Sigh. Sometimes a game is just so damn dull that writing up a review of it becomes a challenge. In that spirit, The Relic of Horus might as well be the Mount Everest of game reviews. I paid 80MSP for it, and now I have taken on this review, just because it’s there. I saw it on the marketplace this morning and figured “why not?” After a couple of hours with it, I can say that it wasn’t the worst game I’ve played on XBLIG. Not even close. But it is relentlessly boring from start to finish, and there really is no such thing as degrees of boring. Bad can go two ways. It can be bad in an entertaining way, or bad in a bad way. Good has all kinds of levels. Good can come in the form of a game that is well designed. Or good can mean better than the sum of its parts. As in something that shouldn’t be fun, but is. Boring, on the other hand, is just boring. The Relic of Horus is boring. Water-flavored candy boring.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz
The idea is you’re a dude who has to shoot things. And there are pyramids and shit. Oh God, I’m having Stargate flashbacks here. That shit was boring too. The movie, not the show. It was just a lot of sand and people with guns shooting things, and there was sand and pyramids and stuff. How about we retire desert settings from entertainment? I think we should strongly consider it.
Trying again. The idea is you’re a dude who has to shoot things. A wave of what looks like soccer players will charge at you. You fire somewhere in their direction and they die. Then you have to get a scroll and a key, which opens up a pyramid, in which you shoot more soccer players and the occasional mummy. There’s switches. Some of them give you items. Some of them cause the ceiling to cave in on you. Why? Because the game sucks, that’s why.
I hope the whole “it’s just boring” thing didn’t imply that there is a decent game in here somewhere. There isn’t. If I had to describe The Relic of Horus in one word that wasn’t “boring” it would be “spiritless.” The best indie games feel like a labor of love. Horus just feels like a labor. What you have here is the bare-bones skeleton of a game. Just enough to function, without any real attempt at being fun or entertaining. What few mechanics are here are clunky as hell. The controls are bad, with movement feeling too loose and slippery. The enemies are brain-dead, so all you have to do when they spawn in run around in a big circle to wrangle them up. Once they’re in position, and assuming none of them get stuck in walls (it happens), you can turn around and pick them off. Collision detection seemed a bit off, at least for the soccer dudes, so just shooting somewhere in their general vicinity should do. Oddly enough, the game seems to fancy itself as a punisher, because it has a leaderboard that keeps track of the amount of respawns you need. That’s weird, because the only time I ever died was when I hit the wrong switches in the stages. By the way, the whole “wrong switch” thing might be the most stupid gameplay mechanic I’ve seen in an XBLIG yet. It would be like a whack-a-mole game randomly spitting out mole-shaped landmines.
Snore
I started writing this review yesterday and for the life of me, I can’t think of anything nice to say about The Relic of Horus. Bad graphics, horrible play control, busted mechanics, tons of glitches, and the underlying concept was boring to begin with. I suppose the game didn’t crash on me, which I guess is the best thing I can say about it, although I’m shocked as hell it didn’t do that. Ultimately, what I really hate about Relic of Horus is there’s no ambition on display here. Gameplay this bad wouldn’t have cut it as a launch-title for the original PlayStation. Not every game is going to succeed, but if you’re going to fail, do so trying something new. You guys are indie game developers. Be weird, just because you can be. The only thing weird about Relic of Horus is that anyone could possibly think there would be interest in a game like this in 2012.
Every once in a while, I need a break from XBLIG. I love you guys, but a girl can only take so many punishers before she needs a vacation from that. So, I’m going to review Spelunky, a recent punisher on Xbox Live Arcamuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Damnit.
Spelunky is a game made by assholes, for assholes. Having put somewhere around ten hours into it since this last weekend, I’m wearing a jumbo-sized asshole badge on this one too. I couldn’t help myself. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t even having fun, but at the same time I was practically hypnotized by what was transpiring on-screen. A series of colossal dick moves, one after another, so random and so spiteful that I’m pretty sure this is a game designed to specifically take players down a peg. I’m know people will say that I just sucked at Spelunky and thus I suck at games and life in general. You know what? Fine, guilty as charged. But Spelunky is a bastard.
The idea is you’re a little explorer dude who has to go through a series of randomly-generated levels, looking for treasure, items, and exits. The game plays out like a platformer, but the first sign that Spelunky shoots baby giraffes with bullets made from the ground-up hoofs of their own mother is the fact that it’s also a Roguelike. When you die, you go back to start, and any progress you’ve made will be lost. And you will die. You’ll die from falling too far. You’ll die from getting squashed by giant boulders. You’ll die from being shot by arrows. Annoyingly, you’ll die from dodging arrows, only for them to bounce off a wall and land on you. You’ll die from bats. You’ll die from trying to avoid bats. You’ll die from trying to throw a rock at a bat, missing, and having the rock land on you. Everything seems to want you dead in this game. If Gandhi was in it he would probably spray you with bullets.
Oh yea, he’s fucked.
I didn’t make it very far into Spelunky. Most of that is on me and a little thing called greed. I’m incapable of doing a bare minimum to survive. The game is filled with tons of treasure just lying around, and I wanted all of it. But the game sends a bit of a mixed message, because Spelunky seems to actively discourage exploration. You only have a couple of minutes to “enjoy” each stage before a giant ghost monster thingie comes to kill you. Thus, you’re forced to rush through each stage, which has far more things to explore than you can reasonably hope to grab. However, rushing means you don’t have time to check to make sure there isn’t something just out of sight that will immediately result in your death. In a way, I like how you have to calculate the risk versus reward. On the other hand, filling the game up with so much shit and forbidding a person from trying to collect it all makes me want to slowly insert a lit cherry bomb up the developer’s piss pipe. Well, not too slowly. I’m not trying to blow my own fingers off here. In fact, maybe I should wait to light it until it’s inserted fully.
Honestly, Spelunky isn’t really that good of a game, mechanically at least. The controls are kind of weird. Jumping and movement are mostly fine, but I was constantly and unintentionally clinging to walls and leaving myself wide open for attack. Aiming your throws is a bit clunky too, and not without risk. If you try to throw a rock in the air, you’re just as likely to kill yourself doing it when it ricochets off a wall and hits you upside your noggin. Items that are allegedly there to help you aren’t safe either. I got a glove that allowed me to throw stuff better. And by better, I mean the shit you throw just keeps going until it hits something. This one time I threw a rock, and then about two seconds later the sound of the shopkeeper declaring his intent to murder me rang throughout the stage. Well fuck. Another time I bought a green glove, which allows you to climb. Sounded great, but remember that “stuck to the wall” bit I was talking about earlier? Multiply that by every fucking jump you make to get an idea of how useful it ultimately is.
Don’t let the cute graphics fool you. This game is evil.
I think the biggest problem is Spelunky relies too much on just plain old stupid luck. This is mostly due to the random level design. Fans of the game disagree with me, while others have said that Spelunky is only 25% luck. I would suggest 1% is too much for certain games, but fine, it’s only 25%. What does that mean? Well, most of the “damsels” that you need to fill up your health will be right out in the open. But sometimes she (or he, or a dog) will be stuck behind a wall that requires a minimum of three bombs to get through, and those are usually in short supply. Or sometimes the game will just randomly make a level dark and practically impossible to navigate. For a while I tried to work my way through those, but after hours of failure after failure, I said “fuck it” and started to commit suicide as soon as those godforsaken things popped up. I figured fate dealt me a shitty hand, and so fuck fate. I won’t give it the satisfaction of watching me fall on a spike.
And then there are the fun random deaths. I’m willing to concede that 19 out of 20 deaths were entirely my fault. Having said that, in a game this brutally difficult, having just 1 of those 20 be something I had nothing to do with is just vile. And probably hilarious if you’re a spectator. This one time I got to level 1-4 and I was having my best run yet. I had taken no damage, gotten my health up to seven points, built up over twenty bombs, ten ropes, and had enough items that I was better equipped to invade a small country. I start the level, walk a little bit to the right, and then an explosion happens somewhere off-screen. And then something that sent a shockwave down my spine occurred: the “TERRORIST!” splash that pops up when you “attack” one of the shopkeeper dudes popped up. When that happens, they pull out a shotgun and open fire on you, and it’s nearly impossible to fight back. Sure enough, we ran into each-other not long after and I was killed. Fuck you, Spelunky.
Do you know what Spelunky really needed? A video sharing function. Without a doubt the most fun I’ve had from the game is swapping tales of my biggest failures with my fellow masochists. They’re all over Twitter. Spelunky is the new “Big Fish Story” game of choice. Everyone that spends at least an hour with it walks away with stories of comical ineptness. Being able to send your friends videos of your most spectacular deaths would have been a huge selling point for the game. But alas, it’s not to be. In fact, other than some lame leaderboards, Spelunky doesn’t take advantage of Xbox Live at all. There’s a way useless death match feature that’s local-only. It’s so badly done that I’m not sure why they bothered. Matches last just a few seconds, and finding three other people capable of lasting longer will be tough even for those of you with an actual social life. There’s also co-op, but don’t even bother trying it. Save some time and stab your nearest friend in the knee with a screwdriver. Trust me, this way is faster. You’ll just end up wanting to do it anyway.
One of the most pointless modes I’ve seen added to a game in a long while.
Here’s a thought: combine the death-match with the co-op, remove any bullshit about working together, and put the fucking thing on Xbox Live where it belongs. Make it a race/death-match where the four players are not anchored together on a single screen. A race to the exit, or the last man left alive. That would have been awesome. Hell, it might have even justified the 1200MSP price tag. Seriously, $15 for this? Out-fucking-rageous. This isn’t an XBLIG we’re talking about here. This is an Arcade game, yet it lacks some of the fundamental bells and whistles of the service.
I can’t recommend Spelunky, because I feel doing so would make me a horrible person. Any fun you have playing it slowly vanishes, yet you can’t stop playing. It owns you. God help me, I’m going to go play it some more as soon as I finish this review. And then when I’m actually playing it, I have trouble tearing myself away from it. One time I only quit because my battery charge went out. This isn’t a game. It’s a drug. And not one of those fun drugs that rock stars overdose on in the grand suite at a five-star hotel. Oh no. This is one of those drugs that hillbillies cook up in their bathtub in Bumfuck, Wyoming. One that’s sold to you by a ragged-looking teenager that’s missing half his teeth. One that you should know better than to try, because just one taste will hook you for life.
Oh fuck it, just buy the damn thing. Just make sure you cancel any plans you have pending in the coming weeks. And absolutely no faking German Measles to get out of work. I already did that one. By the way, chances are you won’t have any more fun than I am having. I’m just telling you to buy it in hopes that Spelunky is secretly running some kind of bizarre version of a video game Ponzi Scheme and if I convince enough people to buy it, the game will suddenly become magically easier for me.
1200 Microsoft Points have never laughed harder than the time they spent a fortune on one of the helpers in Spelunky only to watch him jump up and impale himself on spikes only five seconds later for no reason at all in the making of this review.
My intent here had originally been to review both parts of Sonic 4. However, after slogging through Episode I and encountering the single most boring final boss in the history of video games, I don’t think I have the strength in me to even try it. It doesn’t help that most people are telling me that some of the stuff I will be complaining about below got fixed, yet the game is still worse. How is that even possible? It’s like unclogging a toilet by blowing up the building and calling it a job well done.
Long time readers probably expected me to hate Sonic 4 before I even started it. Whether it was my hate-article against Sega, my review of Sonic CD, or the fact that my Twitter picture was typically me figuring out different ways to torture and kill a stuffed Sonic The Hedgehog doll, I think the message is clear: fuck Sonic. By the way, I would have kept up with the Sonic killings, but wood-chippers are shockingly expensive and there’s a bullshit 7-day waiting period on flame-throwers. To me, the franchise represents everything wrong with gaming: generic character with committee-designed personality that’s best viewed through nostalgia goggles. Sonic is the gaming equivalent of Poochie. Every attempt at modernizing Sonic has failed, with fans rightfully bitching that they suck and they just want an old-fashioned 2D Sonic game. The only problem is, those old-fashioned 2D Sonic games weren’t really all that good to begin with. As a child, they were neat for you because they pushed new technology and did stuff games hadn’t done to that point. Today? They don’t hold up, and neither do attempts at recreating the magic. Stuff like Sonic Colors and Sonic 4 continue to get lambasted. And whenever something with Sonic that is borderline not shitty comes along, like Sonic Generations, fanboys treat it like Jesus just emerged from his tomb. You guys are easier to please than my dog, and all I have to do to make her happy is throw her a teeny piece of pizza crust.
I honestly don’t even think the graphics look that good.
I had only played the demo of Sonic 4 Episode 1 (which ought to have been subtitled The Phantom Appeal) when it came out back in 2010 and I honestly thought it was just a remake of one of the earlier Genesis games. Can you blame me? Same stupid opening level, same enemies, same rings, same abilities, same loops, and same power-ups. I imagine anyone with just a passing interest in Sonic would think this was just a graphical upgrade of an existing title. The full game’s other worlds include a casino, an underwater temple, and an industrial zone. I mean come on, Sega! This is like trying to rob your own home.
Everything bad about Sonic games is also here. Same cheap ass enemy placement, same “gotcha!” level design, and every single thing people never liked in Sonic games to begin with. I have never once met a person who said they enjoyed the water stages in Sonic The Hedgehog. I’m sure there might be one or two stragglers out there who insist they’re brilliant, just like I’m sure that there’s one or two people out there who genuinely enjoy squirting wasabi up their nostrils, but it doesn’t mean anyone else would want to do it. The water levels here are particularly painful because of how bad the controls are. Sonic runs like he’s wearing concrete shoes, so building up speed becomes an issue. Once you actually get some momentum going, good luck stopping when you need to. I tried holding back on one of those accelerators just to see how long it would take me to stop and go back to it. I had to press the left directional button nearly 100 times to get there. Granted, nobody is going to play the game like that, but when you design a game around something that is moving fast and then punish people playing it the way it is intended, you’re a colossal asshole.
Of course, things are totally the opposite in the water stages. They give you a game where you’re supposed to run fast, then submerge the character in maple syrup. It becomes so slow and clunky that I honestly wonder if they keep putting these fucking stages in these games hoping that fans will start taking their own lives in protest. I’m telling you, I think I’m on to something here. There are parts in the industrial stages where you have to outrun a giant, um, not sure what it is besides a hunk of metal, and if you die you go back to a check point. From there, you have about two seconds to run up a series of slopes or risk dying. The problem is, you’re not given the ability to build up the required speed to get up them. I had to spin-dash up one, hope to stop, do it again, hope to stop again, and then do it one more time. Once you get past that, you basically just have to hold forward and wait for the game to start playing itself for you like every Sonic game seems to do. Once again, I took a running count. Not sure how accurate it is because I think I might have accidentally counted a couple of sections twice after dying, but regardless, I counted 77 times where I could advance forward in a level without pushing anything. That’s over the course of only twelve stages. Whether it’s bouncing off springs, rolling through tubes, or running past accelerators, Sonic games sure have a hard-on for not letting you play them. As I pointed out in my last review, Sonic was originally designed by Sega to be Mario for idiots, but game design like this strikes me as Sega having outright contempt for its own fan base. Are you getting the message Sega is sending you, Sonic fans? THEY HATE YOU! What do you think they were trying to tell you with all those 3D Sonics? They weren’t fucking Valentines!
Come on! They didn’t even change the first boss from the first Sonic game! Short of knocking you out with chloroform and shitting in your mouth, what else can they do to show you they don’t like you anymore?
I pressed forward and eventually got to the last boss. Well actually, before you fight it, the game ends with a boss rush. I guess Robotnik felt that all those previous attempts at murdering Sonic with various contraptions that often failed within twenty seconds were worth a second look. Once you dispatch them, you’re placed against one final, giant robot. At first, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. It was slow. It was easy to attack. So I started to bonk it. And then I kept bonking it. It would fly up in the air, crash down, and I would keep bonking it. After EIGHTEEN coma-inducing bonks, the boss finally entered its second phase. It takes eighteen hits to get there! Mind you, this thing doesn’t put up anything resembling a real fight. It just sort of lumbers around, waiting for you to smack it. In the second phase, you can’t attack its body directly, so you have to wait for it to fire one of its arms at you. Once you avoid it, it floats downwards, and you have to bonk it back to the robot to stun-lock it. Of course, the game is kind of fickle about when something constitutes “hitting it” versus “getting hit by it.” The arms have spikes on the bottom, so I would wait until I could attack it at a downward angle, hitting the top of the arm and thus avoiding becoming a Sonic Skewer. This worked, oh, about half the time. The other half the time, I would do a lock-on attack directly to the top of the glove and still die. Grrrrrrrrrr.
Once you die, you get to go back to the 18 bonks before reaching the second phase and hoping like hell your lock-on attack doesn’t crap out on you, forcing another restart. Well, on one such attempt, luck was on my side, because I had kept all three rings I got at the checkpoint, I had gotten to phase two, and I was able to successfully attack the boss another dozen or so times. I’m not sure how many shots are actually required to kill it. Possibly it’s some hypothetical number, like a quajillion, but I won’t know because the game had one final dick move supreme to pull off on me. You have exactly ten minutes to beat every stage, including in boss battles. I had eaten up about four minutes getting to the last encounter, and another three minutes getting to phase two of the final boss. Well, as it turns out, the last boss has random attack patterns, only one of which opens itself up to attack. After getting a bunch of hits on it, with about two minutes and change left until time expired, the game flipped me the bird and never again did that one attack I needed it to do. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Time expired, life lost, back to the start of the fight, cuss words screamed, controller thrown, power off, and Sonic 4 and go fuck itself.
“Dear Sega, less water stages in Sonic games please.” “Did you say more water stages?” “No, less. Preferably none. Nobody likes them.” “More water stages it is!”
And that is when it hit me: the guys Sega stuck this project with hated making it as much as I hated playing it. They just didn’t care. That’s the only explanation I can think of for sticking such a tediously boring boss at the end yet another redundant Sonic game. Maybe this was their attempt at killing the franchise once and for all. Maybe this was their attempt at trying to avoid drawing the Sonic assignments any further. Maybe they were outright trying to get fired. Whatever the explanation is, Sonic 4 Episode 1 is one of the worst pieces of shit I have ever played. But the games sell, so they’ll keep making them. I bought this one and I just bought Episode II, so I’m part of the problem. Excuse me, I need to go flog myself now.
I honestly don’t remember how much I paid for this. I think it was like $1 at Christmas on PlayStation Network or something like that. Quite frankly, I can’t justify spending any amount on this game.
Gold Miner is an attempt at cloning Lode Runner. Fair enough. Lode Runner is a cherished classic, although the reasons for that are completely lost on me. I always thought it was kind of dull. It’s probably a generational thing. Lode Runner came out approximately six years before I was born. Maybe in those dark times, firing up Lode Runner on your Apple II beat adjusting the rabbit ears on your television set so that you could see the latest episode of A*Team. I don’t know. I do know that it’s one of those series that should be allowed a graceful retirement, instead of being dragged back out into a market it no longer has a place in. Granted, I hear that all seven people who bought the Xbox Live Arcade remake of it thought it was just peachy. And then there was the time they dressed it up in a costume and called it Panda Craze on DSi and PSP. Same shit, different name, still fucking boring as hell.
Gold Miner plays like a Lode Runner clone that was made by someone who got all their information on the series second-hand. And then programmed the game using just their feet. While submerged underwater. In a swimming pool filled with moonshine. It’s bad. You have to run around collecting gold while avoiding little bush monsters. Once you get ten piles of it, the map restarts and you keep going. You can cut a hole on a platform with the right trigger. If an enemy falls in it, you can smack it three times to kill it. You can jump with A, which is a much faster and easier way to avoid enemies. There are no Lode Runner-style puzzles here. Gold Miner is an endless arcade game.
And it’s terrible. Really, truly awful. The controls are slow, the jumping is floaty, there’s clipping issues, the sound effects sound like they were recorded using one of those teddy bears that you speak into, and it’s just soul-killingly boring. I can sum up everything you need to know about how much testing went into Gold Miner with this: if you press the start button in the middle of a game, it takes you to a menu. The menu has four options, including “new game” and “resume game.” No matter which you choose, the game gets restarted. Your score is lost, your lives are reset. Disgraceful. I only could stomach twenty minutes of Gold Miner, but with a fundamental mistake that big, I’m guessing that’s nineteen minutes longer than its own developer spent testing it.
The minimum price of 240MSP now applies to games 150MB in size or higher. Games at under 150MB can (AND PROBABLY SHOULD!!) be priced at 80MSP.
Developers can now publish twenty games a year.
As people know from my previous article about pricing, I have no patience or tolerance for developers that over price their games. It’s not reflection of quality. It’s how the market works. Microsoft made this move so developers could be more competitive. And for the record, this is not a race to the bottom. Your games are only worth what consumers are willing to pay for them. If you price higher without being forced to on some misguided principle, you’re just being silly.
Any developers who wish to use my site as a forum to announce you’ve dropped the prices of your games, you got it. Tweet me the title of your game and I’ll note it in a daily update every day for the rest of the month. The guys at Zeboyd Games have already done so with Cthulhu Saves the World, which is now priced at 80MSP.
I’m also interested to hear what you developers plan to do with all the added space you now have at your disposal. You can e-mail me or let me know in the comments section of this post, and I’ll include it in those daily updates. I applaud Microsoft for this decision in helping developers compete better with wireless gaming apps and against their own Xbox Live Arcade platform. Well done chaps. Now stop being assholes and get games a better place in the dashboard.
UPDATE: Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard member Antipole is now also 80MSP, down from its original price of 400MSP. Outstanding move. You absolutely have got to get this game right now.
It’s been about a month since I blatantly trolled Sega fanboys and classic gaming enthusiasts by announcing my dislike for most things Sega. While I admit that this was as about as transparent as attention whoring gets, I want it to be clear that I stand by and truly believe all that bullshit I said. Every last line of it. Classic games are not as good as you remember and Sega games suck balls in general.
But what really pissed people off was going after Sonic The Hedgehog. By the way people reacted to me asserting that it was never a good series to begin with, you would have thought I had Mother Teresa’s corpse exhumed just so I could defecate on it. I just can’t comprehend why this series is so treasured. It kind of sucks. I can’t even believe this would qualify as being good “back in the day.” Put this up against stuff like Super Mario Bros. 3 or even the Alex Kidd games from Sega and it seems like such a step backwards.
So the fanboys didn’t like my hate piece too much. Most of the comments were completely asinine statements like “name one game from that era that was better than Sonic The Hedgehog.” I could have been a total wise ass and said “anything!” but once you’ve got the monkeys throwing out “best game ever” statements, you’ve pretty much already won the battle. Like I said in my VolChaos review, I find the entire situation to be sad. Here are guys who are now in their thirties and they’re declaring the best game they have ever played and will ever play is one that Santa Claus gave them when they were ten years old. I’m only 22, and I sure as hell hope I haven’t already played the best game I will ever play. That would be tragic.
Pictured: something not worth the hype.
Granted, my only experience with the Genesis era Sonic games comes from when I got Sonic Mega Collection as a Christmas gift. I might have even been the same age as those fanboys when I first played those titles. Of course, by this point it’s 2002 and I’ve already played much better games, including some really spectacular 2D Mario games that Nintendo had ported to the Game Boy Advance. Hell, I played Sonic Advance, an original 2D Sonic game on the Game Boy Advance that I had a better time with than anything on Mega Collection.
“Oh, but there’s another Sonic 16-bit era game. One that destroys all those that came before it” cried the fanboys. Indeed. It’s called Sonic CD, and it’s the best of all the Sonics. It’s so good that Sega seemed to go out of its way to not include it anywhere. I mean, listen to how a guy I respect, Xbox Live Indie Game guru and Armless Octopus founder Dave Voyles described it.
Sonic CD is another fine example. It took a lot of the elements which made Sonic 1 so good, and vastly grew them. The future / past scenario for example, still hasn’t been done in other games to my knowledge. Sure, the 3D parts sucked and controlled like garbage, but the rest of the game provided a lot of innovation for the industry.
Well, what do you know, Sonic CD came out on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network this last week. Since it was only $5, I figured what the hoo haw and gave it a whirl. It makes me wonder what exactly Dave was even talking about. What exactly was innovative about it? It had an anime cut scene at the start? Nah, that can’t be it. What about the time travel gimmick? Nah, games were already doing that too.
I got it! It’s insanely easy. Yes, I get it now. Sonic CD was innovative because it introduced us to the era of the half-assed sequel. Before Sonic CD came around, developers actually gave a shit when developing follow-ups to games. And then this arrived, with its totally phoned in level design, boss fights that would embarrass the viewing audience of Yo Gabba Gabba, and levels where over half the game play is done automatically. Developers took notice and said “wow, look at how amazingly shallow and empty this sequel is. We didn’t know you could do that!”
If Sonic games were created for people too stupid to play Mario, Sonic CD must have been created for the recently lobotomized. Everything in it feels stripped down. There’s fewer enemies, shorter levels, easier bosses, and almost no way to game over. It took me all of one hour to finish it. At which point, it gave me TWO achievements instead of one. How sweet of it. I guess the innovation is supposed to be how there are multiple versions of each level, because you can hit a sign post that says “past” or “future” and if you build up enough speed, you time travel to an altered version of the same stage. I don’t know if this has any other effect on gameplay, and the game doesn’t tell you. It was beneficial to me because I nearly had to quit in the middle of one stage due to the strobey effects. I swear, as I was putting down the control, I bumped into one of those time travel sign posts, hit a bumper, and suddenly I was in the past, sans flashy lights.
Here’s the thing about that though: the fucking game did all that by itself. I had already put the controller down. That’s one of my biggest gripes with the Sonic games, that they do all the hard work for you. The first Sonic game I ever played was in fact Sonic Adventure on the Sega Dreamcast. Everyone who played it remembers the iconic scene in the first level of that game where you’re on a dock running from a killer whale. When I was ten years old, that was, up to that point, the single coolest moment I had seen in a video game. And it was cool, until you realized that the game had all kinds of moments where it takes the controller away from you and does all the fancy stuff automatically.
But isn’t that how Sonic games always have been? In Sonic CD, you spend most of the levels doing nothing while the game has all the fun for you. Half the time in the game is spent watching Sonic automatically coast off bumpers and through tubes at warp speed. Granted, that’s enough to give the Sonic fanboys their jollies, but I thought this was supposed to be the Crème de la Crème of series. Instead, it’s probably the worst. Unless you count the Game Gear titles, which were pretty bad.
Here’s my theory: most people who had this fascination with Sonic CD never actually played it. Probably because you needed a Sega CD to play it and their parents weren’t willing to spring the extra $300 for the attachment. So Sonic CD became the unobtainable entry in the series. The one that was so good it had to be put on the most expensive system on the market at the time. It got some good press coverage, but the Sega CD was pretty much dead on arrival and by time you could afford it, the next wave of consoles were coming and all the copies of Sonic CD had already been long snatched up as soon as they hit the clearance rack. It’s status as the lost Sonic game made it the stuff of legends.
Well, legends do tend to disappoint. Sonic CD is bad even by the low standards of the series. It’s everything that every other 2D Sonic has been: horrible play control, no actual platforming skills required, cheap deaths, and lots of watching the game do all the work for you. Only this time, it’s insanely easy, to the point that it’s a little insulting. Thankfully, it would seem even the Sonic fanboys are somewhat on my side with this one. Within 24 hours of Sonic CD hitting the PS3 and Xbox 360 marketplaces, I saw plenty of Sonic aficionados sulkily tweet “not as good as I remember it” or “that was disappointing.” Others are pissing and moaning because some stupid song got cut out of the game. Which is funny to me because I always thought gaming was supposed to be about the gameplay, not the title song during the opening cut scene that most people were likely anxious to skip anyway.
It goes to show you that the older you get, the less kind reality is to your childhood memories. Guys, Sonic CD didn’t get bad. It was always bad. They all were. You’ve just played better games since it came out. Every time I go back and play something I liked as a kid, the memories just don’t hold up. It happened to me with Sonic Adventure, Tony Hawk, and Crash Bandicoot. That’s why it’s best to live in the now. Don’t go back looking for moldy oldies. The best game you will ever play hopefully hasn’t come out yet, but you won’t know that unless you look to the future for it, and not the past.
Oh, and as a spoiler, it’s not Knuckles Chaotix either. I realize now that Sonic CD finally has a wide release, everyone is going to say “okay, it sucked, but I totally remember Knuckles Chaotix on the 32X being the most awesome Sonic game ever!” Wrong! If Sega had any faith in that game they would have re-released it by now. They haven’t for the same reason they dragged their feet with Sonic CD: it sucks, and they know it. Deep down, you know it too. I haven’t even played it and I know it. Helen Keller knows it. She might be blind and deaf, but when shit gets piled this thick for so long you can smell it coming a mile away.
400 Microsoft Points said “honestly, if Sega had released Bubsy the Bobcat and Sonic had been the generic lifeless mascot of some nameless game company, would you even have known the difference?” in the making of this review.
Orbitron: Revolution received a brief Second Chance with the Chick. Click here to read it. Consider this to be the definitive review.
Damn. This is one pretty game. To say Orbitron: Revolution has the most polished 3D graphics of any Xbox Live Indie Game is an understatement. It actually demolishes my argument that even the best looking XBLIG would still pale in comparison to 90% of the games on the market. It really looks like an Xbox Live Arcade Game. As a gamer who has always told people to focus on gameplay and not aesthetics, it’s sure made a hypocrite out of me.
But enough about the graphics. Even if they are beautiful and shiny, like getting your eyeballs gently massaged by the loving touch of a Heaven-sent angel on a mission to NO! Gameplay! Focus, Kairi!
Funny enough, Orbitron: Revolution is pretty much just Defender. You know, that antiquated space shooter from 1980. The one they tried to remake in 2002 and failed miserably at. Orbitron isn’t really about defending anything, but it’s still got that Defender vibe to it. As a ship, you scroll left or right, shooting at various enemies. When you kill one wave, another spawns. This continues until three minutes have expired, at which point the game is over and your score is uploaded to the online leaderboards.
Graphics whores might want to have a box of tissues nearby when they play Orbitron. Things, ahem, might get sticky.
So is it fun? Yes. Yes it is. It’s also got a potential for addiction that would impress your average drug dealer. I told myself I would just play a couple of rounds to get a feel for it, then move on. A couple of rounds became dozens, and soon I was obsessed with landing a spot on the top 20 of the leaderboard. The closest I came was 21st. Yea, shameful for sure. But I do have an excuse: the game is far from perfect.
The tragic irony is that those beautiful graphics are likely the biggest problem. Often times, I just couldn’t see the damn enemies because of Orbitron’s over-reliance on bloom effects. I would have to rely on the radar that’s under the play field, but it’s not exactly situated for lining up your shot correctly. Other times, the enemies seemed to blend in a little too well with the background. So although I was left gobsmacked by the graphics, I feel that a static black background would have made the game more playable. It also would have allowed the game to come in under 50MB and thus cost the $1 that the amount of gameplay present justifies. Really, 240MSP for what is pretty much a three-minute-long minigame is borderline extortion.
Yea, there’s a couple other modes. Ring Defense or whatever the hell it’s called, the second mode, is still the same as the first one. The only difference is you can get the time extended by blowing up various targets before the entire station blows up. If you can stay alive for five minutes in it, you get a third mode. I never actually unlocked it, because I found the Ring mode to be boring compared to the very intense timed mode.
The overuse of bright lights notwithstanding, there are a few other issues that kept pissing me off about Orbitron. Randomness seemed to factor in a lot more than any skills I acquired. If I got a “good spawn” from the enemies, I was bound to rake up points from the larger combos. But the combo system seemed a bit clunky as well. Sometimes it seemed like it only took a millisecond for the combo to expire and reset, while other times the cushion seemed more forgiving. Perhaps it was just my perception, but it didn’t always seem consistent. And finally, there are moments where you clear out an entire wave, only to see that there is one missile left that you didn’t tag. It’s faster than your ship and on the other side of the fucking map. Yea, it’s probably my fault for not blowing it up when I had the chance, but it chaffed my ass and I figured I should bring it up.
Despite all my complaints and my feeling that it’s slightly overpriced, Orbitron: Revolution is a really good video game. It does for Defender what Pac-Man Championship Edition did for Pac-Man. It takes a cherished yet somewhat passé game and makes it relevant in our modern gaming culture. And it does it with style and elegance. I almost wonder if the guys at Firebase could have shopped this around and got it the official Defender license. It also makes me wonder what other games they could revitalize. Perhaps Robotron: 2084 will be next on the agenda. I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any Twin Stick Shooters on XBLIG.
240 Microsoft Points took my love, took my land, took me where I could not stand, but I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take the sky from me in the making of this review.
Early on, when conceptualizing Indie Gamer Chick, I intended to review Xbox Live Arcade games, along with Playstation Network titles. That idea got scrapped when I decided that those types of games have no problem getting attention. Of course, I didn’t take into account that many titles on those platforms come from smaller studios working on a shoestring budget and the big gaming sites can’t be bothered to touch them because they’re too busy going gaga over Batman or Uncharted. Don’t get me wrong, I’m right there with them. Batman is awesome, even if I find it pretty far-fetched as far as video games go. A man dressed like a bat fights an evil clown? The fuck is that about? I would sooner believe in a giant turtle-dragon kidnapping a princess from a group of sentient mushrooms than a man in a bat suit fighting a clown. It’s just not as plausible.
Dungeon Defenders built up decent sized following when it debuted last winter on iOS and Android, but it still has been well under the radar this Fall gaming season for its console debuts on Xbox Live and Playstation Network, while also putting in an appearance on Steam. Thankfully, by total happenstance I caught up on Vintage Video Game TV’s live feed of a play-through of the game and was totally mesmerized by it. I had to play it.
Dungeon Defenders is a co-op-focused game that’s one part tower defense and one part hoard-slasher. You choose one of four character classes: the smart one, the cute one, the quiet one, or the funny one. Each has specific skill sets and attributes. I was Sir. Rimjob, the brave squire who was a hands-on type of dude. Brian became Mr. Fuzzyfat, a wise apprentice wizard who could fire on enemies from a distance and do pretty much squat in the way of damage. Bryce, the indecisive cunt that he is, alternated between using a huntress and a monk that I swear looked like it was ripped right from the Last Airbender. The cartoon, not the crappy movie.
Characters selected, we entered the game world. Naturally the first thing I noticed were the graphics. They were stunning. If someone had handed me a video of this game and told me to guess who developed it, I would have said Rare Ltd. By the way, that’s meant to be a complement. I know good games and Rare have long since parted ways, but the visual style made me think of their Nintendo 64 games from way back when I was a wee one. It reminded me of the line queues at Disneyland, with attention to detail given even towards areas of the game that are off-limits and just for show. I also want to offer a shout-out to the amazing score of the game. Dungeon Defenders is one of my favorite audio-visual experiences this year.
Once you actually get going, the game itself is a total blast. You enter a dungeon that contains an enormous crystal “core” that you have to defend from waves of enemies. Like a hack-and-slasher, you can fight the baddies hand-to-hand if you wish. But you can also set up towers in strategic locations to either directly defend the crystal or turn the hoards into a goblin mixed grill.
For the most part, the playable characters are well-balanced. The squire is good in the thick of battle but is slow in movement and casting time. The apprentice is useless in direct combat but has nifty long-range towers and a swift casting time. The monk is average in most categories but is a well-balanced character. The huntress.. well.. she’s actually kind of useless, or maybe the dude we designated to use her was. Either way, because of the perfect difficulty curve, we were quickly able to get our shit together and work as a cohesive unit.
Dungeon Defenders is at it’s best when you play with people you know. It does offer random pairing, but both times I tried it were unmitigated disasters. Maybe on Steam or PSN you might get good players. Xbox Live is populated by pit vipers that would shame some of the most obnoxious griefers I encountered when I played Warcraft, and they managed to make my life a living hell. I can’t blame the developers for it, but I figured you should know what to expect when you enter random matchmaking on Xbox Live. As if you didn’t already know what it’s like. Hoarding all the mana needed to cast spells. Picking up all the items and immediately selling them. Tearing down my towers and replacing them with the same towers of their own so they could win MVP each stage. Talking so much empty shit that I muted my TV altogether. Just generally being losers on such an epic scale that if they were imprisoned with the most horny serial rapists on the planet they would still manage to die virgins.
With friends, it works. Coming up with a system of how to tackle each stage is rewarding and engaging. Each level is designed uniquely, offering different challenges in how to apply your towers or where each player should be positioned to directly fight the hoards. The actual combat is pretty simplistic: hit the trigger button to swing your weapon. You can also use more powerful attacks that are mapped to the D-Pad, at least if you’re the squire. I could do a spinning attack with my dude that was not-unlike the spinning move Link does in every Zelda game. Alternatively, I could go into “blood rage” mode, where my squire goes into a mad, blood-fueled rage and tears into everything in sight. That happens to me at least once a month so I can relate.
Okay, so you didn’t come here to read what’s sunshine and lollipops about a game. Despite being in love with Dungeon Defenders, there’s a lot not to like about it. For starters, this is clearly a game that was designed to be interfaced with anything but a game pad. The menus are clunky, the control scheme unintuitive, and the quick-actions mapped to the D-Pad not always helpful. Why can’t I customize what the D-Pad does? As a squire, I was not the character of choice for healing towers in the middle of combat. My dude casts his spells way too slowly, and I’ll be damned if I’m wasting any XP upgrades on making him faster at it. Yet that function is mapped to the D-Pad and I can’t change that. It’s a waste of a button for me. UPDATE: Um, actually you can. It’s really simple too. You just press the D-Pad when the action you want to be quick-loaded is highlighted in the menu. I’m going to fucking kill Bryce. He was like “we don’t need a tutorial.” And I was like “Uh huh!” And he was like “Nuh Uh!’ and I just gave in because we can do that for hours. My bad. Carry on.
I also wasn’t a big fan of the shop system. When you use it, the selection is limited to three weapons, three pieces of armor, and three pets at a time. Well that’s a bucket of lame sauce. Also lame is that the selection doesn’t always logically apply to how much progress you’ve made in the game. The first time I entered the shop, there was a pet that cost over a million mana. I had just started the fucking game, mind you. Following the first level I had maybe 2,000 mana tops. It was such a tease. Apparently you can lock an item in the shop so that it doesn’t go away, and maybe it will even be a good price for it. I don’t really care what the reason is, but only three possible items per type is total horse shit, and the lack of scaling the prices to fit your current resources is a dick move supreme.
My biggest complaint is that this is a game that absolutely requires four players to proceed. On your own, you might be able to handle a couple of the early stages, but once you delve further and further into the game, you better have a full party or you might as well not show up at all. There are adjustable difficulty levels, but when it’s just you against nearly a thousand enemies, all coming from different directions, you’re hosed. It’s a battle of attrition that you often can’t possibly hope to win, leaving you helpless unless the stars align properly and all your bestest buds have free time at the exact moment you do.
But those complaints are so minor compared to the big picture. Dungeon Defenders is sublime. The main quest offers a decent twenty hours of gameplay, which is pretty good for a $15 arcade game. But that only scratches the surface. There’s tons of side challenges too. Some of them are pretty creative, like one where the core teleports randomly around the map. This isn’t DLC, mind you. This is all in the initial package. There are plans for DLC that will add more characters, maps, and challenges, but I’m still at least fifty hours away from seeing everything the current build has to offer. The amount of content here is staggering. Dungeon Defenders might be the best total package of any Live Arcade game ever made. Hyperbolic? Maybe. Truthful? Absolutely.
If I was one of those twats that gave out a Game of the Year award, this would be an honest contender for it, and that includes stuff like Arkham City, L.A. Noire, and Portal 2. Dungeon Defenders offers more gameplay than pretty much any mainstream game, but at a fraction of the cost. With the right teammates, you’ll keep coming back to this one again and again. In a perfect world, this would be an unprecedented hit. Alas, we’re not in a perfect world. Tibet isn’t free, gas is still expensive, and your mother is still a whore. Trendy Entertainment could not have possibly picked a worse time than this gaming season to release this masterpiece to the masses. In the history of bad timing, it ranks right up there with the Vienna Academy of Art running out of room for new students around 1908.
1200 Microsoft Points think charging 50,000 mana to rename your character is criminal extortion in the making of this review.
A review copy of Dungeon Defenders was provided by Trendy Entertainment to IndieGamerChick.com in this review. The copy played by the Chick was purchased by her with her own Microsoft Points. The review copy was given to a friend with the sole purpose of helping the Chick test online multiplayer. That person had no feedback in this article. For more information on this policy, please read the Developer Support page here.
Shortly after I posted this score, my right hand filed for divorce.
The Relic of Horus was developed by Golconda
Indie Gamer Chick 
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