Spectrangle360

July 17, 2012 by 5 Comments

Board games.  I love them.  But as video games?  I’m not so sure.  Some games, like chess, are way over-produced.  Did I really need chess on my PlayStation Vita?  Do I really need two version of Scrabble on my iPhone?  That’s ignoring that most of the best board games use “house rules” that aren’t generally an option when you play them digitally.  No money for Free Parking, no starting in a room in Clue, no increasing the value of V in Scrabble.  But what really irks me is how few video board games there are out there that could only exist as video games.  Mario Party is still around, which I really adored as a kid.  As an adult, I see that it’s a game that doesn’t put a heavy premium in skill.  In fact, outcomes are generally determined by plain old luck to such a degree that it might as well be called Mario Bingo.  However, there are nine console Mario Parties now.  Obviously there is a market for this thing, and not just because it has “Mario” in the title.  Let’s say Nintendo marketed the shit out of a multiplayer game where Mario and his friends performed tax audits on people.  Ain’t nobody buying that game, let alone enough people to spawn more sequels than Friday the 13th.  Nintendo already proved my theory by releasing Wii Party, which sold 7.5 million copies.

Spectrangle isn’t one of those “it has to be a video game” type of deals.  Think of it as a color-coated version of dominoes.  You have a grid of 36 interlocking triangles, some of which have multipliers on them.  Each player draws four tiles, which are visible to each-other.  The first player must place a tile on one of the spaces that does not have a multiplier.  The next player then must build off of the placed tile by matching the colors.  Each tile has a value to it, and scoring is based on the value of the tile multiplied by the amount of other tiles it is touching.  Play continues until there are no more moves open to either player or until someone runs out.

It’s a pretty simple concept, and it is fun.  The guys at IronReaverGames have done a fine job of porting it over to XBLIG.  Even the AI is kind of balanced.  Kind of.  I could slaughter the game on easy, while normal took a little bit of thinking power.  I lost a few games to the computer on hard, although I would like to say that luck factored into that.  Actually, it factored in so much that Brian started laughing hysterically while I quietly stewed and wondered if there was any spot on my Xbox that I could safely stab without killing it or myself.  And then I played the game on its insane difficulty and absolutely demolished it twice in a row.  At first I thought “damn, I’m just fucking awesome!”  But then I went back to the hard difficulty, which was the only setting that beat me, and I lost another two out of three games.  So maybe “insane” in this context meant “the game plays like it is in an abnormal mental state.”  Because although it had to pause to think, it still made DUMB moves.  It’s less “Bobby Fischer playing chess” insane and more “Bobby Fischer doing anything but playing chess” insane.

Despite not being very impressive from a visual standpoint, Spectrangle360 works well.  It even has online play, which I was able to enjoy without any glitches.  I’m not a big fan of the fact that it dumps you out to the menu after every game, but otherwise I have no complaints.  Ultimately though, it has limited appeal.  If you’re not into these types of board games, this won’t sway you.  It’s not unique enough to be something you just HAVE to try, nor does it need to exist as a video game.  Is it fun?  It was for me.  I can’t tell you if it will be fun for you though.  Spectrangle360 is what it is.  If you’ve never played anything like it, it’s at least worth trying.  Otherwise, you already know whether you will like this game or not just by reading how it works.

I added a circle to this picture to highlight something that does bug me a lot about some XBLIGs: that damn font that constantly shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s the default font that comes in the XNA starter kit or something, because it’s in so many games. It’s ugly, it’s often blurry, it’s cheap looking, and it always makes a game seem somehow badder. Always. Spectrangle360 looks just fine without it. With it, it looks ten times worse than it really is. Guys, if you’ve made it this far in the development process, you would be doing yourself a big favor by taking the time to make any on-screen text look better than stock.

Board games will always be ported over to gaming devices.  Spectrangle360 is a port itself.  And these types of games will always have their place.  But maybe if you’re going to port it, you should think about spicing it up a little.  Include modes that contain content that can’t be done with boards and dice and luck of the draw.  Board games are limited by the laws of physics.  Video games are only limited by the amount of cocaine the developer has snorted.  I want games to take advantage of this.  I want to see Monopoly where you don’t just buy Baltic Avenue.  I want to see one where you load up on rifles and take the fucker by force.  I don’t want to eat marbles while playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.  I want to be eating something adorable and fluffy that looks like it feels pain.  I don’t want to just bump a guy off a slide on Sorry!  I want to bayonet them in the back, drag their corpse to my home, and eat it raw.  Hey, why am I telling you guys this?  Yo, Hasbro, get on the ball with this shit.  If you could get away turning Transformers from children’s toy into ultra-violent testosterone flick featuring a pot-brownie eating mother, you can get away with making a version of Operation where no anesthetic is used.

Spectrangle360 was developed by IronReaverGames

80 Microsoft Points noted that the corporeal version of this game costs anywhere between $10 and $50, so obviously this version is the one to get, unless you just really hate money in the making of this review. 

Spectrangle360 is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Obsessive Collecting Disorder

July 6, 2012 by 10 Comments

I had a problem with Obsessive Collecting Disorder.  It was the name.  The name is all wrong.  It should have been called Obsessive Collective Disorder.  You see, the name is a play on the anxiety disorder known as obsessive-compulsive disorder.  It’s not obsessive compulsing disorder, because there is no such word as compulsing.  But there is a word called collective, so the game should have used it.  Sure, Obsessive Collective Disorder sounds like something that happens to a cult that undergoes a mass suicide in order to catch a ride on a UFO, but it works better as a pun.

Welcome back to Xbox Live Indie Games: Your source for self-hating gameplay.

I had one other problem with Obese Cauliflower Disorder: the game is a punisher, and I hate those fucking things.  They seem like they’re some kind of repressed anger stemming from not getting enough love as a child, manifested in video game form.  The idea is you’re a stick figure who is being put through various test chambers owned by the, and I’m not making this up, the CrAperture Corporation.  Isn’t it ironic how one of the most clever and original games to come around in a long time has somehow managed to kill the creativity of an entire generation?  Let me guess, the game will end with some kind of reference to the cake being a lie.  Oh, yep, there it is.  Very nice, guys.  What, you couldn’t work in a psychotic artificial intelligence while you were at it?  Well, at least the ending was good for a small giggle.  You know what?  I guess kleptomania falls into the OCD spectrum, so we’ll just say they were running with the theme and move on.

As a game, Opal Chin Disorder is pretty much just like any other punisher.  The idea is similar to N+.  You run around, avoiding traps and collecting coins.  The platforming mechanics are pretty basic.  A jumps, X or the right trigger run, and that’s it.  There’s no double jumps, wall jumps, ducking, sliding, doing short-form taxes, or breaking out into the chorus line from Oklahoma.  It’s just you, jumping, and shit that wants you dead, like some ingenious Olympic Committee person combined the hurdles and archery events.

Platformers live and die on controls.  If a game wants you dead, like Omnipotent Cactus Disorder does, it’s typically because the controls are shit and it’s an over-compensation thing.  In Octogenarian Colon Disorder’s case, I don’t think the controls are shit.  Brian suggested the word “serviceable” to me, but that sounds a bit too generous.  I think I’ll go with “tolerable.”  That sounds unhating yet highly critical.  The controls are just so strange.  The jumping is simultaneously too floaty yet too stiff, like a cloud on Viagra.  You do get used to it, in the same way you would probably get used to hitting your thumb with a hammer if you kept it up long enough, though it would be preferable to not do that.

The developer assured me that people told them Ornery Cardinal Disorder had tight controls. Ha. Where did they get that from? A game of Scattergories? “Things that are tight that start with the letter ‘C’. And GO!” “Oh gee um, collar! Um, cage! Uh uh uh, controls!” BUZZ! “Yes, we challenge ‘control’ and also we can’t believe you guys didn’t come up with cu..”

Everything about Obsessive Collective Disorder does just enough to not suck but not enough to wow me.  The minimalist graphics are tiring and bland.  The level design freshens things up with new obstacles every ten stages, but some of the challenges are copied and pasted far more than needed.  If this makes it seem like I hated the game, I actually didn’t.  It’s short enough to not feel like you’re taking a vacation on death row.  The level design is fair, I guess.  Ultimately, it never feels like you’re trying to shout at the tide to turn back.  It’s a punisher that feels doable.  Assuming you don’t play on Hardcore mode which gives you a limited amount of lives.  Some whack jobs might give that a chance.  Me?  Ha ha ha, no.  Still, I recommend Obsessive Collective Disorder.  Not a ringing endorsement or anything.  I guess it’s like saying “if you want to forfeit your dignity to just one Xbox Live Indie Game this week, make it this one!”

Obsessive Collecting Disorder was developed by Super Smith Bros.

80 Microsoft Points washed their hands seven times, flicked the light switch on an off seven times, then washed their hands seven more times in the making of this review.

Obsessive Collective Disorder is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed. 

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Tales from the Dev Side: What Xbox Live Indie Games Have Meant to Me

July 1, 2012 by 15 Comments

Trust me, nobody was more surprised that Indie Gamer Chick caught on than I was.  And I was even more caught off guard when I realized that I was starting to have an influence on the Xbox Live Indie Game community.  A positive one at that.  At most, I figured I would inspire people to raid my house with pitchforks and torches to tar and feather me while setting my dog on fire.  Instead, people actually use my reviews and my editorials as a case study on what people from my generation (gamers who started during the 32bit era) expect from gaming.  I have to admit, I never figured anyone would seek my advice when it came to game design.  I’m still a little stunned by that.  Part of me is flattered, while the other part thinks you guys need your fucking heads examined.

Realizing that I had something special going with Indie Gamer Chick, I thought about how so many people who come here previously had little to no awareness of Xbox Live Indie Games.  Obviously the lack of promotion on Microsoft’s part shares some of the blame for that.  But part of it is undoubtedly the fact that indie developers typically are faceless to the gaming population as a whole.  That’s not exclusive to XBLIGs, by the way, but I doubt anyone will be rushing to make an award-winning documentary on the trails and tribulations of creating Escape Goat.

It was in that spirit that I came up with Tales from the Dev Side.  Well, that and the fact that it would be an easy way to get content on my site without having to do much work myself.  Again, laziness prevails!  Since starting the feature in December, readers have enjoyed a wide range of topics from pricing to community acceptance.  Hell, one in particular has been cited as the definitive piece on creating online multiplayer games on the platform.  It’s really incredible to me how receptive my readers have been to the variety of topics discussed by developers here.  Thousands of views have been achieved between them.  The people want these, and I want you to contribute them.

Xbox Live Indie Games are niche.  The market is small.  The community is small.  But the people involved are wonderful human beings.  Being Indie Gamer Chick has changed my life, and all I do is write about the games.  I wondered if any developers out there would want to talk about what XBLIG has meant to them.  The results were, in a word, overwhelming.

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Introducing the New Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

July 1, 2012 by 3 Comments

One of the most popular features on my site has been the Xbox Live Indie Game Leaderboard.  But, I have to confess that I wish I had held off on implementing it.  You see, I started the board last August, after only having my site for one month.  Although people have had fun watching it evolve over the last eleven months, there have been games that probably would have never had a shot of making it today, and other games that would have made it on if I had played them earlier.  Maybe that’s the nature of such a ranking, but still, I wish I had waited until today to put it up.

But, I didn’t.  I can’t go back and do it over again, but I can make the board what I always envisioned it would be.  I based the concept on the Leaderboard on the BBC television series Top Gear and its Power Lap Time board.  On the show, they rank every car they’ve reviewed against each-other.  Although I don’t want to put every single game I’ve reviewed on the board, my intent has always been to have more rankings.  When my first anniversary approached, Brian and I talked about my options, and we both agreed that genre-based Leaderboards made the most sense.  So I started to put them together.

Here was the problem with that idea: developers have funny views of what genres their games belong to.  Dead Pixels, a shooter that has some stat-upgrade attributes, was labeled as an RPG.  Huh.  Party game Chompy Chomp Chomp was set up as an Action-Adventure title.  Weird.  Cute Things Dying Violently was listed as a platformer.  Okay, now you guys are just fucking with me.

Check out that platforming action. Super Mario ain’t got shit on this.

I do get it.  Puzzlers don’t attract a lot of interest.  Trust me, I know.  Every time I review one my page views nose dive like Mark Zuckerberg listed them on the stock exchange.  Still, that didn’t help me too much.  Brian and I kicked around the idea of assigning genres ourselves, but fuck it.  That would require more work than we’re willing to put in, so laziness prevails, as laziness tends to do.  Instead, I would take every game that received a positive review and rank them all against each other.  Wait, now.  I demanded the lazy solution.  That sounds like a lot of work!  Sigh.

After a few weeks of sorting and debating, I ranked all 105 games that received a “positive” review from me.  There has been some controversy in the process.  People have said that this is in violation of my “no review scores” policy.  It’s not.  If I said games 1 – 10 got 11 1/2 gold stars, maybe.  What I’ve done is just say which games I would prefer to play over others.  The process was actually very simple.  Have you ever been to the eye doctor?  Do you know the part where they ask you if image A is “better or worse” than image B?  That’s what I did, with every game on the list.

The board is now up, and you can go check it out for yourselves.  I’m very, very satisfied with the rankings.  They accurately represent my views on the top games on the platform.  The list is good.  The list is absolute.  I’m going to hell for using those lines on a video game list.  But, the list will always be changing.  New games will be added weekly.  Well, assuming I play good games that belong on it.

I would also like to point that the leaderboard operates with a paid sponsorship.  I had been getting inquires for months asking if I would take advertisements on my site.  I was against the idea of trying to make profit off Indie Gamer Chick.  I feel that the minute I start treating this like a business, it stops being my hobby and starts being a job.  I don’t want that.  I don’t need that.  So I had to think of a way to make it work, without my site looking like a billboard.

There are two really wonderful charities out there that I have benefited from in my life.  One is called Autism Speaks.  They’ve made amazing contributions in the field of autism research, but directly help the lives of those in the community that are affected by it.  The other is the Epilepsy Foundation.  As you can imagine, being a gamer and being epileptic mix about as well as Seth Brundle and a house fly.  The Epilepsy Foundation is dedicated to targeted research towards discovering the causes, triggers, and ultimately the cures for people like me that live with this condition.

If you want to sponsor the Leaderboard, I don’t want your money.  But these charities are worthwhile causes that will benefit many people all over the world.  So instead of giving me your money, give it to them.  If you want to sponsor the board, contact me and we’ll discuss the terms.  Sponsors will need to provide a receipt confirming donation to one (or both) of the charities above.  If you are donating with the intention of setting up a sponsorship here, do not do so before discussing it with me first, as the current sponsorship is locked up through September of 2012 and I’m already in discussion with other potential sponsors.

Official sponsor of ranking games.

That’s pretty much it.  I want to thank the community for their support.  I want to thank my first sponsor, Mario Wunderlich, whose game Count to a Billion (appropriate, no?) will be launching soon on iPhone.  In closing, I want to put this out there to all developers: challenge me.  If your game is on the board and you think you can do better, prove to me you can.  Patch your game, and let me know it.  I never turn down playing a game a second time.  If your game missed the board the first time, fix it and try again.  The worst thing that can happen is your game stays off the board.  Well, you’re already doing that.  But maybe you can make the board.  Since starting this site, I’ve had developers on the board credit their placement on the top ten with sales spikes.  That can be you.  It should be you.  And I want it to be you.

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Chester (Second Chance with the Chick)

June 29, 2012 by 3 Comments

Despite being a bit on the underwhelming side, the 2011 Indie Game Summer Uprising had a few gems floating among the sewage.  Cute Things Dying Violently provided some good laughs, while Take Arms provided me with being called a “camping ho-bag.”  Which brought a smile to my face, if nothing else.  And then there was Chester, a polarizing game that I loved, but others loathed for reasons that baffle me.  Even my brother from a different mother Alan told me he thought Chester was lame.  Dude.  We had something between us, you and I.  But our views on Chester have driven us apart.  Now he’ll return to his life of Goolin and Fish & Chips, while I’ll return to my life of hanging out with Brian, watching Top Gear and Doctor Who.  Wait, which one of us is British again?

Chester, which I reviewed way back in September, impressed the hell out of me with its quirky hand-drawn graphics coupled with running and shooting platforming.  It had what so many games on the service doesn’t: personality.  Well, that and it actually played well.  But here’s the weird thing: the version I played back in September was more or less an unfinished beta build.  The Chester that is currently on the marketplace is a much more complex game.  And it’s even more fucking awesome than before.

In the old build of Chester, you could change the backgrounds of each stage to reflect different art styles.  Now, the styles actually change the gameplay, affecting the strength or speed of the enemies, or your weapons, or the amount of rare items enemies drop.  There are eight different backgrounds, and scrolling through them is a breeze: just use the bumpers.  Likewise, the character of Chester takes ten different forms, all with unique abilities and attributes.  Combine this with the elemental system that turns battles with enemies into a game of rock-paper-scissors and what once was a fairly simple (if stylish) game is now a pretty complex one.

Chester is so loaded with so many unlockables and extra content that it’s actually a bit overwhelming.  Every stage has various trinkets to find, hidden rooms, and enemies that drop delicious brains (thus making the  XBLIG minimum zombie quota in a roundabout kind of way).  You have catalogs to fill up, shit to buy from stores, and multiple difficult levels to try.  If you’re gaming on a limited budget, Chester could very well be the game you’ve been waiting for.  Hell, I bitched about the game’s lack of boss the first time around and now there is one.  It kinda sucks, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, and I appreciate the effort.

If I had to make a complaint about Chester, and I do, it’s that the controls are still a bit on the stiff side.  Then again, each character handles a little differently, and stuff like gravity affects each one in different ways.  Maybe I made a booboo by playing through most of the game with the default character.  The game can also feel like too much of a collectathon at times.  If you’re the type prone to OCD, Chester might be the worst thing to happen to you.  There’s so much shit to collect and stuff to buy in stores that I don’t think I could ever spend the days it will take to get it all.  Don’t worry, you’re not going to be missing out on levels or anything.  But still, I kind of want a chance to see everything a game, especially an indie game, has to offer without having to invest enough time to drive cross-country and back.  I want my games to feel like a diversion, not a second job.

Still, Chester is amazing.  It offers so much value for so little money.  That is, if you buy on Xbox.  On IndieVania or Dasura, it will cost you a whopping $9.99, compared to a meager 80 Mega Super Pesos on Xbox.  Quite a jump there, fellas, one that doesn’t make a whole ton of sense to me.  It would be as silly as asking for $20 for a Blu-ray, but $50 for a 3D Blu-ray.  Okay, bad example.  Or maybe good example seeing how those things would have trouble selling if they came bundled with a holographic Angelina Jolie giving out force-feedback handjobs.

Chester was developed by Brilliant Blue-G

80 Microsoft Points have Chester’s nuts roasting on an open fire in the making of this review.

 

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Mystic Forest

June 28, 2012 by 11 Comments

Mystic Forest is the latest steamer from Team Shuriken. It’s a text-based adventure where you play as a dude who finds a buxom fairy in the garden he was growing for his vegan ex-girlfriend and oh fuck it you’re just here to read about the boobies, aren’t you?

Perhaps it’s long overdue that we discuss the dos and don’ts of Xbox Live Indie Games and sex. You see, developers have a set of rules of things they can and cannot do called the “Evil Checklist.” Among those things they can’t do is make a game with nipples. Boobs are fine, as long as they’re covered. No sex either. The best you can get is flirting between the characters.

This still isn’t reaching you, is it? All I have to do is post a screenshot of the game and you’ll be super gluing your mouse buttons with spunk, correct?

I can practically hear the FAP FAP FAP coming from your computers.

Well, for those of you paying attention:

See, 

her,

breasts?

See her breasts?

Those two bumps on her chest?

Notice no nipples.

It’s very simple.

They’re on the evil Checklist!

No sex is allowed.

Among the XNA crowd.

Their accounts will be suspended.

If the rules are unattended.

If you want to see boobles.

Have a stop at Google.

They have breasts!

They have breasts!

THEY HAVE BREASTS!

See this game?

It’s so lame.

Most Team Shuriken stuff is all the same.

A few texty slides and some choices.

They don’t even bother having voices.

It’s so dumb.

It’s no fun.

And it’s over-priced for some.

240 points for some sex.

Being horny is a hex.

How much do Playboys cost?

Think of the money lost.

To see these breasts.

See these breasts.

SEE THESE BREASTS!

It’s fairly transparent why I’m doing this game.  It’s good for page views. And obviously there’s market for shit like this, because otherwise Team Shuriken wouldn’t turn these things out at the rate they do. They’re businessmen. I can respect that. But the writing in these games is abysmal, they often don’t have proper spelling or grammar, and they’re just so half-assed. These guys aren’t total washes as game designers.  Dream Divers was at least an attempt at doing something with actual gameplay in it. I just have to wonder what future generations will think when they drudge through the wasteland we leave behind as a civilization: what will they think of us?

Mystic Forest was developed by Team Shuriken (who else?)

240 Microsoft Points are sorry Cathy, I can’t let you do that in the making of this review.

Thanks to Nate Graves of Gear-Fish.com for the picture. Really sealed this review good. 

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Spoids (Second Chance with the Chick)

June 26, 2012 by 3 Comments

I reviewed Spoids back in April and it aggravated the ever-loving shit out of me so much that I wrote an editorial on game difficulty in part because of it.  Well, Spoids is back, all patched up and ready to kick your ass some more.  Why?  Because all the changes implemented are so miniscule in their scope that you’ll hardly notice them.  Since I had a fairly big list of complaints last time, I’ll do what I’ve done in the past and go over every concern one by one.

Original: The enemies are too bullet-spongy.

New Build: The enemies are still too bullet-spongy.  I can spam whole sections of the board with all sorts of firepower and the fuckers still can walk through entire hallways with minimal damage.  The bosses are allegedly less tough, but it doesn’t really seem that way in practice.  The bosses that unleash five extremely fast-moving enemies when they die are still able to absorb entire rows of gunfire without so much as blinking.  They’re usually pretty close to an exit when they die, leaving no time for your defenses to stand a reasonable chance at stopping half the shit they drop, no matter how many things you put to slow stuff down.  Speaking of which, the slowdown stuff is ironically too slow to activate.  When the fast-moving “zoomers” show up, they often cruise a few spaces past the slow-down-thingies before they actually do yield.  We call this “Getting a Yellow Light in California Syndrome.”

God this stage pissed me off. Fucking gloriously addictive piece of shit.

Original: The flying enemies and their associated tower are way unbalanced.

New Build: Efforts were made to fix this, but they failed.  The only tower that attacks flying creatures is the Homing Missile.  Before, they cost $125 a unit, which was way overpriced for a tower that is useless against the vast, vast, vast majority of enemies.  The guys at AirWave took this advice to heart and discounted the tower that is useless against most of the enemies and slow to react to the ones it is effective against to a generous $110.  Gee, thanks guys.  Meanwhile, you still need to occasionally couple them with radar towers, which cost $50.  So the discount you gave us isn’t even enough to make a down payment on one of those.  Hell, it’s barely a third of the cost of the weakest offensive tower in the game.  Why not just suck the fillings out of my teeth while you’re at it?

Meanwhile, the flying guys are allegedly weaker and attack less frequently.  I will admit that the flyers are  slightly more tolerable, but they still are overpowered compared to the price and effectiveness of the towers that can attack them.  A problem with Spoids in general is the important, single-functional towers are slow to react to everything.  The radar stuff takes too long to make the invisible enemies visible.  The slow-down stuff takes too long to slow down the zoomers.  The missiles take too long to fire on the flyers, and they don’t put out enough bullets or fire often enough.  I once again spammed entire sections of the screen with the worthless-against-99%-of-the-enemies missile towers and radar and still had entire strings of flyers just shrug them off and cause damage.

Original: Money doesn’t accumulate fast enough.

New Build: It still doesn’t.  In a game that has so many enemies that require special, non-offensive towers just to open up their vulnerability, you really don’t get enough resources in Spoids.  In the stages where enemies hit you from two different starting points, you often have to pick and choose which side to “let go of” and hope you can catch up later.  You often can’t.  When guys who phase in and out of view are around, you have to set up radar towers, which are costly and don’t fire.  The phasers are every bit as spongy as everything else, so you often have to set up multiple towers just to pick off the front line.  When the zoomers come in, not only do they take more damage to kill than Jason Voorhees but they run faster than your towers can shoot.  To have a chance, you have to put the slowdown towers in, but they come at a cost of $100.  However, their range of effectiveness is small and they don’t activate fast enough, meaning that most of them will receive minimal damage.  You have to cover every corner with the slow-down-thingies, but if you do that you won’t have the money for guns.  It sucks that the tougher enemies don’t pay in proportion to how much they cost to kill.

Don’t count on being able to cover the map like this during story mode. Not even close.

Original: The game cost 240 Microsoft Points.

New Build: The game costs 80 Microsoft Points.  Thus I now feel comfortable recommending Spoids.  For all of its faults, and those faults are massive, Spoids is every bit as fun and addictive as tower defense games can be.  If you’re into these things, that is.  Haters of the genre won’t be converted by it.  But, I liked it.  Don’t get me wrong, if I ever encounter the developers I might give this whole “strangle a fellow human being” thing a test drive, but it will be because I liked the game.  Just not as much as I could have.  AirWave Games has talent.  I just wish the next time they say they’re going to fix a game, they do more than drop the price.  Which was admittedly enough to sway me to say “okay, it’s worth buying” but that’s not the point.  I’m not even sure if the game is better.  I did beat it this time, but it still took me over a dozen tries to finish the 8th and final stage.  After that many tries, you don’t feel a sense of satisfaction.  You feel a sense of “thank Christ I don’t have to start all over with it again.”  Games should never leave you feeling that.  Ever.  They’re entertainment, not dental surgery.  Still, Spoids is one of the most polished looking games on the market, and it’s very playable.  And it’s made by some really cool developers whose necks I’m hoping will be very wringable.

Spoids was developed by AirWave Games

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points have always wanted to try the Vulcan Nerve Pinch on someone in the making of this review.  Oh Mommy, come here for a moment. 

Spoids is also available on Desura for $2.99.  This version is unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The XBLIG version is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Compromised

June 23, 2012 by 1 Comment

Have you ever played a game that seemed like you should like it, but you didn’t?  I got that vibe from Compromised, a patch-work of twin stick shooting, wave shooting, space shooting, and shooty shooted shooter shooting.  It’s a typical “aliens invade and you have to save the world” claptrap storyline.  In the case of Compromised, I’m not sure why you would want to save this world.  The environments are pretty dank and depressing.  It doesn’t look like a world any reasonable being would want to live on.  For all the people of this planet know, the invaders are a race of architects and home decorators who are trying to liven the fucking place up.  Maybe we shouldn’t start blowing them up so fast.  I mean, they can’t possibly make this place any worse.

Compromised is pretty high in production values, as far as XBLIGs go.  At a whopping 426MB, it damn well better be.  Sounds, character models, special effects, they’re all top-notch.  And yet, the actual setting of the game offers such little visual stimulation that the game ultimately becomes a little draining.  Bleak works sometimes, but I feel doing so requires characters and interaction.  When you put a ship alone with no supporting characters in a sterile environment, it can be depressing.  I had the same problem with Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.  The reason why galactic stuff like Metroid or Mass Effect offer such a variety of locales is because the alternative is boring.  In Compromised, the only variety is a change in color.  It’s as inviting as a traffic light.

Gameplay is a bit more lively and typically involves moving forward, fighting a few waves of enemies, moving forward a little more, fighting more waves, and then fighting bosses.  It’s a solid design, but there’s so many little mistakes that I ultimately really don’t like Compromised at all.  The best way to explain why that is can be summed up with all the times I had to pause the game to say “Whaaaaa?”

The first instance was during the tutorial, when the game was trying and failing to explain how the special attacks work.  Each of the four face buttons activates such an ability, with some kind of sub-space nuclear anti-matter black-hole creating fuck you unholy universe killing bomb mapped to the B button.  The game told me to try each of the weapons, so I did, and the thing mapped to B detonated and pretty much insta-killed me.  During the tutorial, after the game told me to use it.  Whaaaaa?

That was pretty much par for the course for that weapon, by the way.  It lingers, and once its been let loose, you can’t safely be around it.  It’s like one of my dog’s farts.

You can upgrade your stats by collecting little orange cores that enemies drop.  You can use them to increase your health bar, which sounds great!  The only problem is, when you die and respawn from a checkpoint, you don’t get the bar filled all the way.  Whaaaaaa?  Typically if you die and come back to life, that’s like a universal cue that you could use a full health bar, but the game doesn’t think so.  Also, you can upgrade how much health refills charge you up.  Again, sounds great.  The only problem is that enemies don’t actually drop the damn things.  They only appear during preset intervals.  In a game where enemies absolutely swarm the shit out of you and you might fight waves of hundreds of guys between checkpoints, you have no way to gain health.  Whaaaaa?

Enemies can spawn into a position where they’re instantly chewing your ass, before you have any chance to defend yourself.  Whaaaaa?

Compromised is a TwinkS, but missiles don’t fire the way your aiming stick is pointing.  Instead, they fire whichever way your ship is pointing.  Whaaaaa?  The whole point of TwickS are that you can move one direction and fire in the other!

I’ve never been the type of critic who settles for saying “it just wasn’t for me.”  I didn’t like Compromised, so I can’t recommend it to anyone else.  Even without all the problems, I found it to be pretty dull.  It’s not as if you just fight one wave at a time.  You fight strings of waves, one after another, in the same drab environments.  Fire-fights stick around too long, well after you’re ready to move on to the next section of the game.  Checkpoints are often spread too far apart, and without a traditional method of health drops and enemies that are completely unfair, you’ll end up replaying the same sections again and again.  I had maxed out my gun’s strength, my missile load and their power, and I still died often and had trouble making progress.  After five hours, lots of grinding, and no end in sight, I gave up.  I wasn’t having any fun.  Ultimately, I feel that Compromised is built using top quality bricks, but they’re held together with rancid tartar sauce and dental plaque.

Compromised was developed by Super Soul

240 Microsoft Points have a friend who really enjoyed the shit out of this game and spent last night telling me I have no taste at all because he’s a big meanie in the making of this review.

 

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Dead Pixels (Second Chance with the Chick)

June 19, 2012 by 7 Comments

It’s been just over nine months since I reviewed Dead Pixels, the #2 game as of this writing on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, and the former king of the mountain.  Despite really enjoying my time with the game, I never really got around to playing the two extra modes that launched months after its release.  With less than two weeks to go before my first anniversary as Indie Gamer Chick, I figured I should finally take a look and see if the content would be enough to elevate Dead Pixels back into the #1 spot on the board.  Of course, my expectations that it might do just that were somewhat dashed by the developer outright telling me that it would not reclaim the spot.

You get more characters to choose from in The Solution, all of whom have been bad little boys. Lord knows that when you have an emergency situation, the only solution is to send in hardened criminals to do all the heroics. I know how it works. I saw Pitch Black too.

He wasn’t being coy.  In fact, he’s right.  The two new modes of Dead Pixels are swell extras, but they ultimately add nothing to the experience.  First up is The Solution.  It’s kind of like a survival mode, where you have to run X amount of streets (depending on the difficult level) and then back again.  You have even more limited resources, and the city is vacant so there are no humans to negotiate goods with.  You can still loot empty buildings for goods, but you don’t want to get bogged down by carrying too much weight.  I had that happen to me when I played the main quest, and I think I would have moved faster if I had waited for plate tectonics to push me to the goal.

I ended up carrying only the default shotgun, and only stocking up on shells for it.  If that doesn’t sound like the most exciting way to play the game, that’s because it wasn’t.  I ended up just holding down left and avoiding enemies.  This did come in handy on the final part of the “walk left” section of the game, when the lights started flickering on and off.  Due to my epilepsy, this was a high-risk section of the game for me to play.  I decided to walk up to the top of the screen, hold the stick left, and not do anything else.  Boring but effective, because it worked.  However, this mode proved to be dull, and not really worthy of the excellent main game.

Last Stand worked better.  It’s a wave shooter where you play as a couple of twats named Hurley and Nate (no joke) as they lock themselves in a mall with a bunch of zombies.  I doubt they would actually do something like that, because I know I wouldn’t do that.  Since they exist only to steal my ideas, their zombie plan would probably involve some kind of elaborate suicide, because that’s what I’m going to do.  If the zombies attack, I’m going to kiss the end of a shotgun that has bullets soaked in cyanide while wearing a vest made of dynamite and the timer set for five seconds from now.  I am taking NO chances of surviving the outbreak.  Among other things, I never see a working Taco Bell in these games or movies, and I will be damned if I’m going to live out the rest of my life without a Chulupa.

I ended up playing as Hurley. And no, that doesn’t mean I ended up with blisters on my hands and a craving for bacon. It’s just a game, not a transmorphic body swapping thingie.

So Last Stand.  The wave shooter part.  Well, you shoot a bunch of zombies and they drop money.  Then between waves you can upgrade your stats, buy different guns, more ammo, health kits, etc.  Every round the zombies grow in numbers.  That’s pretty much it.  This mode is more fun, but then again I’m predisposed to enjoying wave shooters, which is why such a game could overthrow Dead Pixels for the #1 spot on the leaderboard in the first place.  However, I didn’t love the wave shooting mode the way I did the main campaign.  Part of that is there’s no online leaderboards to show off how far you’ve made it.  But it’s mostly because I already got all the value out of Dead Pixels that I could.  The game rocked in single player mode, rocked harder in co-op (even if Brian didn’t like the game as much as me and thought I was out of my mind for putting it #1 in the first place), but its time has come and gone.  Dead Pixels is still an amazing game and will probably hold onto a high spot on the leaderboard for a long time to come, but I’ve moved on.  Granted, what I moved on to has been mostly inferior games, negating my point.  I’m just going to shut up now and leave this review.  Buh-Bye.

Dead Pixels was developed by CSR Studios

80 Microsoft Points have an alternative zombie plan, but it requires duct tape and a steamroller in the making of this review.

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Apple Jack 2

June 15, 2012 by 8 Comments

It’s been almost a year since I played Apple Jack.  Judging by the reaction to my review of it, it would seem that was the most disagreeable of all my reviews.  That, or birds were turning into rocks and dive bombing my windows.  Do birds turn into rocks?  Either way, many people genuinely liked the game.  I didn’t.  I thought it was too hard, the levels too sprawling, and the design rather bland.  I didn’t hate it, but I certainly couldn’t endorse it.  At least not without a kickback from the guys who make high blood pressure medication.

A Super Meat Boy like “run from the big baddie” chase, only your character is about half as agile. Yes, this game hates you.

Apple Jack 2 is now out.  Despite having a pretty good idea that I wouldn’t like the game too much, I have to admit I thought it looked pretty good.  Sure, it’s still a punisher, but there’s now a Prince of Persia (or Braid if you’re the artsy-fartsy type) style rewind feature for the hopeless stumblefuck gaming population.  The graphics look more colorful too.  What could go wrong?

Well, about that.  I guess I can say without reservation that Apple Jack 2 is a better game than the original.  But I still didn’t like it.  I still don’t get the appeal in punishers.  Even with adjustable difficulty levels, I found Apple Jack 2 to be fucking maddening.  The rewind function, which was put in place to give you chances to undo fuck-ups, mostly just increased the aggravation factor.  I often rewound missteps, only to immediately die because I didn’t let go of the button at the right time.  You can only use it every six seconds, so it doesn’t really work as the immortality-granting super power I was hoping it would be.  I guess the argument was supposed to be “we didn’t want to make it too easy.”  To which I counter back “there are adjustable difficult levels.  I picked the pussy mode.  Obviously I wanted immortality, you jerks!”

So I didn’t get to live forever.  Or for more than twenty seconds at a time on average.  What I did get to do was enjoy the significantly improved level design.  Oh, it’s not easier.  Don’t get me wrong.  The game wants you to feel humiliated at your ineptness.  But stages are much more clever this time around.  Some have you trying to get to an exit.  Some have you trying to kill enemies.  Some have you running from things.  Some have you on giant platforms that auto-scroll.  Every new stage seems to be original in concept and execution, which is a big departure over some of the monotone stages of the original.  Unfortunately, originality didn’t extend to the enemies.  You’re still fighting the same pandas, washing machines, eyeballs, owls, and little spiky thimble thingies from the first game.  The only major addition to the enemy roster (as far as I could tell, rage got the better of me about half-way through) is giant saw blades.  As a result, Apple Jack 2 feels more like Apple Jack 1.5.  More of an expansion rather than a continuation.  It’s weird because the box art is a homage to Super Mario Bros. 2, which was a huge departure from the original game.  Despite improvements, Apple Jack 2 is pretty much the same game as the original.

Another change: enemies drop fruit instead of coins now, no doubt some kind of anti-capitalism subtext.

It’s a shame, because I think the developer has got to be oozing talent out his rear end.  The graphics, sound, music, and level design all suggest that.  I just don’t want a game that cheerfully holds my head underwater.  Some people do.  Weird people, sure, but they’re out there.  I do question if the market for these games is as big as people make it out to be. There have been punishers that are huge hits, but how often do those pop up?  Of the 90 top-selling XBLIGs as of this writing, only two are punishers: the Impossible Game and the Impossible Game Level Pack.  The market is trying to tell you developers something.  If you weren’t so busy dumping salt on slugs and blowing up frogs with firecrackers you would have noticed by now.

Apple Jack 2 was developed by My Owl Software

80 Microsoft Points said to debate which of the remaining 88 games are also punishers in the comments section in the making of this review. 

 

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