problem came up.  When I took on my amigo Bryce online, this is the score that showed on their screen.

And this is what showed up on mine.

Same game, vastly different stats.  My policy with online games is to give developers a chance to fix the problems before I post the proper review.  I got notice that the game was finally ready a few weeks ago, but I got caught up in the latest batch of new releases and forgot to go back to Null Battles.  As it turns out, there was no reason to rush.  Again, here are the results from Bryce’s side of things.

And here are the results from mine.

Again, same game.  We’re in agreement of the following things: #1, Bryce did NOT have 100% headshot percentage, and I didn’t have anywhere close to 70%.  #2, none of the scores seemed to lineup with what was happening in the game, except the fact that I lost.  #3, not knowing does negate the amount of fun you have leading up to it.  Sorry, it just plain does.  Maybe not for some (Brian for example) as much as it did so for me.  But this is my blog and I have to say this problem renders Null Battles appeal null and void.

Null Battles was developed by Techno Hermit Games

80 Microsoft Points have absolutely no interest in playing split-screen multiplayer in this day and age in the making of this review.

A review copy was provided by Techno Hermit Games for this review.  The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points.  The opinions of this review are her’s alone. 

They still have a Second Chance with the Chick.  If the scores were accurate, this game would have made the Leaderboard.

Yea, this was a waste of my 300th XBLIG review. 

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