Chronicles of the Fairy is kind of like a Kirby game. The protagonist can “fly” indefinitely, levels center around the simple act of reaching a goal, and the game is as easy as a round of dodge ball against a group of senior citizens. It also features some pretty good 16-bit graphics and decent play control. If we left it simply at that, Chronicles of the Fairy would be a decent, albeit forgettable game.
Come on, now. How often can we leave it at just that?
It looks the part, but Chronicles of the Fairy feels unfinished.
Chronicles of the Fairy isn’t really terrible, but it’s underwhelming or mediocre in so many ways that I simply have to shake my head in disappointment. It looks like it should be good, and feels like it should be good. But the six levels that take all of twenty minutes to complete are boring and uninspired in design. The music is annoying, the enemies are all but useless, and lives are far too plentiful. But what’s really awful is the collision detection on the spikes. Levels are littered with spikes all over the place, with the main challenge being having to squeeze between them. The problem with this is, the collision box for the spikes is not too generous. It leads to many moments where you don’t come that close to the spikes and still take damage for them. Imagine if real life was like that. Imagine if, in football, getting to the three yard line was considered good enough for a touchdown. Raving insanity! Even if replacement referees apparently liked that idea.
Even if that wasn’t the case, 妖精冒険記 is boring. The whole experience feels like the demo for what should be a larger game, or perhaps an early beta-build or proof-of-concept, as evidenced by the ball-and-chain swinging enemy who clipped right into a wall and got stuck. There’s no challenge (even the spikes don’t make much difference when you’re tripping over extra lives every two feet), and no real reason to keep playing once you’re past the opening stage. Then, just as it looks like the game might grow some teeth and ramp up in difficulty, it’s over. It’s quite disappointing. I was interested to check it out because it’s rare when a Japanese-developed XBLIG shows up on the marketplace. It seemed like it might be exotic. Instead, I feel like one of those chicks who gets a tramp stamp in Japanese characters that she thinks says “Free Spirit” and only later learns that it says “Insert Umbrella Below.”
Before the fiasco with Wright Brothers’ Mysteries, my plan had been to include this title in my review. Two for one, that sort of thing. However, Wright Brothers was so embarrassingly horrid that I thought I would be doing a disservice to the guys at Twist-EdGames. I had reviewed two of their previous “games”, Shattered Slipper and Lucky, and I found them to be decent. I mean, they weren’t really games. They were like the end result of a book fucking a DVD menu. Interactive in the loosest possible sense. Read a lot of dialog, press A, read more dialog, and then press A some more. Occasionally a rudimentary puzzle would pop up that would take all of thirty seconds to solve. Typically, the whole thing would be over with in an hour or so. Okay, so I wasn’t exactly glowing when I described what their games were like, but the writing was acceptable and they ended before they could bore. Oh, and they were a little preachy. I would equate the whole experience to reading a tween mystery novel, pausing only once to fiddle with a Rubik’s Cube, while being lectured by your mother on proper manners.
Actually, that sounds quite horrible. Bad analogy.
“Hello Ma’am! Can we interest you in a copy of the Watchtower?”
Well, here’s their newest game: Investigate This. You’re two young private detectives who get hired to investigate this super natural scarecrow that is trying to frighten a woman into selling her farm. The difference between this and other Twist-EdGames? It’s fucking boring. The dialog has a tendency to drone on and on with inane banter that adds nothing to the plot and makes the characters come across like total twats. The writing is also not up to the quality of previous games, despite the fact that there’s no soapbox this time around. It just comes across like a really badly done Scooby Doo plot. In fact, right during the big reveal at the end, just as I said that very line to Brian, the game made a Scooby Doo joke at its own expense. I also felt the hedge maze stuff was more of a rehash of Lucky’s finale. The final kick in the pants is the (required due to file size) 240MSP price tag. It’s simply not worth it. Thus, this becomes the first game of Twist-EdGames that I can’t recommend. If I did so, I would need my head investigated for brain parasites.
I can’t believe I live in a world where Wright Brothers’ Mysteries exists. It’s bad. Bad bad. Endearingly bad, yes, but endearingly bad is still bad. Devoid of anything positive to say about any aspect of it’s design. Hell, there’s really not a whole lot of game here. Watch cut scenes that were apparently made using The Movies (the opening credits show the intro to The Movies), maybe answer a question about that scene, do the occasional amateurish quick-time-event, and that’s it. Fifteen minutes tops. Fifteen unintentionally hilarious, flat-out fucking weird minutes. Surreal in ways I’ve only heard in descriptions of drug intoxication.
The sad part is, if I squint just a little bit, the dude on the right looks kind of like my boyfriend.
The story? Incomprehensible. The dialog? So disjointed and unnatural that it’s practically alien. The voice acting? Awful accents, unemotional tones, and delivery so bad that it sounds like it was pieced together with a sound board. The game? There is no game. Two quick-time events, one of which involves picking a lock and the other which necessitates restarting a heart. That’s really the extend of any “game” function. Otherwise, you get to watch horrible cut scenes play out. I spent the first couple minutes rolling my eyes.
And then the Ninja showed up, and I started laughing.
I didn’t stop laughing for ten minutes. Every single word spoken, every terribly choreographed fight scene where continuity changes from camera angle to camera angle, and just the overall awfulness of the whole mess. Wright Brothers’ Mysteries made me fall to the floor in a rolling laughter that made my sides hurt and tears run down my cheeks. I’ve never laughed harder at any game. Not in a good way, mind you. Wright Brothers’ Mysteries is the brand new Worst Game I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s awful. But hypnotically so. I can’t really say you should buy it. There’s already videos on YouTube that show you the full game, like this one. It’s just awful. I don’t know how far unintentional comedy goes towards redeeming something this bad. I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder. For me, Wright Brothers’ Mysteries made me laugh until I was clutching my sides and my stomach in agony, not to mention the headache. I could have probably been trampled by a marching band made entirely of tuba players and walked away in better shape.
I suck at space shooters. I’ve spent the last two years establishing this fact on this very blog. While I try to claim neutrality towards all genres, that’s obviously a bit of a stretch. Some I like more than others, with shmups typically being “the others.” I’ve just never been able to get into them. Which kind of sucks for the hard-working XBLIG community, because even ones that earn near universal praise (like Aeternum) don’t do anything for me. It seems like the best they can hope for out of me is “I wouldn’t rather be dead than play this.”
Am I the only one who thinks that bullet hell screens always look like those abstract painting made by just splattering a blank canvas with paint?
On that note, I wouldn’t rather be dead than play Pester. Congratulations to the team at Flump Studios for doing as good as you could do with this genre in relationship to me. I was able to get through the full hour Brian forces me to play these games (“out of fairness” he says, the goody two-shoes prick) without wondering if I’ll be locked up in the nuthouse for choosing to hurl myself through a plate-glass window to get out of it. And, while I wasn’t like wowed by the experience or anything, I wasn’t bored. It’s nothing new though. You’re a ship. There are enemies. Enemies fire a whole lot of bullets at you, and you fire a whole lot of bullets back. I’ve always kind of wondered about the economics of bullet hells. Presumably if enemies are firing plasma rounds at you with projectiles the size of small ships, that stuff has got to cost money. You would think they would fire a little more accurately. Conserve ammo, instead of seeing you, going crazy, and firing bullets in every direction including behind them. Or hell, since we’re dealing futuristic space warfare, you would think an enemy force that can employ thousands of ships to take out one single rinky-dinky little adversary could figure out how to do weapons that instantaneously destroy whatever they’re targeting the moment the fire button is pressed without giving them a chance to dodge out-of-the-way. What kind of morons do they have running these evil empires?
Anyway, it’s basic space shooter shit with some neat graphic filters added, and not a whole lot more. I played for a while and realized quickly that I was every bit as shitty at playing Pester as I am at every other game of this godforsaken genre. But the screen wasn’t so spammed with bullets that it was demoralizing or anything. Then something funny happened. At one point, I turned to Brian and said “honestly, I’m not having a blast or anything, but there’s nothing really wrong with this one.” Within ten seconds of me saying this, the game decided to give me stuff to complain about. I’m not saying this for comic effect. This really happened. First, I was fighting a boss that throws giant swords at you and died. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is when I blinked back into existence, the game spawned one of the sword bullets into the same space I respawned into and insta-killed me. The sword wasn’t there at that moment. It just appeared. A bizarre glitch I’m guessing, but it’s so weird that it happened right after I told my boyfriend I had nothing to complain about. As if the game heard me and said “nothing to complain about? Bitch, I’ll give you something to complain about.”
And Pester kept being a shithead to me after that. I played three straight rounds where the game never once spawned an upgrade for my ship’s guns. It spawned plenty of speed-ups and bombs, but no gun upgrades. It was fucking strange, because they had been plentiful before. Not that it really mattered. Gun upgrades or not, I still made it about the same length as I always did, which was between wave 7 and wave 10. Yea, I really suck at this shit. So I booted up Tempus mode, where lives are replaced by time. When you shoot enemies, instead of them dropping coins, they drop clocks that add one second to a timer. When you die, you lose ten seconds. The game goes until you run out of time. Okay, fine. Question: where the fuck is the timer? I couldn’t see it. Otherwise, it’s the same game with the same enemy layouts. You can also adjust the difficulty, and add extra challenges if you’re a masochist, like controlling two ships at once. I didn’t try it myself. I barely have the coordination to tie my shoelaces without breaking my neck in the process. I don’t need a game to tell me I’m an embarrassment to humanity. I already know it.
A spaceship that fires globs of space jizz on you. Sure. Why not?
Really, Pester isn’t bad or anything. And the sword bit I mentioned above was a one-off thing. I guess I kind of, sort of recommend it. A little bit. I’m not sure if that’s because I genuinely enjoyed it based on merit, or if I genuinely enjoyed it because Brian got such amusement out of my pitiful lack of shmup talent. Either way, I had something vaguely resembling a good time playing it, and had the sense to turn it off before I got bored. Having said that, it’s not an ambitious title. This shit has been done before and Pester offers nothing new. Nothing. At best, it shows competence in making a functioning, mildly entertaining game that closely resembles about a thousand other games. I’m not against playing them, but I want to see a different angle on them. There’s got to be a wealth of unexplored twists for bullet hells. I mean come on, you guys are indie developers. You’re supposed to buck the norm. Be weird for the sake of being weird. Dance to the beat of a different drummer. When games like this fill out the cliché checklist with such determination, it’s kind of sad. Not as sad as watching me play games like this must be, but still pretty sad.
Ascent of the Kings comes from the developer of Quiet, Please!, the 2D platforming/point-and-click mash-up I played last April. The fingerprints of the developer are all over this one too. Same art style, same silliness, and same bite-sized game length. It took me just over thirty-minutes to beat Quiet, Please! For Ascent of Kings, which is a Metroidvania type of platformer, it took me about twenty minutes to become king and another twenty-five minutes to find all 12 hidden shrines. So, forty-five minutes total of gameplay. At this pace, Nostatic Software’s next game might stretch to a full hour. Not that it needs to. I’ve enjoyed games that lasted as little as ten minutes. It’s crazy how spending 600 days immersed in the indie gaming scene alters your perception on how long a game should be. I’m fairly certain I’m now in a state of mind where I could approve a game that lasts one minute, as long as it’s the best damn one minute I’ve had since I lost my virginity.
A Boy and his Blob?
So the idea is, the king has died, and in order to determine the new king, all possible suitors (which seems to consist of four brothers that live in a small cottage, still better than what England faces sometime in the next twenty years) have to hop around on platforms and reach a small shrine that bestows upon that person the power to rule. The father of these kids, apparently a bit of a dick, only gives each of the older brothers one special tool that can help them reach the summit and become king. But their hearts don’t seem quite into it. They pull such bullshit excuses as “ouch, sprained my wrist” or “twisted my ankle” like they’re trying to get out of jury duty. The youngest brother, aka you, collects their tools, allowing him to double jump, climb vines, and fire slingshots. You know, the kind of tools found in a real world monarchy litmus test. Psssssh, diplomacy? Economics? Fuck that shit. That’s for democracies.
As a game, what can I say? It’s alright. The movement physics are a bit loose and the double-jump sometimes didn’t seem to work. Level design is very basic, no frills, no surprises. There’s one section that features a timed jumping puzzle, and I hate that if I get to the top and screw up, I have to wait any amount of time before hitting the button to start over. But, the game is so brief that you can’t really get bored with it, and it ends long before any amount of frustration over the various control foibles can settle in. I guess what I’m trying to say is I had a decent enough time playing Ascent of Kings to say it’s worth a buck. It’s not the most enthusiastic recommendation, but hey, it’s not the most ambitious game! One hand washes the other!
Probably the biggest misconception about me as a gamer is that I’m anti-retro or anti-old games. I’m not. I’m simply of the opinion that some games age better than others. I wouldn’t want to play Space Invaders or Pac-Man as they existed back in the day. I’m perfectly fine with modern remakes of them, like Space Invaders Extreme or Pac-Man Championship Edition. On the other hand, some of those older games have aged pretty gracefully. Centipede is one such game. In fact, it’s one of the few golden age coin-ops that I feel blends in perfectly with the current generation. Its twitchy, fast-paced gameplay lends itself perfectly to ten minute portable sessions. It released recently on the Vita’s Home Arcade platform, and I snagged it for $1.49 in preparation for today’s review. That’s about what I would have spent to last 15 minutes on the coin-op if I had been alive in 1983. Did I mention I really suck at it?
Centipede on PlayStation Home Arcade (Vita)
So what do I think of Home Arcade? Um, hmmmm.. you know, in the four years its been around, I never have really used PlayStation Home too much. I would rather just be able to launch games straight off my Vita’s dashboard without having to open Home Arcade. The interface is clunky and half the time I’ll be stabbing the ever-loving shit out of the “your games” button and nothing happens. Having said that, the prices are pretty good ($1.49 each) and it has the advantage of being portable and on the coolest gaming gizmo in years. I don’t even have Home installed on my PS3, and I don’t plan on it, but you don’t need it to use Home Arcade. I can’t speak for the rest of the games (get back to me the next time an Asteroids clone hits XBLIG) but Centipede controls well. I guess you can’t ask for more. Which is a good thing, because what you get is a bare-bones port of the arcade original. They could have thrown in ports of the Atari home versions, but hey, it’s called making a lazy dollar.
I picked up Centipede on Vita because I wanted to compare it to Bad Caterpillar, a new Xbox Live Indie Game from Kris Steele. I like Kris, but the dude fucking aggravates me to no end. His games always have something glaringly off about them. Volchaos would have been fun if the movement physics weren’t so damn loose. The same goes for Hypership: Out of Control on XBLIG. If a gnat so much as farts in the direction of the analog stick, it sends your ship flying. In a game that involves lining up your character to shoot smaller targets, precision control is kind of needed. Hypership is actually sublime on iPhone, and very addictive. Of course, that has the advantage of having drag-the-ship touch controls for extra-accurate firing. His track record of acceptable controls on XBLIG is about as good as THQ’s record with bankruptcy avoidance. Considering that Bad Caterpillar looked really close to Centipede, a game which requires precision movement so much that the arcade original used a trackball, I braced for the worst.
Bad Caterpillar on Xbox Live Indie Games.
As it turns out, my worries were misplaced. Bad Caterpillar handles pretty well. Not perfect. No joystick-based Centipede can possibly be perfect. But, I can honestly say that it plays better than any other version of Centipede I played today. That’s a lot of versions. For the sake of comparison, I also bought Centipede & Millipede, a 2-for-1 Xbox Live Arcade port of the arcade games. Movement for these is too loose to be acceptable. I’ve always had a difficult time in Centipede lining up shots correctly, especially when the last segments of the Centipede are near the bottom of the screen. That’s not a huge problem in Bad Caterpillar. It’s a fucking chore in the XBLA arcade ports. If it was any looser, it would hang out on dimly-lit street corners and be considered a bio-hazard.
The “evolved” version of Centipede & Millipede on Xbox Live Arcade.
The biggest disappointment with the XBLA ports (besides the awful controls) is how the “modern” versions are really just the same old Centipede with some new (re: 15 year-old) special effects added. On the flip side, Bad Caterpillar looks old, but it features some nifty new ideas such as power-ups and bombs. Should probably clear this up: by new, I meant “new for Centipede.” My problem here is that they don’t get spit out often enough. I played full games where the item drops were nothing but points. The game should go nuts with them. I mean, I can already play a Centipede-like game that doesn’t offer power-ups. It’s called Centipede.
Centipede Origins on iPhone.
I guess I should bring up that I also played the iOS update, called Centipede Origins. It’s a micro-transaction oriented shooter that tries to controls like Kris Steele’s Hypership does on iPhone. But I found the drag-the-shooter controls to be too glitchy, with the cursor being unable to keep up with my finger, even as I dragged it slowly across the screen. Only played it for like five minutes, would never want to play it again. I also dug around and found my copy of Centipede for the Sega Dreamcast, but decided against spending any time digging around for the actual machine to play it on. Honestly, I’m all Centipeded out. So what are my thoughts? Well, the Vita version is a worthy use of money for a solid portable version of a masterpiece. The iOS version is just about the worst thing to happen to iPhone since Siri. The XBLA ports of Centipede & Millipede come across like quick, effortless cash-ins and should be avoided like the clap. Finally, the XBLIG update Bad Caterpillar is actually a decent game with a few problems. The moths are unfair, there’s no online leaderboards, and the heavy metal soundtrack is so out-of-place. It would be like going to Ozzfest to listen to country music. But I do recommend it, because it’s the best (and cheapest) version of Centipede you’ll get on your Xbox. Kind of sad that an XBLIG port made by a guy I consider to be a bit of a twat completely slays the official versions of Centipede. Just kidding, Kris.
Dynasty of Dusk is a JRPG made by three college students. It’s an early contender for Worst Game of 2013. When a game is putridity bad, it usually is because the developer bit off more than he could chew. That’s not entirely the case here. Dynasty of Dusk is so stripped down and minimalistic that it’s shocking there’s enough here to be classified as rancid. But what really startled me is this very much comes across like one of those “getting your feet wet” type of games. Those usually are bad, but not THIS bad. I actively looked for something, anything, I could praise, and came up empty-handed. Now I know how Amanda Bynes’ agent feels.
I’ll start with the story, which apparently revolves around an evil king kidnapping spirit animals to try to gain immortality so that he can rule the world forever. I’m not sure why you would want to rule a world that has like ten people living in it. Despite what Tears for Fears would have you believe, I have no interest in this world at all. The writing could not possibly be any more bland. It’s so boring that a big screen adaption would star Kristen Stewart and end up making like $300,000,000 at the box office. Okay, bad analogy.
My point is, the only thing a throwback, turn-based RPG can possibly do to grab attention these days is have an absurd story hook and/or snappy writing. Without those, you probably shouldn’t bother. Yea, I know games like this used to be this badly written and completely lack characterization, but RPGs aren’t exactly like platformers. A story is all they have. Without that, you’re just playing a glorified menu simulator. Being just like the old school games doesn’t work in RPGs because retro charm doesn’t translate to them. It wasn’t the retro graphics that made people like Breath of Death, Cthulhu Saves the World, or Doom & Destiny. It was the writing and the characters. The retro graphics were just good set dressing to take the piss out of the classics. That’s why they worked.
I try not to pick on bad graphics too often, but let’s face it, Dynasty of Dusk looks awful. But it’s the music that’s really bad. Even Gitmo won’t use it for Enhanced Interrogation.
Ignoring the story (you know, sort of like the developers did), Dynasty of Dusk is a complete mess. Right off the bat, I want to gripe about how fucking unresponsive the controls are. Far and away, the least responsive of any game I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s the menus. Not necessarily the ones you use during fights, but sometimes they’re stubborn too. I’m talking about the between fights menus. The ones you go through by, you know, just pausing the fucking game. You have to navigate them using the bumpers and the triggers. I swear to Christ, at best the game recognized a button press once every five times. I would be trying to scroll through the various characters to check and upgrade their stats, but the game couldn’t keep up with such simple actions as pressing the bumper once, indicating that I wished to move to the next menu. It was like having an argument with a hard-of-hearing geriatric.
“Okay, now I wish to see the Warrior’s stats.”
“HUH?”
“I said I wish to see the Warrior’s stats.”
“WHAT?”
“The Warrior’s stats!”
“You need to speak up, child!”
“FUCKING HELL, LET ME SEE THE WARRIOR’S STATS RIGHT NOW YOU GOD DAMN BROKEN DOWN PIECE OF SHIT!”
“The Warrior’s stats?”
“YES!!”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
And this goes on and on. It got to the point that I physically got out of my chair to check and see if something was blocking my controller’s signal. Nope. I checked my controller’s battery. Full charge. I switched packs anyway. Didn’t help. I changed what controller I was using. Still no good. Hell, maybe some other signal in the house is causing interference. Not that either. I got more exercise trying to fix Dynasty of Dusk than I have from three years worth of Kinect ownership. As it turns out, the game is just an utterly broken piece of shit.
And it gets worse once you’re actually playing the fucking thing, as opposed to arguing with menus like you’re the star of Bravo’s newest reality show, The Spreadsheet Whisperer. I’ve always enjoyed abusing level-up systems in games. Indie Games are often prone to this. Pour all your upgrades into one stat, throw the game completely off-balance, then spend the next couple hours mowing down enemies like they’re dandelions and you’re the world’s most efficiently built weed-whacker. Crazy as this sounds, I usually have a better time when I can do this. It gives me a chance to feel all smug, wondering how the developers never saw the potential for someone to do this. Well actually, I do know why. It’s because they have a specific logic in mind when they build the game, and operate under the assumption people will play their game exactly the way they would. They won’t. It’s like those competitions they have where people have to create the most elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines that only serve to make toast, and I’m the one person who says “fuck it” and shows up to the party with a loaf of bread and a flame thrower.
Yea, it’s as boring as it looks.
Here’s how abusive you can be towards Dynasty of Dusk. The game starts with you quickly acquiring the four different attack forms, Warrior, Archer, and.. you know what? Fuck it, you don’t need to hear any more. The archer has a nifty move called “pierce” and that’s all you will need for the rest of the game. It does massive damage and goes through every enemy. Battles consisted of me selecting the archer, selecting pierce, and winning in one shot, two tops. I poured all my upgrades into letting me level up faster, and then spent the next five minutes grinding, because you can force battles with a simple press (or multiple presses, fucking piece of shit game) of the X button. In the span of five minutes, I took my archer from level 1 to level 20. I’m not joking. Before I was even out of the opening caves of the game, the main dude had leveled several times and my archer was a level 20. Later, when I found enemies that paid off even better, I did it more and got him up to level 30 within just a two or three minutes.
And you know what? For once, I didn’t feel that satisfied about it. I felt downright horrible, like one of those assholes that kicks over sand castles for jollies having a sudden, sharp attack of conscience. I vowed to play the game on the straight-and-narrow from here on out. Sadly, not too long after this, the game crashed and kept crashing. Because saving is the most clunky of all the clunky menus, I didn’t give it too much attention and subsequently lost all my progress. Not that it matters, because there was no potential that anything was going to come along and save it, but I still felt bad. Yea, Dynasty of Dusk is among the worst games I’ve ever played in my life, but I did kick over their sand castle and I want to apologize for that. Sincerely. Stick with it guys. Build another sand castle, and I promise I won’t kick it over. I’ll just let the tide come in and wash it away.
Dynasty of Dusk was developed by Tropic Tundra Games. Hey, wait a second. You guys are from Wisconsin. How do you even know what a Tropic is? The rest of the country has gone to great lengths to keep you cheese-eaters in the dark about them.
80 Microsoft Points would have been more interested in a game called “Dysentery of Dusk” in the making of this review.
How hard can it be to make a semi-decent Punch-Out!! knockoff? You create an over-sized monstrosity, slap some boxing gloves on it, have it telegraph its moves at you, give your avatar accurate dodging controls, and tada, you have a Punch-Out! knockoff. There should be dozens of these scattered throughout the gaming spectrum. For all I know, there might be. Steel Champions is only the second one I’ve encountered on XBLIG. The first, Honey Badger: Slayer of Memes was a total piece of shit. The gimmick being Punch Out!! if you beat up long-since unfunny internet running gags. Well, now we have Steel Champions. Its gimmick is Punch-Out!!, only with robots and anime boobies. It also is a total piece of shit, but boobies will always trump the Star Wars Lightsaber dude. Who, ironically, also has boobies.
Honestly, it doesn’t look bad. And it’s not. It’s terrible.
Let me be clear: I fucking love Punch-Out!! And this love isn’t based on nostalgia. I played them in reverse-order. The Wii version first, Super Punch-Out!! second, and NES Punch-Out sans pre-crazy Mike Tyson last. Enjoyed each and every one of them. And they’re all so simple when you get down to it. This should be one of the easiest games to clone out there, but nobody can seem to get it right. Steel Champions is no different. Oh, it looks like Punch-Out!! High and low punches, dodging, and ginormous opponents that telegraph their moves. But it just doesn’t work. The dodging feels imprecise and floaty, and the telegraphing becomes so fast that it’s damn near impossible to dodge. Plus, I couldn’t find any noticeable pattern that allowed me to consistently dodge-and-stunlock opponents. That’s the most rewarding, satisfying aspect of Punch-Out!! Here’s a game that has all the ingredients that makes that game work, except the most important one. It’s like making a cake without sugar.
I only made it to the third fight, which I had trouble finishing because the game kept randomly dumping me back to the Xbox Dashboard. No Code 4. No crash screen. Just “back you go to, to your game library.” This happened twice, and it won’t be happening a third time. By the way, this happened to other people too. Not that it matters much. Even if it didn’t crash too often (some would argue that once is too many), what we have here is a pitiful button-masher that’s only selling point is there are anime boobies on the box art. A selling point so utterly transparent that it’s practically a poltergeist. Actually though, I think we’re getting past that point. Interest in your Don’t Die Dateless Dummies and Team Shuriken crapola and assorted other titty games are circling down the drain. My site is getting far more searches for “Best Xbox Live Indie Games” instead. Sorry, smut developers. You’ve got to step up your game now. Consumers are more interested in GOOD games now, so step up and give them what they’re looking for. Sweaty palms, not blistered ones.
Update: Arcadecraft received a Second Chance with the Chick, where many problems talked about in this review were addressed, and new gameplay features discussed. The price is also now only $1 instead of $3. Continue reading this review and then click here for my updated thoughts.
Arcadecraft is brought to you by the guys who did the incredibly awesome Orbitron: Revolution. What was Orbitron: Revolution? Why, it was an insanely fast-paced modern take on the classic Defender formula that featured arguably the best graphics in the history of Xbox Live Indie Games. It will undoubtedly go down as one of the most professional-quality, vastly entertaining games ever on the platform.
Total bust. Sold fewer copies than an 8-track of Gary Busey belching into a microphone.
What went wrong? Well, I think the name was way too generic. Orbitron sounds like an off-brand anime that would air at 4AM on Cartoon Network. The graphics might have also been too good. Hear me out on this one. I’m of the belief that XBLIG consumers are conditioned to associate good graphics with bad gameplay. Unless those good graphics are of the 8-bit or 16-bit variety, “modern” graphic decency in an Xbox Indie means shitty play control, glitches, and typically rushed game design. Trust me, I’ve reviewed over 300 of these. The better the graphics, the shittier the game. Orbitron is one of the rare exceptions to that.
There are other possible explanations that are beyond my scope of understanding. Perhaps the demo doesn’t hook players in. Or maybe the general gaming populace is indifferent to Defender. Hell, I would actually believe some kind of Gypsy Curse is in play. Either way, the guys at Firebase took no chances with their follow-up game. It’s called Arcadecraft. The presence of the word “craft” in the title alone is probably good for at least 2,500 units sold on XBLIG. Kraft could put out a game where you build stuff out of macaroni called Kraftcraft and it would probably sell a gillion copies. But Arcadecraft isn’t a “build stuff out of stuff” game at all. A more accurate title would have probably been “Sim Arcade” or “Arcade Tycoon.” But Sim Tycoon isn’t trendy on XBLIG right now and Craft is, and Firebase are capitalists first and foremost.
Face it guys, you’re going to hear people keep asking if they can play the games. Better get cracking on making it happen.
Sadly for me, lots of the things I planned on complaining about Arcadecraft are already being fixed. Although the patch isn’t live yet, it covers nearly every problem I had. So I’ll just focus on the gameplay. Honestly, the shocking thing about Arcadecraft is that nobody has thought to make this game before. Build your own arcade during the Golden Age of CoinOps? How is this not already something that exists? You have to buy games, set the prices, set the difficulty, place them, empty the coin boxes, buy more games, pay off your loan, kick out hooligans, buy more games, sell old games, upgrade the power supply of your building, allow world champion players to attempt to break records on your machines, unjam coin doors, buy more games, survive the gaming crash of ’84, stock soda machines, and buy more games.
So yea, it’s a time sink.
A lot of stuff I disliked about Arcadecraft is being patched out. The hooligan won’t appear while you’re in menus anymore, and a more satisfying animation will appear when you boot him. Not too satisfying. If I owned an arcade and someone started kicking my machines, nothing short of Joe Pesci taking a nail gun to his temple would please me, and it would serve the little fucker right. It would be totally justified too. The kid starts kicking machines, somehow teleporting from machine to machine, disabling them before I can clearly identify him and eject him. A better indicator of where he is would be nice, given the fact that he’s powered by the mystical forces of Satan and all.
And the power goes out a lot. Like, at least every three game months, or about six minutes . Where the fuck is my arcade at that the power keeps failing every three months? There’s no “turn on every game” master switch. You have to pick up and slam every machine against the ground. Individually. When you have 30 machines, this becomes a pain in the ass, especially when you’ll inevitably have the hooligan show up to start shit while this is going on. I did find it mildly amusing that jammed coined slots are unjammed in the time-tested tradition of banging the machine repeatedly until it works again. See, who says Armageddon wasn’t factually accurate?
I swear to Christ, every time the dude came by with the premium machines, my arcade was full. The game totally needs to give you the option to make him wait while you hock a machine to make room.
My biggest gripe with Arcadecraft is how fucking slow a start it gets off to. A lot of time sinks are lethargic in the beginning. Arcadecraft is practically in a fucking coma, sort of like I’ve been over the last four days. A common theme among players is one itty-bitty mistake forces them to start over. I never had to myself. I guess I had as perfect a run as anyone could have, but I still only finished 99th on the Leaderboard (now like 118th or some such shit). I could see why others would die though. You’re given too little of seed money and new games cost too much money early on. In theory, you can set a machine to 50 cents a play, but that causes its popularity to plummet. Here’s a hint: sink a soda machine pretty much anywhere and set the price to $1 per can. Occasionally a “hot spot” will appear in the arcade that increases a machine’s popularity, but they’re typically in the least convenient spot. Like in front of the bathroom door, where you then trap a helpless little shit inside, not to mention the kid that made it.
With all the planned changes, plus future expansions, Arcadecraft feels more like a really good beta than a finished game. That’s okay, because it’s a really good beta, sort of like Lexiv was. You can see the potential. If Firebase plays its cards right, they could probably make this a hit iOS game with microtransactions up the ass for years to come. Think of all the stuff they didn’t include this time around. There’s no novelty games, no redemption games, no pinball machines, no skeeball, no air hockey, no cigarette machine in the corner (you know, for the adults, wink), and only a limited supply of larger cockpit games. Arcadecraft has a chance to be a full-blown franchise, and we’re getting in at the ground floor.
You also don’t get enough info on each game. Again, there’s lot of patchwork needed here.
And by the way, in case you’re wondering, it’s fucking awesome as hell. For all the problems, of which there are numerous, Arcadecraft is one of the best sims on XBLIG. But, let’s face it, it doesn’t belong on XBLIG. This should be on PCs, with the convenience of a mouse and keyboard. This would also allow the expansion packs I mentioned above. Plus, let’s face it, we all want to play the actual games. Dead serious when I say that I would pay the full disc-based retail price of $60 for a version of Arcadecraft where you could play the games. Assuming they didn’t suck. Which I’m guessing they wouldn’t. I mean, Firebase did make the coolest modern version of Defender on the market. This would give them a chance to make the coolest versions of EVERY vintage game. Which they should be doing right now. They’re capitalists after all. Don’t believe me? Their next game involves making stuff out of feces. It’s called CrapCraft. And it will be fucking awesome.
I hate reviewing local-only multiplayer games. First, you have to round-up players. Then you have to tell them what we’re playing. Then they leave, because they thought they were coming over to play something they’ve heard of, and you have to round-up more players. Writing these reviews makes me sound like a broken record, because there’s only so many ways to say “it’s tough to sell non-indie fanatics on playing these games.” Even when they turn out to be exceptional, like Hidden in Plain Sight, the real challenge is finding interested parties to play. I think I would have an easier time finding people who want to watch a video of me having my appendix removed.
Squadron Scramble ups the ante by offering eight player local support. Uh huh. Excuse me for one second.
Seriously, I even don’t know eight people by name. There’s Brian, Mommy, Daddy, and everyone else is Whatshisface. And this is one of those games where you get eight players by sharing controllers, with one person using the left stick and trigger and the other person using the right one. It’s the gaming version of a three-legged race. Finding three other competent players would be tough enough, but seven more? Tee-hee, right. Plus, I’m quitting smoking right now and nobody wants to be within assault-and-battery distance from me, let alone sitting right next to me, getting their hand-sweat all over MY controller.
Thus, I only found three other suckers to play Squadron Scramble with, and surprise, we had a damn good time playing it. Actually, it’s not that surprising. As long as the game is fast-paced, user-friendly, and not broken, any four player experience is bound to be jolly-good entertainment. Such as the case here, where you have 2D dog fights with all actions reduced to one stick and one button. Anyone can pick it up and play it. Whether they play it well is really irrelevant to the amount of fun you can have. That’s the mark of a good multiplayer game. At first, Squadron Scramble does that. It just doesn’t last.
The first thing you have to do in Squadron Scramble is move a little dude into a hanger. Once you enter the hanger, you take off in a fighter jet. Each player gets a team of four dudes. You get a point for every plane you shoot down. If you’re in the sky and get shot, your dude parachutes down. You have two options from this point: you can return the dude to the hanger, or you can switch him out for another dude. Since points are tied to dudes that are alive, switching out is meant to add an element of strategy to the game. Switching out dudes “banks” whatever points are made and protects them, since you lose all points scored with a dude if he dies. Sounds like a good idea, but actually this was a game crippler for my session.
The game goes by rounds, with the person who has the most points winning each round. You need three rounds to win. Here’s the problem: points carry over between rounds. So if one player builds an insurmountable lead, they can spend the next couple rounds stalling, with their highest-scoring guys grounded, and never worry about losing. It’s an utterly brain-dead decision and it ruined more than one session of Squadron Scramble, because it was too easy to protect a lead.
This is one of those times where the developers lost track of the fact that not everyone who plays their game will be as highly knowledgeable or skilled as they are. They forget that they, you know, made the fucking thing and thus know how to play it best. It’s not exactly the same as making a punisher too hard and losing track of that, but it’s a common theme in multiplayer games. I’ve had five developers who make such games send me detailed instructions on how to best play their games to ensure maximum entertainment. The developers of Squadron Scramble did this too. Nice guys, mind you. And very patient, considering that I’ve delayed and delayed this review. I like their game. I’m putting it on the Leaderboard. But it’s time for a reality check, fellas: unless you’re going to personally contact every person who purchases your game and give them the same instructions, which obviously you can’t do, you should recognize that maybe your game has a problem. If you need to explain to people the best ways to make your game fun, you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line. The best multiplayer games are self-explanatory. Choppy Chomp-Chomp, the only multiplayer game to reach the top 10 on this site, requires no hand-holding. Squadron Scramble shouldn’t need to, but the developers wanted to hold my hand anyway. Personal space, guys. Don’t make me break out the pepper spray.
It’s still fun though. Very fun, in fact. It’s hugely satisfying to shoot down a guy on a scoring-streak, watch them parachute to the ground, and then Kamikaze your plane into them before they can duck into the hanger. The controls have only a slight learning curve. The action is incredibly fast-paced. I wouldn’t at all recommend trying eight players though. We played with four players and four AI planes, and the game became an unmanageable clusterfuck that nobody could follow. Also, there’s not a ton of depth here. While games like Hidden in Plain Sight might be dusted off from time to time, you’ll get one, maybe two, sessions out of Squadron Scramble and then mothball it for good. Not because it’s bad, but because it wears thin after an hour or two. Once a player emerges from the group as the unquestioned God of the session, the rules skew too much in their favor. This either leads to everyone ganging up on them, or the leader stalling, none of which produce exciting gameplay for anyone involved. Squadron Scramble’s first hour will be the best, and then it will all fall apart after that. That’s fine. That’s how every Will Smith movie plays out, and people still watch them.
妖精冒険記 (Chornicles of the Fairy) was developed by Yuwaka’s Soft
Indie Gamer Chick 
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