Not being able to get a driver’s license of my own, I’m at the mercy of others when it comes to going places. In a way, it’s fun. Nobody ever says “hey Cathy, will you run these errands for me?” No, I get to do all the asking and none of the doing. And because of that, I shouldn’t be able to complain about the driving abilities or quirks of those I’m parasitic towards. And I don’t. At least while I’m in the car with them. Once I’m home, venting to my boyfriend, I can and do complain. I can’t help myself.
For example, my mother will drive around a parking lot for hours waiting to get a space that requires her to walk the fewest possible steps to get inside wherever we’re shopping at. If there’s a space open and it’s the fourth closest one to the entrance, she’ll cruise around for up to fifteen minutes (yes, I’ve timed it) waiting to find one that is the third closest one. Why? I have no clue. And you can’t explain to her that “it’s only an extra four steps.” There has to be some kind of diagnosis for what she has. Parking-lot-exercise-phobia?
Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry. Honestly, I thought you were illiterate.
And I’m sorry to my readers who were looking for a game review and read that nonsense above. But what else can I do with a game like 60 Seconds to Park? There’s almost no actual game here, so I have to fill the space with something. The game is exactly what it sounds like: find an empty parking space within 60 seconds. Every stage, the parking lot gets larger, but there’s only one space that is randomly selected to be empty. Find it, put your car in it. It’s that simple.
Here’s why the game sucks: because there is literally nothing else going on here. Find the empty space, and aim your car at it. There is no penalty for hitting other cars, so you don’t have to worry about parking cleanly. You don’t even have to park straight. A stage ends once your car crosses the threshold of the space, even if you’re coming in at an angle that could politely be described as not insurance company approved. There’s no high scores, local or otherwise, and no real reward for playing at all. I figured this could be a quirky single-minded objective game, the likes of which flood the iPhone market. Instead, 60 Seconds to Park feels like it was developed in 60 seconds.
80 Microsoft Points love their Mommy very much and don’t believe that she’s illiterate in the making of this review. There, happy Daddy? It’s not like she can read this anyway.
March to the Moon is a shooter with RPG-style leveling up and attribute upgrades. The whole shmup genre typically makes blood dribble out my ears. It’s just not my thing. On the other hand, the whole upgradable stats thing I usually have a lot of fun with at Indie Gamer Chick. That’s because my first instinct with any upgrade system is to try to abuse it. Pour all points into one stat, over power it, and see where it gets me. People say “that’s naughty of you, Catherine! You should play XBLIGs the same way you play non-indie games.” To which I say, this is how I play non-indies. It’s also probably why I finish about half the RPGs that I start.
All text is presented on the stage, with you walking over it. There’s not a lot, but what is there is sometimes funny, in a “listen to what that crazy drunk is saying” sort of way.
I suppose I see their point of view. When I’m just playing games on my own time, fine, abuse the shit out of them. Play Call of Duty with your feet. Play Uncharted underwater. Play Dishonored while listening to right-wing radio. Whatever floats my boat. But treating small, simple, single-manned XBLIGs that way is grossly unfair. To which I say this: boo hoo. If I can break the game and turn my character into an unkillable human panzer tank, not only is it my journalistic duty to do so, but I typically like those games more when I can do that.
And I could do that with March to the Moon. Oh lordy, could I. The concept here is you’re a dude who wants to get to the moon to, um, shoot pigs and cows and stuff. The plot is a completely incomprehensible mind-fuck that is so transparently weird just for the sake of being weird that it’s almost sad. However, I did often giggle at the absurdity of it all, which I’m guessing was the point. Mostly, it just serves to move along the 80s shooter that accompanies it. Level design is extremely straight forward. There’s four worlds, each with eight levels, all of which are just auto-scrolling shooters. Some of them last a minute or less. In theory, you could probably beat the whole thing in under an hour.
Me? I had planned on just running through it as fast as I could. But then I got to the second world, which featured a variety of goblins that shoot at you. And I noticed something: the goblins gave off a very generous amount of experience when you killed them. “Ah-ha!” I exclaimed, “abuse ahoy!” An hour of grinding later, my character went from a low-ranking hunter to high-ranking hunter-slash-“spirit” that ate enemies for breakfast and shit bones for lunch, which it presumably then fed to the attack dogs I had acquired. I then finished the rest of the game in approximately thirty minutes.
And you know what? I had a good time doing it. Despite having an experience system that is very exploitable, March to the Moon is actually really fun. Like with Bird Assassin, the brief time I spent grinding my stats up was worth it just to plow through the game and enjoy being an invincible super hero. If there’s a problem here, it’s that March to the Moon is too basic for its own good. The levels have nothing to bother the player besides enemies, many of which you can take down with just a couple of shots. The variety of enemies is also a little lacking. A lot of the enemies don’t even move. They just sort of linger there, shooting straight ahead. Because I had upgraded my hunting skills to fire arrows in five directions, I was able to clear whole stages without moving my character. If the stages didn’t fly by so quickly, that might have gotten boring.
If they were aiming for graphics that pay tribute to truly ugly early 80s computer games, mission accomplished.
I never even died until the last level. When I got there, I was like “oh shit, maybe I should have built up my stats more evenly.” But then, it turns out that you can remove points from some attributes and reapply them towards stuff that’s more helpful. For example, I had put a lot of XP into useless attack dogs. They weren’t so helpful against the final onslaught of evil space pigs. So I completely sacked the dogs and re-applied them towards helper spirits that I could spawn faster than they blinked out of existence. With them, I had a bigger barnyard body-count than Outback Steakhouse, and the final boss (or bosses) were dead before they knew what hit them.
March to the Moon is shockingly shallow for a game with so many upgradable stats. Sure, there’s extra difficulty modes after you beat the game once, and some people might enjoy those. However, I was bummed that I couldn’t put more than 13 points into a stat. Actually, that’s probably a good thing. If I could have, my “human panzer tank” would have been firing the gaming equivalent of nuclear warheads and the game would have crossed the line from “too easy” to “you could beat it by taping down the fire button.” But, I still recommend it because fun is fun, and March to the Moon is unquestionably fun. I would also recommend that its developer send the game to PETA for free outrage marketing ethical approval.
I’m often surprised by an XBLIG that seems like it should be bad, but turns out to be decent or better. Moments like those are what have made Indie Gamer Chick worthwhile. On the flip side of that, there have been plenty of good-looking games that turn out to be pretty bad. Surprisingly, the truly rare moments are those that involve games that look bad, but turn out even worse than I could have anticipated. When I play a game and it seems like the concept of fun has completely drained out of the entire world, leaving an impenetrable void of unhappiness in its wake. When I’m unsure if gaming will ever be the same to me. When I honestly question whether or not I want to keep going with this Indie Gamer Chick stuff, or take up a less painful hobby, like self-mutilation.
Aah, Halloween Pie! is one of those rare games. It looks bad. But it’s even worse when you sit down and play it. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst game I’ve ever played in my entire life. Worse than Sententia. It’s not even close.
I’ve seen Barbies more life-like.
I guess the idea with Ahh, Halloween Pie! was to make a boob version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins. The game starts with a cut scene that lasts over a minute if you don’t mash the A-button. f you do mash the A button, it will still take you a little over 30 seconds. It’s unskippable, and you have to watch it every time you start a new game. Immediately upon spawning, you’ll take damage from a skeleton that pops up. Once you take damage, your top flies off and you’re reduced to walking around in your underwear. I’m not sure if this cheap hit was done on purpose to get the motors revving of the horndog squad. Probably. Although I can’t believe anyone would find the character models here to be erotic. Unless of course you have a wax-museum fetish. I’m sure such a thing exists, but I refuse to Google it, for fear that I would have to bleach my brain again.
So you walk around, shooting projectiles at skeletons and crows. The movement physics are stiff. Probably not as stiff as this game’s target demographic, but pretty stiff. Enemies are placed in ways designed to cause you to die quickly and cheaply. If you shoot at a skeleton while it rises up from the ground, the bullet passes straight through it. Annoying, but at least you can just wait for it to spawn all the way. Unless, of course, the skeleton is too close to you. At which point, the bullet will pass straight through it. Grumble. So decent collision detection was not exactly priority #1 during Halloween Pie’s development, but who cares? BOOBS!
There’s no actual objective to Halloween Pie until you enter the house of a witch. She asks you to fetch five pumpkins from which she will build a pie. Upon exiting her house, you are almost guaranteed to take damage from a skeleton, since two skeletons spawn on both sides of you. Since entering her house is necessary towards making progress, this was quite the dick move. If you enter the house while just in your underoos, you’re pretty much dead. Lose three lives, and you get to start over, watching that unskippable cut-scene again.
Assuming you get out of the witch’s house alive, you have to go gather five pumpkins that are scattered around a stage. If you get these and return them to the witch, she fucks up the pie and you get to start over. Only this time, you need to find seven pumpkins. You leave her house again (another near-guaranteed hit against you), and now you have to deal with skeletons that throw bones at you. Find these seven and.. honestly I don’t know. By this point, I had dealt with numerous cheap deaths, unskippable cut-scenes, shoddy collision detection, and overall shoddiness. After a while, you get sick of taking damage from enemies that are a full length away from you, neither touching you nor facing you. Like in Ghosts ‘N Goblins, you can find clothes to put back on. Except here, when you put it on, you’re frozen in place so the chick can get whistled at. Stay classy, game.
Anyone unfortunate enough to have played the NES game Barbie will find the movement physics familiar. This is not a good thing.
I guess in theory you could finish this, if you wanted to take the time to get good at it. But who in their right mind would? This game is a pile of shit. And not even good shit, the kind you use to plant fields and feed people. This is the kind that turns white, petrified, and makes you dry-heave when you attempt to clean it up. And what makes it really shameful is it not only looks bad, plays bad, and sounds bad, but it’s also one of those games whose sole purpose is to lure in the horny loser demographic that thrives on XBLIG. It’s as if the developer knew that no effort would be needed. As long the game had a pair of tits on the cover art, and screenshots of a woman walking around in underwear, the bruised-pecker brigade would show up in droves. Proof that when it comes to digital knockers, if you build it, they will come.
80 Microsoft Points noted that judging by the top selling charts, it would seem that Ingenious Fun should reconsider whether there’s a market for horrible games with ugly, waxy looking women in the making of this review.
Please note: the developer requested I do this review. I wouldn’t have touched this shit with a ten-foot pole otherwise.
Once upon a time, I had friends who did XBLIG reviews right alongside me. There was Two Fedoras, Gear-Fish, and Armless Octopus. Then my friends all left writing game reviews to making games, leaving me all alone to fend off titles about sperm by myself. Well, now their games have all hit. First was Dave’s horrid Pong clone, a game so bad it has now taken a place on the Wong-Baker pain scale.
“I don’t know doctor. This pick axe lodged in my skull hurts a lot, but I don’t think its quite as bad as Piz-ong.”
And now we have Aeternum, designed by Brooks Bishop of Two Fedoras, with an assist in writing from Nate Graves of Gear-Fish. What is Aeternum? Why, it’s a bullet hell! See though, there’s a difference between this game and the Pong game that Dave made. That difference is this is the type of game Brooks has always wanted to make. My gut tells me that Dave never dreamed of making a Pong game. As a kid, he probably did imagine making a game with rocking Genesis box art, but I’m sure his vision probably involved Mega Man fighting Saddam Hussein or something.
Personally, I hate bullet hells. I know I’ve said that I don’t have any biases against any particular genres, but that was what can politely be described as a fib. I just don’t get the damn things. A challenge is one thing, but bullet hells typically cross the line over into digital self-mutilation. Part of my disdain for them comes from the fact that I totally missed the 2D shooter era. I didn’t grow up with Gradius, R-Type, or Raiden. Maybe if I had spent my formative years hunkering down on those, I would have the skills necessary to make it more than five minutes in a bullet hell. Alas, no. I did have Ikaruga for the GameCube, but its a soul-crushing bastard that I barely spent enough time with to form an opinion at all. Then I developed epilepsy at sixteen and had an excuse to never touch a bullet hell ever again, proof that every cloud has a silver lining.
So here’s the awkward moment: Nate and Brooks are my friends. Nate and me have shared many amazing, emotional conversations. Brooks designed my Sweetie character, a variation of which now graces a few games on the marketplace as my Seal of Approval. I don’t necessarily want to hurt their feelings. Then again, they wanted to hurt my pride and make me question my skills as a gamer. How else do you explain them making a bullet hell? Besides, I was so pissed at Dave for Piz-ong that I sent him to his room to think about what he had done. And that was just for a bad Pong clone. For a bullet hell, I think I’m legally entitled to water-board Nate & Brooks.
The dialog by Nate Graves is, um, hey look, a kitty!
Aeternum (Latin for “Eternal”, the amount of torment one can expect from this fucker) is a loving tribute to evil games with badly translated Japanese. You play as some anime thing that has to shoot bullets at other anime things, such as things that look like strawberry milkshakes, or giant squids that go by names like Archibald the Cat Wrangler. It’s quirky! It’s Japanese! It’s.. fucking impossible. I’m sorry, but I put two separate one-hour sessions into this and I couldn’t get past the first stage. I could get as far as a fight with some other flying anime chick thing, but she spams the screen with fast-moving bullets. I’m going to be the laughing-stock of hardcore gamers everywhere, but I couldn’t make any progress at all. And this was the normal difficulty! But then again, I couldn’t even past her on practice mode. I’m just not wired for this shit.
Here’s what I did observe: the controls seem responsive. The graphics are well done. And every screen-wide spamming is allegedly survivable. I’m not personally willing to put in the time to learn how to survive them, but if you’re into this sort of thing, enjoy. It’s not friendly towards people who don’t like the genre, and I outright didn’t get things like the focus mode, which slows you down but not the bullets. I went through the tutorial a couple of times trying to figure out what benefit there was to it, or to grazing bullets, but the game fails to properly articulate it.
What I’m depressed about is there are now two games out by my former colleagues and I hated them both. They’re my friends, you know? I want them to do well. When we talk about their games, I want to be able to do so lovingly, without having to change the conversation to a more pleasant subject. Like whether or not they think this mole growing on the back of my hand is cancerous or not.
This is as far as I could make it. Shameful? Um, hey look, a puppy!
Props to them though. I couldn’t make a game. Nor am I likely to, say, hypothetically pay someone to make a game for me. A broken one, designed to test how much effort is put into the peer-testing system. A game that has at least one crash, one major play control issue, one major collision detection issue, two other evil checklist violations, and various spelling and grammar errors, which I would then submit for peer review just to see how much you dipshits actually try to find this stuff. Yea, I wouldn’t even consider doing that. See this —> 🙂 That’s a smiley face. And it would not lie to you.
Oh, and Aeternum can put a gun to its own temple and send itself to bullet hell Hell. Which I imagine is where bad bullets go, like the one that killed Bambi’s mother.
In sports, Knicks beat the Warriors 103 to 95. Or possibly 99 to 93. In fact, we’re not even sure if the Knicks won. Carmelo Anthony had 31 points off 27 for 27 shooting from the field. That statistic is actually impossible, but we can only report on the numbers as they are given to us.
Thankfully, real life sports statistics tend to be fairly accurate, unlike the post-game stats that Null Battles spits out. Talking about the type of game it is (arena shooter), how it plays (kind of fun, kind of sloppy), and what makes it unique (strange gravity effects) is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I find that knowing who wins or loses arena shooters is a pretty big deal to most gamers. I’m the type of person who meticulously studies my post-game stats when I play Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty. If those games reported different scores and stats to each player, who would want to play them? I wouldn’t.
I tried reviewing Null Battles back in early September and this problem came up. When I took on my amigo Bryce online, this is the score that showed on their screen.
And this is what showed up on mine.
Same game, vastly different stats. My policy with online games is to give developers a chance to fix the problems before I post the proper review. I got notice that the game was finally ready a few weeks ago, but I got caught up in the latest batch of new releases and forgot to go back to Null Battles. As it turns out, there was no reason to rush. Again, here are the results from Bryce’s side of things.
And here are the results from mine.
Again, same game. We’re in agreement of the following things: #1, Bryce did NOT have 100% headshot percentage, and I didn’t have anywhere close to 70%. #2, none of the scores seemed to lineup with what was happening in the game, except the fact that I lost. #3, not knowing does negate the amount of fun you have leading up to it. Sorry, it just plain does. Maybe not for some (Brian for example) as much as it did so for me. But this is my blog and I have to say this problem renders Null Battles appeal null and void.
80 Microsoft Points have absolutely no interest in playing split-screen multiplayer in this day and age in the making of this review.
A review copy was provided by Techno Hermit Games for this review. The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The opinions of this review are her’s alone.
They still have a Second Chance with the Chick. If the scores were accurate, this game would have made the Leaderboard.
What can I say about the Trailer Park King games that I haven’t already said here, here, or here? Nothing has changed for the third (or fourth) installment. Horrible voice acting. Ridiculous, nonsensical plot. Lack of actual gameplay. Humor so crude and forced that it would make Seth MacFarlane blush with shame. By all rights, these are games I should hate. So why do I keep coming back to them? More importantly, why do I keep adding them to my Leaderboard? Granted, not one game in the series is in the top 100, but still, shouldn’t I be lining them up against a wall and gunning them down like Al Capone? These are bad games. I’m known to clean and gut bad games and mount them on my wall. So what the fuck, Cathy?
Doctor House would diagnose the nurse with explosive jug syndrome. Or it could be lupus.
I think part of it is how much Trailer Park King revels in its subject matter. The characters are all so uncouth, shallow, and flat-out stupid that you can’t help but laugh at it. Another part of it is developer Sean Doherty is Canadian and it strikes me as a potentially offensive look at how our neighbors to the north view the poor of our country. It straddles the line between parody and socioeconomic bigotry, but it’s so damn absurd that nobody could possibly be offended. It’s also one of those “raunchy” games that other developers burn in effigy. I see where they’re coming from, but Trailer Park King doesn’t strike me as particularly sexy. The characters here are so.. well.. trashy, that I can’t believe anyone could get off on this stuff. If these were real people, you could probably get an STD just by thinking about them while jerking off. Never mind that the characters are grossly malnourished and their tits are obviously fake.
It’s rare that games on XBLIG are so bad that they’re good, but that’s the best way to summarize the Trailer Park King series. They’re guilty pleasures. The series might be running out of steam though. This time around, you have to prove that series antagonist Truck is not a zombie. How do you do this? Well, zombies can’t dance, can’t be hypnotized, eat brains, animals don’t like them, and most important, they can’t be anal probed. So you run down those things like a checklist and see if Truck takes the bait on any of them. It’s as dumb as it sounds, but it’s still funny in a self-aware “I’m playing a game where someone shoves a large anal prob up a dude’s ass to prove he’s not a zombie” sort of away.
The only minigame in Trailer Park King carries on the tradition of being needless and dull.
For the third (or fourth) episode in the series, there’s only one mini-game: a shooting gallery where you must fire on wanted posters that have descriptions like “skank” or “dumbass.” Prior knowledge of the series is probably required, or you can just wait for dumbass to pop up and shoot the posters of Truck like I did. It’s not the most well conceived, but it’s better than the sliding puzzle of Cherry Poke Prison. Otherwise, the game seemed like the shortest of the series (it took me about thirty minutes to finish) and the jokes are starting to wear a bit thin. I still enjoyed Trailer Park King 3, but I won’t be reviewing any more games in the series. Quite frankly, I’m running out of stuff to say about them. They are what they are. You’ll either hate them on principle, or you’ll enjoy them for being utterly bad, yet oddly compelling pieces of shit. And hey, white trash is totally an in thing right now. If Ted Nugent is looking for someone to make a video game about her life, she should ring up Sean.
Writing about a really bad game is easy. Writing about a really good game is easy. When a game is middling, neither that good nor that bad, I struggle with my goal to write an entertaining review. I’ve done a few first-person shooters on XBLIG. Of them, two are on my leaderboard: Send in Jimmy and Devil Blood. As of this writing, they occupy the very bottom two spots. I’ll fully admit, those games are both atrocious and could (some would argue “should”) be exorcised from the board. But at least they were playable and fun in a train-wreck sort of way. Others have either been glitchy, poorly conceived, or just plain boring. I previously noted that I was surprised at how few FPSs are on XBLIG, considering that the Xbox 360 is pretty much a dedicated shooter console for many of its owners. Sadly, every XBLIG FPS plays like it arrived to the party about fifteen years too late to be enjoyable. Demon House is not really different. It’s not horrible, but it’s not exceptional enough to make this a fun review to write. This will probably not be one of my better ones, so here’s a preemptive apology. For what it’s worth, I’m doing Trailer Park King 3 next!
Weapon design in Demon House ranges from inspired to predictable, and getting the really fun stuff takes too long for such a short game.
First off, yea, Demon House looks relatively good. I mean, it still looks archaic. It would have been just fine in 2000 as a Nintendo 64 or PlayStation title. In 2012? It falls into the dreaded “it looks good for an XBLIG” category. And that’s where it also falls in other areas. It’s designed well. You know, for a FPS on XBLIG. The controls are pretty good, at least for an FPS on XBLIG. I accept that a first-person shooter is an incredibly hard game to design and the guys behind Demon House should be commended for creating one of the better ones on the platform. But all I care about is how much fun I can have with a game, and fun is a fleeting commodity here.
It started good. Really good in fact. The game opens inside a haunted house. This is your stereotypical amusement-park style ghost mansion, with all the clichés. Piano playing itself? Check. Spooky shadows? Check. Lightning custom-designed to give me a seizure? Grumble, check. Baby carriage that rocks itself? Check, and fucking creepy. I wasn’t kidding about the amusement park feel of Demon House. Considering that the enemies are all robotic devices, I kind of figured the concept here was supposed to be something like Westworld, where the animatronics had simply started to run amok. That would be an interesting plot, but instead you’re dealing with a mad alchemist. That’s lame, but at least the haunted house setting is.. oh. Never mind, that’s only for the first half of the game. The second half takes place in an utterly generic cathedral/catacombs place thingie that looks like it was lifted from Quake and/or any of a trillion Quake mods out there. Good move Photonic Games. I was almost interested for a bit.
The only thing Demon House: FPS had going for it that made it stand out was the legitimately creepy haunted house setting. Once you’re removed from that and instead inserted into the boring, sterile, lifeless second act, the game becomes a chore. Oddly enough, after about thirty minutes in that section, I was hoping the game would just end. And then it did. That was very kind of it.
It’s not THAT complex. I’m pretty sure enemies that stand back and shoot at you instead of charging at you has been around since I was at least old enough to ride the Haunted Mansion ride.
Let’s be clear here: I had fun with Demon House and it is going on the leaderboard. I liked the opening act that much. While playing it, I figured it could be a top-fifty game. Despite dated gameplay, the shooting mechanics are fun, the enemy design is neat, and the floor layout with the multiple hidden nooks made this enjoyable. And then you leave the house and suddenly you’re transported back to 1996, which is not where I wanted to be. The placement of the game started to sink. Not like a rock, which would have been quick and relatively painless. It sinks more like a boat. You know that scene in Titanic where they watch as the ship breaks apart and the lifeboats (some filled to half-capacity) look on in horror? Yea, Demon House is the Titanic and you’re Kathy Bates watching on in horror. Not me though. I’m more like Kathy Bates from Misery, taking a sledge-hammer to the feet of Photonic Games. Out of love of course. 🙂
Hostile Hustle combines a Space Invaders clone with a climber. Sounds like it should work, and maybe it can, but not the way its done here. The problem is gaming has kind of evolved past the original, slow-as-constipated-shit Space Invaders formula. That’s why recent titles in the franchise feature insane amounts of power-ups and move at the speed of lightning. Hostile Hustle slows things back to a crawl, resulting in a title that is exhausting in its tedium. Most innovations in gaming these days come from combining one type of game with another to create an unholy hybrid. In this regard, combing a climber with Space Invaders is like combing a rain forest with napalm. Well, not really I guess, because that would at least be fun to watch.
Here’s the basic setup: a wave of baddies takes formation. As you shoot at them, they disappear and platforms spawn. Jump up the platforms, more baddies appear. Shoot them and more platforms appear. Eventually, an exit will appear. Some traps might pop up, like spikes, stun-lock lasers, air compressors, or spiky balls, but otherwise it’s just you, shooting, and more shooting. 30 levels, good luck having fun.
People out there wonder how other people can truly believe the Earth is only 4,000 years old. To which I say, look at how some people choose to ignore 30 years of gaming evolution in favor of recycling stale gameplay. It’s not that big a stretch.
Mechanically, Hostile Hustle mostly works. The controls are adequate, but I spent most of the game wishing I had a double jump instead of the lame ass “push the enemies back and/or give yourself a seizure” wave thingie that happens when you press the A button mid-jump. Never needed it once, thought it was the most worthless creation since the solar-powered toaster. However, there are some design choices that are really mind bogglingly stupid, like having a bright-orange sun in the background. Why is that annoying? Because enemy projectiles are bright-orange fireballs. It doesn’t seem like it was something done to make the game challenging either. It just seems like a brain fart that made it all the way through production, which made me question whether anyone at Lethal Martini actually played their own fucking game.
Other hiccups include not having enough power-ups, and the ones you get not lasting long enough. Sure, they might make the game too easy. Quick survey though: who wants to play a game that is fun, fast-paced, and easy over a game that is slow, plodding, and only slightly less easy? These are the choices you have to make, developers. Remember, your goal is to give players a couple of hours of entertainment, not bore them into a coma. Hostile Hustle’s lack of frills strikes me as done in that manner because that’s how games used to be. Sure, because games used to be designed to rob you of money one-quarter at a time. When your game is a one-time purchase of $1, your entire focus should be “make sure my game isn’t boring 99% of the time, so that anyone who plays it recommends it to others.” Come on people, this shit should be self-explanatory.
After about 45 minutes, I wanted to throw the towel in with Hostile Hustle, but the only thing it was truly guilty of was being about as exciting as bread-flavored gum. Then I fought the first boss, and once I picked apart all the little green blobs, the stage didn’t end. Why? Because some of the enemies were hanging out at the far left and right edges of the screen, not moving, not shakable with the silly solar-wave thingie. There were also no platforms for which I could stand on to shoot them, because the level was designed by someone with no interest in actually playing the game, and thus I had to fall all the way to the bottom of the map just to be able to shoot the fuckers.
Hostile Hustle would have been way more interesting if it had been made up just of these types of fights. There’s only two, and one ended with my system crashing.
At this point, I had the excuse I needed to quit Hostile Hustle, because it had officially crossed the line from being bland to being bad. Like an idiot, I pressed on because I held out hope that something could be salvaged from this piece of shit. But no, just 14 more levels of agony followed by another shitty boss fight. The only changes being more traps and seemingly shorter levels. By level 25, I was seriously contemplating whether I wanted to play a game ever again, but there’s only five levels left, and how much worse could it get? Then I beat the final boss, and the game promptly crashed. Of course it did. So nearly 90 minutes of my life burned to see the infamous Code 4 ending. Do I recommend Hostile Hustle? I would sooner recommend you drink an actual Lethal Martini.
Entropy was part of the third Indie Games Uprising. Like other members belonging to the second week of the event, it was one of the weaker games. Graphically, it was head-and-shoulders above the rest, but the gameplay was clunky and boring. The developers, even knowing that I wasn’t likely to upgrade the status of their creation to Chick Approved, still asked me to play around with it some more today to show the progress they’ve made. Guess what? They were right. The game is improved, but my personal seal of quality is out of reach.
I would make a Jerry Lee Lewis joke, but there’s nothing great about Entropy. Not even the balls of fire.
Before going any further, you should probably check out my write-up on Entropy. So what’s changed? Well, thankfully I didn’t offer up my immortal soul for the ability to pick up the balls. The guys at Autotivity Games added such a feature in. It’s not perfect by any means. In fact, the learning curve for it is almost as steep as figuring out the best way to slowly push the balls around using your body. It’s still a step in the right direction, even if they got a little dog doo on their shoes. They also cut out some of the more tedious bits in the opening section of the game. Again, smart move.
Thankfully there’s no cake joke.
Sadly, the choppy frame-rate is not only still intact, but it’s actually a bit skippier. So now when you chase around the little pink ball of light designed to point you in the right direction to go, you might not even see where it’s going. One step forward in dog poo, one step backwards into a bear trap. It sucks because Entropy really did go all out with clever puzzles and beautiful scenery, but the biggest problem still remains: Entropy is boring. I’m not encouraging the guys at Autotivity to call it quits. But they need to stop mending this snoozer and start work on something that can capture people’s imaginations. Start by giving it a name less depressing. What is the opposite of Entropy? I don’t know. Euphoric Kangaroos Dancing the Polka? Feel free to steal that one. It has to be good enough to sell at least 100 copies.
Note: this review originally said that Ninja Crash was 80MSP. The actual price is 240MSP. Sorry for the mistake.
Being lazy, I prefer to sum up the Xbox Live Indie Game market by saying a game is just XBLIG’s version of an existing game. It saves a lot of time. So I can say Gateways is XBLIG’s version of Portal. Doom & Destiny is XBLIG’s version of Final Fantasy. Sushi Castle is XBLIG’s version of Binding of Isaac. It’s easy! Frees up my time to watch reruns of House with my boyfriend.
Today’s game is Ninja Crash, which I’ll call XBLIG’s version of Balloon Fight. Which was Nintendo’s version of Joust. Which was Williams’ version of mixing tequila and LSD and translating it to a video game. To be perfectly honest, I never played Joust. I’ve played Balloon Fight, because I got it for my birthday on Animal Crossing. Played it for about fifteen minutes, thought it was okay, wish my gift had been bamboo flooring for my house instead. Haven’t really thought much of it since. Well, now it’s back as an XBLIG, only with more features, modern graphics, and somewhat shoddier gameplay.
I’ve shown this game to five people and they all said “wow, looks like Smash Bros.!” And then they see it in motion and are like “oh, it’s Balloon Fight.” And then they make a sad face.
One of the reasons why I never got into Balloon Fight was the slow, plodding controls combined with the unforgiving inertia that seemed designed to inspire new curse words being invented. Sadly for me, those controls are faithfully recreated here. It’s not that the game controls like shit. It controls just like the 1984 Nintendo game it was inspired by. My problem is, gaming has come far in the last 28 years. All that progress is ignored in Ninja Crash. Maybe that’s what fans of the original want. When I tweeted that I was playing a Balloon Fight clone, I had several people do the Dance of Joy and demand that I release the name of the game I was playing to them. Guess what? I’m sure they’ll love it.
I didn’t though. I might have, if their attempts at improving the formula didn’t fail. But they did. Here’s a common problem they tried to fix: enemies hanging out near the ceiling. Happened in Balloon Fight. As I just learned, happened in Joust too. Unlike a lot of attempts at improving games, this is a real thing that did require improvement, so I applaud them for giving it a try. It just didn’t work. When you or enemies hover too close to the ceiling, a finger comes down from the sky and pushes you back towards the ground. And I’ll be damned if it’s not the most annoying thing in gaming since Baby Mario’s cry in Yoshi’s Island. It also pushes the enemies down, often right into you. I appreciate the effort, but wouldn’t a better idea have been to line the ceiling with barbed wire or something? Hell, they actually did do that in later levels, and it worked. The finger thing is like trying to stop people from speeding by putting a brick wall up every five feet.
The other big problem is popping guys doesn’t result in their death. It didn’t in Balloon Fight either, but at least if they landed on the ground, you had a few seconds to kick them off the edge before they inflated another balloon and took off. You don’t even have a full second in Ninja Crash. Once a dude lands, they immediately begin inflating a new balloon and take to the skies before you can even collect yourself. And unlike Balloon Fight, simply touching them while they’re grounded does not defeat them. You have to land on them again. Because you don’t so much control your character as you do aim him and hope for the best, this feature serves to multiply the frustration factor. Granted, they did make it so if you pop a dude and he falls too great a distance before hitting the floor, he dies (or crashes, if you will), but I almost never did kill a dude that way. I either had to pop them above the water or hope like hell I could pop them close enough to land that I could double-tap them. What was so wrong with the way it was done in Balloon Fight?
The screenshots don’t do the game justice. It does look really good in motion. Oh, and see those spears in the corner? They kill you.
Team Devil Games had their heart in the right place with Ninja Crash, and some additions to the formula (environmental hazards, weapons) are a welcome change of pace. But every step forward is followedby a bigger step backwards. Ninja Crash has an audience out there that will enjoy its take on the classic Joust formula, but I didn’t like it at all and I can’t recommend it. I also didn’t get a chance to give this a try in competitive four-player mode. Sorry Team Devil Games, but you did sort of release right in the middle of the holiday gaming season. Trying to tear my friends away from Borderlands 2, Halo 4, or Black Ops 2 is an act of futility not seen since the time I watched Brian attempt to break the world record for most live bees fit into a mouth.
60 Seconds to Park was developed by SirBot Games
Indie Gamer Chick 
You must be logged in to post a comment.