Shark Attack Deathmatch

December 27, 2012 by 11 Comments

Oh yea, this one will cause controversy.  No, not the fact that you’re killing realistic-looking depictions of the majestic and noble great white shark.  Personally, I don’t get why that’s such a big deal.  It’s not like someone is going to be motivated by playing this game and arm him or her self to go shark hunting like they’re fucking Brody or something.  The world doesn’t work that way, unless you’re one of those people who desperately needs to find proper medication.  The fanatical types will note that Super Mario Bros. didn’t breed a generation of children who ran around stomping turtles to death.  And where is this outrage when games depict dinosaurs being killed?  What’s the difference between that and killing deer in a hunting simulator?  Dinosaurs used to be animals, right?  And according to some people, that was just 4,000 years ago!

In all seriousness, I don't consider myself an animal-rights aficionado, but I'm agast at the Shark Fin Soup industry. You should really see this documentary by Gordon Ramsey on it. It's on YouTube, and I've linked to it here. Just click the picture.

In all seriousness, I don’t consider myself an animal-rights aficionado, but I’m disgusted by the Shark Fin Soup industry. You should really see this documentary by Gordon Ramsey on it. It’s on YouTube, and I’ve linked to it here. Just click the picture.

No, the real controversy is going to be about how much I liked Shark Attack Deathmatch.  Because I really did.  Opinion on it is fairly split, with some calling it good fun, and others calling it a steamy shit mountain.  I lean towards the good fun crowd, on account of actually having fun playing it.  But I could certainly see why so many people would call it Mount Crapmore.

It’s a weird idea: a slow, more methodical first-person-shooter set underwater.  And with sharks.  But killing the sharks is not the focus.  The idea is to kill the other scuba divers.  You’re armed with a spear gun and a knife to do this.  You’re given a decent-sized arena to fight in, but there are no boundary markers and I sometimes would swim out-of-bounds.  When you do, the game goes ape shit and demands you return to the play field, with a big arrow pointing you in the correct direction.  This was probably not a the best idea.  I would think having actual walls there would be preferable.  Like you’re in a giant lake.  A lake with great white sharks.  Okay, so it wouldn’t be authentic, but come, we’re in a video game where you can refill your health by picking up a giant red cross.  I think realism was thrown out the door at that moment.

You can't shoot the eels or turtles that float around. They only seem to be there to cause the occasional (actually quite rare) frame-rate hiccup. They should have been put there to give you powers or something. Maybe for the sequel.

You can’t shoot the eels or turtles that float around. They only seem to be there to cause the occasional (actually quite rare) frame-rate hiccup. They should have been put there to give you powers or something. Maybe for the sequel.

I think most of the hate for Shark Attack Deathmatch comes from those who stick exclusively to the demo.  Without getting to play the game online, you’re really missing out.  The single player Survival modes are pretty lame.  One of them involves zombie sharks, although I’m not sure what difference it made besides making them look scabbier.  If it’s not the single player mode, it’s the aiming of the spear gun.  I admit, I hated it at first too.  There’s a learning curve to it, and you can’t possibly get it down pat in the amount of time the demo gives you.  I’ll admit, even after a couple of hours of playtime, the aiming was never that good.  Even if you adjust the sensitivity, at best it can be described as barely satisfactory.  I found I did best when I centered my aim with the cross hairs and then switched to views with the left trigger.  Cumbersome?  Yea, but it was the only way I could seem to shoot accurately.

Of course, the one thing everyone says that’s nice about Shark Attack Deathmatch are the graphics are seriously stunning.  And yes, while you have to pull the old “good for an XBLIG” card, it looks really, really good.  For an XBLIG.  Easily the best looking first-person shooter on the platform, with nothing coming close.  And the audio cues are well done too, with a Jaws-like “daaa daaa DAAA” whenever a shark draws near you.  Of course, the sharks really aren’t the focus of the game.  They’re more like window dressing, if window dressing was sentient and out to kill you for no reason.  You can even turn off the sharks when setting up an online game, although I didn’t find anyone willing to do it.  The only way I could use the sharks was to feed myself to them if I was in danger of dying, thus depriving an opponent of a point.

I enjoyed most of the matches I played of Shark Attack, but there are tons of little annoyances.  Spawning is horrible.  I’ve spawned and died in less than five seconds because an angry shark was pissed off that I had blinked into existence on their watch.  Or there was one time where I spawned literally between two guys who were having a knife fight.  In the couple of hours I played, there were nearly a dozen instances of the “you’re alive again, you’re dead  again” spawning.  Brian once came back to life right in the path of an oncoming spear someone else had already fired.  Hilarious if it’s not you, but fucking annoying as hell when you’re on the receiving end of it.  To defend yourself, you can run for it, or you can drop a flash grenade.  The problem with this is it takes so fucking long to activate that by time you’ve removed it from your holster, pulled the pin, and dropped it, you’re probably either dead or dying, and all lined up in the sights of whatever is trying to end you.

"Running out of air? Don't worry, in a few seconds you'll have a fresh set of gills, and perhaps a blowhole in your back too!"

“Running out of air? Don’t worry, in a few seconds you’ll have a fresh set of gills, and perhaps a blowhole in your back too!”

Aggravations aside, Shark Attack Deathmatch is really fun.  And unlike a lot of games with online multiplayer, it has a full community.  I never once had a problem getting a full slate of players into a match.  Typically, if someone quit, there would be someone there to replace them in just a few seconds.  It didn’t matter if it was 11PM on Sunday or 4AM on Christmas morning.  Someone was always there.  Sure, it’s a totally different beast than your typical shooter, but that’s part of the charm.  I don’t really want to play a poor-man’s version of Goldeneye or Doom.  I want to try something original, and Shark Attack Deathmatch is that.  When I played with friends, we all had a hooting and hollering good time.  And hey, Sharks!  Who doesn’t love sharks?  It gives new meaning to the phrase “hanging out with chums.”

xboxboxartIGC_ApprovedShark Attack Deathmatch was developed by Lighthouse Games Studio

80 Microsoft Points noted that when you die from a shark, it says “you were murdered by sharks.”  I don’t think what Sharks do is technically murder, unless they’re killing us for shits and giggles.  Dolphins do that, not Sharks in the making of this review. 

Shark Attack Deathmatch is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  See which games it put a scuba tank in the mouth of before shooting them with a harpoon. 

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Project Gert: Recon

December 23, 2012 by 60 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

See? Pretty cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xboxboxartProject Gert: Recon was developed by Modern Intrigues

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

♫Hark the imperiled Gamer Chick sings:

Glory for the Code 4 screen!

Piece of shit that boils my bile.

Gert and physics won’t reconcile.

Joyless crap with cheap ways to die.

Puzzles can be skipped so why should I try?

Like Tom Selleck’s agent proclaimed:

It’s over dude, this shit is dead.♫

Um, in the making of this review.

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Heavy Recoil

December 20, 2012 by 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, bad example.

xboxboxartHeavy Recoil was developed by Wide Pixel Games

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

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Bleed

December 15, 2012 by 40 Comments

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

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

It’s called Bleed.

Just Bleed?

Just Bleed.

Huh. No funny accents on the letters?

What do you mean?

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

Um, no. It’s just Bleed.

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

Yea.

Seriously?

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

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

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

Bleed is fucking awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

screen4

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

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

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

IGC_ApprovedxboxboxartBleed was developed by Bootdisk Revolution

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

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

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Zomp 3: The Quest for Z’s

December 6, 2012 by 1 Comment

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

Why is everyone so sleepy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

xboxboxartZomp 3 was developed by Skelman Software

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

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

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

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Space Crüesader

November 30, 2012 by 9 Comments

Sometimes a game comes along that really surprises me.  I thought nothing of Space Crüesader.  The generic name coupled with the tired twin-stick shooter genre seemed to doom the game before I even booted it up.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered its one of the better games to come out in months.  I feel ashamed that I could be so prejudice.  I swear, I’m not really like that.  In fact, some of my best friends are twin-stick shooters!

With the market over-saturated with TwickS, anyone attempting one needs a solid hook.  Looking at the cover art for Space Crüesader, I figured the hook was “same old shit, only this one has a mock Atari 2600 box art.”  Wrong.  The hook is actually rescuing stranded ships.  There are six “zones” in the game, which is fancy talk for stages.  In each stage, you have X amount of time to rescue X amount of ships.  To rescue a ship, you have to park on top of it and let a meter fill up.  You have unlimited lives, but if you don’t save all the ships in the time limit, it’s game over.  To the best of my knowledge, it’s an original idea.  Even better: it’s an original idea that makes a mundane genre exciting and fun again.  So many bright ideas end up being video game polio, crippling an otherwise decent title.  Not this time.

TwickS are a common theme in XBLIG because, from what I hear, they’re relatively easy to design.  I haven’t really played any that are horrible.  Even the sperm game.  It sucked because the idea that you were shooting sperm was the only hook to the game.  But as boring as it was, it played well, with good control and clear visuals.  So saying Space Crüesader has good control isn’t unique to it.  By the way, Space Crüesader has nearly perfect control.

You’ll need it too, because the screen is often completely spammed with so much shit that you can barely move.  Most of this comes in the form of asteroids, but there’s also comets, enemy ships, some of which fire heat-seeking missiles at you.  Soon, different enemy ships come in that fly fast, shoot faster, and go after you like they’re on a suicide mission.  While this is going on, the amount of asteroids on the screen grows to absurd levels.

Yea, it's a mess. For what it's worth, it doesn't look that bad in motion.

Yea, it’s a mess. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look that bad in motion.

Oh, and there’s a needless background that absolutely wrecks the game sometimes because you can’t fucking see what’s going on.  At best, the options allow you to dull it.  You can’t completely turn it off though, and that sucks because the colors typically match objects such as items, enemy fire, and even some of the smaller asteroids.  There’s no good reason for this.  If it was done for artistic reasons, it’s a bad move, because graphics should never get in the way of gameplay.  Ever.  If it was to increase the challenge, again, bad move.  Challenge is fine, as long as it’s fair.  Making enemy bullets hard, or possibly impossible to spot isn’t fair.  It’s frustrating.  Ultimately, the game would have been more fun without the backgrounds.  If you’re developing for XBLIG, the first question you should ask when adding stuff to make a game challenging is “does this make the game less fun?”  If it does, don’t do it.  Yea, it really is that simple.

There’s a few other problems.  Sometimes the rescue ships are fairly close to the edge of the screen.  Because asteroids fly in randomly, it’s sometimes absolutely impossible to defend yourself against them.  By the time you’re on the third stage, the level is almost completely caked in enemies and asteroids, so it’s bad enough without having stuff fly at you where you don’t have the time or ability to not die from it.  I kind of wish it did things Asteroid-style, where you fly off the edge of one screen and come out the other.  And where the FUCK is hyperspace?  Nobody puts hyperspace in their games anymore.  It’s just faded away, like Steven Seagal.

One final complaint I have is upgrades come too slowly.  You get them by picking up tiny little crystals that scatter around when you shoot asteroids.  The problem is it takes a metric fuck-ton of them before you actually get a boost.  Also, stuff like shields or the plasma canisters don’t spawn enough.  The shield might spawn more and I simply couldn’t see it on the grounds that it blends in too much with the background (that happens), but it really does seem random.  Of course, once you die, you’ve lost all your upgrades.  On later stages, you might as well restart once you die because your standard weapon is way too slow even think about tackling a screen where there’s barely a centimeter of free space on the board.  And there’s no possible way you can hope to collect enough crap to get it back up to full strength.  I’m not exaggerating when I say the screen is completely suffocated with enemies.

See what I mean about the background? It renders even the screenshots incomprehensible. You know, Asteroids didn't need that shit. If you couldn't see what you were doing in Asteroids, would it have been one of the biggest games ever? I think the answer is no.

See what I mean about the background? It renders even the screenshots incomprehensible. You know, Asteroids didn’t need that shit. If you couldn’t see what you were doing in Asteroids, would it have been one of the biggest games ever? I think the answer is no.

It sounds like I hated the game, but actually, I loved it.  For all the problems it has, and some of those problems are huge, Space Crüesader is one of the best XBLIGs of the year.  I’m disappointed in it because it should have been a top 10 game.  It had all the tools to be such.  An awesome hook, decent graphics, great play control, global leaderboards (though they were as fickle as always on XBLIG thanks to requiring a shitty peer-to-peer system, we really need to picket Microsoft to get them to change this), and a fun co-op mode.  The classy developer even put in an option to remove flashing effects for those with a similar form of epilepsy to my own.  So don’t let any of the bitching above turn you away from this.   Space Crüesader is one of the best titles on Xbox Live Indie Games.  In a just world, it would be a top seller.  Alas, I think the name is too generic to get your average person to click it.  If it was called Boob Boobsader and featured a pair of boobs shooting other boobs, it would be the top trending game on my site and the #1 seller on the marketplace.  Feel free to steal that idea for the sequel.

xboxboxart

I dig the Atari 2600 box art, but wouldn’t it be more fitting in a game that has Atari 2600 style visuals?

Space Crüesader was developed by Unfinity Games

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend that said “bad comparison, because people are happy that Steven Seagal faded away” in the making of this review.  He has a point I suppose. 

Space Crüesader is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  But it should have been ranked way higher. 

 

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Aeternum

November 28, 2012 by 18 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aeternum was developed by Wasted Brilliance

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

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Null Battles

November 26, 2012 by Leave a comment

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

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

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

And this is what showed up on mine.

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

And here are the results from mine.

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

Null Battles was developed by Techno Hermit Games

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

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

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

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

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Demon House: FPS

November 21, 2012 by 9 Comments

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.  🙂

Demon House: FPS was developed by Photonic Games

80 Microsoft Points DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!!! in the making of this review.

Demon House is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard, although I’m sure that will be of little consolation to its now crippled developers.  


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Hostile Hustle

November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments

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.

Hostile Hustle was developed by Lethal Martini Games

80 Microsoft Points noted that hemlock taste just like parsley juice in the making of this review.

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