Slick

July 25, 2012 by 17 Comments

Slick received a Second Chance with the Chick. Both reviews should be taken together.  Read my updated thoughts here.

Slick has graphics and sound that try to mimic the look and feel of the original Game Boy.  This is sort of weird to me, because I truly don’t get how anyone could want their game to look like that.  This isn’t the Atari or the NES we’re talking about here, where the delusional say “gaming was never better than back in those days” and we all have a laugh.  I thought everyone was in agreement that gaming has done better than the Game Boy.  So I find it strange, in the same way that I do when I hear that senior citizens in Russia pine for the old days when Stalin was in charge.

For what it’s worth, Slick does a pretty dang good job of looking like a Game Boy game.  It even has a mono midi soundtrack.  I guess if you’re going to do something, it’s worth doing right, even if it’s recreating garbage.  But gameplay is all that matters to me, and Slick is one of the biggest offenders of being a gleefully evil fuck that I’ve come across on Indie Gamer Chick.  It’s a punisher, which isn’t exactly my favorite genre, but this one at least had some promise to it.  I made it past the first sixteen levels and was pretty impressed by the clever level design.

And then, I got to stage 1-17.  And that’s where I quit.  I’ve never done this, but I want to do a step-by-step breakdown of where this game failed.

1. You have to start the stage by bonking your head on the ceiling in the spot where there is no spike., and then land on the floor to the right.  Then you have to hop up to platform.  Trust me, this is all a lot harder than it sounds.

2. You have to jump up, turn mid-air, and land on this block.  Slick controls fairly decent, but the one thing it doesn’t do well is handle mid-air turns, so this seemingly easy bit is a lot harder than it should be.  But this isn’t even the worst offender of this problem on this stage, or even the second worst.

3. These spiked turtle things had popped up in previous levels, but I never noticed how off the collision detection on them was until here.  It is WAY the fuck off.  See the blue box I drew around the turtle to the left?  That’s a rough approximation of the enemy’s collision detection box.  If your dude enters anywhere into that field, you die.  You’ll also notice there are blocks above them, which prevent you from getting adequate clearance when you attempt to jump them.  This causes the difficulty of this section alone to spike to unnecessarily brutal levels, never mind the frustration a player experiences when they are killed by a creature that they didn’t come remotely close to touching.  Perhaps that’s not just a spike on its back.  Perhaps it’s a mound of polonium and you’re actually dying from acute radiation poisoning.  That’s hardly fighting fair at all.

4. Once you hop across those blocks, you have to fall down this chute, swerving right-to-left to avoid fireballs.  As I previously stated, the controls do everything BUT mid-air movement to varying degrees of decency.  So naturally the main challenge of this stage tests just that.  Well, there’s an added bonus to the assholery of this section: you actually accelerate while you fall.  So the game wants you to do something it is barely capable of doing in the first place, and it wants you to do so at a multiple of the normal speed you jump.  Oh, and there’s an enemy at the bottom of the jump, but don’t worry about it.  Like Butch Cassidy said to the Sundance Kid, the fall will probably kill you.  Or, more accurately, the third fireball.

5. Was #4 fun for you?  Well now, you get to do it again, only in reverse!  Oh, and you start off with the fast acceleration here.  Oh, and there’s a twist to this part..

6. You can’t see it, but there’s an indestructible turtle enemy thingie that is walking along the spikes, and after you successfully (HA! As if!) reach the top of this chute, you have to land on it and bounce across the top of it to the goal.  I can’t really tell you if the fireball at the top of the screen is a problem because I never made it this far.  In fact, I tried over 100 times to beat this level, and made it past section #4 a whopping three times.

There are those that saw the picture above and will say to themselves “sign me up!”  But to those of you that haven’t gone off your meds today, Slick is not worth the effort.  What it offers isn’t really any more of a challenge than trying to thread a needle on the other side of the room.  You could do it, in theory, but aren’t there better uses of your time?  If you absolutely need something that plays like a punisher to justify your existence, you’re better off picking a game that gives you the proper tools needed to complete it.  It’s such a shame, because I actually liked Slick up until that point.  It was still challenging, but the level design was fun and had a lot of neat twists in it.  And then the game just went all emo and wanted you to know no joy ever again.   That’s only 17 of 100 levels in, mind you.  I’m almost afraid of how depressingly impossible this game might get.  Abraham Lincoln was famously afraid to carry a knife on him, for fear he might turn it on himself.  I used to wonder how a person gets like that, but after playing Slick, I think I know.  Which is why I just carved “bullet goes here” in the back of my head with an X-Acto Knife.

Slick was developed by Halcyon Softworks

80 Microsoft Points tried to search for videos on Slick and found Rainslick instead in the making of this review.  Cue the sirens. 

Thank you @Hamcha

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer.

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Dead Sea (2012 Xbox Live Indie Game Review)

July 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

Dead Sea isn’t a game that was half-assed. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was good, but actual effort was put into it. So here’s my question: why the hell did the developer choose not to capitalize the letter “S” in the word “sea”?

See what I mean about sea? Si?

It doesn’t seem like it was done for style reasons. It just seems like some kind of oversight on the developer’s part. I see stuff like this a lot on XBLIG, and every time it happens I think the same thing: sloppy. Like the developer simply did not give a shit while entering in the game’s information for the marketplace. It really starts things off on the wrong foot, because if the developer put no effort into simply typing their game’s name, why should I believe they made an effort building the game? Come on, Brave Men Games. You made it this far.  Could you really not spare that extra fraction of a second it would take you to hold down the shift key before hitting S?

I actually tweeted about Dead Sea before I played it. It looked bad, and people were anxious for me to sock it to it. Sorry to disappoint my fans, but I don’t really have a lot of bad things to say about Dead Sea. It’s not a good game or anything. It won’t be making the leaderboard. But it’s not horrible. The idea is you’re a chick who is on a boat when your boyfriend whips out a ring and proposes OH SWEET JESUS LORD HAVE MERCY!!

.. or do I have to devour your immortal soul?

Yea, that fucking thing will be giving me nightmares for a while.

Anyway, no sooner do you agree to marry whatever the fuck that’s supposed to be when a shark knocks him out of the boat and gobbles him up. She gets knocked into the water too, but the Sharks seem kind of picky and leaves her to swim for it. What “it” is or where “it” is at is never explained. There is a compass, but it doesn’t tell you what direction to go. The first time I played, I just swam in an arbitrary direction and ended up drowning. As it turns out, you are supposed to swim north. How I was supposed to know this, I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I had just encountered what looked to be a love-struck zombie pimple cream ad. To put this in perspective, I’ve walked in on my parents having sex. There was chocolate syrup and whipped cream involved. At least I hope it was chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Either way, that was less traumatic than Mr. Undead Acne Man.

The concept behind Dead Sea is not bad at all. But the gameplay is just so boring. All you do is point yourself north and then alternate the trigger buttons at a slow and steady pace. If you go too fast, you attract the attention of the sharks. If this happens, you have to survive a quick-time event. After that, you reposition yourself north and start alternating L and R again. After a couple of minutes of this, you reach a buoy. You tap a button to climb up it, and then survive a couple more quick time events. Then you swim some more, reach a boat, watch the sharks do their best Free Willy imitation while doing more QTEs. After a couple of those, a shark rams the bottom of the boat, splitting it in two. Do they eat her when she’s in the water? No. Granted, I’m the same way with curry. Seems good to smell and look at, but I’m always intimidated to taste it.

It has finally happened: Xbox Live Indie Games have sharked the jump.

After one final swim, you reach another boat. All you have to do is button mash to throw a barrel and then do a three-sequence quick-time event to detonate it. You win, game over. Total time: ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Which is fine. I don’t think I could have taken another fifteen minutes of Dead Sea. Is the game terrible? Not at all. The gameplay mechanics work, and despite the literally cringe-inducing graphics, this is a fully functioning game. The concept of an open-world game where you’re stranded in water trying to avoid sharks sounds great. I just don’t know how it can be executed in an entertaining way. Dead Sea certainly doesn’t do that.  I’m not sure how they could have done better, or if it’s even possible. Points to Brave Men Games for trying, minus several more points for actual execution. Also, I’m deducting 185,962 points for the opening cut scene. Mind you, these are the guys who made Hell’s House, a game that was about as scary as a kitten. But that dude? He’ll scare the enamel off teeth.

Fuck this, I’m taking my chances with the sharks.

Dead Sea was developed by Brave Men Games

80 Microsoft Points wonder what would happen if you fired the land shark gun from Armed & Dangerous at the sharks in Dead Sea in the making of this review. Shark on shark violence rules!

Gameplay courtesy of Aaron The Splazer. He’s been providing these videos for the community for a while now. Go follow him on Youtube. He’s earned it.

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The Relic of Horus

July 22, 2012 by 5 Comments

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.

The Relic of Horus was developed by Golconda

80 Microsoft Points think the Stargate TV series kind of sucked too in the making of this review.

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About To Blow Up Part 1

July 20, 2012 by 11 Comments

When I hear the term “Point & Click Adventure” it typically stimulates in me the same response as the term “Urinary Tract Infection.”  And when I hear the term “Hip-Hop” it usually causes my own stomach to digest and barf itself up.  So a game that purports to combine hip-hop culture with point & click adventures ranks right up there on the “things I’ve feared” list with “AIDS going airborne” or “Joel Schumacher is doing another Batman film.”  But it suckered me into buying it because the art style reminded me of a John Kricfalusi cartoon, and I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Yea, I’ve been to Oakland.

As it turns out, About To Blow Up is about as good as a point & click on XBLIG is capable of being, and the hip-hop crap doesn’t factor into the gameplay at all.  The story is actually kind of cute.  You play as a lovable loser who aspires to manage a hip-hop act.  However, the music scene (and the city as a whole) is dominated by a megalomaniacal bastard named Mr. Sleez.  It’s fun, almost to the point that you forget how tired this genre is.  The logic is as bullshit insane as any clicker is, and those times where you’re generally lost without direction can be draining.  There are a handful of puzzles, but they’re pretty simple and can generally be solved just by randomly clicking buttons until something happens.  Which is ironic because most of the item puzzles are solved by total random guesswork.  “So you put the wig on the rat.  Well duh, why didn’t I think of that?”

I don’t really have a lot to say about About To Blow Up, other than the fact that it’s a dick move on the developer’s part to start the game’s name with “about.”  Which led to the awkwardly worded sentence above that contained the word “about” twice in a row and is totally screwing with my grammar check.  Otherwise, About To Blow Up has the best story of any Plicker on the XBLIG, along with the best graphics and characters.  I’ll look forward to future installments.  I can’t say I’ll actually review them.  It took me all day to come up with the shit I wrote for this one, and I’m only 381 words in.  383 now.  384.  Oh fuck off.  387.  Sigh.  388.  I’m done.

390.

About To Blow Up Part 1 was developed by Facepuncher Worldwide LLC

IGC_Approved80 Microsoft Points said that all questions related to how to solve a section of this game that don’t begin with the phrase “I’m a surrender monkey” will go unanswered in the making of this review.

About To Blow Up Part 1  is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

461

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Spectrangle360

July 17, 2012 by 5 Comments

Board games.  I love them.  But as video games?  I’m not so sure.  Some games, like chess, are way over-produced.  Did I really need chess on my PlayStation Vita?  Do I really need two version of Scrabble on my iPhone?  That’s ignoring that most of the best board games use “house rules” that aren’t generally an option when you play them digitally.  No money for Free Parking, no starting in a room in Clue, no increasing the value of V in Scrabble.  But what really irks me is how few video board games there are out there that could only exist as video games.  Mario Party is still around, which I really adored as a kid.  As an adult, I see that it’s a game that doesn’t put a heavy premium in skill.  In fact, outcomes are generally determined by plain old luck to such a degree that it might as well be called Mario Bingo.  However, there are nine console Mario Parties now.  Obviously there is a market for this thing, and not just because it has “Mario” in the title.  Let’s say Nintendo marketed the shit out of a multiplayer game where Mario and his friends performed tax audits on people.  Ain’t nobody buying that game, let alone enough people to spawn more sequels than Friday the 13th.  Nintendo already proved my theory by releasing Wii Party, which sold 7.5 million copies.

Spectrangle isn’t one of those “it has to be a video game” type of deals.  Think of it as a color-coated version of dominoes.  You have a grid of 36 interlocking triangles, some of which have multipliers on them.  Each player draws four tiles, which are visible to each-other.  The first player must place a tile on one of the spaces that does not have a multiplier.  The next player then must build off of the placed tile by matching the colors.  Each tile has a value to it, and scoring is based on the value of the tile multiplied by the amount of other tiles it is touching.  Play continues until there are no more moves open to either player or until someone runs out.

It’s a pretty simple concept, and it is fun.  The guys at IronReaverGames have done a fine job of porting it over to XBLIG.  Even the AI is kind of balanced.  Kind of.  I could slaughter the game on easy, while normal took a little bit of thinking power.  I lost a few games to the computer on hard, although I would like to say that luck factored into that.  Actually, it factored in so much that Brian started laughing hysterically while I quietly stewed and wondered if there was any spot on my Xbox that I could safely stab without killing it or myself.  And then I played the game on its insane difficulty and absolutely demolished it twice in a row.  At first I thought “damn, I’m just fucking awesome!”  But then I went back to the hard difficulty, which was the only setting that beat me, and I lost another two out of three games.  So maybe “insane” in this context meant “the game plays like it is in an abnormal mental state.”  Because although it had to pause to think, it still made DUMB moves.  It’s less “Bobby Fischer playing chess” insane and more “Bobby Fischer doing anything but playing chess” insane.

Despite not being very impressive from a visual standpoint, Spectrangle360 works well.  It even has online play, which I was able to enjoy without any glitches.  I’m not a big fan of the fact that it dumps you out to the menu after every game, but otherwise I have no complaints.  Ultimately though, it has limited appeal.  If you’re not into these types of board games, this won’t sway you.  It’s not unique enough to be something you just HAVE to try, nor does it need to exist as a video game.  Is it fun?  It was for me.  I can’t tell you if it will be fun for you though.  Spectrangle360 is what it is.  If you’ve never played anything like it, it’s at least worth trying.  Otherwise, you already know whether you will like this game or not just by reading how it works.

I added a circle to this picture to highlight something that does bug me a lot about some XBLIGs: that damn font that constantly shows up. I’m pretty sure it’s the default font that comes in the XNA starter kit or something, because it’s in so many games. It’s ugly, it’s often blurry, it’s cheap looking, and it always makes a game seem somehow badder. Always. Spectrangle360 looks just fine without it. With it, it looks ten times worse than it really is. Guys, if you’ve made it this far in the development process, you would be doing yourself a big favor by taking the time to make any on-screen text look better than stock.

Board games will always be ported over to gaming devices.  Spectrangle360 is a port itself.  And these types of games will always have their place.  But maybe if you’re going to port it, you should think about spicing it up a little.  Include modes that contain content that can’t be done with boards and dice and luck of the draw.  Board games are limited by the laws of physics.  Video games are only limited by the amount of cocaine the developer has snorted.  I want games to take advantage of this.  I want to see Monopoly where you don’t just buy Baltic Avenue.  I want to see one where you load up on rifles and take the fucker by force.  I don’t want to eat marbles while playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.  I want to be eating something adorable and fluffy that looks like it feels pain.  I don’t want to just bump a guy off a slide on Sorry!  I want to bayonet them in the back, drag their corpse to my home, and eat it raw.  Hey, why am I telling you guys this?  Yo, Hasbro, get on the ball with this shit.  If you could get away turning Transformers from children’s toy into ultra-violent testosterone flick featuring a pot-brownie eating mother, you can get away with making a version of Operation where no anesthetic is used.

Spectrangle360 was developed by IronReaverGames

80 Microsoft Points noted that the corporeal version of this game costs anywhere between $10 and $50, so obviously this version is the one to get, unless you just really hate money in the making of this review. 

Spectrangle360 is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

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Puzzle Cubicle

July 14, 2012 by 1 Comment

It’s a bitch trying to think of ways to keep puzzle reviews interesting.  Even if the game is decent, which Puzzle Cubicle is, it really is hard to get emotional over it.  Emotions are the fuel of my writings.  I use them as the compass for what direction I take with my reviews.  But when a game offers absolutely no stimuli and has the personality of a piece of chalk laying on top of a loaf of tofu, writing about it can be almost painful.  I’ve been staring at my monitor for an hour now trying to come up with someway to spice this review up.  It just didn’t provide me with any material to start with.  I guess I could go back and try it some more, but after a few hours with it I feel about as emotional as a corpse.

Puzzle Cubicle is sort of like one of those “make a shape out of other shapes” thingies.  The hook here is that you’re given only a small point of reference to what exactly the final look of the design is supposed to be.  Pieces are arranged on a grid, with a small “example” in the left corner that shows the location of a couple of the blocks.  Using this as a reference point, you must create an enclosed cubicle (or more).  I almost activated a case of narcolepsy in myself trying to describe it.  Some games just sound boring on paper.

Oddly enough, I really liked Puzzle Cubicle.  It’s not for everyone, and it’s probably out-of-place on XBLIG, but the mechanics are solid and I could finish all 50 puzzles without the game crashing on me.  I do have a few complaints.  First off, the explanation screen is terrible.  The goals of the game needed to be articulated better.  Second, I hate how it’s sometimes possible to create the desired pattern exactly how it’s supposed to look, but you don’t actually win because the alignment is off.  Who gives a shit?  Is that the pattern?  Yes?  Good, I beat it.  Next!  Third, the game’s timer keeps going if you pause the game.  Why?  I wasn’t using it to cheat.  I was using it to piss or to answer the phone.  You know, the type of thing people need to do from time to time.  Not that the timer matters at all, but I was using it to measure my own intelligence and it really irked me.  Although it did prove my theory that phone calls from my mother drop my IQ.  Finally, why aren’t the pieces that are shown in the example just locked into place at the start of each round?  That would have hastened the pace of the game and maybe made it more attractive to our cro-magnon population.  No, really!  I’m being serious here.  Stop laughing!

If you haven’t fallen asleep by this point, Puzzle Cubicle might just be for you.  It’s not exactly exciting, but it got my attention.  Mechanically it’s functional and the puzzles are well made.  Will it be the kind of game you talk about with your friends?  No.  Will you remember it after you’ve finished it?  No.  Is it worth your dollar?  Probably.  You can safely liken it to Ben Stein: impressively intelligent, but duller than a butter knife.

Puzzle Cubicle was developed by Geek Mode Games

80 Microsoft Points turned your Cubicle into a Youbicle in the making of this review.

Puzzle Cubicle is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

Win 1600 Microsoft Points, a free Xbox Live Indie Game, and your name in the credits of a game.  It’s the Name the Game contest.  Click here for details.

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Andy’s Notepad [Saucers]

July 10, 2012 by 6 Comments

Despite not being an artsy-fartsy graphics junkie, I do appreciate games that have a sense of style.  Yea, I’ve said that gameplay is all that matters to me, and that is still true, but I have to admit that good graphics will get you my attention.  Andy’s Notepad [Saucers] has a style that’s not totally original on XBLIG.  It reminded me of Robot Platformer, which I reviewed way back in August of 2011.  It had the same casual-doodle look, which helped to push aside the fact that it was as utterly generic and basic as a platformer could be.  It’s like the difference between a guy who dies in his sleep and one who dies while driving his Ferrari over endangered jaguars before crashing into a maternity ward at a veteran’s hospital.  Which dude do you think people will talk about in the morning?  Style counts.

The heat ray weapon is so slow, even when it’s fully upgraded, that I think starvation is actually a quicker form of death.

Andy’s Notepad takes the sketchbook look and applies it to the classic space warfare genre.  It’s sort of like the granddaddy of all of gaming, Spacewar!, with twin-stick shooting thrown into the mix.  You select one of nine flying saucers that dogfight each other.  In single player, you have to go through 20 matches, earning upgrades to your various weapons along the way.  Matches take place with near a moon of which gravity is centered around.  If this sounds boring, it is.  The game is as dull as a plastic spoon.  Mechanically, it works fine.  The physics and controls are difficult to work with, but that’s sort of the point of Spacewar!.  Cycling through the various weapons is what the real problem is.  The AI ships can change-up on the fly, while you have to fumble around with buttons.  After the first half-dozen battles, even after upgrading my stats to their max, AI ships were able to stun-lock me and fire without giving me a nano-second to fight back.  Cheap?  Oh yea.  This is the boxed wine served in Dixie cups of XBLIG.

I gave up after nine or so levels, because I simply could not make any progress against the unreasonably perfect AI.  But, Andy’s Notepad is unquestionably made with multiplayer in mind.  Since the game does play like an updated version of an antiquated gaming treasure, I conned my father and his best friend A.J. to play a few rounds with me.  Both are in their sixties and I figured they must have played something like this at some point in their lives.  They even probably had to walk uphill in three feet of snow and work for six days to earn the quarter it took to play a single round of it too.  As it turns out, A.J. hadn’t.  Daddy had played stuff like Spacewar! though, and both guys had enjoyed playing Chompy Chomp Chomp with me.  I figured why not?

Well, it was a semi-bust.  Andy’s Notepad can be fun, but the game gives too much power to the person who wins the first round.  The winner gets more upgrade points than the losers, and the obvious strategy is to pour everything into those God damned stun-lock bombs, which can cause you to crash into the moon.  Contact with the surface causes your health to drain faster than anything else (I think), so all you really need is those stun-lock bombs, and one good shot.  Since there’s no limit on the amount you can fire, you just have to keep shooting them until the person bangs themselves to death on the planetoid.  Even guys that don’t spend all day and night philosophizing about games could figure that out, as evidenced by the fact that A.J. handed my father and me our asses.  Even then, the old guys really didn’t enjoy the game.  In fact, I liked it more than they did, which was a surprise.  What the game needed is balance, or some form of a counter attack.  There is a tractor beam thing which you can use to drag someone onto the moon, but it’s clunky as hell and only works at a short-range, and quite frankly you’re just as likely to kill yourself trying to use it.

There’s other problems.  The bullets are too small for one thing.  I have a television that could comfortably double as a highway billboard, yet the bullets are so small that they might as well be invisible.  Also, the nine different ships you can choose from are not distinctive enough, and since they’re all drawn in black and white, it becomes too easy to lose which one you are.  Again, I appreciate the art style, but ease of gameplay should never take a backseat to art.  Adding color to the things would have completely fixed the problem, but of course doing so would have gone against the whole sketchbook thing.  I guess Andy’s parents were too cheap to buy him colored pencils.

I do love the character and planet design. It’s almost Dr. Seuss-like.

Andy’s Notepad is not entirely without merit.  There’s a good game somewhere in this mess, but the horrible AI destroys the single player experience and the imbalance of weapons cripples the multiplayer mode.  With some small fixes, this could be a leaderboard game, but right now Andy is a doodle of a smelly turd, stink lines and all.  I guess I should be thankful that Andy is drawing UFOs instead of tits made out of guns like a normal teenager.

Andy’s Notepad [Saucers] was developed by Coneware

80 Microsoft Points used to make doodles of praying mantis-spider hybrids in the making of this review.  Can you picture one?  Scary, huh?  Well, sweet dreams!

 

 

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Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

July 8, 2012 by 10 Comments

Update: Super Amazing Wagon Adventure recieved a Second Chance with the Chick to cover the Steam build of the game. Click here for my updated thoughts.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is alleged to be an Oregon Trail homage.  And it is, only you actually have to fight your own battles, there’s blood and gore, intentional humor, and it’s actually fun to play.  Okay, so that means it’s absolutely NOTHING like Oregon Trail, but that’s what people are comparing it to.  Basically, take everything that made Oregon Trail educational and strip it out.  Replace it with sadism and adult situations, and you have Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, a game that is most certainly NOT educational.  In fact, I think it might actually make you stupider while you play it.  I went from being a reasonably smart person to putting my shoes on the wrong feet and watching Jersey Shore in just a matter of hours.  Potent is the derp in this one.

I’m changing my name from Kairi Vice to Kairi Buffokill.

As a game, Wagon has little going for it.  It’s part space-shooter (well, minus the space part.. mostly) and part TwickS.  Both variations are fairly primitive in their play style, and other than the occasional power-up, this is really as basic as you can get.  Calling it Atari-esq would be fair.  Where it won me over was with its personality.  From the dead-pan descriptions of your frequent failures to the gleeful mass slaughter of indigenous animals,  this is a game that revels in its absurdity.  But never to the point that it becomes obnoxious, like Torque Quest did.  Thus a game that is very fundamental in its design actually becomes something you want to press on with, just to see what crazy shit will happen next.

What’s really cool is Wagon has so many different possible scenarios built into it, all of which are chosen at random.  I played it for over two hours and I never once had the same experience.  It doesn’t mean they’re all good ones.  Sometimes I would start a game and the first thing that would happen was one of the people in my wagon would get some kind of illness and immediately lose all their health but one.  Sometimes my wagon would break and I would have to walk to the nearest outpost to fix it, which might be one screen away, or it might be three screens away.  Either way, the enemies tend to move faster than your bullets shoot, so you’re pretty fucked.  Actually, a lot of the boards tend to overwhelm you with too many enemies, and you’re often not equipped to avoid them.  There’s even scenarios where you spawn and are almost immediately fired upon, before you even realize the round has begun.  As quirky as Wagon is, it can be pretty brutal as well, and that saps the fun out of it.  I probably would have kept playing, but I was so pissed by time I finally beat the damn thing that I didn’t want to see what I missed.

And they said Sputnik was the first thing in orbit. Psssh, historians. What do they know?

I missed a lot too.  Again, over the course of two hours the game never repeated itself in the same way twice.  I still had alternative wagons to unlock.  I kind of wanted to, because they actually have different abilities.  You can ride a dinosaur and hurl eggs at enemies.  You can fly a space shuttle that moves quickly.  My personal favorite was a wagon pulled by a buffalo where you send a falcon to attack enemies.  But, there were a lot of things I missed.  And I will continue to miss them.  Yes, I had fun playing Super Amazing Wagon Adventure, but sometimes it’s too damn frustrating for its own good.  One time I was close to the end, only to lose one member to disease and one member to artistically poor play control brought on alcoholism.  This is a game that does not want you to ever be comfortable.  You’ll have laughs, but you’ll also gnash your teeth when the game decides you’re doing just a little too good and pulls a dick move.  I suppose this is what the settlers went through, which means it actually is educational.  Wait, did the settlers really fight off pterodactyls and do mushrooms?  Wow.  History is way cooler than Little House on the Prairie made it seem.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure was developed by Sparsevector
Point of Sale: Steam – Desura – Xbox Live Indie Games
Port played for this review: Xbox Live Indie Games.

IGC_Approved$1 Died of dysentery in the making of this review.

 Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed.

Happy Birthday Brian.  I love you with all my heart.

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Obsessive Collecting Disorder

July 6, 2012 by 10 Comments

I had a problem with Obsessive Collecting Disorder.  It was the name.  The name is all wrong.  It should have been called Obsessive Collective Disorder.  You see, the name is a play on the anxiety disorder known as obsessive-compulsive disorder.  It’s not obsessive compulsing disorder, because there is no such word as compulsing.  But there is a word called collective, so the game should have used it.  Sure, Obsessive Collective Disorder sounds like something that happens to a cult that undergoes a mass suicide in order to catch a ride on a UFO, but it works better as a pun.

Welcome back to Xbox Live Indie Games: Your source for self-hating gameplay.

I had one other problem with Obese Cauliflower Disorder: the game is a punisher, and I hate those fucking things.  They seem like they’re some kind of repressed anger stemming from not getting enough love as a child, manifested in video game form.  The idea is you’re a stick figure who is being put through various test chambers owned by the, and I’m not making this up, the CrAperture Corporation.  Isn’t it ironic how one of the most clever and original games to come around in a long time has somehow managed to kill the creativity of an entire generation?  Let me guess, the game will end with some kind of reference to the cake being a lie.  Oh, yep, there it is.  Very nice, guys.  What, you couldn’t work in a psychotic artificial intelligence while you were at it?  Well, at least the ending was good for a small giggle.  You know what?  I guess kleptomania falls into the OCD spectrum, so we’ll just say they were running with the theme and move on.

As a game, Opal Chin Disorder is pretty much just like any other punisher.  The idea is similar to N+.  You run around, avoiding traps and collecting coins.  The platforming mechanics are pretty basic.  A jumps, X or the right trigger run, and that’s it.  There’s no double jumps, wall jumps, ducking, sliding, doing short-form taxes, or breaking out into the chorus line from Oklahoma.  It’s just you, jumping, and shit that wants you dead, like some ingenious Olympic Committee person combined the hurdles and archery events.

Platformers live and die on controls.  If a game wants you dead, like Omnipotent Cactus Disorder does, it’s typically because the controls are shit and it’s an over-compensation thing.  In Octogenarian Colon Disorder’s case, I don’t think the controls are shit.  Brian suggested the word “serviceable” to me, but that sounds a bit too generous.  I think I’ll go with “tolerable.”  That sounds unhating yet highly critical.  The controls are just so strange.  The jumping is simultaneously too floaty yet too stiff, like a cloud on Viagra.  You do get used to it, in the same way you would probably get used to hitting your thumb with a hammer if you kept it up long enough, though it would be preferable to not do that.

The developer assured me that people told them Ornery Cardinal Disorder had tight controls. Ha. Where did they get that from? A game of Scattergories? “Things that are tight that start with the letter ‘C’. And GO!” “Oh gee um, collar! Um, cage! Uh uh uh, controls!” BUZZ! “Yes, we challenge ‘control’ and also we can’t believe you guys didn’t come up with cu..”

Everything about Obsessive Collective Disorder does just enough to not suck but not enough to wow me.  The minimalist graphics are tiring and bland.  The level design freshens things up with new obstacles every ten stages, but some of the challenges are copied and pasted far more than needed.  If this makes it seem like I hated the game, I actually didn’t.  It’s short enough to not feel like you’re taking a vacation on death row.  The level design is fair, I guess.  Ultimately, it never feels like you’re trying to shout at the tide to turn back.  It’s a punisher that feels doable.  Assuming you don’t play on Hardcore mode which gives you a limited amount of lives.  Some whack jobs might give that a chance.  Me?  Ha ha ha, no.  Still, I recommend Obsessive Collective Disorder.  Not a ringing endorsement or anything.  I guess it’s like saying “if you want to forfeit your dignity to just one Xbox Live Indie Game this week, make it this one!”

Obsessive Collecting Disorder was developed by Super Smith Bros.

80 Microsoft Points washed their hands seven times, flicked the light switch on an off seven times, then washed their hands seven more times in the making of this review.

Obsessive Collective Disorder is ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Click here to see where it landed. 

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Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3

June 30, 2012 by 11 Comments

I never have been huge into Penny Arcade, or comic strips in general for that matter.  I did read it for years, but after a certain point it was done more out of habit.  I suppose it’s the same reason I always check what Garfield is up to every Sunday, even though I don’t think I’ve ever found a single joke in it to be funny.  I’m not sure anyone over the age of six ever has.  I heard a guy somewhere in the South once laughed at one of the endless “he’s a fat cat, get it?” gags, probably something involving lasagna, but that might be an urban legend.  At least Penny Arcade is topical to me, even if it’s really just observational humor with a couple generic stock characters conveying it.  It works, because we notice these things too.  And after going through their recent archives in preparation for this review, I learned that it’s still funny.  I mean come on, who could have watched E3 and not laugh at this?

Having said that, I really didn’t enjoy the first two Penny Arcade games.  And it had nothing to do with developer Hothead Games, who went on to do Deathspank and The Swarm, a couple of my favorite PSN titles.  I have a theory on this, and it goes like so: maybe these characters don’t actually lend themselves well to being in a video game.  Penny Arcade belongs outside the confines of the industry, looking into it and saying “you ever notice how fucked up all this is?”  When you place these characters in a position to drive a complex narrative, it seems like the entire point of their existence has been missed.

The Mario Party series has gotten weird.

I pretty much feel the same way about the latest Penny Arcade game.  Even with a new developer, the insanely talented guys at Zeboyd Games, something about it just doesn’t work.  One of the biggest problems is how married this sequel is to the original two games, the second of which didn’t exactly set the sales charts on fire.  It seemed weird to me that they would do another sequel.  I figured the people had spoken with their wallets and there wasn’t a lot of interest in continuing this particular story any further.  Granted, you don’t need to have played the previous two games to play this.  In fact, they advertise that fact in the game’s blurb on the marketplace.  Again, if we’re going to do that, maybe they should have just started all over with a fresh storyline and new characters.

I actually thought the storyline for On the Oil-Slick Recipe of Blackness Electric Bologna 3 was as dull as a butter knife at times, while downright fucking surreal at others.  The dialog can be sharp and at times very funny, but most of the time I was just like “please stop talking so I can fight something.”  The jokes are hit and miss (emphasis on miss), with the funniest bits not coming until you’re about 75% done with the game.  The best laughs I got were typically from the enemy names, although some of them were pretty damn good.

Ha, Optimus Mime. Classic.

The actual plot of Tycho being some kind of janitor to the universe was confusing and clumsily handled, and I would be hard-pressed to think of a way the ending (the real one, not the bullshit one) could have let me down more.  Maybe if it had advocated the benefits of eating baby seal meat while getting puppies drunk on helium.  I’m still not sure that would be as disturbing as the tone the game took at the end.  It would be like ending a wacky situational comedy by having the lead character suffer a nervous breakdown after watching someone smother a chicken to death.  Only it wasn’t a chicken.  IT WAS A BABY!

(Brian, who actually has watched M*A*S*H*, just told me that the show was supposed to be half-serious, half-comedy.  Yea, fuck that.  It had a laugh track.  It was a comedy.)

I’m not just hating for the sake of hating here, by the way.  If all the stuff you read in the previous 672 words sounded bad, let me reassure you that On the Slick-Dick of District 9 is one seriously amazing RPG.  You can tell Zeboyd spent many of their formative years growing up playing the classics of the genre (which typically included at least one of the following three words: Fantasy, Chrono, or Mana), but knew what could make them better.  So when they were all grown-up, mentally warped, and insane enough to give game production a try themselves, they actually fixed what was wrong with RPGs.  As opposed to most RPG developers who include every antiquated, conventional mechanic, just because that’s how an RPG is supposed to be.  Gone from this game are random encounters, items to juggle, and boring fights that you could win by training a woodpecker to beat on the A button while you go outside for a smoke.

In their place is a simple-yet-deep system involving “pins” that change your character class on the fly.  Each of the four main characters has one default class, but you can equip up to two others, each of which levels up independently as you play the game.  I loved this set-up and was still mixing-and-matching the different pins right up until the last boss.  It never got old, and that is so rare in a role-playing game.  Whenever things threatened to get repetitive, the game will toss out special conditions to change things up, if only for just a fight.  It’s nice that a developer finally recognized the potential for their game to stagnate and put fail safes in to prevent that.

Every mechanic of this game just works.  The combat is fast paced, varied, smart, but complex enough that you have freedom to experiment.  It’s a rare turn-based RPG that feels like more than scrolling through menus.  You truly feel like you are in charge.  Sure, a few stereotypes rear their ugly heads.  The accessory system is more or less the same shit every RPG has, but at least it complements the fighting system well.  Thankfully, you don’t have to stockpile items.  Every item used is replenished between fights, and there’s only six types anyway.  It sure beats dealing with a U-Haul full of potions, mid-potions, high-potions, elixirs, herbs, tents, and bombs.  Instead, you pay to upgrade each item in a shop, or buy the ability to use it more times in every battle.  Having dealt with decades of what RPGs have taught us, that you’re allowed to carry enough health potions that you could practically replace your own blood with the shit, I liked this system.  It kept things clean.

Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 is not perfect.  The dialog can just drone on and on.  When the dialog works, it’s entertaining.  When it doesn’t, that’s usually when it just won’t fucking shut up.  But, as a game?  It’s incredible.  Again, I think most of the problems with it can be tied to the source material.  Penny Arcade is funny.  Penny Arcade as a semi-comedic, semi-dramatic video game is not.  These are characters that make jokes about iPads and E3.  I don’t want to see them dealing with doomsday scenarios and deep introspective soul-searching.  I want to see them taking the piss out of the gaming industry.  Rain-Slick 3 doesn’t do that.  I figure there’s two ways to go around it.  One is to do a straight gaming parody, like Airplane! did for disaster movies.  The other idea is a bit more radical: leave the Penny Arcade characters out of it.  Make Penny Arcade the gaming brand for parody, like National Lampoon or Monty Python do for film.  Oh don’t worry Mike & Jerry.  You guys can still have the ego-inflation you need by inserting yourself into the games, but as cameos.  Hey, some people go very far doing that!  You know that old dude with the sunglasses and the mustache that’s in every single Marvel Comics movie?  Stan something.  Yea, him.  Get this: it turns out THAT GUY actually wrote the original comics those films are based on.  I know, right?  Crazy shit!

Maybe I accidentally didn’t play the right game. Instead, I played a game called “3” that was about the guy from Metal Slug hunting Adam Lambert.

Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-oh fuck it.

Penny Arcade 3 was developed by Zeboyd Games

400 Microsoft Points thank everyone for an incredible first year.  I love you guys.

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