5 Minutes RPG

May 24, 2012 by 3 Comments

UPDATE: 5 Minutes RPG is now $1.

5 Minutes RPG, or 5MinRPG as its known on the marketplace for reasons that baffle me, is a little misleading in its name.  It’s not really an RPG in the strictest sense, nor does it only last for five minutes.  It plays more like an action-based dungeon-crawler.  At least I think it does.  This is one of those “tough love” games that mostly leaves players to figure things out on their own.  There’s a couple help screens, but they’re not much use.  The first level acts as a sort of tutorial, but ended before my head scratching did.  And trust me, I don’t have head lice.

Anymore.

The idea is you’re a wizard (or wizards, but I didn’t get a chance to play co-op, more on that later) who has to work his way through a series of randomly generated dungeons, fighting monsters, opening treasures, and slaying bosses.  There are six levels and one final boss fight.  I didn’t even make it half-way through the quest without giving up, so I can’t tell you what you fight in the end.  I will say that you better hope it’s not straight above you, because otherwise you’ll be in big trouble.

I get the impression that 5 Minutes RPG started out as a turn-based strategy game and devolved into the sloppy hack-and-slasher that ended up on the marketplace.  Screens are broken up into hexagonal segments that limit what direction your character can move and shoot.  You can go straight in a horizontal line, but you can’t move vertically up and down, only diagonally.  This makes no sense at all in an action RPG.  It makes all movement feel clunky, and lining up to attack enemies a chore.  I quit on the third boss, because I was getting surrounded on all sides by enemies.  Even with a weapon that could attack in all six directions, it didn’t really work as advertised.  I could still only damage the one enemy I was pointing at.  While the enemies on the other five sides could leisurely chew on my ass, my attack (of which the animation did seem to touch them) had no effect.  What is the point of even having something that attacks in all six directions in a hexagonal based game if the developers didn’t take the time to make sure its range actually covered all six directions?

If it wasn’t for that, I could probably recommend 5 Minutes RPG.  It wouldn’t be stellar or anything, but it would probably be a decent waste of time with a few friends.  I really do get the impression that you need to play in co-op to have a fighting chance.  Even when I took the time to kill all the enemies and level up my weapons, I couldn’t get past that third boss because I was being absolutely gang-banged on all sides by the boss and minor baddies.  If someone had been there to take the load off, I might have been able to fight off two or three guys.  By myself, I would enter the boss chamber and watch my health go from full to empty in just seconds once all the enemies spawned around me.  And this was on the normal difficulty.  I’m guessing on anything higher, the enemies would have raked my face across the pavement and then poured quicklime on my quivering body.

If 5 Minutes RPG was an experiment, let’s call it a failed one and move on.  It’s not the biggest conceptional stillbirth I’ve seen here, but it’s close.  The combat system just doesn’t work, and never really had the potential to.  I like the idea of bite-sized, randomly generated dungeons that I can complete in a couple of minutes while I wait for my bagel to get toasted.  Do you know what I like more?  Being able to move in a straight vertical line.  I find it to generally be an important aspect of gameplay.  I never liked how Q*Bert controlled either, but at least I’m young enough to say I think that game sucks and have old timers pass it off as being a smart-assed whippersnapper.  Of course, comparing Q*Bert to 5 Minutes RPG is unfair.  The only thing they have in common is you need some kind of inner-ear disorder for the controls they use to feel intuitive.

5 Minutes RPG was developed by Andreil Game

Points of Sale: Xbox Live Indie Games

$3 still have no clue what the point of having enemies drop gold was in the making of this review.


Video courtesy of Alan at The Indie Ocean

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MiG Madness

May 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

You’ll probably get 80 Microsoft Points worth of entertainment out of MiG Madness.  It’s a solid wave-shooter in the styling of Time Pilot that features four player co-op.  No storyline or bullshit cut scenes.  It’s just you, your buddies, some power-ups, and some bad guys.  There’s not a lot of meat on the bone, but what it here is fairly palatable, making MiG a solid waste of an hour.  I almost have nothing to complain about.

Almost.

MiG’s graphics are not spectacular or anything, but it does have decent character models and pretty looking clouds.  I would probably have liked these things more, but it quickly became obvious that MiG could serve as a poster child for developers allowing ascetics to get in the way of gameplay.  MiG suffers from all kinds of visibility issues.  You often can’t see your bullets, but more importantly, you often can’t see those of the enemies either.  In a game that is all about shooting things and dodging bullets, that is pretty significant problem.  The bullets just blend it too much with the background, and sometimes the planes do too, depending on what color the backdrop is.  The game constantly switches between day and night, dusk and dawn, meaning that no matter what color ship you choose, keeping an eye on it can be troublesome.  I had the best luck with yellow, even if it made me feel like I was flying a giant Twinkie.

I’ve played other games here where the graphics got in the way of gameplay.  I do get it.  Better graphics equals more commercial appeal.  However, I don’t think anyone is going to look at a game that looks like this:

And say that they’re sold on it based on how gosh darn swell the clouds look.  A person is either going to want a quirk-and-dirty wave shooter themed on vintage military planes or they won’t.  MiG is not a bad game by any means.  It’s fun in single player or co-op, has a nice variety of weapons (even if some of the missile-based stuff is too slow to be useful), and controls pretty decently.  It’s the type of game that you can spend a buck on, play for an hour, feel satisfied, and never go back to it again.  If it wasn’t for the graphics getting in the way, I wouldn’t have to include “but..” with all of that.  Sadly I do.  It’s a big but, I cannot lie.  You developers have got to try.  When a title shows up with a pretty face but busted gameplay all over the place, it is dung.

MiG Madness was developed by Bionic Shark Studios

80 Microsoft Points promise to never do that again in the making of this review. 

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Miasma 2

May 18, 2012 by 12 Comments

Having never played the original Miasma, I wasn’t sure if this would be one of those instances where I would feel like a party crasher.  But, the developer sent me a review request, the trailer looked slick, the graphics were really good-looking for an XBLIG, and I think it’s probably a good idea to only piss people off every 48 hours.  Thus, I shelved my planned Sonic 4 review again and bought Miasma 2.  I mean, how bad could it be?

Well, it’s not that Miasma 2 is bad, or at least it probably isn’t if you’re into turn-based tactics games.  I wouldn’t say I hate them, but I rarely get into them.  I finished Final Fantasy Tactics and a couple of the Advance Wars games, and I kind of, sort of dug Valkyria Chronicles.  But I wouldn’t describe my relationship with Tactical games the same way I would with Tower Defense, where I never think about them but tend to get hooked on them when I actually play them.  Tactical shit generally has to be exceptionally good for me to get into it.  Or so stupidly idiotic, like Valkyria was, that I keep playing just to ogle the train wreck.

For what it’s worth, the game really does look this good.

So I struggled with Miasma 2, because I just found the whole thing to be so damn bland.  Everything here is generic.  The character designs, the enemies, the backdrops, and especially the story.  The game allows you to choose between playing as a chick or a dude, so I chose the chick.  The opening tutorial stage requires you to take out a couple of enemies and rescue your husband.  Right from the get-go, Miasma 2 doesn’t do a good job explaining the play mechanics.  All movements and actions feel overly complex and unintuitive.  Special abilities aren’t well explained, damage ratios barely get mentioned, and it ended before most of my questions were answered.  It’s like getting swim lessons from an instructor that is secretly taking bets on what child will be the first to drown.

The tutorial ended with me saving my husband.  And then there was the story.  Lots and lots of boring story.  And inconsistent story too.  So the dude I rescued is my husband.  At some point, he asked me why I saved him, if it was because he was a soldier or if there was more to us than that.  And then you get to choose which one it is.  Well, this is kind of fucked up on account of it already being established that we’re married.  God, it would suck to serve with these two.  They’ve already tied the knot and yet all their conversations still sound like the clumsy small-talk of two preteens with puppy love in their eyes.  I only played a few levels before getting bored and quitting, so I’m trying to picture what kind of dialog I’m missing.  I would not be surprised if at some point the wife turns to her husband and asks if he wants to go steady with her.

Between levels, you navigate a small hub world from a first-person perspective, and it’s pretty well done.  I almost wish they had figured out how to add guns to that and just turned this into a Perfect Dark clone.  Once things get back to the battlefield, the tedium returns.  In the second level, you are given a tank-thing that you can barely move, a couple extra guys to move around, and some frag grenades, which I quickly used to take out a couple grunts and a mech-thingie.  Then more baddies came in, and I was already dying on account that I didn’t grasp the concept of hiding behind shit to avoid getting shot.  I decided to restart the level.  Except this time, the game forgot to give me my grenades back.  I don’t know if I somehow walked over something that picked them up and didn’t realize it, or if the game glitched out, but I had no grenades.  I also was so bored out of my fucking skull by this point that Brian suggested it might be on account of me needing a nap.  So I took a nap, woke up, restarted the game, got my grenades back somehow, finished the stage, and it still wasn’t fun.

Thankfully, you can make the whole stage’s grid visible in the options menu. Why on Earth would you want to play with it turned off?

I did try the third level, but I realized quickly that there was no potential left for myself to have any entertainment with Miasma 2, so I bailed on it.  I’ve done that a few times here at Indie Gamer Chick, but this time it really wasn’t out of spite.  I just didn’t enjoy anything at all and I saw no potential for it to get better.  I’m not one of those critics who will say “yea, it wasn’t for me, but the graphics were really well done and they obviously put a lot of work into this game, so you should try it.”  I can’t do that.  I didn’t even hate Miasma 2.  I just don’t want to ever play it again.  I can say firmly that if you enjoy Tactical stuff on the same level I do (which is barely at all), this game won’t cause an epiphany.  If you’re a fan of the genre, I honestly don’t think you’ll get any amusement out of it besides the fact that it’s $1 and functional.  I might be wrong.  Maybe Alan, Tim, or Tristan will say otherwise.   I would like to see something else by ESP Games, because they clearly have the technical chops.  Now they just need to figure out how to nail down that whole “don’t make a boring game” thing and they’re set.

Miasma 2 was developed by ESP Games

80 Microsoft Points said the only thing they could have read on my mind while playing this was BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHH in the making of this review.

 

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A Madman’s Guide To Happiness.

May 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

Trying to keep regular updates on my site can be a bit of a bitch at times.  Clearing 200+ reviews in under a year was probably not the best idea, because finding time to keep up that established pace can be trying.  I had to put a slight delay on my planned massacre of Sonic The Hedgehog 4, and here it is, 11:00PM and I still haven’t done a review today.  Thank Christ for Xbox Live Indie Games, where titles that can be beaten in five minutes or less are as abundant as McDonalds, although not nearly as healthy for you.

Well, it is Thursday, and thus it’s time for a Katch-Up.  I had been given a heads-up that A Madman’s Guide To Happiness was short, shitty, and insane enough for me to get a good review out of it.  Well, they got two out of the three right.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s shitty.  That’s mostly because it doesn’t last long enough to leave any impression on me at all, really.  I hate to call any game I play a Mulligan, but Jesus, five minutes isn’t a lot to go on.

Are there any annoying kids in your life that you never want to have to speak to again? Show them that picture, tell them you turn into that whenever there’s a full moon, and you won’t have that problem ever again.

The basic idea is you’re reading the computer of some psychotic dude who sets up a couple of puzzles for you to solve.  And by puzzles, I mean stuff that seems like it was copied straight out of Highlights for Children that had its innocence stripped away by being forced to watch Nicolas Cage’s snuff film collection.  Basic math questions, a trick-question style riddle, and even one of those “count the triangles pictured, but don’t forget that small triangles make big ones” things.  It’s as if John Wayne Gacy was forced to repeat the first grade.

Between all these brain teasers that are about as stimulating as a medically induced coma, you get to read these rambling, incoherent ravings by the titular madman.  I have to say, at first I figured the game was trying to be weird for the sake of being weird, but actually I was sort of taken in by the creepiness of it all, the same way I was with Silver Dollar Games’ Fatal Seduction.  I became a little invested in it.  And then it ended in roughly half the time my average bowel movement takes.  The really weird part?  Like a good bowel movement, it was oddly satisfying.  I don’t know if that makes it worth the $1 it costs, but hell, people pay more than that for X-Lax.  Sometimes you just need a nice, satisfying dump.

A Madman’s Guide to Happiness was developed by Jaded Horizon

80 Microsoft Points honestly, truly cannot believe I ended up liking this weird ass piece of shit enough to give it a positive review in the making of this review.

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Pendulous

May 15, 2012 by 7 Comments

I’m sure there are games out there similar to Pendulous, where the idea is to swing from pendulum to pendulum trying to reach a goal in the shortest time possible.  I already had someone tell me that it’s not all that different from Jungle Hunt, a game I never played.  Jungle Hunt was a product of the Golden Age of Arcades, circa 1982.  I’m a product of unprotected sex, circa 1988.  However, as it turns out, Jungle Hunt is included in Tatio Legends for the original Xbox, which I actually own.  So I fired it up and discovered that the person was totally wrong.  Well, that was a waste of an opening paragraph.

The idea is you swing from spot to spot as a little cog thing, latching onto the nearest swing-point automatically.  Using the left and right triggers (or the stick if you’re an idiot, more on that later), you build up momentum to launch yourself to the next spot.  As you progress through the meager fourteen stages, various traps and obstacles pop up, including one annoying section featuring a red gunky sludge stuff that seemed to bubble up at random and was the only bit of  true frustration in the game.  Well, that and the fact that the developers made a liar out of me.

Dear Datura loving twats: that shit was NOT art. Now THIS is art.

When I reviewed Cuddle Bear, I noted that I would immediately discontinue playing any game at the first instance of a leap-of-faith moment.  So naturally Pendulous was full of those types of moments.  Only I didn’t quit the game.  I kept going.  And thus I’m a big liar.  At least my excuse is good one: Pendulous is a really well done game.  The problem is, there was no need to map the swinging mechanics to both the sticks and the trigger buttons.  The triggers work just fine, so the stick should have been used to move the camera.  There’s just too many spots where you can’t see the next object you’re swinging to.  Or traps that move up and down are off-screen, so you can’t possibly calculate when the appropriate time to jump is.  This was probably related to the porting of this game over from Windows Phone, which the developer noted to me had been the cause of a few issues.

This is where being The Chick is tough, because I have to say something that is probably devastating for a developer to hear: this game was so good that it had a spot on the leaderboard all locked up.  I really loved it.  This is exactly the kind of original, quirky type of game I expected to find in the XBLIG channel when I started this site, and it’s worth your money right now.  The length of the game didn’t bother me at all.  Fourteen quickie stages that are sublime (plus another 14 mirrored ones, snore)  is preferable to a four-hour game that struggles to tread water.  But that damn camera issue was like the iceberg to Pendulous’ Titanic.  Its chances were sunk.  All is not lost.  They already planned to add more levels, and Do Better Games are aware of my concerns, because I sent them a singing telegram.  Only I misread the job description.  It was actually a singeing telegram, who knocked on their door and proceeded to set himself on fire.

Well, they got the message.  The game needs a camera, and then they need to issue what could be the most important Second Chance with the Chick challenge in the history of this site.  They would probably get to it sooner, but because of my screw-up, they first have to clean up a hell of a mess on their porch.

Pendulous was developed by Do Better Games

80 Microsoft Points noted Polish is a nationality, not a race, so that technically makes me xenophobic, not racist, in the making of this review.

You can also read my buddy Hurley’s review at Gear-Fish for this very title.

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SEAL Team 12

May 12, 2012 by 11 Comments

SEAL Team 12 comes to us via Social Loner Studios, the nutjobs behind the hilariously absurd Bird Assassin.  I have to admit, I didn’t think SEAL would be any good.  I think my exact words to Brian were “oh great, another TwickS on XBLIG that tries to ape some 80s shooter I never played.”   Plus it was overpriced at 240 Microsoft Points, because some developers hold on to their belief that their game will sell despite that price point.  It’s kind of cute in a demented “twenty-year-old still believes in Santa Claus” kind of way.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find SEAL Team 12 to be a pretty decent game.  The idea is the world is being threatened by the Guardians Of Devastation, or GOD for short.  Ah, I see what you did there, Social Loner Studios.  Actually, Stevie Wonder can see what you did there on account of the joke being run into the ground about half-way through the game.  Sure, there’s enough anti-GOD puns to make Christopher Hitchens’ corpse obtain the rare status of “double rigor” if you catch my drift, but damn do they lay it on a little too thick.  The rest of the humor mostly works.  Every stage begins with an NPC character (that is wearing a red-shirt for double the geek points) being killed by whatever is the newest enemy added to the game.  This actually caused me to laugh out loud a few times.  The only time it fell flat was when the dead man walking was named Kenny.  I accurately predicted a horrible “oh my God, they killed Kenny” joke, and then watched in disgust as the prophecy was fulfilled.  Jesus Christ, people!  When the guys who created the joke realize it’s not funny anymore and drop it, maybe it’s time to get a fucking clue.

The game itself is a typical Commando-style “walk upwards, kill dudes, walk upwards a little more, kill more dudes” twin-stick shooter .  If this was done straight-laced, it would have been boring.  Thankfully, the game has what so many XBLIGs don’t: personality.  The witty dialog that opens every stage, the moments where you see enemy conversations, and the well done cast of characters.  Considering that the genre couldn’t possibly be more tired if it took an entire bottle of Valium, the effort to dress it up is admirable.  When you strip away all the ascetics, SEAL Team 12 is as generic as it gets.  Walk, shoot, throw grenades, pick up weapons, occasionally hop in a tank, fight a few bosses, end credits.  Quite frankly, everyone should approach a game like this with skepticism.

And it’s not like what is here is done perfectly either.  There are a few problems.  The weapon selection is limited and clichéd.  All weapon pick-ups are done via duel-wielding, mapped to the left trigger to fire, while your right hand always retains the default machine gun.  The setup works, but there’s not enough weapon drops, and what is here is limited.  Some of the guns, particularly the flame-thrower, are worthless.  You get an unlimited amount of normal grenades, but you can’t stack any special ones you pick up.  Given how outlandish the plot and characters were, they should have gone nuts with the variety of guns.  But they didn’t, and the game suffers a lot for it.

A bigger problem is the game becomes a bit of a bullet-hell in the final stages.  Let’s be clear about something:  bullet-hells work in space-shooters when you’re a nimble ship and the battlefield leaves plenty of room to maneuver.  They tend not to work if you’re a clunky, slow-moving steroid freak that has various obstacles you have to walk around.  The game got so ridiculous at the end that we had to swallow our pride and set the difficulty to easy.  Shameful for sure.  Not as shameful as, say, announcing a fake contest for a popular new release on Twitter, then creating a fake account designed to be the “winner” five minutes after you announce the contest.  Then retweeting posts from people your original account follows to pad things out.  And not remembering to try to type different than you typically do.  Or even more brazenly, only retweeting one person’s “wow, I’m so excited, I hope I win!” tweet out of the dozens you receive from gullible people who think you actually have something to give away, and having it be from the fake account you just made five minutes after your fake contest began, making the fix so obvious that a person could accurately predict to multiple witnesses the outcome of the “drawing” for the second straight contest you’ve held.  I mean, theoretically, if your contest was a real random drawing, nobody could possibly predict the outcome of the winner once, never mind twice in a row.  Finally, as soon as your fake contest is over, you never Tweet from that fake account again, just to finally and officially confirm what an oblivious loser you are for thinking nobody would catch on.  Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Despite a few hang-ups, SEAL Team 12 is really well done. Yea, it offers nothing new as a game, but it’s still fun.  In fact, I’m kind of surprised at how well it works in both single player and co-op.  Yea, the price point is kind of stupid.  Sure, some of the jokes fall flat.  You know, Social Loner Studios have been off my radar, but they’re actually 2 for 2 here at Indie Gamer Chick.  But, they haven’t made a leaderboard contender yet.  They probably have the talent to do so, so I’ll be keeping an eye on them.  Well, I’m also doing that because I think they’re fucking insane and might kill and eat me if I turn my back on them.

SEAL Team 12 was developed by Social Loner Studios

IGC_Approved240 Microsoft Points noted that nobody’s fake contest was mentioned in particular, so if you think I’m talking about you, that really says more about you than me in the making of this review.

SEAL Team 12 is also available for PC on Desura for $2.99.  This version is unverified by Indie Gamer Chick.  The XBLIG version is Chick Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

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Droppin’ Ballz

May 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

Droppin’ Ballz is one of those “fall as far as you can” games.  My gut tells me it was designed with tilt-controls in mind.  Because Microsoft opted to not go with a motion-controller like everyone and their mom and instead decided to create a device that plays like Minority Report as invented by the chronically unambitious, Ballz is stuck using the trigger buttons instead.  I guess this control scheme works, but it never feels quite right.   My biggest complaint, that the game moves too slowly, is easily corrected by adjusting the difficulty.  The game is set to easy on default, but it’s only really tolerable on normal or higher.  And that’s assuming you play the game on its classic mode, where you just fall from one platform to another.  I was ready to write off Droppin’ Ballz as just another phone-style faller that has no place on a console.

I think the developers were droppin’ something, but it wasn’t ballz.

And then I tried Fever mode, which feels like you’re falling through the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland, only without having to drop acid.  Actually, I imagine if you dropped acid while playing this, it would be pretty fucking bad ass, but probably a little too difficult to play.  The idea is still  the same: fall from platform to platform, try to not miss the platforms, and try not to land on the black platforms.  Only in this mode, the background changes color and tries to distract you, plus there are perspective-altering “power-ups” that shift what angle you view the game from.  This is what the whole game should have been like.  It’s as if developers flipped a coin to decide if they would go the generic route or the trippin’ on mushrooms route, and the coin fell down a sewer grate.  And they couldn’t flip another because then they wouldn’t have enough change left to get a Mountain Dew, so they said “fuck it” and continued working on the inferior classic mode as well.

I actually did like Droppin’ Ballz, but I have a tough time recommending it.  There’s no online leaderboards, so there’s really no point in playing it.  Hell, even the local leaderboards are all kinds of fucked up.  In theory, there should be six boards: one for each game mode on each difficulty level.  The point values increase on the higher difficulty stages, so ranking a game played on the tedious easy mode over the medium mode is silly.  But that’s how it’s done in Droppin’ Ballz.  Even worse, it ranks games played in Classic mode against games played in the wacky Fever mode, which makes no sense at all.  I guess Fever Mode is good for a twenty-minute distraction and priced accordingly, so I do mildly recommend it.  I would rather see this game on iPhone, with online leaderboards.  I could see it being a big, word-of-mouth hit on there.  It would be a perfect fit on a platform developed by an acid-dropping, corporate hippie.  They could rename it “Jobs Ball.”

Droppin’ Ballz was developed by He-3 Software

80 Microsoft Points heard Hurley gave his hopes up when he heard that there was a way to make your balls drop for just 80MSP in the making of this review.

Gameplay footage courtesy of

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Cuddle Bear

May 7, 2012 by 20 Comments

Cuddle Bear received a Second Chance with the Chick. Vast improvements have changed it from one of the worst games ever made to merely terrible. I kid. It’s not really that bad anymore.  Read the new review.

In order for Cuddle Bear to be as bad as it looks, it would have to walk around kicking puppies and luring children into discarded refrigerators. I’m not sure if it does those things, but I can’t swear it doesn’t. This is one of the worst Xbox Live Indie Games of the year. It didn’t start that bad. You play as a psychotic teddy bear that goes around killing various bugs and animals. You’re armed with a gun, you have the ability to buy more guns, and levels are usually filled with plenty of God’s creatures for you to gleefully murder.

No really, that is what the game looks like.

The first world, set inside a house, is actually not too bad. Yes, the MS Paint graphics are embarrassing, the amusement level of the sound effects gets old fast, and the floaty jumping I just fucking knew would be problematic later, but it was still kind of cute in a “oh, look at the three-legged kitten” kind of way. And then I got to the suburb level, where the game took a turn for the worst. The platforming started to rely heavily on leap-of-faith gameplay. You know what I’m talking about. It’s where you have to jump to a platform you can’t see, possibly into enemies that you can’t defend yourself against. Some levels from that point on are completely centered around that concept. You jump, wait for the platform to appear, see an enemy next to the ledge, hit the enemy, recoil hugely off it, and fall to your death. Or even worse, you don’t die, fall to the ground, and have to walk all the way back to the start of the level to try again. At this point, if I had a button in front of me that would have detonated the developer’s head, I can’t say I wouldn’t have pushed it. Actually, I probably would have had someone else push it for me. Never hurts to have a second set of fingerprints on head-popping buttons.

I’m not sure how a game gets made in this day and age with gameplay like this. Did nobody play this far and tell the developer “you know, this is kind of just a series of dick moves that isn’t fun in the slightest bit?” I’m guessing not. It sucks that it falls to me to tell the developer that Cuddle Bear is just a series of dick moves that isn’t fun in the slightest bit. At least the leap of faith stuff isn’t the only thing to complain about. The graphics are shitty, but the game somehow still comes in at 241.5MB, necessitating an insulting 240 Microsoft Point price tag. Truth be told, that’s probably a good thing. It means nobody is likely to waste any time or money on this piece of shit. The enemies end up being bullet sponges, it takes too long to upgrade guns, and the game is kind of too long and samey for what it has to offer. I was getting bored with it long before I was getting angry at it.

Pictured: Cuddle Bear after he murdered fun itself.

Cuddle Bear isn’t the first title here that featured leap-of-faith platforming, but it will be the last one that I make any effort to finish. If developers don’t want to put in any effort into their level designs, I’m not going to make any effort to play them. I did excuse the first couple dozen instances of blind jumping in Cuddle Bear, but it became apparent during the second beach level that I was wasting my time. Nothing good had come of the game by this point. It was just getting worse and worse. This kind of stuff worked in old school games where the enemies didn’t spawn until you reached the point they were meant to appear. In this game, and many other XBLIGs for that matter, the enemies are just there, walking back and forth. You can’t prevent them from being close enough to the ledge, and thus all platforming is left completely to chance. I find it odd that the developer requested I review this game. Maybe he wasn’t aware how bad it was.  Well, hopefully he knows now.  If not, I’m not sure how else to say it.  I could sing it.

Beneath the knees, hopefully nobody pees.

He’ll slurp and gag and gargle the sea.

Because that’s the day the Cuddle Bear sucked a big dick.

Cuddle Bear was developed by Happy Sock Entertainment

240 Microsoft Points read that the developer has Cuddle Bear 2 planned, says this is confirmation of the existence of evil in the making of this review.

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Insane Zombie Carnage

April 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

I don’t like to play iPhone or even iPad games with flimsy, fake control schemes.  I just can’t get the hang of virtual controls.  So I missed out on the Super Crate Box craze.  Well, if you can call it that.  Compared to other popular games like Draw Something, Cut the Rope, or Angry Birds, Super Crate Box is more like a mild rage than a craze.  I hadn’t given the game a second thought until Brian and I did Indies in Due Time a few weeks ago, where we previewed yet another fucking zombie game, Insane Zombie Carnage.  Several of my readers immediately recognized it as a Super Crate Box clone.  I didn’t, because I never played it.  So I went into Crazy Undead Bloodbath without any prejudice.  Except against people of all races and religions, but that’s unrelated to the game.

So the idea behind Super Zombie Box is zombies rain down and you have to shoot them while collecting crates.  Wooden crates contain weapons of varying usefulness while question mark crates alter the flow of the game.  Body count is irrelevant, and so are the question mark boxes.  The object of the game is to get as many of the wooden boxes as you can before dying.  You start with one stage and unlock alternative modes and levels based on how big a streak you can get.

So what did I think?  I played it for an hour and I would rather be dead than ever play it again.  What a boring concept.  Don’t get me wrong, if suicide was not an option, I would choose Insane Zombie Carnage over Super Crate Box, simply based on my hatred of iOS virtual controls.  Loony Brain-Muncher Brouhaha actually controls fairly decently, which shocked the fucking hell out of me.  Clones tend to skimp on such features as playability in favor of cha-chinging and rolling in the dough.  I do think it’s a touch on the sensitive side, and the collision detection seems a bit off as well.  I cut a few zombie encounters close but know I missed them and I still died.  If I had actually gave a shit about the game, I would have been pissed off about that.  But, by that point, I couldn’t have given two shits less about it.  Perhaps this was because of crates that spawn right under where the zombies drop in at, making them almost impossible to fetch.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Preposterous Poltergeist Pandemonium, but I’m sure there are some Super Crate Box fans out there who are happy to be able to play this on a console.  Even if it’s not even close to the same game.  It doesn’t have the same graphics style.  It doesn’t have that “world-wide community” feel that Super Crate Box has.  It doesn’t have the word “super” in it.  It seems more like it exists to rub in the fact that this is as close as you can get if you’re among the handful of losers out there that still haven’t been assimilated by the Apple Collective.  But again, I really liked this more than Super Crate Box.  Which is like saying I would prefer to have my head blown of with a bazooka than be slowly disembowed using a rusty, urine-soaked samurai sword.

EDIT: Super Crate Box apparently got its start as a PC game.  Um.  Yea.  Move along.  Please.  Pretty please.  With cherries on top?

Insane Zombie Carnage was developed by Geex

80 Microsoft Points says repetition is the heart of gaming, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck 90% of the time in the making of this review.

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Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 3

February 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

Our esteemed heroine took time out of her busy schedule working on a cure for cancer and rescuing orphans from a fire to play an episodic platform game for Xbox Live Indie Games called Oozi.  The graceful and magnanimous Kairi forgave the first installment for being such a generic bore that it caused joy itself, manifested corporeally as a beautiful baby koala, to commit suicide by throwing itself in the path of a steamroller.  The villainous Oozi, regretful that it had erased joy from the world (and made a gruesome yet morbidly hilarious mess of a patch of forest in Queensland in the process) reformed itself with episode two.  The sequel proved just fun enough to play that the puddle of gore that formerly was the Koala of Joy started to piece itself together.  However, the threat of Oozi still existed.  Will Episode 3 cause the Koala of Joy to re-liquify itself, or will it spring to life and bring happiness to sad children?  We rejoin the mighty Kairi, already in progress.

As you can see, Oozi: Episode 3 brings us to a science lab.  Ooooh, that’s bold innovation, fellas.  What’s next?  A castle?  A desert?  A sewer?  I bet it’s a sewer.  It can’t be an action video game if there isn’t a sewer level.  It’s a sewer, right?

Okay, so originality was never what Oozi was about.  I’ve actually had people explain this to me like I’m some kind of idiot.  “You know, I think it’s actually supposed to be completely devoid of a personality of its own.  That’s the point.  I think.”  Even if that’s so, let me pose this question: does anyone really think back fondly on the time they played Prehistorik Man?  Gex?  Spanky’s Quest?  Plok?  Of course they don’t.  They remember playing Mario, Crash, and yes, even Sonic.  Paying tribute to the also-rans of gaming sounds more like a skit from Family Guy than a potentially lucrative XBLIG concept.

All bullshit gaming philosophy aside, not a whole lot has changed for Oozi.  The graphics are still far above the standards of a typical Xbox Live Indie Game.  In fact, they’re so good that you can’t help but notice how many corners they’ve managed to cut.  Back when I reviewed Episode 1, I noted that there’s no unique drowning animation, or gurgling sound effect that accompanies it.  Episode 3 has so many situations where a comical death scene could be used for effect, yet Oozi simply disintegrates into a pile of ash or just flops up in the air.  Having a larger variety of animations might have given the game some kind of personality, which is what the series desperately needs.

Really though, any complaint that I could make about Oozi has pretty much been made by me here on this site.  And also through a bullhorn in front of the police station, but they asked me to quit doing that.  Episode 3 doesn’t bring anything new to the table.  It does try to, but it fails miserably at it.  The feature that stands out the most are these annoying parts in one stage where you have to avoid security lights.  If you set one off, a gate shuts and you have to walk out of the security zone and start over again.  Don’t mistake this for stealth.  It’s not.  In fact, the security lights operate under the same principles as various traps and enemies do.  The only difference is instead of taking damage, you have to just wander backwards and then start over.  Some might argue that’s actually worse than death.

Oh, and there’s a boss, just like the last two times.  And, like the last two times, it’s fucking boring as hell to fight.  Oozi boss encounters always operate like the telephone game.  They do one series of attacks at you, then open themselves up to be hit.  Then they repeat the same cycle of moves as last time, adding one new twist before opening themselves up for attack again.  Finally, they repeat all the previous steps, add one final twist, and then leave themselves open for the killing blow.  It’s so fucking tedious, and the opening attacks (the ones that get repeated the most) are so insultingly easy to avoid that I wonder what they were thinking making you go through over a dozen rounds of them.  A lobotomized blind wino would brush them off.  It’s just busy work.  Meanwhile, the later attacks are so cheap that you’ll inevitably die a couple of times, forcing you to go through the same lazy attacks again and again.

Snore.

You know what?  I really am bitching too much here.  I did have fun with Oozi’s third chapter.  I can’t even say I think the game got off to a slow start, like Chapter 2 did.  It actually got my interest right from the start and held on until the boss fight bored me out of the mood.  The level design is so much better than the previous two games, and difficulty is much sharper, if a bit inconsistent.  It looks like the next chapter will be a wrap on Oozi’s tales, and by golly gee wiz, I’m actually looking forward to it.  Mostly because I actually believe it will see the light of day sometime before I start collecting Social Security.  Hey, Red Candy Games, we all like Valve and everything, but you don’t have to follow their lead and treat episodic gaming like you’re operating a bizarre nerd version of a time-share scam.

Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 3 was developed by Awesome Game Studio

80 Microsoft Points believe Half Life 2 episode 3 is currently being playtested by Santa Claus, Batman, and the Koala of Joy in the making of this review. 

I got interviewed twice this week.  Check out the interviews from Albatross Revue and Recensopoli.   

Vaya Con Dios, Rodger

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