Eighteen minutes, fourteen seconds. That’s the time it took me to beat City Tuesday, the game that I was looking most forward to during the Uprising. Like my neighbor who entered her half rottweiler, half-some smaller terrier thing (they named it Crime, short for Crime Against Nature. I’m not kidding) into the dog agility contest, I think my expectations were a tad bit too high. The idea is you’re a dude who has five minutes to defuse various bombs that terrorists have scattered around a city. The hook to that is you can repeat that five minutes as many times as you need to get all the bombs. Whenever you rewind, everything unfolds exactly the way it did before, unless you manage to interfere. Using this mechanic, you have to figure out ways to free yourself to snatch the bombs.
This sounds great, but I don’t feel the concept goes far enough. The first ten minutes of City Tuesday is spent playing two glorified tutorial stages of the “throw the child in the water and see if it learns to tread water” variety. To City Tuesday’s credit, it actually is designed in a way where you can figure stuff out on your own with minimal fuss. There’s really not a lot to learn. Pay attention to the dudes, follow their patterns, and figure out how to get to the bomb.
I hate branded screenshots, but this will have to do.
Once the game opens up into the more open-ended city, you have to follow multiple patterns and probably restart the day several times. Restarting is handled by pausing the game and selecting it from a menu with no bells and whistles, a very unsatisfactory way of doing it. Thankfully, you can also fast-forward by holding the right trigger. There’s only a small handful of tasks to do here, followed by one final chase and platforming section. Then the game is over. Again, my one and only play-through took eighteen minutes to finish.
Is it worth a buck? Well, no. The opening tutorial levels (with the exception of a bit that involves a vending machine and payphone) offer none of the real meat that City Tuesday seemed to promise, yet they make up the largest chunk of the game. The city section does offer those Groundhogs Day type of puzzles, but it feels more like a proof-of-concept design for a larger game than something fully realized. Yea, sometimes a game can leave you wanting more in a good way. City Tuesday didn’t do that for me. I felt the game never even really warmed up. The tasks you’re given in the city are still so fundamental in their simplicity that I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything at all by solving them. I love the concept of City Tuesday, but nothing here makes truly good use of it. Such a shame.
Here’s irony for you: I played about half-way through Entropy yesterday. Now, I know the game was making track of my progress, because at one point I left the game and checked the level-select on the menu. I just wanted to know how far I had made it. Then, I went back to the game. I played for a while, got bored, hit Borderlands 2, and figured I would finish Entropy today. Instead, I found that my save file was gone. So a game called Entropy experienced entropy. Awesome. Thankfully not all games do what their names say. Wargasm for example. Shudder.
*Note: I’ve talked with many players and nobody else has had this happen, and in fact it didn’t happen to me when I tried to recreate it. It’s unknown what happened, but this is not expected to be anywhere remotely a common issue.
Hey look! Writing on the wall. Just like that one game!
Perhaps it was somewhat merciful that I lost my progress in Entropy. I was downright bored by it just a few stages in. Maybe I’ve over-loaded on puzzlers as of late. More likely I’m just sick of test-chamber games that have the personality of a sea cucumber, which is the perfect way to describe Entropy. The setting is so lifeless, grim, and dark that it’s exhausting to experience. Games like this need something entertaining to drive the player forward. So many games seem like they want to be Portal, yet their developers completely missed the point of why Portal turned out the way it did. Portal was given personality out of necessity, because the game would have been tiring without it. I think this is why so many players succumbed to Gateways! As cool as the puzzles in that were, there was nothing but the promise of more puzzles to drive the game, with no reason for players to stick around and “see where they’re going with this.”
Entropy does have some kind of plot. I guess. But things are kept too abstract and minimalistic to get a feel for what’s going on. You have no character yourself. You’re just a camera that hovers five feet off the ground. The antagonist is a pink ball of light that leads you around from room to room. There’s no dialog, so all you get to go by is the rare pop-up hint, or a sketch on a wall that points you in the direction of a puzzle’s solution. Forget about seeing where they’re going with this. I don’t even know what they’re doing right now.
The hook of Entropy is that it’s a first person puzzler. On XBLIG. That’s pretty much it. It doesn’t sound like much, until you remember that your average first-person XBLIG would qualify as the worst game ever played by your average gamer. My expectations were set so low that Satan himself had to do the limbo under them. I figured the controls would be unresponsive and the jumping mechanics would be crippled. I was wrong about both. Entropy actually handles reasonably well, and features the best first-person jumping physics on XBLIG. Of course, that means absolutely squat. It would be like being the best arm wrestler at the Center for Arthritis.
Entropy looks better in screens than it does in motion.
Unfortunately, the well done mechanics are let down by puzzles that are really a chore to solve. Most of them revolve around pushing balls around a room. There’s four kinds: rock, water, fire, and acid. Your goal is typically to get these onto a scale that measures heat, pH levels, or weight. Unfortunately, there’s no way to pick up a ball, so moving them around means clumsily shoving them around and hoping they don’t roll into a wall, off platforms, or into each-other in ways that cause them to vaporize. It’s not totally broken, but the process is slow and clunky and makes you wish there was some other way. I wouldn’t exactly sell my soul for the right to pick up the ball, but if I was negotiating it for a long and healthy life, I would have that thrown in.
The slowness factor really kills Entropy dead. When a gun that sucks the orbs up in a bubble is added, it just further slogs down an already snail-like pace. It’s kind of sad, because Entropy really is the best controlling first-person game on the platform. It even looks good too, chugging frame rate not withstanding. And I like how you can undo mistakes with a Prince of Persia style rewind. It’s just too bad that the actual game here is just not fun. Remember developers, that’s your ultimate goal: give players something entertaining to pass time. A game should be at least as entertaining as throwing paper airplanes at the seniors waiting at the bus stop.
Oh don’t look at me like that. It’s safe. They’re seniors! They all have glasses on!
80 Microsoft Points said the scoring for Airplaning Old People (aka Greatest GeneRAGEtion) is as follows: 1 point for making them flinch, 2 points if they look cross at you, 3 points if you get it stuck in their clothes or hair, 4 points if they threaten to get up at you, 5 points if they actually get up, or 10 points if you get a direct hit and they do nothing in the making of this review.
Smooth Operators is a time sink, and I mean that in a good way. I started playing yesterday around 11:30AM, and emerged around 8:00PM wondering exactly where the day went. Titles like this are the alien abductions of the game world. When you try to explain to people that you just lost eight hours of your life playing a game where you operate a call center, people look at you with rapidly blinking eyes as if you just took that last step off the deep-end. And then you try to explain your side of the story, saying “no, no! You don’t understand! You have to staff out buildings and hire janitors and there’s incoming calls and outgoing calls and it’s really, really fun!” And they just nod politely while thumbing through their phone, looking for your family’s number and wondering how they’re going to break the news.
As Brian pointed out to me back in July when this very site ran a contest to give Smooth Operators its name, the idea of a Sim Call Center is not original. A free-to-play game called Corporation Inc has been around since at least November of 2010. Smooth Operators is perhaps uncomfortably similar to it, but hey, some companies make billions doing this. At least the XBLIG is both a faithful tribute and a full evolution of the concept. Just make sure you keep an eye on your wallet in its presence. It’s a crafty bastard.
Funny how some of the most addictive games sound like weaponized boredom on paper.
Dante, in his infinite wealth.. of knowledge, couldn’t conceive what circle of Hell has sinners forced to work a call center. But managing a virtual one is undeniably addictive. First you have to build an operations center. Then you have to staff it. There’s three kinds of duties that need to be done: answer incoming calls, make outbound calls, and back office grunt work. A helpful meter in the upper right hand corner of the screen tells you the work load and how far each occupation has to go to complete that day’s allotment. You also have to hire janitors, IT guys, managers, and cheerleaders. Sudden thought: wouldn’t cheerleaders be counter productive for a call center? All that shouting and pompom waving is bound to be distracting, especially for a job that involves talking on the telephone. “Okay, well why don’t you tell me the nature of your computer proGIMMIE AN B! GIMMIE AN E! GIMMIE AN C! GIMMIE AN C! GIMMIE AN A! WHAT’S THAT SPELL? BECCA!” I wouldn’t be too happy about that, even if the people in Smooth Operators seem to like it.
There’s no real goal in Smooth Operators per se. You just build and staff buildings to earn money to build more buildings to staff to earn more money. So yea, time sink. But it works, and it plays relatively well. Shockingly, I enjoyed playing it more with an Xbox controller than I enjoyed playing the PC game it was, ahem, inspired by. BUT, I’m not totally in love with the interface. I don’t think it gives the player enough. One niggling little thing that bugged me was having to click on an employee’s desk and hope they were somewhere in the building to be able to upgrade them. The process is slow and cumbersome. Why can’t there be a drop-down menu that has a list of every employee, so that I can attend to them that way? Smooth Operators practically demands that you micro-manage all the dudes you hire, but as your staff increases, this becomes more tiresome.
There’s no “increase all wages” or really any helpful shortcuts at all. I figured hiring Human Resources Managers would take care of issues like schedules and vacation time for me, but it doesn’t. In fact, all they do is make employees work longer without them becoming less happy. In a roundabout way, this actually made my employees less happy, as they were now clogging all the facilities and elevators in my building. I wanted to upgrade things, but even after hiring several spendy “Project Managers” that serve to unlock goodies, unlockables just take too God damn long to get, and most of the early things they get for you are as useless as a fireproof surfboard. What the FUCK is a potted plant going to do to increase morale when people have to wait two hours to get down one story on an elevator? If this game were made in the United States, that potted plant would be used to bludgeon the nearest authority figure.
I guess people in Kyrksten like the increased workload and have more patience. Sigh. These are getting harder to work in.
Because of the slowness of the upgrades, and the indifference of my employees to water coolers, my moral dipped to record lows and my employees started resigning on me faster than I could appease them. Now, if this was Sim City, I would have responded in a perfectly calm and rational manner. Meaning I would have sent Godzilla in to kill and eat all my employees and knock the building over. Unfortunately, there’s no Godzilla, or earthquakes, or tornado, or alien invaders, or guys named Gustafsson who prefer to live on the 40th floor. Sigh, God damn Andreas. You couldn’t have used words like snickerdoodle or farfanoogin? Those would have been easier to work in.
So after I lost over half my employees, including most of my janitors and IT guys, I surveyed the remains of my once beautiful office building. Trash scattered everywhere. Computers smoking. Employees swearing at the slowness of the elevators. Mangers swearing at the employees. Cheerleaders cheering the one IT guy left who didn’t quit. Money drying up. Tasks being unfulfilled. I thought to myself “really? I spent the last eight hours of my life doing this and this is all I have to show for it?” After a brief period of reflection, I did the only thing that seemed rational at the time. I turned my Xbox back on and spent another eight hours doing the same thing.
Update: Gateways now includes an easier mode that will still eat your ass for lunch.
Halfway through Gateways, I had it pegged as the new #1 game on my site, and that Escape Goat had been slain. No joke. It has the most awesome hook of any XBLIG to date (2D Portal, enough said), a developer with big time credentials (a game on XBLA and a game already on my leaderboard), amazing retro-graphics, and some of the most clever puzzles I’ve ever seen in any game. #1? It’s a lock.
Actually, describing Gateways as essentially being a 2D Portal is way over-simplifying things. Portal was never this smart, nor did it give you this many things to do. You had two portals and maybe a cube to drag along with you. Even Portal 2, with its tractor beams, gels, and variations of the companion cubes, can’t touch Gateways for literally mind-numbing complexity. Strange as this sounds, Gateways is actually too smart, to the point of turning off some of my Uprising comrades.
See, this is why I wouldn’t make a good time traveler. I would take a razor to my old self’s throat, just to see what happens.
Once again, a puzzle game on XBLIG made me question what I thought I knew about gaming. As a kid, I always figured puzzlers were the product of a publisher pulling an Arliss Loveless, kidnapping top eggheads from around the world and forcing them to create puzzles, for profit! But no, it turns out you don’t need shackles, chloroform, or threats of bodily harm to create puzzles, meaning those things can stay in the bedroom where they belong. One dude came up with all the puzzles in Gateways. One fucking dude, presumably with a brain that outweighs a Volkswagen Beetle.
Playing as a kooky scientist who is trying to return to his lab’s command center (why doesn’t he just have Zordon teleport him?), you have to search around for new portal guns and abilities. Gateways is laid out like a Metroidvania, meaning you’ll end up doing a lot of backtracking, retracking, and teleporting around the map. This could have been hugely risky, but Smudged Cat put a big “go here” arrow on the map that appears as soon as you clear the latest puzzle. Smart. However, I still found the design somewhat problematic. Although there are special shortcuts that open up as you make progress, I feel some kid of magical “return to the starting spot” item would have cut down on some of the tedium involved. That, or include the ability to warp at your will from save point to save point, like LaserCat did.
Which brings me to the puzzles. They’re genius, and this is commendable. But the difficulty of finishing them, ahem, scales. My biggest complaint with Escape Goat was that there was no difficulty curve. Because you could pick levels in any order, Mega Man-style, that game couldn’t escalate the puzzles and make them tougher as you went along. Gateways has no such limitations. However, the curve of it was allowed to grow out of control. As a result, Gateways is possibly the most difficult platformer-puzzler in gaming history.
Things start out smoothly with the simple portal gun. It plays more or less exactly like a 2D Portal game. The first twist comes with the size portal thing, which allows you jump through one portal and come out the other end either larger or smaller. Sort of like Alice and Wonderland without having anything tell you “Eat me!” At this point, things are still pretty straight forward. And then comes the Time Travel gun. The idea behind it is you place one portal and then wait for some time to pass. Then, you place the second portal and hop through it. When you come out the other side, you travel back to that point, with your former self doing whatever it was you were doing while waiting for the time meter to fill. At this point, any sense of wonderment in the puzzles is replaced by conundrums designed to blow your cerebral cortex.
See this picture? You will be expected to recreate it at some point. If this doesn’t sound like something you think you are capable of doing, go try your hand at Diehard Dungeon. I’m not kidding. I can’t stress this enough: this game is fucking hard. I showed this picture to Brian, Bryce, and Cameron, and the results weren’t pretty. Brian walked out of the room, complaining of a headache. Cameron buried his head in his lap and began to cry. And poor Bryce keeled over dead.
Doc Brown would be thrilled with Gateways, which requires you to think 4th dimensionally. Once you’ve made “clones” of yourself, you have to use them to stand on switches and line up mirrors to deflect lasers, all within a small amount of time. Although you can get items that extend how long the time portal works, it never really eases up on the tension of getting everything absolutely fucking perfect, with no room for error. This is harder than it sounds, because moving from portal to portal is disorienting. Solving puzzles requires concentration, coordination, and cognitive thinking on a level no game in history has. That’s not hyperbole.
The first time I encountered a puzzle that used the time gun and required you to make clones of yourself that reflect a laser, I literally froze in my chair and processed the turn the game just made. Gateways wasn’t fucking around anymore. But the game wasn’t done. It added more abilities and guns. By the end of the game, puzzles require you to use multiple guns, time windows, and abilities. It’s so much to juggle that I sincerely doubt 99% of all people who play Gateways will ever actually finish it. Don’t believe me? Here’s a video of the solution to the final puzzle. Mind you, even with this video, people are having trouble finishing it. Don’t worry about spoilers either. There’s no possible way more than 5% of this will stick anyway.
I get a headache just from watching it. Now imagine trying to solve it yourself. Not just knowing the solution, but selecting the right guns, the angles of the mirror, lining them up correctly, paying attention to the orientation of the room, remembering where the already created clones will be standing, the locations of the switches and the lasers, what portals do what and lead where, and what order you’re supposed to do everything in. Hell, most people can’t stand on one foot and with their eyes closed.
Earlier puzzles offer a “help” system which really is just a “we’ll solve it for you” system. Throughout the game, you collect orbs. Every puzzle is marked with a “help” station that works in two parts. First, you have to pay five orbs just to see if you have the equipment necessary to finish it, even if you already know the answer. Then, if you get truly stuck, you can pay 40 orbs to have the game take over the control and finish the puzzle for you. I wasn’t a big fan of this set-up. I almost wish there had been some middle-ground option that steers you in the direction without outright playing the game for you. To solve some puzzles (including the final one), I cheated by putting numbered masking tape on my TV so that I would know where exactly to stand. Maybe something like that for 10 orbs would be preferable to having the game solve itself for you. Oh, and you can’t buy the solution to the final puzzle.
Needless to say, this difficulty spike makes Gateways a title that won’t be enjoyed by everyone. Or most people actually. I really, really enjoyed it, but I didn’t forget what it was. Or the many annoyances I experienced playing it. Not just the brain freezes, but little things. I found switching between the flashlight, mirror, and guns to be somewhat unintuitive, and that really makes the final few puzzles more annoying than they have to be. I found the flashlight stages aggravating. I don’t think the game really needed enemies at all, or dying, and these things could have probably been comfortably edited out. And I wish the game had a bit more personality. That’s really the difference between this and Portal: I wanted to solve the puzzles in Portal so that I could hear the next bit of hilarious dialog from GLaDOS or Cave Johnson. Gateways is played completely straight, and that’s really disappointing.
Brian wanted me to note that he did not find it difficult to cycle through the various items. Noted. Now I would like to note that he made it about 25% through the game before stopping and he never had to deal with the ultra complex stuff.
Right before publication, my buddy Tristan of Clearance Bin Review became the latest of many players I follow on Twitter that threw in the towel at some point on Gateways. I stuck it out, and I’m happy I did, but overall I believe Escape Goat is still the better game. It controls better, is more accessible to everyone, and has more personality. Gateways is hyper-intelligent, but that actually works against. It’s still, as of this writing, the second best game time I’ve ever had with an XBLIG, but such experiences will not be typical, so purchase at your own caution. You can’t possibly get a feel for how much grey matter this requires just from the demo. It catches you by surprise.
Let’s put it this way: imagine if every XBLIG had a human counterpart at a bar. Gateways would be the genius of the room who traps you in a corner, forgets who he’s talking to, and starts to practically speak in tongues. At first you feel like you’re privileged to be in the presence of such intelligence, but after an hour, with no end in sight, you start to look for any excuse to break up the conversation. By the way, Cute Things Dying Violently would be the frat boy making inappropriate dead-baby jokes, Don’t Die Dateless Dummy would be the slow, awkward kid who trips over his own tongue every time a cute girl walked into the room, and Sententia would be the guy who gets drunk, passes out, falls off the bar stool, and lands face-first into a puddle of his own vomit.
240 Microsoft Points heard Raventhorne has been doing the Dance of Joy ever since Sententia came out, as it’s no longer the defacto “disappointing game in an XBLIG showcase promotion” poster child in the making of this review.
Update: Diehard Dungeon now costs 240 Microsoft Points.
After Diehard Dungeon, it’s safe to say the Uprising is back on track. Comparing it to Sententia is like comparing flying in a private luxury jet to having your head stuffed up the ass of a burrow and trotted across country with your legs dangling the whole time. And here’s the funny part: unlike the Sententia, the argument of “it’s just not for everyone” is actually valid here. Roguelikes are not for everyone. And I’m generally among those that they’re not for. So it might surprise you to hear that I actually kind of enjoyed Diehard Dungeon. Then again, the only other Roguelike I tackled this year was Spelunky. Double D wasn’t nearly as sadistic. If both were school bullies, Diehard would be content to wedgie you and move on. Spelunky would trap you in a locker with live tarantulas while stealing your date to the Prom.
Which is not to say that Diehard Dungeon is all sunshine and lollipops. It’s got a mean-streak that might be the result of some design flaws. The idea is “Roguelike-meets-Zelda.” Only instead of an obnoxious fairy following you around, you have a mute treasure chest. Sure, why not? Levels are randomly generated, but all adhere to the same principle: fight enemies, find key, go to next room. Occasionally you’ll pick up items or spin a slot machine for upgrades, but really, Diehard Dungeon is all hacking, all slashing. The mechanics of this were done well enough that somehow the part of my brain that knew I was playing a Roguelike shut off. As a result, I was practically euphoric during my first play-through. I had built up twelve hearts, was having good luck with the slot machines, had absolutely slayed all three “upgrade” minigames that play out like a really shitty version of Pac-Man (these have GOT to go), and had the smuggest of smiles plastered on my face.
And then something that looked like an armed Cabbage Patch Kid knocked me into a corner and drained my entire stockpile of life in about four seconds. I had gone from not taking any damage to being dead before I could even process what was going on. There’s no temporary “immunity” when you take damage, so if you get pinned into a corner, you’re fucked amigo.
Games give you immunity for a reason: because the other way isn’t fun. Imagine if Mario didn’t blink after taking damage in the original Super Mario Bros. If you went from being big Mario, getting shrunk, and then dying because of the lack of blinking, that game does not become the all-time classic that it did. Hell, you might as well not have a life system and make all hits instant-death. But since you numbskulls can’t seem to grasp that, I’ve arranged a deal with Microsoft. From now on, all XNA starter kits will come with ankle monitors that must be worn to use the program. If you even think about allowing enemies to gang-bang you in the corner without having any means of defending yourself, you get a 50-volt shock.
Of course, word is this is already getting patched out, along with a few of my other complaints. The game frequently skips. This formed a “fuck me over” tag team with the aforementioned killer Cabbage Patch Kids. Well, it’s being fixed. Keys slow you down too much when you have them. That’s getting fixed. Bonuses don’t stack. That’s getting fixed too. Grumble. You guys are kinda ruining my schtick here. Oooh, I have one that I don’t think is getting fixed: you can’t slash diagonally. What the fuck is up with that? Do we live in a world where diagonal doesn’t exist? Bullshit. I saw something that looked like a triangle. You can’t have triangles without having diagonal. But I’m being nitpicky. Even in its present, non-patched state, Diehard Dungeon is pretty fun. It’s not only one of the best hack-and-slashers on XBLIG, it’s also one of the best twin-stick shooters too.
Wait..
Huh?
Yea, as it turns out, the developers tacked on a seemingly half-assed (at least compared to the main game) TwickS minigame as an afterthought and it could very well be the most fun TwickS on the entire marketplace. Go figure. It even has online leaderboards, which is more than qrth-phyl had to offer. I’m not complaining or anything, but it’s kind of weird. It would be like if Lord of the Rings had 1996 Chicago Bulls highlights play over the credits.
I’m guessing they never got over the whole Garbage Pail Kids thing.
Diehard Dungeon could very well be in a Beta state right now. Other planned changes include improving the graphics (which I had no complaints about, besides not being able to tell blood apart from hearts), fixing some of the cheap trap placement issues that happen when shit is random, improving the odds of getting the rare “gold keys”, and a whole slew of other things I never even thought to complain about. Mind you, Diehard Dungeon is already pretty damn good and well worth your money, but that’s not enough for the developers of it. They want it to be better. As opposed to deflecting critiques back with “It’s not for everyone, and I wouldn’t change anything.” It’s actually encouraging to see a developer so much on the ball that the ball can claim its personal space is being violated.
As I noted in my review of qrth-phyl, I get called out a lot for picking on developers. I really try to avoid this and focus on the game, but sometimes my methodology on criticism can seem like I’m going after someone when I’m not. If I say a developer’s game sucks, it’s taken to mean I think the developer sucks. And if I’m especially harsh on a game, it’s thought that I need to lighten up and look for positive things to talk about and “quit being so personal.” It’s never personal. Ever. So hopefully I’ve cleared that all up and can now focus on writing a balanced review.
Sententia is the worst Xbox Live Indie Game of the year.
I spent a few hours slogging through it, including accidentally scrubbing my save file while attempting to show someone how the game began, which meant I got to start over. Of all the critics who are covering the Uprising, I’m pretty sure I made the least progress in the game. I know there are people who say that a review doesn’t count if you don’t finish the game. To that I say, unless it has a magical stop-being-crappy section, I don’t think there’s anything I can possibly miss discussing about it.
The idea is you’re some kind of demon monster thingie (I think) who is coming of age and learning to use magical connect-the-dots to um, do something. I honestly have no clue. Which is odd because there’s certainly enough writing that I would hope to grasp what is going on. Instead, a kid just kinda wanders off on the woods, sees giant-sized devil thingies, and doesn’t turn around and run home to his daddy.
Sententia describes itself as an art game in its marketplace blurb. I’m not a huge fan of games that label themselves as such, because most that do so use it as an all-purpose bullet-proof vest for criticism. It gives a developer or a game’s fans the ability to deflect any valid complaints by saying “it’s art house, it’s not for everyone.” I got this vibe when I interviewed Michael last month. I came away liking the guy and admiring his amazing effort in organizing the Uprising. I also looked at his game, compared it to the other eight games, and figured it didn’t belong. And it doesn’t. I get no pleasure from saying that, but it’s true. It probably should have been the last game to release, so as to not taint the event.
Let’s picture non-regulars on the XBLIG scene catching wind of the Uprising through some of the big time coverage it has got. Sententia is the second game in the promotion, after the very good but also very weird qrth-phyl. Maybe qrth-phyl looked too weird to sample. Thus, Sententia becomes the first game that many people sample in this promotion that purports to show off the best XBLIG has to offer. Within fifteen minutes, everything wrong with Sententia becomes evident. Bad graphics. Annoying sound effects. Horrible play control. Sloppy interface. Bad writing. Cheap level design. Those people who think XBLIG is a joke and avoid the channel like the plague who decide to take a chance because of the hype say “this is the best Xbox Indies are capable of?” They don’t know that Sententia, and this will really sound harsh, only got in because it’s the game created by the guy who ran the promotion. So those people play this, are completely turned off by the scene, and they never come back.
And for the record, I feel like a total bitch for saying that.
Guys, next year I’m picking the order.
Sententia’s hook is that you occasionally have to pause the game and do a connect-the-dots puzzle. Every dot has little slash-marks on it, signifying how many lines will extend from it. This is actually a cool idea for a standalone game, assuming it’s done right. Sententia doesn’t do it right, mostly owing to the clumsy building interface. It’s slow-moving, awkward, and accident-prone. If you make a mistake, deleting a line can be an exercise in frustration. There were times where the cursor simply refused to highlight the line I wanted to delete. I had to delete all the other lines that it wanted to highlight instead before I could correct the mistake. There’s also no “clear-all, start over” button. So if you’ve totally cocked-up a puzzle (and you will do that a bunch, trust me), your punishment is to slowly clean up before starting over. I asked Michael if anyone had pointed this stuff out to him, and he said no, the play testing went well. So going off that, good job play testers! Given the nearly universal negative reaction to Sententia I’ve seen today, I can’t believe none of you thought “maybe I should say something.”
This is where I quit. The smaller, hard-to-see blocks in the center of the level drop quickly after you land on them. Because of the timing of the controls, you don’t have enough time to shoot the enemies or defend yourself in any way against them. It’s one of the most horribly conceived layouts I’ve ever seen in any game.
So the hook was botched. The rest of the game pretty much plays like a run-of-the-mill platformer, assuming the run was given to a recently lobotomized goldfish. The controls are horribly sluggish, with movement and jumping being slow. There’s a noticeable delay in responsiveness. So naturally the game has several sections that require timed-precision platforming with respawning enemies. The enemies are typically placed on narrow platforms, and will fire at you if you are on the same plane as them. Since you can’t jump and fire at the same time, you pretty much have no choice but to rely on luck and hope the game glitches out and the enemies get respawned on the wrong platform. That happens. And thankfully the enemies can’t possibly respawn on the wrong platform in a way that makes it impossible to proceed. Oh wait, that happens too. Don’t worry though, it won’t matter, because you’ll get stuck trying to walk past two respawning enemies on platforms that drop out from underneath you almost as soon as you step on them. Or “get as close to the edge as you can before jumping” platforms that are scattered all over the game. I honestly can’t come up with a single positive thing to say about the gameplay. It’s abysmal in every way a game can be.
I’m not sure how Sententia was released in the state it’s in, or how anyone, even the creator of the game, could be delusional enough to think this should have been included in an Xbox Live Indie Game showcase. A theory kicked to me on my Twitter feed is that Sententia made it in as a matter of convenience, because it was a game that was available and done. If that’s the case, I object to the use of the word “done.” Unless we’re using the “stick a fork in it, it’s done” context. Simply put, you don’t stick a game that is total and complete uncompromising and unapologetic garbage in a lineup of games designed to showcase the potential of a game platform on the grounds that there was nothing else available. It would be like not having enough food to cover a reception, so one lucky guest gets the honor of eating a plate full of shit. Again, not trying to pick on Michael Hicks. He’s a cool dude. But his game could very well be the worst game on the entire XBLIG platform, and should not have been used in a promotion designed to lure in new fans. Michael, I commend you for your efforts in the third Indie Games Uprising. You busted your ass hard for your fellow developers and you should be saluted for that. You spread the gospel of Xbox Live Indie Games like a modern-day John the Baptist. And, like John, your head ended up being served on a silver platter.
Last year’s Uprising started with Raventhorne. It took me about fifteen minutes to realize that the promotion was in trouble. When I played qrth-phyl, I took an instant dislike to it and thought “oh shit, here we go again.” But, while the reality of Raventhorne’s badness slowly sunk in, I didn’t even begin process how entertained I was by qrth-phyl. I’m not sure how many hours passed before I realized it was good. It was probably around the time that I told my dog “oh just go on the carpet! Can’t you see I’m busy here?”
Speaking of dogs, doesn’t this look like an advertisement for worm medication?
qrth-phyl does a lot of things right. Not the name though. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. Probably just by clearing your throat. No really though, come on. qrth-phyl? What is that? Mr. Mxyzptlk’s pet snake? Sure, it obeys the Google Rule in a major way. But it doesn’t exactly lend itself to word-of-mouth advertising. I could picture the following conversation taking place:
Gamer A: I just found this really cool version of Snake on Xbox Live Indie Games. It’s in 3D and it has some of the most bizarrely hypnotic gameplay I’ve ever seen.
Gamer B: Really? What’s it called?
Game A: It’s called, um, qarrrrr.. qerrrrrrth.. fuck it, have you ever heard of Dead Pixels?
It’s such a pretentious name, to the point of distraction. I get flak for calling artsy games as such, but what else can you say about it? If you give your game an unpronounceable name that doesn’t seem to connect to the actual gameplay at all, you probably smell like stale vaginal run-off on account of being a douchebag.
But, enough about the name. Let’s talk about why qrth-phyl has set the perfect tone for the Uprising. First off, the concept sounds ludicrous: Snake in 3D. Insanity I tells ya. Unless you account for the roughly six million (give or take) versions of Snake already on XBLIG. Suddenly, a 3D, single-player version seems like the perfect way to say “see, we can be different” that the community so desperately needs. Of course, that point would be lost if qrth-phyl sucked. Thankfully, that’s not the case at all. In fact, it’s pretty dang good.
Remember in the late 90s to early 2000s, back when every classic was getting a bastardized modern remake? I had them all, from Robotron 64 to Centipede to Defender. Well, qrth-phyl is probably better than any of those. However, it’s not as strong as the reigning champion of retro classic re-imagination on XBLIG: Orbitron. What qrth-phyl does right is the atmosphere. The bright, colorful, trippy graphics and electric soundtrack make this feel like what someone in 1976 imagined games of the future would be like.
But gameplay is king, and qrth-phyl does this well too. It reminded Brian of Rattler Race, a game that anyone who had early Windows computers probably wasted a little bit of time with. Gameplay starts on flat playing surfaces set on a cube or rectangle, but shifts to a fully 3D environment once you meet certain scoring benchmarks. You’ll continuously bounce between the two play styles, with the transition between the two typically a little rough around the edges. Disorientation was the main problem I had with qrth-phyl, especially in the 3D environments. The levels seem randomly generated, including the color schemes. Depending on the layout, I couldn’t get a good feel for things like depth or scale. Even playing on a TV large enough to double as the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man’s iPad, I was constantly braining on walls without realizing that I was close to them.
Raise your hands if this picture reminded you of Cubixx HD.
I’ve never been super comfortable endorsing any game where I can say “the controls take getting used to” and literally mean “it takes more than a couple of hours to really get the hang of them.” However, in qrth-phyl’s case, it almost seems appropriate. I went from being constantly frustrated to not even noticing that I was making hairpin turns and squeezing between tight spaces with honest-to-goodness ease. I almost wish I had never realized I was doing it. Once it stuck me that “hey, I’m doing bad ass at this!” my mojo went the way of the dodo and I could barely press start without losing a life. I wish I was kidding. I never did beat that cunt Hurley’s score either.
Yea, I busted the developer’s ass for being a fart-sniffer, but I don’t deny that he’s created something very special here. It’s not perfect, but qrth-phyl outranks all but one of the games from last year’s Uprising on my leaderboard. I would say that’s a hell of a start to the promotion. I don’t know if qrth-phyl will be the type of game you go back to. Still, I got over three hours of playtime with qrth-phyl and was totally hypnotized by it. It’s a perfect time waster, especially if you’re waiting for the carpet cleaners to come clean up the mess the, ahem, dog made on the carpet. Yes, that was the dog. I wouldn’t, say, just take a dump right on the floor because I’m too absorbed in a game to walk ten feet to the bathroom. Come on now, I’m totally civilized.
qrth-phyl was developed by FUCK YOUR ACCUSING EYES, IT WAS THE DOG! BAD DOG! BAD BAD DOG!
And that’s a wrap on Oozi. One game. Four chapters. $4 spent. Four boss fights that made me question the existence of evil on this Earth. Zero attempts at originality. But is the overall experience worth it? Kind of. Let’s start by recapping the previous chapters.
Part One: AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!! Well, that sucked.
Part Two: AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!! Oh hey, wait a second, it stopped sucking.
Part Four: Still not bad. Oh wait, I have to feed this thing fruit? AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!! This is boring.
Best as I can see, this fucking thing has legs, so why do I have to feed him? I think this is what the Republicans have been warning us about.
Oozi’s problem is and always has been how unambitious it is. It does the graphics thing really well, but does everything else so much by the book that the book is now claiming royalties on the series. Oozi is the poster child for generic 90s platforming mascot. Like Serpentor, its creators borrowed the DNA from such soulless, design-by-committee, me-too cash-ins as Aero the Acro-Bat, Bubsy the Bobcat, or Crash Bandicoot. I was going keep that going all the way to Z, but I figured you guys would hire ninjas to insert burrowing cockroaches into my ear canal after I listed Donkey Kong Country and Earthworm Jim as soulless. Which they are, but I probably shouldn’t say it. Fans of those games take it too personal.
I’ll grant Oozi this: it’s not original, but it does what it does well. Paint-by-numbers levels, almost too easy platforming, hop-on-heads cruelty to animals, double jumps, butt stomps, and every other stand-by of the genre. If the subject is anything but sound effects, Oozi is decent. Not spectacular. Not memorable. Not something you’ll enthusiastically tell your friends to try. Just a good solid waste of 90 minutes per chapter. All four chapters are more or less the same, with the same scaling of difficulty, same principles of level design, and a hugely tedious boss fight to cap it off.
That’s probably the thing that pisses me off the most about Oozi: so many of the tasks of the game are busy work. In chapter four, there’s a couple of sections where you have to feed fruit to a monster. To get the fruit, you have to butt-stomp the ground by the fruit. Then, you have to carry the fruit, tossing it between enemies, over gaps, and up platforms. You move slow when carrying the fruit, and you can’t jump. If anything touches the fruit, you get to start over. It’s sooooooo boring, not at all difficult, and takes way too long to accomplish. But, and this is the thing that almost drove me towards taking up genocide, these sections don’t immediately place checkpoints after completing them. So let’s say you spend ten minutes getting this entitled mother fucking critter its food. Then, a random volcano spits up a fire-ball and you die. Guess what you get to do? That’s right, start all the way fucking over. And that happened to me. Twice. After the first time, I almost rage quit. The second time, I seriously wanted to personally strangle a species into extinction. I don’t care which one, but something fluffy and adorable would have been swell.
“So my agent says to me “Bob, baby, we have a part for you in the next Simpsons Halloween Special.” But nooooooo, I have to take the starring villain role in some dry ass independent video game. Way to go, Bob!”
Oozi did end on a bright note: the very final boss was probably the least annoying of the series. As a result, Oozi 4 finds a spot on the leaderboard. It’s not as good as parts two or three, but it’s way better than part one. Then again, so is gonorrhea, so that’s not saying much. Ultimately though, if Oozi is remembered for anything, it will be for being the ultimate uncanny valley of XBLIGs. Oozi is a game you’ll swear you played on your SNES back in the day. Depending on your level of gibbering nostalgia, that might be a better thing than I experienced. As a child of a different era, I would like to put out this challenge to Awesome Games Studio: you guys are better than this and you know it. You created a series that is amazing to look at, but when it came to gameplay you settled for functional. I’ve seen artwork made out of feces that is more inspired. So next time, try something new and weird. Think of every fucked up thing you ever thought of doing with a platform game and give it a shot. The best case is you’ll have a game that people talk about as something other than a lifeless 90s platforming clone. The worst case is, well, you end up with a pile of shit. But hey, your mascot already looks like the bastard offspring of the Great Mighty Poo, so the status quo remains intact!
Xbox Live Indie games release in streaks. Whole weeks will go by with nothing coming out. Then Zeus will declare “unleash the Crapan!” and a flood of sewage-saturated indies will hit. Honestly, it’s not that bad. It’s just always a little overwhelming in a “where do I begin?” sort of way. Starting with a game like Volley seems like a good warm-up act, until I remember that well-meaning, not at all horrible games that have little in the way of gameplay can be just as soul-crushing for me to write about as a terrible game is to play.
Volley is the second game I’ve played this week that was created by students, only these ones come from Munich. Smart people they have in Munich. They all speak German fluently. Crazy impressive, huh? Volley is similar to a previous XBLIG I encountered: Bug Ball, a game that both myself and Brian really enjoyed. Volley tries to play like an evolved version of it. There’s more power-ups and you’re given more control over the ball. So how come I didn’t like it as much as Bug Ball? Perhaps the games are too similar. Both are 2D, arcade-oriented versions of volleyball. Both are pretty heavy on the glitchy side. Both can be played with up to four-players, although Volley skimps on online play in favor of not having online play.
What makes Volley different is you play as a circle that grows a bulge in it when you fiddle with the stick. And I just realized that did not come out right. I meant to say that if you tug on the right stick, it grows an erect extension that can be used for smacking the balls that come at it. I mean, you know what? Fuck it, here’s the trailer.
Okay, see what I’m talking about? It does that. But honestly, that appendage thing isn’t that big a deal, as most of the time we just jumped up and bopped the ball without swinging at it. You can use it to create a power shot, but none of us could quite get the hang of it. The physics of using the bulge seem to be lacking a bit of oomph. Speaking of oomphless stuff, the power-ups are mostly worthless. All one of them does is turn the lights out, which might make a difference if all the players and the ball didn’t suddenly light up like they were dipped in plutonium. Other times, it will put up little water-fall blocks that you have to hit the ball over or under. Or it will put a bomb on the table. No clue what the point of that is, since it never once detonated anywhere near a player. Finally, it will sometimes drop multiple balls onto the table. This is fine for 2 v 2 play, but one-on-one it’s simply a dick move because you can’t possibly keep both balls alive.
Even with all the problems, Volley is perfectly decent waste of a one dollar, provided you haven’t already played Bug Ball. Volley did make me wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn’t already played such a similar game. Nah, I don’t think that’s the case. Bug Ball was also slightly more fast paced, had a bigger variety of courts, and the grab-mechanics were more fun than the appendage thing that Volley has. Yea, this is really unfair. Volley is a pretty fun and should be rated on its own. But I can’t. This is like trying to decide if Zack or Cody is hotter. An absurd debate, by the way. It’s clearly Cody.
To make a game that is a local-only four player top-down 2D arena shooter on a market like Xbox Live Indie Games takes guts. That’s because you’re making a game with the full knowledge that it will be a tougher sell than a steak house in the middle of Mumbai. I’ve played a few multiplayer-only games on XBLIG and they tend to range from solid hit to complete miss. Nothing so far has really found the middle ground. Well that’s over with, because Warp Shooter stubbornly refuses to be either awesome or horrible.
Warp Shooter is the product of a group of students from Indiana. Their story is a fascinating one that will be told in an upcoming edition of Tales from the Dev Side. This is the third student project I’ve reviewed, following Mr. Gravity and Heroes of Hat, both out of the University of Utah. The relatively simple puzzler Mr. Gravity, despite becoming impossibly difficult in later stages, was good enough to make the leaderboard. Heroes of Hat, a more ambitious title, was plagued with various technical glitches, unfair level design, and bad control. Obviously simpler works better for students.
This is what happens when George Lucas runs out of ideas: Rainbow Brite joins the Rebel Alliance.
I guess that’s why it’s weird to see a relatively simple concept turned so overly complex. Warp Shooter plays like a modernized version of Combat. I gathered three amigos (sadly not THE Three Amigos, although I hear Martin Short is insatiable) and asked them kindly to help me with my latest review. When they refused to do it out of kindness, I offered to bribe them. Finally, I had my goons take their families hostage. Hey, I have a duty here, and they were fucking with it.
Things got off to a slow start when nobody could figure out how to move. There’s no tutorial, so the four of us fumbled around, doing our best to pretend like we knew what we were doing. Most firing was done from a stationary position, until Chevy figured out that movement was done by pressing the right trigger while pointing the right stick in the direction you want to go. Mind you, the right stick also controls your firing. Thrust is limited, so you’re never in full control of your vehicle. You do have the ability to aim a little dot thingy that causes damage to an opponent if it touches them, or you can warp to the spot the dot is on. It’s supposed to provide an alternate means of movement, but it’s slow and clunky and it doesn’t provide the element of being unpredictable that other movement means has. You can see where the person is warping to. It’s like drawing a diagram for your enemies. “I’ll be moving here. Take aim and fire at your leisure.” It would be like the army replacing fatigues with tee shirts supplied by Target.
The best party games tend to be self-explanatory. Warp Shooter is regrettably missing that. We never did get the hang of it, but after about twenty to thirty minutes, it did provide moderate fun. The absurd amount of options provided assures that you would have to be actively trying to not have fun to, well, not have fun. When we turned on three asteroids and death rays, we were whooping and laughing and high-fiving each other, even though we could barely move. It was like watching the Narcoleptic Olympics. I can barely squeeze out something resembling a recommendation for Warp Shooter, but chances are when it only makes the Leaderboard on the grounds that “well, it’s playable!” that’s a sign that maybe some aspects of the game should be rethought. Starting with the movement controls. I can’t imagine anything that is more awkward or dangerous to use. Maybe a B-52 which has their weapons mapped to their intercom button.
80 Microsoft Points reserve the right to murder the next person from Indiana who uses a lame “Hoosier Daddy” joke in the making of this review. I’m looking at you, Kenneth.
City Tuesday was developed by Return to Adventure Mountain
Indie Gamer Chick 
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