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.
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.
I’m baffled when unambitious games come along that strive only to look and play kind of, sort of like the classics of ye olden days. All I can think of is: why? Why not make them better, or at least give them a different hook? Especially since those old games already fucking exist and have been played to death. Hey, not everyone is creative. But even if you’re uncreative, you must have actually played the games and know what works in them and what doesn’t. I don’t expect perfection from an indie developer, but I also expect that, as gamers, they know the difference between fun and boring.
Mechanician Alex, a game from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that 80s PC gaming fans would have shit on.
Then you get into the realm of pure raving insanity, where you try to ape a gameplay style that wasn’t all that good to begin with. Mechanician Alex wants to be one of those old-timey, single-screened platformers from the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum era. I know a lot of my readers are still gaga over them. When I reviewed the official XBLIG port of one of the all-time cherished members of that genre, Manic Miner, the old farts that read me were less than receptive to my take on it. Fine.
But would those gamers be receptive to a game that looks like it could have been a lost game in that series, and plays almost like them, only everything is a little worse? I’m guessing not. Strip away the attempt at making a player nostalgic, and Mechanician Alex is simply a bad game. The controls are atrocious. Unresponsive controls are a signature of these type of games, and getting used to the wacky delayed timing is supposed to be part of the charm. I guess if you’re playing a game legitimately made in that era, that’s acceptable. Well, at least if you’re a child of that era looking to reclaim your youth. But fans of those games aren’t in denial about the controls being shit. Why the FUCK would a game made in 2013 try to emulate that? Manic Miner fans aren’t going to Tweet each other saying “Oh my God, this game controls even worse than Manic Miner. IT’S FUCKING AWESOME!!”
Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik’s Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)
And the levels are poorly designed too. The game has a real issue with height. For example, on one stage you’ll be walking on a cloud that is bumpy, like clouds tend to be. There’s almost no clearance, and an enemy is scooting back and forth above your head. Unfortunately, the collision detection is spotty enough that you’re bound to burn lives just trying to get a feel for it, and there’s so many variables on the height that never seem right. It immediately stinks of a stage that was rushed through production. Beyond that, if you slip off the cloud, you can’t finish the level regardless of whether you land on a platform or not. This is really fundamental level design stuff and I shouldn’t have to have explained to you why its bad. It’s a worst game of the year contender.
Sadly, the same developer recently went on a release spree, and they also brought out a side-scrolling platformer called Pablo’s Fruit, and it’s even worse. Taking it a step further than Mechanician Alex, it’s a contender for worst XBLIG ever made. Every gameplay aspect of Pablo’s Fruit is terrible. Here, the idea is you have to collect all of the fruit in a level to open up an exit. Movement is slow and jumping is floaty, which makes playing through the levels a tedious chore. And then you get to the technical issues. When you take damage, you don’t recoil from it, and you don’t get much (if any) invincibility to prevent further damage. Thus, it’s conceivable that you could go from 5 “lives” to 0 in a second just from getting pinned next to an enemy. That’s just utterly lazy, sloppy programming. This is coupled with poor level design. In one stage, the level opens with a fruit above your head, out of reach. At the end of the stage, by the exit, there’s a teleporter that drops you back at the start. You collect the fruit, but you have to walk all the way back to the exit. All enemies you’ve taken out are still gone, which begs the question: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE SOMEONE DO SOMETHING SO FUCKING BORING? Didn’t it occur to anyone making this piece of shit?
And it’s got dumb logic too. Enemies are beaten by jumping on their heads. But it’s not always clear which enemies will die when you do it and which ones you’ll pass-through, taking damage along the way. I made a video to demonstrate.
What the fuck? By the way, that vulture that’s flying back and forth? You die from jumping on it too. Why the hell does a ghost (hypothetically a transparent, dimensional being) die from being crushed but not an insect or a bird? Is this some kind of PETA subliminal message?
An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that continuously fly around. They’re supposed to be in the background, but it’s done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.
If I sound too negative, please keep in mind that I actively, for days, tried to think of something nice to say about these games. I came up completely empty. The sad thing is, both these games are courtesy of the developer of Naoki Tales. I didn’t like it either, but really, its only true sin was being boring. These games represent a gigantic step backwards. Pablo’s Fruit came out a day after Mechanician Alex, and those came out a few days after another game by the same guys, Paper Galactica. I’m not doing a full review on that (click the link, because Tim Hurley did), but it was pretty fucking boring as well. Three games, all released in one week. If I had to ask these guys a question besides “have you ever actually played a video game?” it would be “why didn’t you guys focus on one project?” Granted, it’s possible that all three games sat in peer review purgatory until the community came out of a coma and put them through to the market.
Actually, I would have one more question, and this is the most obvious one: would you actually want to play these games if you hadn’t made them? Would you pay money for them? Hell, would you play them if they were free? Yea, that’s three questions, not one, but all of them are valid. Look, these games suck. You’re not going to make a lot of money on them. They don’t even have the absurdity or the charm of Silver Dollar’s low-end, quick cash stuff. Bad games DO make money on XBLIG, but your stuff isn’t falling into those niches that have such potential. So don’t rush your games out. Polish up your work. Do something wild and creative. I’ve played four of your games. Not one of them managed to entertain me or any of my colleagues for a single second, nor did any of them display the slightest bit of creativity. If I had to guess, I would guess the developers were bored silly making these. Their existence seems almost cynical. Both are trying to capitalize on nostalgic memories. But unless it’s a port of something, you’re not going to lure in day-dreamy nostalgic types. Being primitive shouldn’t be confused with being a classic, and these games are so primitive that they sacrifice virgins to the sun gods.
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.
If I pulled out a gun and shot myself right now, then reincarnated, I’m pretty sure I would be running in my new body faster than I would as my Xbox Avatar if I just stayed alive and kept trying at Avatar Physics: Running. Based on the popular (and free, and slightly less impossible) flash-based game QWOP, Running is a simple 100 meter dash, only you have to manually work the legs of your avatar to get there. Of course, doing so is complicated in a way that makes the Impossible Game look like a preschool admission test. After over thirty minutes of playing, the furthest I had made it was a little over two meters past the starting line. Mostly, my character just stiffened up and fell down, like she had simultaneously suffered a stroke while catching a glimpse of Medusa. Take a look at this video from my amigo Splazer Productions.
Splazer did better than I did. Hell, I typically ran further backwards than I did forwards. The only value Avatar Physics: Running has is bemusement at your own failures. This is obviously meant to be the primary draw of the game, as evidenced by the one and only marketplace picture featuring an avatar that has cocked things up about as bad as you can. The problem is, laughing at how hard this game is only lasts about, oh, two minutes. After that, it’s just frustration and tedium. I’m certain someone out there can finish the full 100 meters. I’m also certain someone out there knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. It doesn’t make him any less dead.
Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance. The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other. The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw). You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today. I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen. I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today. Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.
Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness. It looks ugly. There’s no multiplayer. The AI is brain-dead. The gameplay is boring. The upgrades are dull. The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag. All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with. You’re on one side of a screen. Your AI opponent is on the other. You shoot until one of you is dead. Then you upgrade your ship and do it again. The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit. Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship. After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller. So I did. Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved). At which point, it instakilled me again. Grumble.
This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.
Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games. But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare. The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint. The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see. The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot. That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing. Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare. Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care. I don’t know what else to say. Boring. Bad. Overpriced. You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser. And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.
240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review. I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.
Dark Quest is based on the early 90s cult board game hit HeroQuest. I’ve never played the game, but after asking around on Twitter, I had a few fans of it confirm that it’s a very close facsimile of the real thing. If that’s what you’ve been looking for over the last twenty years, this review is irrelevant to you. Go get it. This review is for those who missed out on it when it was played using cheap plastic characters, dice, and cardboard.
In the interest of professionalism, I looked up the original rules to the game. And by that, I mean I watched a four-minute long video by the Angry Video Game Nerd that kind of, sort of explained the rules. I thought “ugh, looks complicated. Well, at least I’ll be able to learn how the game plays in the tutorial they no doubt took the time to meticulously craft.” Which again proves that the whole Cuban women having clairvoyance thing is hogwash. There is no tutorial for Dark Quest. You’re thrown into the first dungeon immediately, which offers things that are sort of pointers, but not really. Fighting enemies, discovering hidden traps, and using various weapons are mechanics the player is left to discover on their own. I suppose if you’re familiar with HeroQuest, this might not be so bad. For people like me, it’s clear that we’re unwelcome guests at the Dark Quest party.
Yea, to be perfectly frank, I had no idea what I was doing.
After somehow stumbling through the first dungeon and picking up a couple secondary characters, I shamefully succumbed to boredom and ignorance in the second level. Here, you have to find hidden jewels, insert them into statues to activate a door, and then fight roughly five million skeletons, give or take. The problem here was my previously established “worst random luck in gaming” status was confirmed about ten fold. I would swing at the skeletons with my barbarian and miss. Then my dwarf and miss. Then my wizard and miss. Or, if I didn’t miss, something would pop up that said “CHEAT DEATH” which I think is basically a fancy way of saying “missed.” Then, the room full of skeletons would attack. Funny enough, they would also miss more often than hit, no matter which of the characters they attacked. But, they had numbers on me, and slowly I would drain away until I was reduced to a pile of bones. I either was killed by the skeletons or I died of boredom. Not sure which.
I tried this level a few times. There is a small instruction card, which noted that the dwarf was the best defender. So, on my second attempt, when I would enter a room that I knew was filled with baddies, I would lead with him. Which made sense, since he has the largest movement. Now, here’s where it gets weird: the dwarf, the guy with the alleged best defense, was the character that the enemies missed the least. It was un-fucking-canny. I’m not blaming the developers for me being unlucky, but I would ask them “are you sure this guy has extra points of defense?” What am I missing here? Besides 3 out of 4 of my attempts at attacks? To make matters worse, every once in a while the dungeon master would spit out a random effect, which includes such things as “lose some gold” or “lose your turn.” What did he hit most often? “Lose one health.” Of course that’s what he did. Meanwhile, I was getting my will to go on sapped by the game’s snail-like pace and unintuitive control scheme. After giving that second dungeon a fourth go and dying in the same fucking room, I’d had enough. Yep, I couldn’t even complete the second stage. Shame on me, I suck as a gamer, yada yada yada.
You know what? In this case, I don’t think it was just me. I’ve heard from at least one other player that they were the victim of missing far too often when they went to attack. Or sometimes a character can be next to an enemy and they can spend multiple turns swinging at each other and missing every time. Each stage has a time limit in the form of a limited number of turns the player can take. I never came close to the limit, but the sheer number of turns that a battle can drag out could be problematic in later levels. Maybe.
Why the fuck do I not automatically pick up whatever gold or items I step over? Why does this game seem to go out of its way to be inconvenient? Grrrrrrrr!
I know I’m not who this game was made for, and that’s fine with me. It looks good. It sounds good. I know HeroQuest fans are satisfied with it. Although they’re a little puzzled by the lack of dice. However, non-fans will find a slow, newb-hating dungeon crawler in board-game form that is about as exciting a watching paint dry. On top of that, I also think fans of HeroQuest will find things to be disappointed in it. There’s no multiplayer. Granted, eliminating a player controlling the enemies is probably a logical and reasonable thing to hand off to the AI. But, not having the option for four players to take control of the heroes is kind of silly, especially since board games such as this are built entirely around social interaction. I guess you could hypothetically just pass the controller off to other players after making your move. It’s not really convenient, but hey, it’s a chance to play a moderately popular game twenty years after it dropped off the face of the earth. I mean, it wasn’t popular enough to last more than a couple of years on store shelves. And you would think fans of the game would still own the corporeal board and game pieces. Okay, so I have no fucking clue at all why this game exists, since it takes almost no advantage of things that can only be done in the realm of video games. H.i.v.e. demonstrated they can at least be used to ease people into learning a new game, but Dark Quest doesn’t even do that. Nor does it have online support. This was a weird one to review. A really well produced homage to some vintage thing that I’d never heard of. I can’t recommend it to non-fans of the thing it’s based on, but even fans might find little to get excited about. Don’t get me wrong: there’s an audience for Dark Quest. Twitter already confirmed that for me. What I’m saying is, if you want to properly pay tribute to a classic gaming property, here’s a thought: use some of this space-age technology we have these days and make the original concept better. Otherwise, it’s less a tribute and more like grave robbery.
80 Microsoft Points wouldn’t mind some kind of version of Don’t Break the Ice for Wii U, but only if it involves using the touch screen and an actual mallet in the making of this review.
Arcadecraft was developed by Firebase Industries
$1 (originally $3) have no idea how you would pronounce that in the making of this review.
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