Sigh. A few months ago, the much lambasted Silver Dollar Games released their long-awaited, DREAM-BUILD-PLAY winning title One Finger Death Punch onto the market. Despite being well received by pretty much everyone who played it, it bombed hugely. And now Silver Dollar is back to throwing out hastily produced mini-games in short order. This is depressing. It would be like if Ron Jeremy quit adult films to star in a Martin Scorsese crime epic, winning the critical acclaim and the respect of his peers while sweeping the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, but the film bombed so it’s back to having bimbos suck him off to make his gas payment. That’s what this feels like.
I’ve always said that talent is something that can’t be taught. It’s something you inherently have. You can improve upon it. You can nurture it. But you can’t create it from nothing. I assure you all, a team that had no talent could not have come up with One Finger Death Punch. Some people get lucky, but nobody could get that lucky. Silver Dollar probably wishes they did have that kind of luck. They’re heartbroken by OFDP’s performance. I am too, and I barely got to play the game. Everyone has their theories on why, with themost common explanation being karmic justice. Look, I get that Silver Dollar is not the most beloved developer, but regardless of your feelings for them, OFDP under-performing is nobody’s victory, and shame of you if you feel that way.
My theory is still that the box art looked too generic, like a bad Last Airbender rip-off. Allow me to elaborate. Look at it.
It’s really good-looking. Very professional. A cut above your typical XBLIG release in terms of quality. But, still kind of generic. It looks like any other game. And the art isn’t really representative of the quirky gameplay involving stick-figures pummeling each-other to death. You would never guess that beautiful box art is connected to this game.
See what I mean?
More over, the box art doesn’t stick out. Here’s a screenshot of One Finger Death Punch sitting alongside other games released around the same time.
It blends in. Gets easily lost in the shuffle. The box art is good, but it doesn’t do that perfect siren song that lures potential buyers in, even to get a quick sneak peek. Really, it looks like it could be just any other game. Now compare it to Learn to Eat, SD’s first post-OFDP rush-job that immediately was a bigger hit despite taking about 1% of the effort OFDP did to create.
Say what you will about it being lazy or rushed out, but you can’t say it blends in. It sticks out. People would want to see what that game is. It’s unfortunate that Silver Dollar wasn’t able to carry that over to their big, award-winning, mega-hyped title. I truly in my heart of hearts believe that is what cost it sales.
And now, SD is having a sulk and releasing unplayable shit back into the marketplace. Again, depressing is the word that springs to mind. I bought two of them. First up was Cooties: Patient Zero. It’s a text-based adventure featuring still images instead of static anime screens like a typical game in this genre does on XBLIG. Here, you’re a loser with touching issues. Your billionaire father gives you an ultimatum: get laid or get cut off from your inheritance. Wait, didn’t Chris O’Donnell already make a movie about this?
Look, at the risk of getting quoted (again) in SD’s satirical “Awards” tab they include in games that contains all the hatred and anger they’ve generated from the community, this game really sucks. And I’m not just saying that because it’s an SD game. There are dozens of games exactly like this on XBLIG by a variety of developers, and all of them have the same problems. Firstly, when presented with a multiple choice question for which path you’re taking, it’s impossible to determine which answer is the bad one that will get you killed and which one is the good answer that moves the story along. In Cooties, three wrong guesses leads to you “getting Cooties” and starting over. And, by wrong guess, I mean the girl you’re courting physically touches you on the hand. No, really.
The concept is the guy you’re playing as can’t stand any female contact. The voice actor playing him seemed miscast. The dude had a deeper voice, sort of like a bad Solid Snake knock-off, instead of a shrill, squeaky, geeky voice that would have been a better fit. But when you rush games out the door like you have a 30 minute delivery or-your-money-back guarantee, I guess casting isn’t something you give a lot of thought to.
So at one point in the game, you end up in a restaurant. The girl requests that you hand her a menu. If you do so, you take a hit point because the girl touches you. Later, she asks to have the salt passed to her. Doing this does NOT result in a hit point. Okay, how the fuck does passing a menu (which is typically a large piece of laminated paper) result in any physical contact, but passing a salt shaker, which is, you know, the size a fucking salt shaker, not result in some skin-on-skin contact? And that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s so random and so illogical that nobody can possibly guess what the correct answer is supposed to be. All these games have this problem. I’ve played over ten on XBLIG and not one was exempt.
Cooties: Patient Zero was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said “checkpoints alone might have led to the game getting a very mild recommendation in the making of this review)
This leads to a bigger problem: no check points. When you die, you have to start over again. Only the opening scenes seem to be skippable. Once you’re past those, you have to sit through the same dialog again and again until you get things right. There’s no on-screen text here. All the dialog in Cooties is done via voice acting from two performers that sound so bored that you can practically hear them doze off a few times. The only thing that ever breaks up the dialog is the occasional quick-time button mashing event. Ultimately, Cooties is just plain boring, and there is no bigger sin a game can commit. Yea, it’s also dumb, but endearingly so. I wanted to see how the story played out, but not so much that I would sit through endless replays of the same dialog until I hit the exact logic-string the developers used. Beyond that, Cooties is confusing as to what you’re trying to accomplish. The game encourages you to shack up with a girl, but discourages you from making any contact with them. It seems like a story that had no editing done before it was made. Given the breakneck speed SD has been putting games out, I’m guessing that is the case. They’re hardly alone in doing this, but unlike most developers that do, they’ve proven they know how to make really, really good games. That’s why people like me get frustrated with them.
Every time you heckle, the meter fills up a little bit. If you fill it up all the way, the dude has a nervous breakdown and the game is over. It’s so badly done.
So then I tried The Heckler, and it turned out to be even worse. The idea is, a dude is on stage reading poetry and you press A to heckle him. If you do so too much, you game over. And that’s really it. The poetry is hilariously pretentious and the concept of heckling someone vomiting it is solid, but there’s almost no play mechanics here. I kind of wish there had been. I was so mesmerized by the over-the-top dialog that I did a play-through without pushing anything, laughing my ass off at it. But the actual game of heckling but not heckling too much, is dull. What really sucks is that Silver Dollar provably knows how to make a game with minimalist gameplay be fun, exciting, and engaging. I certainly wouldn’t expect it from every game of theirs, but they’ve put out three games since September 11, none of which really serve to entertain. They’ve been accused of trolling the marketplace in the past, and stuff like this just fuels that. Why live down to that? And why deflect everything with “we’re just having fun” or “we have no experience”. Which, by the way, that’s tough to use when you’ve made nearly a hundred games and won prize money based on how much potential one had.
The Heckler was developed by Silver Dollar Games ($1 said the game really needed some kind of “throw rotten fruit” mechanic in the making of this review)
Silver Dollar has a reputation of not being open to criticism, and I’m fairly certain they hate my guts, but I do want to offer them this: I never say anything I don’t mean. If I say you have talent, I would hope that means something. I’ve reviewed over 400 games since 2011, and I’ve seen what games by people who truly have no talent look like. You guys don’t fall into that category. I know it must have been demoralizing to have a game you poured your heart and souls into not be well received on a commercial basis. But you have something many out there only wish they could have: talent. People aren’t pissed at you because you’re dumping out games in short order. If the games were fun, nobody would care. These games are boring, and that’s what bothers people. One Finger Death Punch wasn’t a very complex game. It featured minimalist play mechanics, and it was spectacular. You guys have an eye for that play style, and this was hardly the only game of yours that was well received. I’m not saying you should stress yourselves to death like you did with OFDP. You need to find a healthy balance between having fun and making decent games. Cooties and Heckler were boring. That’s what pisses people off. It feels like you’re not trying. Be honest with yourselves: you’re really not. With your amount of talent, the sky is the limit for you. OFDP didn’t bomb because you tried too hard. It was just shitty luck. Don’t let that spoil your talent. You don’t owe it to us. You owe it to yourselves. You can do better.
Though I admit, it does suck that OFDP bombed. Hell, you would have been better off spending your DREAM-BUILD-PLAY prize money on hiring Patrick Stewart to do the poetry for The Heckler. That.. that would have been fucking awesome.
Arcadecraft has been updated three times since I last played it back in February. Not only have a few bugs been squashed, but a lot of content has been added. The length of the game has been extended by a full in-game year, with new machines being released during the course of it. To give the game a more authentic arcade feel, different machine types have been added, including 2-player upright games, pinball machines, more cocktail tables, and more options to dress up your arcade. Gameplay mechanics have been cleaned up as well, including the problematic hooligan, who is now easier to deal with. The power doesn’t go out as much, and coin doors don’t jam as much. Because the busy-work has been significantly toned down, Arcadecraft feels less like one of those plate-spinning things carnies do and more like an actual, professional sim game.
My arcade was never this organized. Nowhere near as bad as my Sim Cities were, but still..
Which is not to say the game’s shelf-life is that much longer. When Arcadecraft is done, it’s done. There isn’t a whole lot more you can do once you’ve run out the clock. Replay value is lacking sorely. Unless the developers could come up with scenario-style missions and side-quests, Arcadecraft probably won’t be the type of game you go back to again and again. It also still gets off to too slow a start, though this can be negated if you have Firebase’s other game, Orbitron, or Bad Caterpillar by Kris Steele. If you do, you can unlock cabinets for those games in Arcadecraft. Games that you can bump up to 50 cents and push the difficulty to hard without them taking a hit. Arcadecraft was a bit too easy to begin with. I can’t believe I’m saying this, given that the Bad Caterpillar cabinet has what I think is a shout-out to me in it (or possibly Donna Bailey, but the narcissist in me thinks it’s me), but avoid those two cabinets if you’re looking for a challenge.
A game set in the 1980s has characters using the word “retro”. That somehow seems wrong.
Despite the lack of difficulty, I love Arcadecraft. Love it. It no longer feels like it’s in the Beta stage of development. Arcadecraft is now a fully realized, glorious game. It’s one of the ten best Xbox Live Indie Games ever made. By all rights, this should be the next big simulation mega-franchise. Unfortunately, Firebase has no plans to put Arcadecraft on PC. Well, I simply cannot accept that. So I propose that fans of this game line up in single file to set themselves on fire in protest of that. Their charred remains are on your head, Firebase. We’ll go in alphabetical order by surname. I’ve never been happier that my real name is Cathy Zykozawitz.
The Useful Dead is platform-puzzler where you must intentionally murder the current character you’re playing as in a way that allows the next character you get to finish the stage. Perhaps a distant, platformer cousin of Lemmings, or maybe Voodoo Vince. It’s a cool concept, but cool is as far as they get. I certainly didn’t hate Useful Dead. I like it enough to give it my seal of quality (spoiler alert). But it ultimately felt more like a really good proof of concept than a fully realized game.
The biggest problem was the puzzles. They were too damn easy. Besides the “kill yourself to use your corpse as a platform and/or crate” gimmick, the difficulty hook comes from only having ten extra-expendable creatures throughout the length of the game. In other words, if a level’s par is three creatures and you kill four before reaching the goal, you would only have nine expendable creatures left to beat the game. I actually finished the game with thirteen expendable creatures, having finished a couple of stages under par. Yea, that was in part by design, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I was finishing more than one stage in ways the developer didn’t have in mind. This was especially true of the last stage, which I beat after the game glitched and one of the critters clung to a platform for no reason.
This is the final stage of The Useful Dead. The dude in the yellow circle is NOT supposed to be able to stick to the wall like that. Ironically, this would have been the only stage where I would have been incorrect about the solution if he had fallen to the ground.
The puzzles lack in variety as well. Most involve impaling yourself on a spike, then maneuvering your corpse in a way that activates a button that opens the door. Sometimes you’ll have to do this in two or three different ways. Others might involve using wind to push corpses into switches, or jumping from high ledges in a way to die and land on a switch, or kicking corpses into switches. Again, this is where the whole “proof of concept” thing kept beating me over the head like I was a baby seal. There are multiple different animals, but none of them have unique abilities. Perhaps having levels use specific animals with unique traits, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or special maneuvers would have added to the complexity. As it stands, all the puzzles have self-evident solutions and it’s just a matter of how much time you want to put into breaking the game and coming in under par. XBLIG has been home to some of the most mind-bending puzzlers of this last console generation, such as Gateways, Spyleaks, and Pixel Blocked! By comparison, Useful Dead is mere child’s play. Easy to the point of being insulting. And I really hate saying that about any indie developer’s puzzles. I don’t know. It feels like I’m telling someone that their child has funny ears.
PETA’s favorite game.
If you think of The Useful Dead as a bare-bones prototype, possibly something you would see if you were pitching a publisher on a concept, it does soften the blow somewhat. I did like what I saw here, but not as much as I could have. Yea, my recommendation is as tepid as I’m capable of giving, but I still hope you try it. And I certainly don’t want to discourage the developer from working with this more. In fact, I would be really disappointed if The Useful Dead was a one-off experiment. Fuck that. There’s a great puzzler somewhere in here. Something with potential to short-circuit your grey matter, but absurd enough to be a big, word-of-mouth hit. The product we have here feels like something that barely made it off the drawing board. You know, Star Wars was originally about a search for a magical crystal. Sonic the Hedgehog was originally going to be a clown. Woody was originally an evil bastard trying to murder Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. In the case of The Useful Dead, it’s like we got the early draft instead of the finished product. So help me God, this better not be the end of this project. If it is, I’ll demonstrate how useful the dead really are when I re-purpose the developer’s corpse as a morbid coffee table.
Today’s game is called 一>◇. No seriously, that’s the name. 一>◇. It’s a name that search engines and headers will not put up with, so for the purposes of today’s review, I’ll be calling this game the Strange Japanese Game. Not that anyone would actually want to Google it or see it on YouTube. It kind of sucks. Which is a shame because the concept is original and quirky, but a horrible control scheme fails the vision.
Strange Japanese Game is a God Game where you play a giant green hand. There’s little sentient beans walking around, reminiscent of Pikmin. They even grow little spouts on their head. When they have a sprout, you can poke them into the ground. Then, you grab a handful of water from the lake that is the main focal point of the game’s challenge and dump it on the sprout. The sprout then grows into a tree. You can flick the tree with your finger to knock more Pikmin-like-things out of it, but ultimately you want to masturbate the tree (I’m not joking) to shape it into a spaceship. Once you’ve beaten your bush into the shape of a shuttle, you have to load it with the Pikmin-like-things. Doing this will make the ship blast off, scoring points. The object of the game is to score as many points as you can.
After beating your bush, the tree becomes a rocket that blasts off in a shaft of fire and two black balls of smoke. Sickening thought: someone, somewhere is getting horny thinking about this.
First off, props to the developers for taking the God genre and trying to make a quick actiony arcade game out of it. That took a creative spark and balls, and I appreciate that. Having said that: why on Green Skinned God’s blue Earth did they map every action to the X button? The Xbox controller has four face buttons (six if count the clickable analog sticks) and four shoulder buttons. Strange Japanese Game only uses ten percent of the total available buttons, but the actions performed are very different from one another and possibly consequential. For example, flicking. You have to move the hand and press X to flick. If you stop moving and press X, it becomes grab instead. Except there’s a problem: there’s a slight delay in the game recognizing that you’ve stopped moving, even if you release the stick. Thus, there were times when I let go up the stick and pressed X in an attempt to grab a not-a-Pikmin and instead flicked it into the water, killing it. This isn’t the fucking Atari 2600. Why couldn’t grab had been one of the different available buttons?
There’s also no way to separate the little not-a-Pikmins from each-other. When they bunch up, even an action as simple as planting one in the ground can likely result in killing ones next to it. This gets really frustrating when the creatures turn evil if you let them sit around too long (perhaps they ate something after midnight when I wasn’t looking) and start to attack the good ones. If you let THOSE linger too long, they become tentacles (it’s Japanese, OF COURSE they become tentacles). In order to prevent that, you need to flick the critters into the water. Of course, that typically will result in killing a bunch of innocents. Really, imprecision is Strange Japanese Game’s biggest sin. If you grab a handful of not-a-Pikmins to drop them in the spaceship, it’s hard to line it up in such a way where all of them fall into the ship. Any that don’t die upon hitting the ground, even though they fall the same distance and land safely when you knock them out of the trees you grow.
There’s a really cool and quirky concept at play here. Again, an arcadey God game? Madness! But the slow pace, awful play control, and imprecision of the action kills all potential it had. I truly do feel that the groundwork for something fun and addictive has been laid with this strange Japanese game. With fine-tuning to the controls and something added to the gameplay that would speed up the pace, I think this could be a sleeper hit. Maybe. I should probably note that all the gameplay mechanics above are left up to the player to figure out on their own. There are no instructions in the game, and no on-screen indicators of what to do or how to do it. The only instructions are found on the game’s marketplace page, and in Japanese. I’m a fan of quirk, but being quirky doesn’t have to mean leaving a player to figure out stuff on their own. Then again, this is a game that involves jerking off trees. I imagine writing instructions for such things is a crime in many countries.
$1 was warned by their father that if they kept doing that, their hand would turn green in the making of this review.
Seriously: horrible name for a game. Horrible. If the game had been good, the name would have doomed it. It’s a game whose title cannot be spread by word of mouth. Sigh.
UPDATE: Magicians & Looters received a Second Chance with the Chick. To say it improved the game is an understatement. I now consider this to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Click here for my updated thoughts.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Xbox Live Indie Games, where expectations are so low that there’s not sufficient clearance for microbes to hang themselves from it. Because of this, sometimes games that are just not that good end up getting elevated beyond their actual value. Take Magicians & Looters. Here’s a really ambitious first effort by a group of developers with not a whole lot of experience, and it’s not terrible. It also has, for my money, the best comedic writing ever seen on an XBLIG.
M&L is a Metroidvania. I fucking love those, but XBLIG hasn’t been the best source for them. LaserCat is my favorite. It was the original #1 game on the old, ten-games-only Leaderboard. But it’s a different breed of Metroidvania. There’s no combat in it, only avoidance. It’s also easier than boxing a newborn paraplegic orangutang . But that was pretty much the cream of the crop. Other attempts were nowhere near as successful. There was Astroman, a Metroid-inspired adventure that came very close to hitting the mark, but wasn’t quite there. Still, this is probably the genre that, if done right, I like the most.
To get the good out of the way first: Magicians & Looters isn’t broken or glitchy or likely to physically materialize like that spooky chick from The Ring and murder you after seven days. In fact, all the ingredients seem to be here, fully functional, and primed to present one of the best values a game could have. But, for me at least, it just never came together. By far the best aspect of Magicians & Looters is the writing. The story is a sort of spoof of Harry Potter. You play as three teenagers enrolled in a wizard’s school. It gets overrun by evildoers and you must band together and save the day. They’re also all, to put it politely, type-A personalities. They spew out non-stop sarcasm, have endless disdain for one-another, and almost seem to speak in the language of a sitcom. I always hate games like that. It’s one of the things that turned me off of musical RPG Sequence. Here? It works. Even better, the jokes don’t rely on referential humor. No callbacks to bad game dialog. No “remember that movie you’ve seen? We’ve seen it too, and we’ll demonstrate that by quoting it verbatim, but you should laugh because we’re going to do it in an unexpected way” type of stuff. Hell, they don’t even directly reference Harry Potter, and the game is a send-up of it. I mean, damn. Standing ovation right here.
The sharp writing is the ONLY thing that kept me playing, though. Mechanically speaking, I just found Magicians & Looters to be boring. Mostly because of the combat. I give them props for wanting to do something different. Here, touching enemies doesn’t inflict damage on you. Everything is handled by actual hand-to-hand fighting. You attack a few times, then hold block, wait for them to miss, and then continue on. That sounds great, but there’s a reason why 2D games typically don’t do that: because it’s slow and it makes combat a plodding chore. Of course, there’s no real reason to fight enemies. The leveling-up system is handled entirely by finding hidden trinkets, which was another dumb idea. For almost any game, combat will stagnate after X amount of hours. The grind of leveling up could very well be the only thing that keeps your average player from just running past enemies. In M&L, they do drop money that you can use to buy better weapons, but progress on that is too slow as well.
The main hook is switching between three characters, each with their own unique abilities. Unfortunately, this also is bungled, because two of the characters (the guy and one of the girls) are too slow. For a game that already has severe pacing issues, this one really got to me. Most of the time, I wanted to be playing as the near-naked chick, who was faster in movement and could jump significantly higher than the other two. But she was especially crappy at combat. So, you have to switch between the three to open up the map, but playing as the other chick, who was so slow that I was wondering if she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, was torturous. Also, in order to switch characters, you need to go back to a save-station. They’re liberally scattered throughout the world, but the needless backtracking when a Castlevania III like on-the-fly switcheroo would have been so much more preferable and obvious just adds to the dullness factor.
Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn’t make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night’s combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.
My dislike for M&L has nothing to do with the hype I got from my buddies. If anything, I spent more time with it than I would done with any other game because I was trying to find the game they both loved so much. If you hear something unequivocally called better than one of the best games ever made, it catches your attention. I also wasn’t looking for reasons why it’s not. That’s what lifeless fanboys do. No, I wanted to see what they saw. I looked hard for it. Instead, I found dull combat, bland level layouts, and just an overall slowness that I couldn’t get into. I tip my hat to the guys at Morgopolis Studios. I typically discourage first efforts from being this ambitious. Ambition wasn’t what went wrong with Magicians & Looters. Truth be told, it’s a well designed game. Results will not be typical, I guess, considering that my colleagues are shaking their fist in anger that it’s a digital-download game and not on disc, meaning there is no hole for (remaining review censored by Brian for the sake of Cathy’s parents. I don’t want them to know I taught her what THAT is)
I don’t mind racing video games, but I’m bored silly by any real form of automotive racing. So naturally, I ended up with a boyfriend that’s a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth Formula One fan. Magic Racing GP 2 was made for him, not me. It was a game with old-school top-down gameplay, and that’s fine. Where the game made itself inaccessible to me was in the insane attention to detail of the nuances of racing. You had to calculate and adjust for every thing, right down to the types of wheels used. Yea, not for me. Then again, Brian and his F1-loving friends liked the concept more than the execution. The controls were pretty rough for GP 2. If they had been smoother, I think Brian and Bryce would still be playing it to this day. Hell, I think a lot of people would have. It had such raving devotion to the simulation aspect of F1 that I think people might have used it as an honest-to-God league, in the same way people set up Madden leagues or even Tecmo Bowl.
This is one of those games that looks better in screens than it does in motion.
Magic Racing Rally is a much more simple game. There’s still a wide variety of race classes and cars (based on real cars but with thinly veiled name changes) with different attributes, but it’s nowhere near as terrifying for non-fans of the sport. Also, the controls seem more manageable. But, I was still quite bored by it. Mechanically, it’s just too basic. From a graphical point of view, it reminds me of one of those preschool race car toys with the magnets. Just a static screen with the cars and the skid marks they leave behind being the only moving parts. It’s quite low tech and not very stimulating, even though the courses are well designed. Hell, some of the courses are downright beautiful, but when you superimpose a little eight-bit car on them, it kind of looks silly.
The big draw of Magic Racing Rally is the sixteen-player online racing. Giggle snort chuckle ha. Look, kudos to them for thinking to include support for sixteen players, but you’re more likely to see Sasquatch rollerblading on UFOs before you find sixteen players at the same time. The best I could do was three players. Unfortunately, even with what felt like better controls, all of us kept crashing into the walls repeatedly. Only on the slowest class were we able to come somewhat close to staying on the road. Otherwise, it was like trying to trace a doodle in the middle of an earthquake. I’m sure with patience and practice, I probably could have gotten the hang of it, but I was not engaged enough to want to get good at it. I hate doing this, but I wasn’t Magic Racing Rally’s target audience. I think fans of rally racing might enjoy it, assuming that any of the dozens currently available titles from that genre no longer “do it” for them. The weird part is, the racing was never the best part about their original game. It was the simulation aspect. With that significantly toned down, I wonder who this was made for? I didn’t really like it, and actually Bryce didn’t like it either, and he’s into this kind of stuff. Oddly enough, as intimidated as I was about Magic Racing GP2, I think that was the better game. The marginally better controls don’t make up for the lack of customization. I do think the audience of devoted GP2 fans might enjoy this, but otherwise, this race is permanently stuck in a yellow flag.
A review copy of Magic Rally Racing was provided by Magic Studios to Indie Gamer Chick. The copy played by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test online play with her. That had minimal feedback in this review. For more on this policy, consult the FAQ.
Lots of XBLIGs look like they’ll be fun. Then you play them, and they make you actively question whether the concept of fun is something you’ve been hallucinating this whole time. That’s what The Last Fortune made me ponder. I took a peek at the screen shots of it and thought it looked kind of like Wonder Boy in Monster Land, a retro gem that I picked up for $1 on PSN that was just swell. Then I picked up Dragons Curse (which I guess is Wonder Boy 3, or possibly 4.. then again, I’m not sure which one Monster Land is either) on Wii’s Virtual Console and thought that was even better, until I hit a brick wall about halfway through and gave up in shame. Still, fun series It’s about time someone tried to make a tribute for them on XBLIG. It’s just too bad this one turned out a bit warped.
It really does have a bit of a Sega Master System look to it. There was no problem with the graphics, besides item pick-ups being too small and samey.
The game starts with a village full of peaceable folks getting ransacked by evil doers that burn it to the ground. Choosing to play as either a boy or a girl from the village, you seek out revenge. Because the language of the option menu suggested that The Last Fortune might be, ahem, difficult, I decided to forgo the medium setting (my typical starting point for most reviews here) and play on casual. But even on sissy mode, I still had a tough time with Last Fortune, because the mechanics of the game kind of suck. Like the developers fundamentally had a good idea of what to do, but didn’t take the time to polish anything up. The controls have issues with unresponsiveness, which makes movement a chore, especially when you get to sections of the game with long jumps and an emphasis on platforming. I was practically praying that the game wouldn’t go nutso with jumping elements. So naturally, there’s a boss fight that takes place during a vertical auto-scrolling section. It’s like being on an airplane that just lost an engine, so you pray for safety and get rewarded by having a wing break off.
The Last Fortune simply doesn’t do a whole lot to entertain. Progression is straight forward. Get from point A to point B while stabbing everything in-between. Combat is the focus of Last Fortune, which is unfortunate (pun fully intended) because the combat is shit. The range of your attack is limited, and thus you’ll have to do most of your fighting up close. You have no dodge, counterattack, or block. Thus, most of the time you’ll be forced to trade damage with the enemy in a way that gets downright maddening later in the game. I especially hated these giant red knights that looked more like a spartan from Halo brandishing a Halloween novelty sword. You have to get too close to attack them, and they’re spongy enough and fast enough that you will take damage. Well, unless you unload your special moves on them, assuming you have a good one. For some reason, you can only have one type of spell at a time. The item-picks for these are tough to distinguish from one-another, even if you’re on a TV big enough to double as an ark with two of every creature. You can buy a charge attack that shoots a Zelda-ish beam across the room, but it’s as weak as a watered down Martini. All the purchasable upgrades are overpriced and money is scarce even if you go out of your way to slay every enemy. Plus, you can only access the store between levels, which are too long and boring for anyone to reasonably endure.
The Last Fortune was only one dodge or block move away from being a decent game. Alas, it was not to be, making all combat an exercise in frustration and annoyance. The only way to safely fight these flying bastards is to hit once, run away, and wait for another opening. Also known as Zzzzzzword Play.
There’s just no hook to keep you going. In fact, the game seems to go out of its way to make you want to quit. The asinine continue system forces you to spend your coins (which again, you aren’t provided enough of to make shopping enjoyable) to continue from the beginning of whatever stage you’re on. To salt the wounds, you have to pay extra to start midway through the stage. Lives systems are obsolete anyway. A continue system this punishing for a game that isn’t very fun to begin with will not add incentive or replay value to it. It will just make people quit and find something better to play.
That’s what aggravated me the most about Last Fortune. It looks good enough that obvious care was put into it. The developers just forgot to bring the fun. Gameplay is bare-bones. Enemies are cheap. Damage is often unavoidable. The level design is basic and boring. The dialog is soul-crushingly long and dull. I truly believe the building blocks for a good game are somewhere in this mess, but Last Fortune never puts it together. It’s like the developers were given multiple paths for each mechanic: the fun way and the boring way. They fully intended to go down the fun way, but couldn’t read the map properly and ended up in the boring capital of the world. And that’s a shame. Bad game or not, nobody should be stuck in Sacramento.
80 Microsoft Points have friends that live in Roseville, which is right next to Sacramento and thus is a like a satellite of boredom in the making of this review.
I’m a dumbass. I attempted to play One Finger Death Punch, the final Dream-Build-Play winner. Both the developer and my boyfriend had declared the game off-limits to me due to my epilepsy. However, that didn’t stop me from playing Charlie Murder, and I still had all the equipment I used to make it through that game (an older, fading projection TV and extra lighting in the room, in addition to sunglasses I was wearing), so why not?
Well, because it still wasn’t safe for me. That’s why. One Finger Death Punch was much more intense in its effects than Charlie Murder was. I was only able to play a little past the first world before a flickery background made me feel a little off and it was decided I shouldn’t play any further. Rats, I say. Rats, because I was really enjoying it up to that point. The basic concept is using only two buttons, you kung-fu your way through wave after wave of stick figures. You don’t even move your character. All the action in the game is done using only the X and B buttons. When an enemy enters your attack range, you hit them. The violence is over the top, but really, One Finger Death Punch reminded me of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line of titles. It’s just about timing and patterns. Gameplay boiled down to its purest core. Yet, OFDP is a total reinvention of some extremely old concepts, and it works well.
Theory #1 on why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say “we’ll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game!” Yeesh. That goes double for all you iPhone developers.
At least it did until I got to the part that simply wasn’t compatible with my medical condition. So I can’t vouch for the game completely. That wouldn’t be fair. I can say this: it seemed good enough that I think I would have ultimately awarded it the Seal of Quality. I mean, you never know. I really did suck at what little I got to play. Once enemies started to come in different colors (green enemies take two hits, blue ones dodge your first hit and jump into the other button’s range, and I’m sure more colors were coming) I started to fail with more consistency. I also was downright embarrassing against the first boss, losing three times before getting it right. But I was enjoying my mediocrity. I wish I could have played further.
Either way, One Finger Death Punch is, according to developer Silver Dollar Games (yep, those guys), a total bust in sales. What sucks about that is this was their most expensive production, and their most critically acclaimed title. These guys have been lambasted by the community, including me, and yet in the end they proved that they were real artists with real talent. Let it be said, even though I couldn’t finish their game, Silver Dollar today made me proud that I’m Indie Gamer Chick. Perhaps they’ll be the final reminder of how Xbox Live Indie Games cultivated talent. These guys went from being demonized for their, how shall we say it, less than play-value-chalked titles to being demoralized by their best game doing poorly at the point of sale. It’s almost like a microcosm of the XBLIG community as a whole. Don’t let this get you down, guys. You made a believer in me. Stand up, lick your wounds, and go make something else spectacular. I have no doubt you can do it.
Oh, and that spectacular thing you’re going to make? Yea, can you do me a solid and try to make it something that won’t potentially kill me? Thanks.
Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don’t screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.
80 Microsoft Points are really bummed about this because the thing that made me feel ill was a darker, wavy-pulsing background effect. Not my typical trigger. Shows how unpredictable this shit can be in the making of this non-review review.
I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming. I thought Mega Man 9 was alright. I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so. I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid. And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider. I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing. I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.
With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well. Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about. With platformers, it gets especially difficult. Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it. And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice. Vintage Hero doesn’t have that. It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy. Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.
Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.
Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play. Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms. The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man. It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets. His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s. When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man. Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret. If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.
But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there. Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles. Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system. As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out. Of course, it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title. There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush. Is it too short? Perhaps. It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be. If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate. Me? I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.
Vintage Hero isn’t flawless. I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own. I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses. It all felt a bit generic. The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal. It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody. Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged. Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design. Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen. But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.
You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out. And it does. It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more. Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own. Its gameplay is fine-tuned. Its levels inspired. It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did. But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy. By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed. Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review. Pure, unbridled love of gaming did. And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.
(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)
80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review. Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff. It was all about the color swapping.
Back in April, as the gaming landscape was preparing for a next-gen level shakeup, I was only thinking about one thing: XBLIG is almost done. I mean, there would be indies on Xbox One of course, but the community that I’ve come to know and love would change. It might be better. It might be worse. But it would certainly not be the same. I’ve thought about how my previous reviews would lose their relevance once those games were no longer available. I’ve thought about the types of games the hundreds of developers I’ve come to know and befriend will create in the future. Change is scary. I’ve spent two years trying to be the best (if not, the loudest) advocate for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Tough Sell
Has my blog actually done anything? Maybe, but not as much as I would have liked. Some developers have credited positive reviews from me for causing a brief sales spike, but nothing significant. On the flip side, I’ve had developers of games I absolutely cremated credit me with a bump in demo downloads.
LaserCat
But then I get down to the sad truth of the matter. There are games on my Leaderboard that have sold under 1,000 copies. Hell, there are games on it that have sold under 500 copies. There are games on XBLIG where I am literally the only person that bought it. I’ve played amazing games that sold so poorly that the developers became demoralized and quit. Being Indie Gamer Chick has been the privilege of my life, but sometimes the tales of woe from developers can be downright heartbreaking.
With the sun setting on this generation, I wanted to try to make one last big push for Xbox Live Indie Games. The community has come together in the past and done their best to promote the platform. There has been three promotions called the Indie Games Uprising that tried to showcase the best new XBLIGs. Unfortunately, the quality of those games was a mixed bag of some genuine gems to go with some unpolished, unfinished turds. The last Uprising was particularly devastating. Microsoft didn’t promote it until long after it had already ended, and when they finally did, the main game featured was Sententia. A well-meaning title that was almost universally recognized as being one of the most abysmal games the platform had seen. To have a game of its quality be the focus of an event designed to promote the best of XBLIGs only served to cement the unfair reputation XBLIG has of being nothing but low quality games that aren’t worth the average one dollar price tag.
I believed the reputation myself before I stated my blog. From the time XBLIG launched until the time that I started Indie Gamer Chick, I bought two games for it. Breath of Death VII was the first. I Made a Game with Zombies in It was the second. I enjoyed both, but attempts at finding more titles of their quality didn’t seem worth the effort. Mostly, I found a lot of demos of stuff that felt like they were developed over the course of a week, devoid of passion, and aimed at entertaining nobody. When I finally started my blog, it didn’t take me too long to find out that there are some really good games on the platform. But the sheer number of awful games drowns out the good.
Beyond that, XBLIG also got a reputation of being nothing but clones of popular games, particularly Minecraft. I’ve played the two most famous of those, Castleminer Z and FortressCraft. I didn’t like them, but I wasn’t really interested in Minecraft either. After playing them, I will say that they are quality games, if you’re into that sort of thing. But there are also a lot of similar games on the platform that weren’t as well produced as those two. At the same time, people would say things like “the top two Minecraft clones weren’t as good as Minecraft was.” Well, of course not (though I’ve heard from some Minecraft fans that actually prefer the XBLIG clones). But their popularity was directly tied to the fact that Minecraft wasn’t available on Xbox. Unfortunately, having clones top the sales charts unfairly painted the platform to look like it was only good for clones. Or if not clones, games featuring Avatars. Regardless of the quality of those games (admittedly, most games centered around Avatars are horrid, but not all of them), most regular gamers don’t like Avatars to begin with, and that turned them off the platform. Then you have non-gaming apps such as Rumble Massage, which is actually the #29 best-selling XBLIG of all-time as of this writing. When there are thousands of titles on the platform and an app that turns your controller into a vibrating dildo has sold better than 99.999% of them, people are just not going to associate that platform with quality video games.
Smooth Operators
So that is the handicap that myself, along with dozens of other advocates of XBLIG, have dealt with. I certainly wasn’t the first critic to focus on XBLIG. I’m just the most successful. But that success is only in comparison to other sites with an XBLIG focus. Your average moderately popular indie gaming site does multiples of what I do on my best day. It’s just plain hard to get gamers excited about good titles on Xbox Live Indie Games. It carries too much baggage. It’s also hard to get someone to take another look at something they’ve long since dismissed. That’s just human nature. In the case of XBLIG, most of what was wrong with it before is still problematic today, so anyone glancing would be likely to assume that nothing has changed. And they’re right, because nothing really has changed. That’s because there were very good games on the service all along. You just had to look closely to find them.
I had two ideas for trying to get a new audience exposed to XBLIG before the new consoles launched. The first was to do a bundle of PC ports for XBLIG. The problem with that was the odds on being able to get one off the ground were probably slim. Even good XBLIGs are a tough sell because of the stigma the brand carries. The other option was to do a massive giveaway of the best XBLIGs over the course of a single day. Well, you know how it played out.
Surprise! We Like Your Idea!
I sent an email off to the guys at Indie Royale sheepishly explaining my idea for a bundle centered around Xbox Live Indie Games. I couldn’t pitch them on the merits of sales potential, because there is no denying that the whole idea was a long shot at best. Thus, I did exactly what I advise people not to do when seeking investments from venture capitalists, or crowd funding, or angel investors: I pitched to them from the heart. I explained to them how the XBLIG/XNA community “adopted” me and what they’ve meant to my life. I was frank about why XBLIG’s reputation was fair, but the fogging effect it created caused the majority of gamers to miss out on some of the best indies of this generation. Finally, I basically said that these developers deserve a break, and that exposure on Indie Royale would not just benefit those with games in the bundle, but could open up the doors for greater recognition for the hundreds of talented developers whose games have sat unloved on XBLIG.
Little Racers STREET
Graeme, one of the main guys at Indie Royale, did respond to me. Which is awesome considering that I’m ultimately small potatoes on the indie scene. Not only did he respond, but I had caught his interest. We discussed the types of games I would include, and how we could set this apart from other bundles. Then, things went quiet for a while. So quiet that I was sure I got the blow off. So, I turned my attention to my alternative plan: a huge giveaway of the best PC ports for XBLIG. The idea was, the developers would have their games free for one day only: July 1, for Indie Gamer Chick’s Second Anniversary. After lining up over a dozen top-notch games, many of which I had planned to include in the bundle (plus other games that would be discounted), I thought I had organized a pretty good little event.
Then I heard back from Graeme. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was officially on. I just had to round up the games.
I changed my underwear and started contacting developers.
Rounding up Games
Your typical bundle usually has five games. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle has eight. The reason for that is simple: I wanted gamers to get the best value for their money as possible. Many of these games sell for between $1 to $3 on Xbox Live right now, not to mention that some would have been featured on previous bundles. But most importantly, I wanted people to see that there is a huge variety of very good games on the platform that they had been missing out on.
If I could have, I would have included every single developer who wanted in. But that wasn’t an option. I’ve made tons of friends who develop XBLIGs since starting my site. I wish I could have included those I was closest with. But the concept of the bundle was that it was supposed to represent the tippy-top of XBLIG quality. After coming up with several variations, I ultimately decided to go off my leaderboard and pick the first eight games that were available in sequential order.
For those new to Indie Gamer Chick, the Leaderboard is a concept I adapted from BBC’s automotive show Top Gear. The idea I had was I would rank every game that I enjoyed in the exact order I would prefer to play them. The method is actually very simple. Whenever a new game receives my Seal of Approval, I start at the bottom of my list and ask myself if I would rather play the new game or the old one. If it’s the new one I prefer, I go up to the next game on the list. I do this until I reach an old game that I prefer over the new one. The new game is then placed below that title on the board. It’s been a fun idea that works really well. It’s interactive. My readers get to debate placement. It also gives developers something to aim for. Just having it made the selection process for this bundle pretty easy. Or so I thought.
Right off the bat, the #3 game on my site, We Are Cubes, was eliminated. It has no PC port, and there wasn’t enough time to get one up and running. The #2 ranked game, Gateways, was not available because the developer already had plans to be in an upcoming bundle. #9, Bleed, was only recently listed on Steam and the timing wasn’t right, but I have no doubt they’ll be in a future bundle. Games like Miner Dig Deep (#11) and Star Ninja (#13) also have no PC ports, while Cthulhu Saves the World (#12) has been in more bundles than I can count. That was cool, because everything in my Top-25 I would proudly stand by as the cream of the XBLIG crop.
But this was a bundle that was about the XBLIGs. So I considered putting some games that were well received by everyone but me in the bundle, with Apple Jack being the game that I felt would probably be the most well received. The problem there was Apple Jack isn’t out on PC yet. It will be soon, and for fans of punishers, you’ll probably like it a hell of a lot more than I did. I thought about including the most popular game on XBLIG that I’m incapable of playing due to my epilepsy: Score Rush by Xona Games. That wasn’t an option because they already had a bundle planned out. Finally, I almost went completely nepotism corrupt and including Aeternum by Brooks Bishop, who is one of my better friends I’ve made through Indie Gamer Chick, not to mention the man who designed my mascot. But that just plain wouldn’t have been right. His game was well received by fans of Bullet Hells, but I absolutely hated it. I get along with bullet hells about as well as I imagine Michael Vick will get along with Cerberus.
So my lineup was set. And then I lost Escape Goat. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong. He wanted in, but he had already committed to other bundles and deals and had to pull out. This was pretty devastating, because Escape Goat is the #1 ranked game on the Leaderboard. I consider it to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made, and I’ve reviewed nearly 400 of them. I also lost Chompy Chomp Chomp, the #5 game on my board, which I consider to be the best party game of this entire gaming generation, indie or otherwise. I was counting on its inclusion because pure party games are quite rare in these kind of bundles, and I wanted it to set this bundle apart from the rest. The developers at Utopian World of Sandwiches were besides themselves when they had to drop out. They wanted in, but a miscommunication forced them out. That sucks. I still get a knot in my stomach thinking about it. Chompy Chomp Chomp is a game that didn’t sell extremely well on XBLIG, but it’s worth your time. Gather up your friends, because you’ll never have a better party for $1, I promise you.
So I went back to the list. Again, many games were just not options based on being too recently featured in other bundles. Penny Arcade Part 3 was out. DLC Quest was out. A couple of my favorite puzzlers, Pixel Blocked! and Aesop’s Garden had no PC ports. Thankfully, the vastly overlooked SpyLeaks was available. Finally, I went to Orbitron, one of my personal favorite games on XBLIG that, I admit, got a mixed-reception elsewhere. Though to be frank, I’m disappointed that ArcadeCraft, which was created by Orbitron developers Firebase Industries, had no PC port. This is thanks to its use of avatars as characters. Yea, ArcadeCraft ranks two spots below Orbitron on the Leaderboard, but there’s no questioning that is has a larger appeal. Seriously guys, get cracking on that PC port. No XBLIG screams “this would be a PC megahit” quite like ArcadeCraft does.
Orbitron: Revolution
The eight games confirmed for real, I had one last thing to do. I really did want to include as many developers as I could, but the problem was, the more games, the smaller the piece of the pie each would get. Indie Royale had never had a bundle with eight separate developers. The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle isn’t the largest in terms of total games, but it is the largest in terms of total developers. It also complicates things more from legal and logistical points of view. But I really wanted everyone who had earned my Seal of Approval and genuinely wanted in to have a shot at being in. The only way to do that was to ask if they wanted to simply donate their games to the bundle. A shit deal for them perhaps, but it was all I could do.
Guess what? As always, the XBLIG community stepped up, and I had volunteers. That mystery game? I’m not even sure what it is, but it will come from one of those games, and it will be a game off my Leaderboard. Incredible. Those who did step up are artists. They also have future projects that are coming very soon to both XBLIG and to PC, and they wanted to show that they’re here, they have talent, and you can trust that they can make good games.
Naming Your Bundle of Joy
When I started Indie Gamer Chick, it was totally on a whim. My boyfriend (along with my parents, coworkers, and the ghost of Jacob Marley) all said I needed a hobby. We were going through my Xbox hard drive and stumbled upon Breath of Death VII and I Made a Game With Zombies, the two XBLIGs I owned before starting my blog. Brian, like many gamers, had honestly never heard of XBLIGs. I had previously considered doing a movie related blog, but Brian suggested that I should do XBLIG reviews instead, since gaming was basically all I did with my free time. The name came about after just a couple of minutes of brain storming. I’m a fan of online movie reviews from sources like Red Letter Media and That Guy with the Glasses. TGWTG included the Nostalgia Chick, whose reviews I had come to enjoy quite a bit. So I thought, hey, Indie Gamer Chick. Done and done.
The name is good and catchy, but I didn’t stop to think about the negative aspects of it. Namely, the whole GURL GAMER thing. Besides the very rare joke, I’ve never played up the girl card here. It takes about five minutes worth of reading my blog to see that I’m not playing the “I’m quirky because I’m a girl and I play games” tit-shaking stereotype. So while the name might land curiosity seekers, I would hope my writing and coverage of games that don’t typically get a lot of attention would be the draw of my site. And for the most part, it is. In two years, the amount of times someone ripped me for having “Chick” in my site’s name was minimum. It was a non-factor, and I’m proud of that.
Chester
And then I attached a teaser to the bundle at the end of my review for Penny Arcade 4, and the response was overwhelmingly negative, but in silly ways. Maybe a bit mean-spirited, but mostly the jokes you would expect. Menstruation jokes. Boob jokes. Jokes about casual games that girls play, or games starring girls. That didn’t bother me so much. I mean, if I can’t take that shit (and obviously some people can’t, hence some recent controversies) I should crawl under my bed and never come out because that’s just how people talk. It’s dumb. It’s juvenile. But I’m a critic who liberally uses dick and fart jokes, so I can’t say anything against low brow humor.
The problem is, for the name of a gaming blog, Indie Gamer Chick is perfect. For the name of a bundle? I’ll admit, it’s not so perfect. First off, people unfamiliar with my site (which includes the whole world, give or take a couple thousand people) have no point of reference to why the bundle was called that. None of the games feature girls as the protagonist. Thus, the bundle might seem like Indie Royale was marketing directly to girls in a way that could be considered sexist. This at a time when gender-related tensions in gaming are at an all-time high. Granted, their site and their press release make it clear who Indie Gamer Chick is (raises hand) and that I hand-selected the games. Which is fine, if everyone reads it. They didn’t. The name “Indie Gamer Chick Bundle” appeared on Twitter and across message boards and people lost their shit over it. For most of those people, their anger/outrage was defused when they found out the context of the name. Others moved on to being pissed that my blog had the name “Chick” in it. The rule I guess being that girls that play games are not allowed to say they are girls. I’m not sure if the rule applies to other forms of entertainment. I’ll ask Lady Gaga is she gets shit for her stage name.
The second part is the whole girl gamer thing carries with it the jokes that are such layups that even Kwame Brown couldn’t blow it. “It’s Indie Gamer Chick so of course Bleed will be in the bundle.” Not only does that not bother me, but I laughed. I mean, they’re easy jokes for a reason. Because more than one person thinks of it. Not clever, but hey, funny. And there was no actual malice behind them. Yea, there were a few douchey comments, but the internet has a few douchey people. You know what? The internet is not made up mostly of assholes and misogynists. I know this because I spent two years working with the XBLIG community, which is made up almost entirely of men and they treated me amazing. By the way: making a random girl gamer joke doesn’t make a guy a misogynist or an asshole. Not every joke has malice behind it, and those with malice only seem more represented because they never.. shut.. up!
Should the bundle have been called something else? Maybe. My friend Matt played the devil’s advocate role as we tossed around the merits and detriments of having the bundle carry my name. He floated the idea that calling it the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle would take the attention away from the XBLIG concept. He wasn’t totally wrong about that. Of course, there was no name available that could hammer home that this was an XBLIG themed bundle. Legally, we couldn’t even call it the Xbox Live Indie Game Bundle. The alternative name considered was the XNA Showcase Bundle. XNA is the free gaming development tool set provided by Microsoft upon which all XBLIGs (and some spectacular Xbox Live Arcade games such as Bastion) were built with. XNA was recently discontinued by Microsoft, so having that name for the bundle as a final tribute made sense. Better sense than my friend George Clingerman, who got XNA tattooed on his arm. Though I believe he was merely pining to be Peter Moore’s heir at Microsoft when he did that. Probably while drunk.
Of course, XNA doesn’t mean a whole lot to people outside the development community. And, unlike indies, which will have some future on Xbox as a platform, XNA is done. People will still continue to use it to create PC games, and tools such as MonoGame could potentially lead to some games for next-gen platforms being started on XNA. But it won’t ever again be a major factor in indie development.
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle was the name to go with. I know it works at catching attention. If I had to go back to July of 2011, the day I started the site, would I have called it something else? Perhaps CathyPlaysIndies.com or something like that? Again, maybe. If I had known I would eventually end up doing one of these bundles, I probably would have come up with something less controversial. I mean, who knew? I figured nobody would read me. But, I’m not ashamed of the name. I’m proud that Indie Gamer Chick has caught on. I’m proud that I am Indie Gamer Chick. I never thought I would catch on enough to be the recipient of backlash.
And it’s not just me, but the guys at Indie Royale who are getting it. Again, they’ve done everything they could to make it clear that the bundle was handpicked by me, but the name is all most people see, and they find the name sexist. I’m getting a small minority of gamers upset by being yet another female gamer who has to call attention to her gender. That was never my intention. I just thought the name sounded cool. It had a ring to it. Now the name is getting me labeled as an anti-feminist. It’s true that I don’t give a flying fuck about feminism. It’s 2013, and despite the best efforts of some politicians, I don’t feel like a second class citizen, nor have I ever. And yet, based purely on gender, I’m supposed to automatically side on every single point made by professional feminists like Anita Sarkeesian. Isn’t the whole idea that I must side with a professional feminist actually sexist in and of itself? So yea, I do regret that the name in the sense that it brings the gender debate (and all accompanying jokes) onto the table. It’s totally fair, because it’s the name I chose.
SpyLeaks
I’ve always thought what most set me apart from other bloggers and critics was my age and inexperience. I was about two weeks away from turning 22 when I started Indie Gamer Chick. I didn’t grow up with an Atari 2600 or an NES or even the 16-bit platforms. My first console was the original PlayStation. My average reader tends to be about ten years older than me. It’s having that totally different perspective that sets me apart. This is the first time I’ve really talked about the gender issue, but I sort of have to. Would I have gotten it regardless if I had named my blog Random Game Crap, which was seriously what I almost called it? Probably a little, but not as much. Thankfully, some of the people who were like “what the fuck is an Indie Gamer Chick” took the time to read my blog and realize that I’m not a stereotype.
And, of course, my review style sets me apart. I’m certainly not the only critic who is known for being harsh. It’s just that indies are typically spared from scorn. I admit. I knew almost nothing about the indie scene before starting Indie Gamer Chick. I had played indie games, mostly through promotions like Xbox’s Summer of Arcade, or various random PSN releases. But, when I went to check on reviews for Xbox Live Indie Games, there were slim pickings. And what little reviews I could find seemed like they were written by cheerleaders. Absolutely nothing negative discussed about the game. Just praise and positivity, as if the developer were a delicate flower who would wilt and die if anything resembling constructive feedback was spoken. Yea, fuck that. If I was going to do this thing, I would just say exactly what I thought. And that’s what I did.
It’s exactly what quality developers want. I mean, they want to get positive reviews, but they want to earn them. They’re meaningless if they’re handed out like candy to trick-or-treaters. Indie developers desire to improve, and the only way they can do that is through honest feedback. And honest feedback is something they couldn’t count on from friends or family or fellow developers. They should have been able to count on it from critics, but the critics failed to actually criticize anything. When the XBLIG community finally discovered my blog, they were briefly mortified by my review style. But community leaders embraced me and my style. Now, developers use my reviews to help them improve. They aspire to be better. To be what they use as a guidepost for improvement is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever accomplished. It’s especially touching because they’re the ones with the real talent. I’m just someone who plays games. But they treat me special, and that feels amazing.
Let’s Do Launch
The Indie Gamer Chick Bundle launched yesterday. The response across message boards was generally negative, I admit. But, aside from a handful of people who just plain loath the idea of my name, most of the feedback is centered around game selection. It’s not that the games are bad. The consensus seems to be that these are good games. It’s that there’s too many repeats from previous bundles, or that only one of the games (Dead Pixels) has Steam keys as an option. These criticisms are absolutely fair and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
Centering a bundle around XBLIGs doesn’t exactly give one the widest range of game selection. There are a lot of solid titles, but stuff I felt worked as a proper showcase for the platform that was available and not completely over-bundled limited my choices. Do I regret not getting Escape Goat? Sure. Am I ashamed that my bundle instead has SpyLeaks? Absolutely not. It’s a wonderful game. I wouldn’t have settled for a selection that wasn’t representative of the best of what XBLIG has to offer. I’m proud that I got to present these eight games to a community that might have overlooked them.
I do admit, not having Steam be an option for seven out of the eight games does suck. Not having Mac as an option for any of the games sucks too. Part of that is that games developed on XNA are tougher to transition to Mac, not to mention costly. You have to remember, with the exception of Dead Pixels (which would qualify as a modest hit), none of these titles were best sellers, and getting the games on Mac could very well have been cost prohibitive. As far as Steam, it again comes down to these games not having the biggest following, and the Greenlight process being slow. Four of the games are going through Greenlight now, and if you enjoyed playing them, give them your vote please. They’ve earned it.
Antipole
So who was this bundle aimed at? I really wanted this to reach gamers who ignored XBLIG, or long since dismissed it. I wanted to show that this is what XBLIG was capable of. One gentlemen offered the following feedback: “I haven’t heard of any of these games.” He meant that as a negative. I was thinking “wait, if you’ve never heard of them, isn’t this exactly the kind of bundle you should be looking at Indie Royale for?” Most XBLIGs have no name recognition. That doesn’t mean they have no value to you as a gamer. If ever there was a platform that should have thrived on sleeper hits, it would be Xbox Live Indie Games.
I think the bundle is probably being better received in terms of sales than people expected from an XBLIG-themed bundle selected by a nobody critic. Is it going to break sales records? Probably not. But is it succeeding at exposing a new group of gamers to XBLIG? Thankfully, the answer to that is yes. People are using my Leaderboard to discover some great games that flew under the radar. That a wonderful market full of hidden gems was right there on their Xbox all along. Even if it only creates a handful of new XBLIG fans, it’s still totally worth it.
It’s ironic that Microsoft announced their plans for self-publishing on Xbox One the same day that my bundle launched. The same bundle I wanted to use to create new fans for my beloved XBLIG. The term “better late than never” comes to mind. That applies to new customers for XBLIG as well. And even for those who think the Indie Gamer Chick Bundle stinks, I hope you will at least tip your hat to this development community, because they will factor into your future in gaming. With their amount of talent, crossing paths with them will be unavoidable. If you have an Xbox and you haven’t checked out the indie channel in quite some time, if not ever, I truly hope you fire it up. You have no idea what you’ve been missing. It’s not perfect, and many of its games downright suck. But the good stuff? The really good stuff? It’s there, and when you find it, it will make your day.
Indie Gamer Chick 
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