You’ll probably get 80 Microsoft Points worth of entertainment out of MiG Madness. It’s a solid wave-shooter in the styling of Time Pilot that features four player co-op. No storyline or bullshit cut scenes. It’s just you, your buddies, some power-ups, and some bad guys. There’s not a lot of meat on the bone, but what it here is fairly palatable, making MiG a solid waste of an hour. I almost have nothing to complain about.
Almost.
MiG’s graphics are not spectacular or anything, but it does have decent character models and pretty looking clouds. I would probably have liked these things more, but it quickly became obvious that MiG could serve as a poster child for developers allowing ascetics to get in the way of gameplay. MiG suffers from all kinds of visibility issues. You often can’t see your bullets, but more importantly, you often can’t see those of the enemies either. In a game that is all about shooting things and dodging bullets, that is pretty significant problem. The bullets just blend it too much with the background, and sometimes the planes do too, depending on what color the backdrop is. The game constantly switches between day and night, dusk and dawn, meaning that no matter what color ship you choose, keeping an eye on it can be troublesome. I had the best luck with yellow, even if it made me feel like I was flying a giant Twinkie.
I’ve played other games here where the graphics got in the way of gameplay. I do get it. Better graphics equals more commercial appeal. However, I don’t think anyone is going to look at a game that looks like this:
And say that they’re sold on it based on how gosh darn swell the clouds look. A person is either going to want a quirk-and-dirty wave shooter themed on vintage military planes or they won’t. MiG is not a bad game by any means. It’s fun in single player or co-op, has a nice variety of weapons (even if some of the missile-based stuff is too slow to be useful), and controls pretty decently. It’s the type of game that you can spend a buck on, play for an hour, feel satisfied, and never go back to it again. If it wasn’t for the graphics getting in the way, I wouldn’t have to include “but..” with all of that. Sadly I do. It’s a big but, I cannot lie. You developers have got to try. When a title shows up with a pretty face but busted gameplay all over the place, it is dung.
I’m sure there are games out there similar to Pendulous, where the idea is to swing from pendulum to pendulum trying to reach a goal in the shortest time possible. I already had someone tell me that it’s not all that different from Jungle Hunt, a game I never played. Jungle Hunt was a product of the Golden Age of Arcades, circa 1982. I’m a product of unprotected sex, circa 1988. However, as it turns out, Jungle Hunt is included in Tatio Legends for the original Xbox, which I actually own. So I fired it up and discovered that the person was totally wrong. Well, that was a waste of an opening paragraph.
The idea is you swing from spot to spot as a little cog thing, latching onto the nearest swing-point automatically. Using the left and right triggers (or the stick if you’re an idiot, more on that later), you build up momentum to launch yourself to the next spot. As you progress through the meager fourteen stages, various traps and obstacles pop up, including one annoying section featuring a red gunky sludge stuff that seemed to bubble up at random and was the only bit of true frustration in the game. Well, that and the fact that the developers made a liar out of me.
Dear Datura loving twats: that shit was NOT art. Now THIS is art.
When I reviewed Cuddle Bear, I noted that I would immediately discontinue playing any game at the first instance of a leap-of-faith moment. So naturally Pendulous was full of those types of moments. Only I didn’t quit the game. I kept going. And thus I’m a big liar. At least my excuse is good one: Pendulous is a really well done game. The problem is, there was no need to map the swinging mechanics to both the sticks and the trigger buttons. The triggers work just fine, so the stick should have been used to move the camera. There’s just too many spots where you can’t see the next object you’re swinging to. Or traps that move up and down are off-screen, so you can’t possibly calculate when the appropriate time to jump is. This was probably related to the porting of this game over from Windows Phone, which the developer noted to me had been the cause of a few issues.
This is where being The Chick is tough, because I have to say something that is probably devastating for a developer to hear: this game was so good that it had a spot on the leaderboard all locked up. I really loved it. This is exactly the kind of original, quirky type of game I expected to find in the XBLIG channel when I started this site, and it’s worth your money right now. The length of the game didn’t bother me at all. Fourteen quickie stages that are sublime (plus another 14 mirrored ones, snore) is preferable to a four-hour game that struggles to tread water. But that damn camera issue was like the iceberg to Pendulous’ Titanic. Its chances were sunk. All is not lost. They already planned to add more levels, and Do Better Games are aware of my concerns, because I sent them a singing telegram. Only I misread the job description. It was actually a singeing telegram, who knocked on their door and proceeded to set himself on fire.
Well, they got the message. The game needs a camera, and then they need to issue what could be the most important Second Chance with the Chick challenge in the history of this site. They would probably get to it sooner, but because of my screw-up, they first have to clean up a hell of a mess on their porch.
I don’t like to play iPhone or even iPad games with flimsy, fake control schemes. I just can’t get the hang of virtual controls. So I missed out on the Super Crate Box craze. Well, if you can call it that. Compared to other popular games like Draw Something, Cut the Rope, or Angry Birds, Super Crate Box is more like a mild rage than a craze. I hadn’t given the game a second thought until Brian and I did Indies in Due Time a few weeks ago, where we previewed yet another fucking zombie game, Insane Zombie Carnage. Several of my readers immediately recognized it as a Super Crate Box clone. I didn’t, because I never played it. So I went into Crazy Undead Bloodbath without any prejudice. Except against people of all races and religions, but that’s unrelated to the game.
So the idea behind Super Zombie Box is zombies rain down and you have to shoot them while collecting crates. Wooden crates contain weapons of varying usefulness while question mark crates alter the flow of the game. Body count is irrelevant, and so are the question mark boxes. The object of the game is to get as many of the wooden boxes as you can before dying. You start with one stage and unlock alternative modes and levels based on how big a streak you can get.
So what did I think? I played it for an hour and I would rather be dead than ever play it again. What a boring concept. Don’t get me wrong, if suicide was not an option, I would choose Insane Zombie Carnage over Super Crate Box, simply based on my hatred of iOS virtual controls. Loony Brain-Muncher Brouhaha actually controls fairly decently, which shocked the fucking hell out of me. Clones tend to skimp on such features as playability in favor of cha-chinging and rolling in the dough. I do think it’s a touch on the sensitive side, and the collision detection seems a bit off as well. I cut a few zombie encounters close but know I missed them and I still died. If I had actually gave a shit about the game, I would have been pissed off about that. But, by that point, I couldn’t have given two shits less about it. Perhaps this was because of crates that spawn right under where the zombies drop in at, making them almost impossible to fetch.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Preposterous Poltergeist Pandemonium, but I’m sure there are some Super Crate Box fans out there who are happy to be able to play this on a console. Even if it’s not even close to the same game. It doesn’t have the same graphics style. It doesn’t have that “world-wide community” feel that Super Crate Box has. It doesn’t have the word “super” in it. It seems more like it exists to rub in the fact that this is as close as you can get if you’re among the handful of losers out there that still haven’t been assimilated by the Apple Collective. But again, I really liked this more than Super Crate Box. Which is like saying I would prefer to have my head blown of with a bazooka than be slowly disembowed using a rusty, urine-soaked samurai sword.
EDIT: Super Crate Box apparently got its start as a PC game. Um. Yea. Move along. Please. Pretty please. With cherries on top?
Nope. The name doesn’t work. It doesn’t sound like a video game. It sounds like a breakfast cereal, and a bland one at that. The type that you would need to add copious amounts of sugar to just to choke down. When you can name your game anything that your imagination can come up with and Brand is the best you can do, what does that say about the developer? It’s not one of those catchy one-word names that you can get away with, like Halo or Infamous. Brand. Seriously, the name of the game is Brand. What were they thinking?
“Brand thought Braid” says Brian. Excuse me while I untie my tongue.
Brand is a hack-and-slash platformer where you try to upgrade your starting sword to make it “fit for a king.” Once you’ve done this fifteen times (or sixteen, whatever) you move on to a final battle. There are nine ways to upgrade the sword, and you can do each upgrade up to five times. To get an upgrade, you select what one you’re going for, and then you’re sent off on a fetch-quest in one of three locations. Once you’ve met the terms of the quest, you open up an exit portal and wait five seconds, then return to the shop and activate it.
It sounds like a solid idea, and if it worked it would have been fun. But it doesn’t work. I put eight hours into Brand yesterday and I can honestly say it’s one of the worst games I’ve played on Xbox Live Indie Games. Wholly and entirely without any redeeming value whatsoever.
Let’s start with the first thing people talk about with Brand: the graphics. They seem really good. Certainly a couple notches above what people expect from an XBLIG. But really, what do those good graphics get you? In Brand, there’s only four enemy types. Those four creatures are the same in every one of the three levels. Nine Dots Studio didn’t even bother re-skinning the enemies to match the theme of each stage. Variety is achieved through palette-swapping, with the stronger enemies usually signified by darker colors, resulting in the characters lacking distinguishing features. The spitting frog-monster thingies are particularly pitiful in design. It looks like someone just vomited out a puddle of sprites on a screen and said “good enough!” If it seems petty of me to call out one creature type, I’ll remind you that creature represents 25% of the monsters you fight. Great graphics? Not when the character design is that bad.
Oooh, pretty! I can't make out anything, but damn!
Ironically, it’s the backgrounds that stand out the most. They’re rendered beautifully and would work at setting the mood for the title. They would, if they didn’t come with a tradeoff in performance. The game has major issues with lag. Especially the Castle, which scrolls very jerkily, like a first-generation Playstation 1 game. These also are probably the contributing factor in the brutal load times throughout the game. I actually used a stopwatch to time them. It takes 52.2 seconds for the Mine stage to load. If you die in the level and want to restart, the total time it will take is a 1 minute, 16 seconds. For a 2D side-scrolling indie game. The other two levels are worse, both taking over a minute to load, and about a minute and-a-half to reload if you die. It’s not unlikely you’ll spend over an hour waiting for stuff to load up, in a game that should only take a couple of hours to beat. It’s outrageous.
Once you’re actually playing the game, things go downhill quickly. Combat is relatively simple: X is weak attack, Y is strong attack, B you’ll never ever ever ever ever ever use (it’s a useless dash attack) and A jumps. Allegedly there are combos, but you’re not told what they are and I couldn’t figure out how to activate any. The one or two times I thought I had done one, they didn’t really do any damage so I didn’t bother experimenting further.
Not doing any damage to baddies was a recurring theme throughout Brand. Of the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades you have to do, I “refined” my sword four times and strengthened it three times. I also gave it the ability to poison, I made it so a magical light sword thingie would poke out my back allowing me to fight creatures behind me, and I added a fire wave to it and upgraded that a couple of times. The end result? The starter enemies might die in one hit, but everything else remained damage sponges. Mind you, the entire game is about upgrading your offense. There’s no defensive upgrades at all. Yet, even once I had done the fifteen (or sixteen, whatever) upgrades and was dumped into the final stage, I felt like I had made no progress. My dude was still a total pussy and my sword couldn’t cut butter.
Part of it seems to be a result of the game just ignoring your actions. Direct combat seems to work best, in that about half of your attacks will result in damage. On the other hand, the upgraded effects do not want to work at all and will fight you every step of the way. As I noted, I got the fire sword thingie and then upgraded it once. I then watched as I would send a colossal wave of fire at an enemy and have it pass right through him, doing no damage at all. I know it didn’t because the enemy didn’t do it’s damage-indication flash. I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but actually it got so bad that I started keeping count of how many attacks a single enemy could fail to take. Around three seemed about average. Ten wasn’t all that rare. The most was this one mid-level wasp that was all alone in a normal room with no walls, barriers, or anything else in the way. I was swinging the sword close enough that in theory the sword itself would do damage, but if that failed the fire would get it as the wasp was dead center in the wave. Total swings before it registered damage for the first time? Twenty-fucking-two times.
In order: useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, and useless.
Again, there’s no defensive upgrades in the game. Well, there is one. It makes it so you damage a creature you block. Sounds great! Sure, the block doesn’t even work on anything past entry-level enemies, but at least you’ll be dealing them damage back! Yea, about that. If you get this upgrade and use it too much, it kills you. No really, you die from it. And once you have it, you can’t turn it off. Thus, you’ll be unable to defend yourself throughout levels for the rest of the game. Given the fact that harder enemies attack faster, cause more damage, and gang up on you, you’re already screwed without the block “upgrade.” With it, you might as well take your sword and commit Seppuku. Although if you could actually do that, it would probably take the game five or six tries before registering it. You can’t increase your lifebar, armor, speed, or jumping ability. I guess Brand wanted to prove that a good defense is a strong offense. It’s too bad a strong offense is not an option.
Once you’ve made the last upgrades to your character, you enter the final stage. Hopefully your sword will be strong enough -snicker- because you’re entering the arena. You know those stages in Zelda games where you fall down a hole and then you have to fight every single enemy in the game? Yea, that’s what this is. You fight a wave of ten or so guys off, all attacking your literally defenseless ass all at once. If you kill them, a door unlocks, you fall down a hole, and you repeat the process. There’s no situational health refills. It seems like one random enemy in each stage will restore a sliver of your bar, so naturally it was always the first enemy I killed each time. Hell, I can’t say with 100% certainty that there is a random enemy giving away a teeny tiny scrap of health each floor. I cleared whole rooms out and was always left with a micro-fraction of health left. I tried beating this for an hour yesterday and another thirty minutes today, never actually making it past the fourth wave. Perhaps I didn’t upgrade my sword correctly.
Yes, Brand has avatar support. No, I have no fucking clue why this was added instead of fixing the game.
Apparently there is some kind of boss monster at the end of it. I never found out for myself. The thing is, I’m guessing that the giant scorpion-dog thingies that were scattered throughout the normal stages are in the Arena and I just hadn’t reached them yet. If they are, I want to go on the record of saying the game is probably impossible. I encountered several of those fucking things throughout the game and I only managed to kill one. They have four attacks, three of which are maybe-unblockable quick strikes that drain your health faster than smoking the exhaust pipe of a bus. If you manage to get close enough to start swinging, they take dozens of shots before they die. The mere threat of them was enough to make me realize playing the arena wasn’t worth it, because unless the game ends with you shoving the sword through the throat of the king, then deleting Brand from your hard drive and replacing it with a better game, it’s just not worth the effort.
I could go on about the play control (meh) or the jumping (bleech) or the fact that the price of Brand is going to be raised to 240MSP in 90 days (a proclamation so fucking arrogant the developer ought to be flogged just for thinking about it) but I think I’ve said enough. If anything I’ve said about this game sounds like something you want to play, have at it, you fucking weirdo. I’ll close by going back to the graphics, because once again the usual gang of idiots are saying “it’s worth it just for the graphics!” Quite frankly, I don’t think the graphics are that good. But let’s say they were. I think saying gameplay doesn’t matter if the art is good is kind of a hypocritical stance from a community that complains about everything done by guys like Silver Dollar who phone-in nearly every title they release. How come it’s not okay for them to release busted, broken games with limited play mechanics, but a game like Brand can be nearly unplayable and still get you XBLIGers to stock up on tissues and baby lotion? I don’t get it. It would be like only being able to enter the Louvre if the curator gets to cockslap you across the face while the janitor shoves his mop up your ass.
Update: Magic Racing GP 2 is now 80 Microsoft Points.
Well, this was quite stupid of me. Three racing games recently hit Xbox Live Indie Games, so I said “Hey, I’ll do a racing theme week! Sure, I don’t normally play racing games, or at least ones that don’t involve throwing turtle shells at other drivers, but that’s the point of my site!” It seemed like a good idea, especially after I had such an easy time doing a review for Ocean Drive Challenge. The next game on the list was Magic Racing GP 2, which looked like little more than a glorified Super Sprint clone. How hard could it possibly be to write about?
Having spent the last hour cowering in the fetal position, mumbling to myself “I don’t understand this at all” I guess the answer is pretty fucking hard.
Magic Racing GP 2 does have gameplay similar to Super Sprint or Super Off Road, but that’s where any resemblance ends. The developers were aiming for a more authentic simulation feel, and their dedication to this is admirable. First things first, if you’re not a Formula One fan, you might as well stop reading this right now. I feel like a party crasher because I’m clearly not someone who should be playing this particular type of game. It would be like asking a Hindu for proper ways to cook a steak.
Focusing on gameplay, I found MRGP2 to control pretty much just like the arcade ports of Super Sprint or Super Off Road that I played on the Midway Treasures series. The thing is, I could never handle those games, and I couldn’t handle Magic Racing GP 2 either. At least at first. Even after putting thirty minutes into it, I was still crashing into barriers, cutting corners, and getting a speed penalty for driving too fast through the pit. I did have a breakthrough after about an hour of gameplay and could, more or less, keep my car on the track. At least when doing practice laps. In the game’s season mode, where you have to deal with other cars and weather conditions, the control constantly locked up on me, not in a glitchy way, but as if I had actually stalled the car. This is probably because I have no fucking clue what different types of tires do, or how to “use the weather” or various other idiosyncrasies that Formula One fans would know.
Magic Racing GP 2 is a F1 fan service that aims for the type of crowd that insists they would rather play Tecmo Bowl over the latest Madden entry. Gameplay is old school, yet the amount of modes is impressive and the level of customization offered is pretty intimidating. There are dozens of drivers to choose from, all based on real F1 stars. There is an option to edit their name, so Sebastian Vettel doesn’t have to be stuck with the more wanky moniker of “Sebastiano Vartel.” Every other aspect of F1 is present here as well, from well-known venues to the scoring system to the team system. Sure, you’ll want to change “Renalot” and “Mercides” to their proper names. Or you can do what I did and give them more catchy ones, like “Hippo Riders” and “Skid Marks.” There’s also 16-player online play, but I would guess that you’re more likely to see a Yeti figure skating with Jimmy Hoffa before you actually manage to get a full lineup of players together for it.
I can’t really tell you whether or not Magic Racing GP 2 is a good game. The best I can do is make the following observations. First, it’s not newbie friendly. The game assumes you know the ins and outs of Formula One, because there is little in the way of help or instructions for you. Second, the amount of ambition on display here is highly commendable. The fake versions of real drivers, real teams, and real tracks easily impressed my Formula One loving boyfriend, so it hits the right cord with the type of crowd it’s aiming for. Third, the game is playable, probably more so if you’re familiar and skilled at the classic racing titles that it builds off of. So if you’re into this sort of stuff, Magic Racing GP 2 is the game for you. If you’re not, for God’s sake do not buy this game. I have never been into car racing and I can’t see myself ever getting into it. Besides, if I want to watch cars driving really fast, all I have to do is hop over to Oakland and pull up a lawn chair to watch Formula 510, featuring the biggest stars in drug dealing hauling ass in their blinged out Cadillacs while the boys in blue give chase. Sponsored by Krispy Kreme.
MiG Madness was developed by Bionic Shark Studios
Indie Gamer Chick 
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