Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance. The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other. The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw). You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today. I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen. I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today. Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.
Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness. It looks ugly. There’s no multiplayer. The AI is brain-dead. The gameplay is boring. The upgrades are dull. The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag. All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with. You’re on one side of a screen. Your AI opponent is on the other. You shoot until one of you is dead. Then you upgrade your ship and do it again. The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit. Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship. After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller. So I did. Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved). At which point, it instakilled me again. Grumble.
This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.
Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games. But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare. The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint. The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see. The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot. That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing. Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare. Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care. I don’t know what else to say. Boring. Bad. Overpriced. You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser. And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.
240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review. I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.
Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick. It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined. This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows. And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers. Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions. I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.
This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off. The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck. But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions. The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here. The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them. Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it. The other two are looking for profits. And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.
For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.
There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs. His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it. Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio. Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one. If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible. This is rubbing people the wrong way.
Guys, come on. This is clearly a satire. And I’m not joking about that either. I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here. This was obviously a joke. And, in a way, it might be brilliant. I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick. Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character. Jaded. Bitter. Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit. The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with. It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.
As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys. You can’t be that thick. It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community. The kind that nobody really should take seriously. I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it. The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting. It’s uncanny. And it’s also clearly parody. The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog. They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game. Get it? This was spot on. Perhaps too deadpan though. There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die. They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.
Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it. I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes. No, really. There are multiple endings of course. I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls. This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game. Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me. Yea, go figure. I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it. My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.
After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.
The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present. When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog. You have to start from the beginning. Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason. The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls. Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game! You know what? I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought. I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have. It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.
240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review. You know what? It’s an RPG that actually looks good!
You can file Monkey Poo Flinger.. again, no really.. under novelty games. It has no real value as a game. On my most generous day, I would call its gameplay mediocre. On a less than generous day, I would probably just flip the bird and make fart noises with my mouth. But seriously, you don’t buy a game called Monkey Poo Flinger expecting the next Spec Ops – The Line. You get it because monkeys are hilarious, poo is hilarious, and monkeys throwing poo is the greatest comedy goldmine of all time.
BUT, if your game is going to be themed around a monkey throwing poo at people, it has to at least look good. Covering some gawking human with feces should be a visually satisfying experience. That’s not the case here. The graphics look crude, so any successful shot doesn’t have any zing to it. I mean, you just absolutely plastered some asshole in the face with a handful of shit. When I do that to Brian, it’s the highlight of my day. Here, it’s just hollow. I mean, look at it.
It looks horrible. It’s actually not as bad as it appears from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still not fun. Monkey Poo Flinger is a pretty basic gallery shooter. Press the right trigger to shoot. Targets walk in front of you and you shoot them. Sometimes there are barriers between you and then. Sometimes they throw stuff back. Sometimes the game forgets to take its brain pills and takes away your ability to shoot altogether in a level that is, I shit you not, themed around being constipated. Not that I’m offended. I’ve played games where you have to feed cows prune juice to give them diarrhea and games where you use yellow snowballs as weapons. Do you know what all those games have in common? The novelty wore thin pretty fast, and you’re left with a game that was average at best (Conker) or pretty terrible (South Park 64). The novelty is a non-factor in Monkey Poo Flinger because the graphics just don’t do the concept justice. Thus, it’s boring right from the get-go.
I’ll say this: I thought I would be playing something utterly broken, and that’s not the case. There’s a real game here. It’s just not fun at all. There’s other problems too, like projectiles (especially from the seagulls) being too hard to see, or the targets not being large enough. Probably the best thing about the game is the dialog, which is like saying the best part about getting hypothermia is you get a souvenir blanket. The between-the-levels banter offers, at best, a smirk and a shake of the head. But you have to play a dull as dirt game to get those meager crumbs of entertainment. So I can’t really recommend Monkey Poo Flinger. I also have to ask a couple of questions that really ought to be addressed: where the hell is that monkey getting all that shit from? Does his anus contain a fucking zip-drive? And why does the zoo leave this monkey in such a high foot-trafficked area? I think a better concept would have been a mad monkey won’t stop throwing shit at people and we have to stop it, with the ultimate goal of dropping it off at the state department so that we can send it to North Korea as a, ahem, diplomatic gift.
Boob games. They’re all over Xbox. They make more money than most of the top-ranked games on my Leaderboard do. Other XBLIG developers hate them. I’m tolerate of them, and sometimes even award them my Seal of Approval. All I want to do is be entertained, which isn’t as hard as people think. Take the Trailer Park King series. The three main releases (Trailer Park King 1, 2, and 3) all made the Leaderboard. The first spin-off, Cherry Poke Prison, did not. In part, because of burnout on the, ahem, humor, which is exactly what hurt Trailer Park King 3 as well. DERP of Duty is the second spin-off, and now I’m so burned out that I need a fucking skin-graft.
Ha, BB! That’s a gun too! Brilliant! And the place has Bazookas in the name! That’s a euphemism for tits! I haven’t seen this many plays on words since I last played Scrabble!
DERP of Duty was developed by Freelance Games (80 Microsoft Points still think Trailer Park King is begging to be made into an animated series in the making of this review)
I want to say something in defense of Sean Doherty, the developer of the TPK games: he’s a genuinely cool dude. He was the first developer I ever talked directly with as Indie Gamer Chick. I also think he’s probably as burned out on this series as well. DERP of Duty feels like it’s trying too hard. As cringe-inducing and skin-crawly as the dialog could be in the early TPK games, at least it felt somewhat organic. Maybe Sean felt the need to top those efforts with even more shocking banter, but this time it feels hollow. Without a compelling narrative, the overly-simple pointing and clicking simply can’t carry the game. I think even the most staunch fans of Trailer Park King will be letdown by DERP of Duty. It’s time to retire this series. Sean has established he has the talent to make, ahem, interesting characters and accompanying mythology. Now, I want to see him apply all this towards a more involved game.
And I don’t mean more involved as in getting guys to spank their monkeys harder than they already do. XBLIG has enough games that do that, as seen in this collage by Mount Your Friends developer Daniel Steger. Which I’m sure he compiled for market research and not as part of his newest cardio-vascular workout routine.
But, the real question is: how well do they sell? Really, boobs seems like no more a sure bet than recent Minecraft clones do. Judging by the success of Mount Your Friends, it would seem there’s an emerging market for penis-themed games that you guys are missing out on. So stop being boobs and start dicking around.
And while I’m on the subject of boob games, Team Shuriken is back. The guys behind such classics as Temple of Dogolrak and Mystic Forest return with a game that has, gasp, actual gameplay! I know they’ve tried that in the past with Dream Divers, but I still thought the gameplay felt sloppy in execution. Here, Team Shuriken took no risks. Uncraft Me ! is a bare-bones punisher with the hook being instead of just jumping, you use a jetpack to thrust around. And this is Team Shuriken we’re talking about, so beating levels means unlocking risque anime girls with breasts so large I believe they’re medically considered cancerous.
It’s also their first game to win my Seal of Approval and get ranked on the Leaderboard.
Yea.
Pretty sure this was spoken of in Revelations.
Or maybe it’s not a jetpack and the main guysis hovering around using highly-pressurized urine. Which I’m sure is another fetish but I’m too cowardly to Google it.
Look, all I’ve ever cared about is being entertained. If a game is 50.000001% entertaining and 49.999999% shit, it wins my seal of approval. On balance, I had more fun with Uncraft Me ! than not, so it gets it. Sometimes the levels have clever design. Other times they go for precision-platforming involving, simultaneously mind you: buzz saws, missiles, and timed-barriers that stay closed permanently if you’re not fast enough. There’s no margin of error for these sections, and the controls aren’t exactly perfect enough to validate their existence. I had Uncraft Me penciled in as yet another Team Shuriken failure when I played it last week. As often is the case when I dislike a game by a razor-thin margin, I boot it up one last time just to make sure. And, what do you know, I was able to finish the nearly-impossible stages. Barely. My amigo from TheXBLIG.com Tim didn’t like it it, but I thought overall it was Shuriken’s first decent game. Not spectacular, mind you. I could probably name thirty better platformers for XBLIG off the top of my head. But your money isn’t totally wasted here, nor is Team Shuriken’s talent.
Uncraft Mewas developed by Team Shuriken (80 Microsoft Points recommend these girls get a mammogram ASAP in the making of this review)
I guess that’s the most gratifying part. Yes, they have talent. Not just talent to lure in the horny teenage demographic. Actual game design talent. They’re like Larry Flint. Peel away the filthy exterior that makes you feel like you need a shower and you discover something downright decent in them. Do I expect them to focus on gameplay instead of mammary glands? No. Then again, I don’t expect to get struck by lightning while holding the holy grail in one hand and a winning lottery ticket in the other.
Update: Mount Your Friends received a Second Chance with the Chick. Click here for my updated thoughts. Consider this review to be for the XBLIG version and the Second Chance to be for the Steam version.
Okay, so the name is as absurd and juvenile as a title can possibly get. But, we are talking about a game by Daniel Steger here. His previous hits include a game called Baby Maker Extreme (the ninth all-time selling XBLIG), This is Hard, and Blow Me Up. But the really weird part is, his games tend to be pretty decent. Blow Me Up and Lots of Guns both are Chick Approved and ranked on my Leaderboard. And now we have this, a game about building a human pyramid. In keeping with Steg’s tendency towards gratuitousness, it features Team Ninja-like jiggle physics.. for penises. This is a game tailor-made to generate scorn and ridicule from the XBLIG scene.
It’s also Daniel Steger’s best game by far.
Schwing!
This is exactly the type of weird, experimental game that I had in mind when I started Indie Gamer Chick. Okay, maybe I didn’t picture those games having dicks that behave like bobbleheads. But I figured I would play a lot of games unlike anything I’ve seen before. Mount Your Friends does that. It’s like a video game version of the popular Catalonian pastime known as Castell. In other words, people climbing on each other to build the tallest human-building they can make. Only here, there’s no worries about the laws of physics or structural integrity.
The way you go about moving at first seemed like it would be overly complicated. Each limb is controlled by a separate button. You move one limb at a time, with limbs automatically clinging to the bodies already placed. Each turn, you must climb higher than the highest body on the stack. Once you’ve above the line, you can press start to end the turn and start from the bottom with a new body. In the normal mode, you have 60 seconds to get above the line. It sounds dull, but it can be exhilarating. Especially when time is running short. There were multiple situations where the timer was nearing zero and I just barely got my hand over the line. This always resulted in hooting and hollering. Well, just from me, while my friends told me to sit down and shut up. But hey, I was excited!
Simpsons already did it!
Where Mount Your Friends really shines is in the multiplayer mode. Here, each player takes a turn trying to cross the bar at the highest point in the stack. Play continues until one player can’t make it to the top in the time limit. I’m shocked to say this, but this is one of the best multiplayer experiences to ever hit XBLIG. It even has online play that went off without a hitch. My biggest overall complaints relate to the movement physics. Flinging yourself instead of moving one hand at a time feels loose in terms of gravity and imprecise. I also had issues keeping limbs I didn’t want to use from going limp and getting stuck to one of the guys on the stack. I mean, wait, probably shouldn’t use the term limp in relation to this game. I mean they had trouble staying stiff. NO, erect. NO! God damn, this is tough to write about.
Okay, so the Mount Your Friends might be embarrassing to pull out to show friends and.. FUCK!! See what I mean?
Stegs, I fucking hate you. You make this really awesome game that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen or played before, but it’s almost impossible to describe without receiving an awkward stare. You know what? I don’t care. Mount Your Friends is fun, plain and simple. It’s not very deep. The best concepts rarely are. But you simply have to try it, because there’s nothing else like it. I’m not the most athletic person in the world, and I’m afraid of heights, so this is probably the closest I can come to climbing a rock wall. Well actually, this is probably more like one of those walls where you hold a peg in each hand.
Don’t do that Cathy. Just don’t give him any more ideas. He’s incorrigible enough as is.
When I first saw the cover art and heard the name, I figured it was going to be a professional wrestling game.
$1 (Steam version $3.99) asked if you heard the one about three guys laying in the same bed? They wake up in the morning and the guy on the left says “I had the best dream! I dreamed I was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy on the right says “that’s weird, *I* dreamed *I* was getting a wonderful handjob!” The guy in the middle goes “I dreamed I was skiing!” in the making of this review.
A review copy of Mount Your Friends was provided to Indie Gamer Chick to test online functions. The copy purchased by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test out online components. The person receiving it had no feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ.
From the studio that brought you the Oozi games comes an utterly generic, avatar-based punisher with bad level design. Can’t get enough of those. This is also one of those annoying auto-scrollers. Hate those in general. Especially hate them when they’re done vertically. I probably should have researched my game selection better, because there was almost no way I would have enjoyed Deadly Tomb from the get-go. Yea, it was a bit of a dick move for me to pick it. And if you’re expecting some Planet of the Apes style “it was a good game all along!” twist, think again. I played Avatar and the Deadly Tomb on the easy difficulty, because I’m shamefully bad at punishers and blunt in my admission of this. Even then, I found it to be beyond frustrating.
So boring I can’t even muster the humor to make a funny caption.
But, I think I must stress the difference between a fair challenge and an unfair challenge. I feel a fair challenge means you have a realistic (if far-fetched) shot at getting past an obstacle on your first attempt, using nothing but your reflexes and gaming acumen. When a player of any skill level has no remote shot of clearing some spots on their first try, that’s when a game crosses the line for me. It’s the difference between “smart-difficult” and “asshole-difficult.” Auto-scrolling punishers almost always fall into the asshole-difficult category, and Tomb is no exception. Things like timed-trap platforms combined with vertical auto-scrolling are just cruel, since your vertical field of vision isn’t as large as your horizontal vision. Not only that, but some sections of the game require you to clear timed sections, then drop down to a lower platform before climbing up. This is while a column of fire continuously rises. Unless you are 90% flawless in your run (which you probably won’t be), you have no reasonable chance of clearing these sections on your first attempt. By time you drop to those lower levels, the fire is probably already there and you’re doing your best impression of Frollo.
I’ve had this review sit unfinished for nearly a week now. I’ve made several attempts to finish it, but as of yet have been unsuccessful. Part of that has to do with the utterly generic theme. Whether or not I thought the Oozi games were ambitious, at least they aspired to look good. Avatar and the Deadly Tomb features a bland theme and boring graphics. It doesn’t exactly control that well either. The biggest problem is the wall-jump is handled the same way as the ledge-cling. Sometimes for those timed puzzles you’ll need to cling from a ledge. But most of the time you’ll just want to do wall jumps, but the clinging will get in the way of that. Screw it. I give up. There’s no way to describe my experience with Avatar and the Deadly Tomb in a stimulating way. The game was dull as a book on cooking with tofu, although I would recommend reading that over playing Deadly Tomb. At least you’ll get something to eat out of it.
80 Microsoft Points noted their avatar would never actually have the guts to explore a deadly tomb so the game made no sense from a story perspective either in the making of this review. Then again, my avatar wouldn’t snowboard, do parkour, or run across the top of a moving train either. It’s kind of a coward.
H.i.v.e. is a digital version of a moderately popular, award-winning tabletop game. It’s also one of those rare Xbox Live Indie Games that is officially licensed. You can think of H.i… you know what, fuck it, I’m not using the periods. Think of Hive as a cross between chess and dominoes. You’re given a collection of hexagonal tiles, each with its own movement properties. One of the tiles is a queen bee. You have to place the queen on the board within your first four turns. Gameplay continues until one queen bee has been completely surrounded on all sides, whether the titles belong to you or your opponent. In addition to the bee, there’s also ants, grasshoppers, spiders, and beetles. Ants can move to any free space as long as there is a path to get to it. Spiders must move three spaces at a time. Beetles can walk over and cover other tiles. And grasshoppers can only move by jumping over pieces. If you want to read the full rules, you can click here. You probably should too. Our first game didn’t involve any rule reading, because Bryce thinks rules are for squares. We didn’t know fuck all what we were doing, which explains why I lost to.. sorry Bryce.. a FUCKING MORON!
Of course, that doesn’t explain why I lost eight straight games to Brian immediately following that, but you shouldn’t dwell on that. I certainly haven’t. Sniffle.
Because there is no board, the camera sometimes has to pull pretty far back. But, worry not, because all the tiles are easy to see and distinctive from each-other.
H.i.v.e. is a lot of fun. I’ve never played the board game that it’s based on, but the interface created by BlueLine Games is well handled. I’ve always questioned the existence of video-board games that only strive to recreate the exact experience of the corporeal version. But actually, I think in the case of games like H.i.v.e., they serve a purpose of making complex games easier to learn. It lays out for you exactly what moves are legal, what pieces can be moved, where they can be moved, etc. It takes the edge off the learning curve to a huge degree. But, it still is a no-frills video game version of a board game. I firmly believe that the best video board game do things that only can be done in the realm of games, and that doesn’t apply to Hive.
Hive is also not without faults. As of this writing, online play is unstable. In thirty attempts at playing online, only eight games successfully connected. If both players are able to make an opening move, the connection won’t drop, but that barely happens a quarter of the time. The developers are aware of this issue, but I’m actually not grading against it. I preferred playing locally against human opponents sitting right next to me. You can play against the AI, which actually isn’t that bad as far as video game AI from a first-time developer goes. Early on at this site, I played Avatar Chess, which had genius-level AI even on the easiest settings. While the AI in Hive can lean towards the fierce side on medium, the easy setting is a good way to break into the game, but not so dumb that you’re embarrassed to play it. I can’t tell you how good the hard mode is, because I didn’t really try it. I had enough difficulty beating Brian, who isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. Not that I’m obsessed with the fact that I couldn’t beat such a simpleton. I’m not. Really. DAMN YOUR ACCUSING EYES, STOP LOOKING AT ME!!
So let it be said that Hive, a simple adaption of a cult board game, is the game that ended the Leaderboard’s losing streak. Despite having no apparent talent for it, I had a great time playing it. I even played a few rounds against my father, and it was very fun to bond over. I mean, he wiped the floor with me too, but I still had fun in my failure. I liked H.i.v.e. so much that I ordered the actual game off Amazon. So while it doesn’t really need to exist as a video game, I’m happy it does. And by the way, Brian can’t even remotely come close to beating me at chess, so obviously I’m better than him. I think that’s how it works.
A review copy of H.i.v.e. was provided to Indie Gamer Chick by BlueLine Game Studios. The version played by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was provided to a friend just to help test online functions. That person had no feedback in this review. Consult the Indie Gamer Chick FAQ for how this policy works.
After fumbling around with what might be the worst point-and-click interface I’ve ever encountered, my patience was stretched to the limit during one sequence in Life in the Dorms. While on a scavenger hunt, I accidentally clicked one of the beds in my room. What followed was an interaction system so comically awful that I was convinced that I had broken the game. Upon clicking the bed, the dude you control (named Dack, poor kid) walked over to the door. Then back in front of the bed. Then back to the door. Then back to the bed. Then the door. Bed. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. I couldn’t stop it. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. No interrupt button. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. WHY IS IT DOING THIS? Door. Bed. Door. Bed. Door. Bed. A minute straight of walking back and forth. Door. Bed. Door. Bed.
Finally, Dack sat down on the bed, and sputtered out a one-liner bitching about how hard the mattress was. I turned to my boyfriend and said,
“Brian?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Please turn off my Xbox before I murder it.”
Despite the clunky interface, the puzzles of Life in the Dorms seem about as logical as your average point-and-click game. Such as “Use lightsaber to get toilet paper down from shelf.”
I’m sure the above CPU brain fart was due to a criminally horrible design choice that required the lead character to physically touch every object you point-and-click on. Though for the life of me, I can’t bring myself to the mindset where anyone could believe this was a good idea. Point-and-clickers are slow enough without having to watch your character lock into the appropriate place. The above example with the bed actually happened, and it kept going because the character couldn’t properly line up in the spot that triggered the “sit down” animation. That’s the only explanation I could come up with for why he staggered back and forth like a flash bang had gone off next to his face. But it wasn’t the only time I had problems.
I didn’t make it out of the first chapter of Life in the Dorms before my patience wore thin. I wouldn’t have even bothered going as long as I did if the writing didn’t at least hold the promise of being good. Unfortunately, the awful interface negates whatever potential the dialog had. Like going through a box of DVDs. Instead of being able to collect every DVD, the game plays out like this.
Step one: click on the box. Make sure you click the eye, which means you want to look at the contents of the box.
Step two: wait for the camera to hover over the box.
Step three: select one of the DVDs in the box.
Step four: Slowly pull the DVD out of the box and put it in your inventory.
Step five: Click another DVD in the box.
Step six: Dack will address the camera directly saying how he better put one of the DVDs back.
Step seven: you watch Dack put the DVD back, then the camera pulls back, then zooms in again when Dack grabs the next DVD you selected and puts it in his inventory. The length between steps five and seven is fucking atrocious.
It’s even worse because the dude who addresses the camera (and occasionally has awkward hugs with various NPCs) has no expression on his face except “I will steal your immortal soul.” Shit will haunt my nightmares.
This is one of the most clunky, cumbersome, awful interfaces I’ve ever seen. It’s like Life in the Dorms is overdosing from that slow-motion drug from Dredd. I just want to move the plot forward with as little resistance as possible. Yet every rinky dinky action requires Dack to turn and face the camera to address the situation, in what I can only guess is an attempt to break down the fourth wall. I’m actually embarrassed that I gave up on a game this quickly, even though I was an hour in and had made almost no progress. The only thing I could think about was “this is a point-and-click game. Those typically require lots of insane logical-leaps and guesswork. That means I’ll be seeing a whole lot of wrong guesses where the punishment is more slow movement from Dack as he turns to address the camera. Fuck that.” I think what happened is the developers forgot they had made a story driven game. Imagine if the only way you could watch a DVD was to fumble with the controller and push a random sequence of buttons, then wait for the next portion of the movie to slowly load up. So slowly that you see five minutes worth of story over the course of your first hour in. Nobody would find it unreasonable if you just moved on to something else. With that in mind, I’ll move onto something more exciting. Like sleeping.
There were two reasons I’ve avoided the whole Minecraft craze and most of the clones that have followed in its wake. I figured I would either not get into them, or I would get too into them. I decided temperance was the best solution. Then again, I wasn’t expecting hundreds of requests for these reviews. Requests that come from people who already own and are fans of these games. I’m not sure why they want to know what I think, especially if they already like them. I guess my opinion is just that cool.
Well, while I certainly won’t argue that they’re badly made games (they’re not), I now have the verification I need that this genre isn’t for me. Probably. I mean, I couldn’t get as deep as I wanted in either of them due to my epilepsy, but I think I played enough to get the gist of it. I’ll start with FortressCraft.
You know how there are people who will get a set of Legos and come up with the craziest contraptions on their own? Yea, I’m not one of those people. When I was a kid, I would get a set of Legos, whip out the instructions, follow them to the T, and once completed, never touch that set again. I just don’t have the imagination to take a set designed for, say, Indiana Jones, and create my own Starship Enterprise from it. I’m just as bad at playing sandbox games. I need a specific goal when I play. FortressCraft has no goal. If you’re the creative type, hell, it’s probably exactly what you’re after. I tried to set a project for myself: a giant version of my Sweetie character. The little angry yellow-faced monster thing in my logo. But the monument never quite came out looking the way I envisioned.
Give me the world to mess around with and I couldn’t come up with anything to do.
I also had issues with the speed of building. This won’t be typical for most people. Unfortunately, the little ray-gun building thing that allows for faster construction is also what nearly triggered my epilepsy. So I was stuck using the slow-as-constipated-shit pick-axe. I don’t think it would have mattered either way. If you like to build voxel-style and want a clean slate to do it with, FortressCraft might be for you. For me? Not so much. This is a Lego set without my instructions. It leaves me like a flock of sheep without a border collie: utterly useless.
CastleMinerZ has more of a point. There’s zombies. I mean, hey, zombies! Who doesn’t love zombies? I’m fucking shocked that General Mills hasn’t added a zombie to their Monster Cereal lineup. Probably something that would taste like a blander version of Cap’n Crunch, only with stale marshmallows. Yea, I’m stalling. The truth is, whereas I could avoid having a seizure by not firing the build gun in FortressCraft, there was no way to avoid my personal epilepsy trigger in CastleMinerZ. There’s a lightning effect that seems to go off fairly regularly in the background. Thus, I was limited to smaller, shorter sessions. But even without the lightning stuff, I wouldn’t have been able to get into this. I’m not into the concept of zombies or voxel building. Getting into something that centered around both would probably be a sort of miracle.
I did almost get into a game mode that requires you to run as far away from your spawning point as possible. Unfortunately, in order to play this successfully, you typically have to be able to look up, so as to see and shoot the zombies. Looking up wasn’t really an option for me, unless I wanted to do my best impression of someone holding onto an electric fence. What would have helped was some kind of radar, so that I could tell where the zombies were spawning in at. However, what little I did monkey around with in the zombie shooting department slightly disappointed me, as it felt like there was no “oomph” to capping the undead. There’s so many games that involve shooting zombies, I’m really to the point where the act of killing them has to be satisfying in and of itself. Otherwise, it’s just as stimulating as shooting those mechanical ducks at the carnival.
I saw more dragons in five minutes of CastleMinerZ than eleven hours (at least that’s what it felt like) of watching The Hobbit.
If you’re into building stuff, you can do that too in CastleMinerZ. I couldn’t. Again, I tried to create Sweetie, and again it came across looking like a smiley face with two pink horns sticking out of its head. Then again, my logo isn’t exactly the most complex thing in the world and I can’t draw it on paper either. I think games like this or FortressCraft or Minecraft are probably designed with artistic types in mind. I’m certainly not that. Even in Terraria, I did NONE of the building when I played our main world with Brian. When I made my own world, the building were really just boxes with doors that took minimal effort to make. If you’re a into building stuff, you might like these games. They seem to play pretty well from a technical standpoint. I can’t compare them to Minecraft, but the graphics were crisp, the framerate was consistent (though CastleMiner had the occasional hiccup), and the controls are accurate. I guess. But I’m certainly not among this game’s target demographic, and my opinion shouldn’t factor into your purchase of either of these titles. I’m not really great at building things. Except animosity among Shenmue fans.
FortressCraft was developed by Projector Games (240 Microsoft Points asked if the whole “world is cooking” thing is what Al Gore warned us about).
CastleMiner Z was developed by DigitalDNA Games (80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend who is PISSED about the Hobbit joke)
Please note: I know that for some people, the whole epilepsy and games thing is a sensitive subject and they get very vocal about how games don’t cater to their needs. For me, my doctor has made it perfectly clear to me: playing games is a risk, period. I can alleviate some of those risks through proper lighting, distance, and medication, yes. But, if a game gives me a seizure, it’s my fault, not the developer’s. If you have a preexisting condition such as me, I sympathize with you, but I also ask you to assume personal responsibility. I don’t expect developers to cater to my relatively rare condition, and you certainly shouldn’t DEMAND it like I’ve seen some people do. I’ve found that in my nearly two years of being Indie Gamer Chick, developers want to learn about my condition. I’m guessing they do that because I’m cool about it, and assume all the risk myself. So while I couldn’t fully play a game like CastleMinerZ, that’s my circumstance. If you’re an asshole to developers, you’re not helping. They’re eager to be educated, not yelled at. I generally start by pointing them in the direction of the Epilepsy Foundation. But seriously, just be cool and you’ll find they’re receptive. Indies especially.
Dinora bears a strong resemblance to Terraria, the sleeper-hit that’s climbing up the charts on XBLA, and of which I reviewed the PSN version. As a reminder of what I felt of Terraria, I was annoyed by its numerous game-killing glitches, then went on to lose 50+ hours to a borderline-addiction to it. So, I guess you can say I’m a fan of it. Oh, I’m done with it. For reals this time. I swear. No really. Stop looking at me like that. Look, Brian and me went to play it a little more and the glitches they patched out were replaced by even worse glitches that made half the world invisible to me. So seriously, I’m over it. It’s out of my system. Had a good time while it lasted, but the thrill is gone.
At least until they patch it some more.
And possibly a reunion if they do DLC for it.
Never did kill that wall of flesh either.
You know, we had just started doing plumbing the last time we played it. There are lots of unexplored uses for that.
NO, STOP CATHY! Remember that 12 step program.
Hey look, it’s a giant disembodied head that attacks you with its two disembodied hands. Just like in Terraria!
Of course, if you can’t get Terraria out of your system, there’s always Dinora on XBLIG for 80 Microsoft Points. It will either curb your Terraria addiction or give you nuclear-level cravings for it. Feast or famine. For me? It really did help to strengthen my resolve to never play Terraria again. Which impressed the hell out of Brian, who has since gone on a quest looking for the Dinora-equivalent of something to help me quit smoking. He’s wasting his time, since that’s probably lung cancer.
When I said Dinora had a resemblance to Terraria, I wasn’t being coy. It looks just like a cheap, unrefined, non-pixel-art version of it. But endearingly so, like when a kindergartener draws a picture of his family. Sure, it’s crude, but hey look, it’s your family! Not sure why the dog looks like a shark, but whatever. And that’s Dinora: looks the part, if the part was left out in the sun too long. And guess what? It plays the part too! Well, kind of. I suppose it’s like if you had a friend who got sucked into a jet engine and his broken body was held together by staples and kept alive using a machine. It’s still your friend, but not really. And that’s Dinora: like Terraria on life support.
Everything bad about Dinora I can explain using something as simple as a door. In Terraria, you have to build a shelter to stay safe at night for when the monsters come out. This involves putting up walls, then covering the back wall, and finally sticking a door to enter through. This is typically the first thing you do when you turn the game on. Dinora does the same thing, only it does it badly. In order to place a door in Dinora, you must have four spaces of clearance, plus solid blocks above and below you. Okay, that door is just way too big, but it gets worse, because you can’t actually reach five blocks above you to place a block to hold the door. Thus you’re required to build a staircase to create enough clearance to have room for the door. Sure, you could just have your house dip slightly underground, but what if I don’t want that? I mean, it’s unsanitary! It’s so badly handled and stinks of careless design that it makes me sad. I really loved Terraria, and I would be totally game to enjoy a clone of it that offers more features. The problem here is that Dinora does everything Terraria does, only it does it worse. So who cares about the new features?
Correction: Apparently you can adjust the building reach in the options menu. I’m not sure why the default is so low, nor would I have thought to check to see if you can adjust reach. I still think Dinora is bad though, for many more reasons.
If I seem like I’m being too harsh on Dinora, I’ll remind you that Terraria was developed by two guys using XNA. Two guys whose brains I assure you are no bigger than yours or mine or the guys who made Dinora. But Dinora looks so much worse than Terraria, in addition to sounding worse, playing worse, and lacking the multiplayer aspect. What makes me shake my head in disappointment is that to make a knock-off that is this close to the original in so many aspects took actual talent, I think. I just wish they had applied that talent to something original. I hope these guys gut it out and make something quirky, weird, and new. Something not done before.
The enemies look lame, and on the default difficulty, they utterly swarm you. Pretty spongy, too. Your character moves too slow, jumps to shallowly, and is pretty much useless. At least as the class I picked: a miner. This multiple-character types function seems like it would work better when playing in a party. When I played Terraria, Brian and I divided responsibilities. He built our shelter and tunneled to hell, while I mined for precious metals and fought bosses. There’s no multiplayer in any form for Dinora, which sucks because that’s the hook that kept me coming back to the original. The enjoyment of playing it with the man that I love. Left on my own, the world was quite boring and I just wished I could play it with Brian.
The controls are much clunkier as well, though this stems from the best of intentions. You can now equip stuff to both hands, with the left and right triggers and bumpers used to scroll through items. Great theory in concept, but it turns an already unwieldy design into a digital form of patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. Even the most staunch fans of Terraria on consoles will probably admit that the controls were anything but intuitive. Could they have been done better? I don’t know. But at least with Dinora, now we can point to something and say “but it could have been a lot worse. See?”
Alan with the Tea said it best to me: they tried to do what Terraria took years to perfect in short order. Or, at the very least, the game gives that perception. For all I know, they’ve been working on Dinora for years. I sure hope not.
Dinora comes from the root of Dinah, a Hebrew name meaning “justified.” That’s ironic, because I honestly can’t justify the existence of Dinora. It’s just one bad issue after another. While it does aim to add complexity to the Terraria formula, adding new minerals to mine and giving you new tasks to keep up with, it ultimately feels like a really bad, hastily made knock-off. Terraria is a game that’s been being developed and refined for years now. I certainly don’t expect the level of sophistication it has in an XBLIG clone. But this doesn’t even come close to offering the satisfaction of that one. Even if I had never played Terraria before, I wouldn’t have liked Dinora. The bad movement parameters that need way more thought put into them, and the overall shoddiness of the control design need way more time in the cooker. Is there a good game buried in here somewhere? Sure, I suppose. If you ignore every single major flaw, of which there are numerous. But, if you strip away all of those, you’re left with a game that is already out and available for this platform. The Minecraft clones on XBLIG came out before the real Minecraft hit the console, which makes their existence mean something. Dinora is a poor-man’s Terraria and simply can’t escape that shadow. So what do you do if you only have $1 and want to experience what all the hype is about? Well, you probably should try to remember how you got that $1 in the first place and just repeat the process fourteen times.
80 Microsoft Points appreciate that the guys at Neuron Vexx warned me about the ultra flashy company splash screen in the making of this review. Of course, my attention span is roughly that of a Cocker Spaniel, so I promptly forgot the warning and I nearly had a seizure when I booted it up in the making of this review. Actually, I did that twice. Why? Because I’m a fucking moron. That’s why.
Fishy Warfare was developed by Elemental Zeal
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