Good news: these next two games made the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
Bad news: they were already on it.
Good news: both games moved up the board!
Bad news: Actually, there’s nothing but good news left!
Still not completely sold on Magnetic By Nature’s art-style, but it has gotten critical acclaim elsewhere. Guess I’ll hop on the band wagon and give them a quote for their next crowd-funding effort. Ahem. “Magnetic By Nature is Art-Decoriffic!” I’m such a sell-out.
Last month, I checked out student project Magnetic By Nature and enjoyed it well enough, even though the game had severe frame-rate issues. I just played through it once again, and the skipping is almost completely eliminated. Without it, you get to appreciate this smooth, very well conceived physics-platformer. Sure, I do wish it had more emphasis on physics-based puzzles. And sure, the controls still never become fully intuitive, but that’s the nature of the magnetic-based physics. They’re magnetic-by-nature if you will. Yuk yuk.
Like many twin stick shooters, you can’t tell what’s going on in Sherbet Thieves just from screen shots.
Okay, so Magnetic By Nature didn’t have a whole lot to improve upon. I can’t say the same for Sherbet Thieves, which just broke the record for longest gap between my original review and my Second Chance, at nearly twenty months. In that time, the game’s been overhauled with new levels, better balanced difficulty, smarter stage design, and a well-implemented unlimited mode. So what was already a pretty decent (if not memorable) title is now one of the better twin-stick shooters on the XBLIG platform. If you forgot it before, don’t forget it now. It’s a keeper.
I’m really puzzled as to why more developers don’t take me up on Second Chances with the Chick. Almost every game sees improved standings over their previous review. The best part about being an XBLIG critic is seeing so many developers hone their craft and improve upon the skills they’ve built. Really, there is no better way to witness evolution in action. Well, except by watching nature videos of the mudskipper.
Oh look. Tee hee, there is goes, thumbing its nose at creationists.
80 Microsoft Points each will be posting a special feature on the five games most in need of a Second Chance with the Chick in the making of this review.
Here are two games that seem like good ideas, but the execution is just a bit off, resulting in the losing streak the Leaderboard has been on continuing. First off is Bug Zapper, which comes from the developer of previous Leaderboard title Zomp 3 (#84 as of this writing). This time, instead of a Lolo-esq puzzler, Chris Skelly went for the good-old-boy pasttime of bug zapping, with the idea being you’re the one insect who is immune to the hypnotic glow of electric death device. Thus, you have to prevent your fellow pests from going towards the light. This is hilariously done by beating them to a bloody pulp. As far as solutions to potential problems go, that’s pretty fucking awesome. It would be like helping a coke head stay sober by breaking his nose.
Bug Zapper gives you a lot to keep up with, and in its present form, it really is too much.
As far as game concepts go, it’s actually pretty good. Bug Zapper also features upgradable stats and a wide variety of bugs to smack down. So what’s the problem? Well, I had two major problems. The first was I couldn’t get the hang of the throw controls. Bug Zapper heavily relies on throwing bugs into each other in order to rack up combos that build your special moves meter, but even with lots of practice, I had just as good a chance of throwing a rescued bug into the zapper as I did into another bug. This is because the swarms of bugs heading for the zapper is utterly relentless and you have to keep moving nonstop to have a chance to prevent them from dying. More control over what directions the bug could be thrown would help, because throwing at angles was imprecise.
A more troubling problem is the fact that the player can completely ruin the ability to throw bugs by picking the wrong upgrades. You can upgrade the strength of your punching and of your throwing. In order to throw a bug, you must weaken their health past a certain point, depending on how many times you’ve upgraded your throw. However, it is possible for you to have a punch so powerful that bugs are knocked out before being weak enough to throw. Since many of the stages later in the game rely on this ability, the result is you have to grind upgrade points to strengthen your throw. It really saps the fun out of it, because grinding doesn’t really fit well with this style of game. There’s a few other smaller issues dealing with the difficulty levels (consider “Medium” to be hard and “Easy” to be medium) and collision detection (it’s too easy to accidentally get zapped by the zapper), but there’s a real game here. It just needs a tiny amount of work to fix the pacing issues.
Screen from Hop Til You Drop. Not a fan of the background changing colors here either, but I didn’t play the game long enough to grow what was certain to be a hatred for it.
Speaking of pacing problems, I didn’t get very far into Hop Til You Drop at all. Why? Well, the concept is decent enough, I guess. You’re a dude who has to hop around a room collecting coins. The hook is, when you hop, the gravity switches and you end up walking on the ceiling, then back on the floor, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the game randomly spawns a huge number of traps that try to kill you. Just get as many coins as you can before dying. Simple enough. Hey, I’m into games based on high scores, even if they tend to suffer without online leaderboards, which I don’t believe Hop Til You Drop has. No, here’s my problem: rounds in Hop Til You Drop can be very, very short. That’s fine, if it’s done right. However, once you die, you have to first view a screen that gives you your stats for this last game. Then you have to go to main menu. Then you have to select your character again. There is no quick-load to start playing again, so you’ll spend as much or more time in menus then you will playing the game. Fuck. That. Jesus Farting Christ, hasn’t the developer ever played a fucking good punisher before? In the good ones, you die and BAM you’re playing again. There is no break. That’s how they become addictive, because they cater to that “just one more try” mentality. Hop Til You Drop openly fights it, and that’s why it sucks. The game itself is probably good enough to make the board, but I would rather give myself a swirly then play it again in its present state.
80 Microsoft Points said guys named Chris must have problems getting proper playtesters in the making of this review. It’s because guys named Chris are too sweet for their own good. Think about it. Do you know a Chris in your life? I bet you can walk all over him.
There were two reasons I’ve avoided the whole Minecraft craze and most of the clones that have followed in its wake. I figured I would either not get into them, or I would get too into them. I decided temperance was the best solution. Then again, I wasn’t expecting hundreds of requests for these reviews. Requests that come from people who already own and are fans of these games. I’m not sure why they want to know what I think, especially if they already like them. I guess my opinion is just that cool.
Well, while I certainly won’t argue that they’re badly made games (they’re not), I now have the verification I need that this genre isn’t for me. Probably. I mean, I couldn’t get as deep as I wanted in either of them due to my epilepsy, but I think I played enough to get the gist of it. I’ll start with FortressCraft.
You know how there are people who will get a set of Legos and come up with the craziest contraptions on their own? Yea, I’m not one of those people. When I was a kid, I would get a set of Legos, whip out the instructions, follow them to the T, and once completed, never touch that set again. I just don’t have the imagination to take a set designed for, say, Indiana Jones, and create my own Starship Enterprise from it. I’m just as bad at playing sandbox games. I need a specific goal when I play. FortressCraft has no goal. If you’re the creative type, hell, it’s probably exactly what you’re after. I tried to set a project for myself: a giant version of my Sweetie character. The little angry yellow-faced monster thing in my logo. But the monument never quite came out looking the way I envisioned.
Give me the world to mess around with and I couldn’t come up with anything to do.
I also had issues with the speed of building. This won’t be typical for most people. Unfortunately, the little ray-gun building thing that allows for faster construction is also what nearly triggered my epilepsy. So I was stuck using the slow-as-constipated-shit pick-axe. I don’t think it would have mattered either way. If you like to build voxel-style and want a clean slate to do it with, FortressCraft might be for you. For me? Not so much. This is a Lego set without my instructions. It leaves me like a flock of sheep without a border collie: utterly useless.
CastleMinerZ has more of a point. There’s zombies. I mean, hey, zombies! Who doesn’t love zombies? I’m fucking shocked that General Mills hasn’t added a zombie to their Monster Cereal lineup. Probably something that would taste like a blander version of Cap’n Crunch, only with stale marshmallows. Yea, I’m stalling. The truth is, whereas I could avoid having a seizure by not firing the build gun in FortressCraft, there was no way to avoid my personal epilepsy trigger in CastleMinerZ. There’s a lightning effect that seems to go off fairly regularly in the background. Thus, I was limited to smaller, shorter sessions. But even without the lightning stuff, I wouldn’t have been able to get into this. I’m not into the concept of zombies or voxel building. Getting into something that centered around both would probably be a sort of miracle.
I did almost get into a game mode that requires you to run as far away from your spawning point as possible. Unfortunately, in order to play this successfully, you typically have to be able to look up, so as to see and shoot the zombies. Looking up wasn’t really an option for me, unless I wanted to do my best impression of someone holding onto an electric fence. What would have helped was some kind of radar, so that I could tell where the zombies were spawning in at. However, what little I did monkey around with in the zombie shooting department slightly disappointed me, as it felt like there was no “oomph” to capping the undead. There’s so many games that involve shooting zombies, I’m really to the point where the act of killing them has to be satisfying in and of itself. Otherwise, it’s just as stimulating as shooting those mechanical ducks at the carnival.
I saw more dragons in five minutes of CastleMinerZ than eleven hours (at least that’s what it felt like) of watching The Hobbit.
If you’re into building stuff, you can do that too in CastleMinerZ. I couldn’t. Again, I tried to create Sweetie, and again it came across looking like a smiley face with two pink horns sticking out of its head. Then again, my logo isn’t exactly the most complex thing in the world and I can’t draw it on paper either. I think games like this or FortressCraft or Minecraft are probably designed with artistic types in mind. I’m certainly not that. Even in Terraria, I did NONE of the building when I played our main world with Brian. When I made my own world, the building were really just boxes with doors that took minimal effort to make. If you’re a into building stuff, you might like these games. They seem to play pretty well from a technical standpoint. I can’t compare them to Minecraft, but the graphics were crisp, the framerate was consistent (though CastleMiner had the occasional hiccup), and the controls are accurate. I guess. But I’m certainly not among this game’s target demographic, and my opinion shouldn’t factor into your purchase of either of these titles. I’m not really great at building things. Except animosity among Shenmue fans.
FortressCraft was developed by Projector Games (240 Microsoft Points asked if the whole “world is cooking” thing is what Al Gore warned us about).
CastleMiner Z was developed by DigitalDNA Games (80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend who is PISSED about the Hobbit joke)
Please note: I know that for some people, the whole epilepsy and games thing is a sensitive subject and they get very vocal about how games don’t cater to their needs. For me, my doctor has made it perfectly clear to me: playing games is a risk, period. I can alleviate some of those risks through proper lighting, distance, and medication, yes. But, if a game gives me a seizure, it’s my fault, not the developer’s. If you have a preexisting condition such as me, I sympathize with you, but I also ask you to assume personal responsibility. I don’t expect developers to cater to my relatively rare condition, and you certainly shouldn’t DEMAND it like I’ve seen some people do. I’ve found that in my nearly two years of being Indie Gamer Chick, developers want to learn about my condition. I’m guessing they do that because I’m cool about it, and assume all the risk myself. So while I couldn’t fully play a game like CastleMinerZ, that’s my circumstance. If you’re an asshole to developers, you’re not helping. They’re eager to be educated, not yelled at. I generally start by pointing them in the direction of the Epilepsy Foundation. But seriously, just be cool and you’ll find they’re receptive. Indies especially.
Dinora bears a strong resemblance to Terraria, the sleeper-hit that’s climbing up the charts on XBLA, and of which I reviewed the PSN version. As a reminder of what I felt of Terraria, I was annoyed by its numerous game-killing glitches, then went on to lose 50+ hours to a borderline-addiction to it. So, I guess you can say I’m a fan of it. Oh, I’m done with it. For reals this time. I swear. No really. Stop looking at me like that. Look, Brian and me went to play it a little more and the glitches they patched out were replaced by even worse glitches that made half the world invisible to me. So seriously, I’m over it. It’s out of my system. Had a good time while it lasted, but the thrill is gone.
At least until they patch it some more.
And possibly a reunion if they do DLC for it.
Never did kill that wall of flesh either.
You know, we had just started doing plumbing the last time we played it. There are lots of unexplored uses for that.
NO, STOP CATHY! Remember that 12 step program.
Hey look, it’s a giant disembodied head that attacks you with its two disembodied hands. Just like in Terraria!
Of course, if you can’t get Terraria out of your system, there’s always Dinora on XBLIG for 80 Microsoft Points. It will either curb your Terraria addiction or give you nuclear-level cravings for it. Feast or famine. For me? It really did help to strengthen my resolve to never play Terraria again. Which impressed the hell out of Brian, who has since gone on a quest looking for the Dinora-equivalent of something to help me quit smoking. He’s wasting his time, since that’s probably lung cancer.
When I said Dinora had a resemblance to Terraria, I wasn’t being coy. It looks just like a cheap, unrefined, non-pixel-art version of it. But endearingly so, like when a kindergartener draws a picture of his family. Sure, it’s crude, but hey look, it’s your family! Not sure why the dog looks like a shark, but whatever. And that’s Dinora: looks the part, if the part was left out in the sun too long. And guess what? It plays the part too! Well, kind of. I suppose it’s like if you had a friend who got sucked into a jet engine and his broken body was held together by staples and kept alive using a machine. It’s still your friend, but not really. And that’s Dinora: like Terraria on life support.
Everything bad about Dinora I can explain using something as simple as a door. In Terraria, you have to build a shelter to stay safe at night for when the monsters come out. This involves putting up walls, then covering the back wall, and finally sticking a door to enter through. This is typically the first thing you do when you turn the game on. Dinora does the same thing, only it does it badly. In order to place a door in Dinora, you must have four spaces of clearance, plus solid blocks above and below you. Okay, that door is just way too big, but it gets worse, because you can’t actually reach five blocks above you to place a block to hold the door. Thus you’re required to build a staircase to create enough clearance to have room for the door. Sure, you could just have your house dip slightly underground, but what if I don’t want that? I mean, it’s unsanitary! It’s so badly handled and stinks of careless design that it makes me sad. I really loved Terraria, and I would be totally game to enjoy a clone of it that offers more features. The problem here is that Dinora does everything Terraria does, only it does it worse. So who cares about the new features?
Correction: Apparently you can adjust the building reach in the options menu. I’m not sure why the default is so low, nor would I have thought to check to see if you can adjust reach. I still think Dinora is bad though, for many more reasons.
If I seem like I’m being too harsh on Dinora, I’ll remind you that Terraria was developed by two guys using XNA. Two guys whose brains I assure you are no bigger than yours or mine or the guys who made Dinora. But Dinora looks so much worse than Terraria, in addition to sounding worse, playing worse, and lacking the multiplayer aspect. What makes me shake my head in disappointment is that to make a knock-off that is this close to the original in so many aspects took actual talent, I think. I just wish they had applied that talent to something original. I hope these guys gut it out and make something quirky, weird, and new. Something not done before.
The enemies look lame, and on the default difficulty, they utterly swarm you. Pretty spongy, too. Your character moves too slow, jumps to shallowly, and is pretty much useless. At least as the class I picked: a miner. This multiple-character types function seems like it would work better when playing in a party. When I played Terraria, Brian and I divided responsibilities. He built our shelter and tunneled to hell, while I mined for precious metals and fought bosses. There’s no multiplayer in any form for Dinora, which sucks because that’s the hook that kept me coming back to the original. The enjoyment of playing it with the man that I love. Left on my own, the world was quite boring and I just wished I could play it with Brian.
The controls are much clunkier as well, though this stems from the best of intentions. You can now equip stuff to both hands, with the left and right triggers and bumpers used to scroll through items. Great theory in concept, but it turns an already unwieldy design into a digital form of patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. Even the most staunch fans of Terraria on consoles will probably admit that the controls were anything but intuitive. Could they have been done better? I don’t know. But at least with Dinora, now we can point to something and say “but it could have been a lot worse. See?”
Alan with the Tea said it best to me: they tried to do what Terraria took years to perfect in short order. Or, at the very least, the game gives that perception. For all I know, they’ve been working on Dinora for years. I sure hope not.
Dinora comes from the root of Dinah, a Hebrew name meaning “justified.” That’s ironic, because I honestly can’t justify the existence of Dinora. It’s just one bad issue after another. While it does aim to add complexity to the Terraria formula, adding new minerals to mine and giving you new tasks to keep up with, it ultimately feels like a really bad, hastily made knock-off. Terraria is a game that’s been being developed and refined for years now. I certainly don’t expect the level of sophistication it has in an XBLIG clone. But this doesn’t even come close to offering the satisfaction of that one. Even if I had never played Terraria before, I wouldn’t have liked Dinora. The bad movement parameters that need way more thought put into them, and the overall shoddiness of the control design need way more time in the cooker. Is there a good game buried in here somewhere? Sure, I suppose. If you ignore every single major flaw, of which there are numerous. But, if you strip away all of those, you’re left with a game that is already out and available for this platform. The Minecraft clones on XBLIG came out before the real Minecraft hit the console, which makes their existence mean something. Dinora is a poor-man’s Terraria and simply can’t escape that shadow. So what do you do if you only have $1 and want to experience what all the hype is about? Well, you probably should try to remember how you got that $1 in the first place and just repeat the process fourteen times.
80 Microsoft Points appreciate that the guys at Neuron Vexx warned me about the ultra flashy company splash screen in the making of this review. Of course, my attention span is roughly that of a Cocker Spaniel, so I promptly forgot the warning and I nearly had a seizure when I booted it up in the making of this review. Actually, I did that twice. Why? Because I’m a fucking moron. That’s why.
Yea, I know. The game is called “the monastery” in one of those strange cases where capitalization is denied. There’s irony in that, because the developers didn’t capitalize on solid 3D graphics to create something worth playing. The Monastery is just plain boring. Now if the guys at Rendercode Games were aiming to create an authentic wandering around simulator, mission accomplished.
Make no mistake, the visuals could have been spooky. But the scariest thing about The Monastery is just how boring it is.
The idea is you’re stumbling through the ruins of an ancient monastery looking for ten over-sized bibles. In about an hour of gameplay, the most I could ever locate in a single play-session was one. Maybe I could have found more, but roughly 90 seconds into every game, an enemy would spot me. Once they’ve done that, they give chase endlessly. There’s no attacking, so fighting back is out of the question. As far as I can tell, there really is no rhyme or reason to avoiding the monster. Hypothetically, you could just hold the run button (and there is never a time when you won’t want to be running, because the normal walking speed is snail-glued-to-a-sloth-slow), but that defeats the whole point of a game based around exploration. If you can’t stop to look around every once in a while, what you’re really playing is a one-sided game of Tag where you never get to be “it.”
So what else can I say? It’s bad. Don’t buy it. I can’t say too much else, other than I hope the developer does something better with the pretty decent looking graphics engine they used. The Monastery is a scary game that’s not scary. Yes, it looks cool. It probably looks even cooler in the dark. Of course, so does radium, but I wouldn’t recommend you get near it.
80 Microsoft Points stood shaking their fist defiantly at XBLIG devs threatening them to not actually make a game of video tag in the making of this review. Seriously, it’s a game that requires the ability to run and touch other people. This does not need to be digitized.
I started Indie Gamer Chick looking for weird, exotic, experimental game types. But, every once in a while I just want a platformer. That doesn’t mean it has to be a generic, lifeless one. The formula is so established that developers are almost forced to tinker with it, lest the game be skewered for being unambitious. That’s kind of the case with Naoki Tales. It’s so straight forward and unoriginal that you almost wonder who this was ultimately designed to appeal towards. Modern platforming fans will quickly get bored by the bare-bones, basic gameplay. Classic platforming fans will ultimately compare this to their childhood favorites, which at best can invoke dormant memories of long forgotten also-rans of the genre. They might be pleasant memories, sure. It might even cause random “Naoki Tales is not bad” tweets on Twitter. But it won’t be something people pester others to play. I’ve spent so much time trying to sell people on playing We Are Cubes that a friend threatened to re-purpose my ovaries as organic earmuffs if I didn’t shut up about it.
Break bricks. Stomp on baddies. Yawn.
By the way, I’m not trying to suggest that Naoki Tales is a bad game. It’s not. The controls are pretty decent, the graphics clean and distinctive, and the level design is not incompetent. Having said that, I did not enjoy my time with it at all. Not even a smidge. It’s just so damn dull and basic that I found nothing to keep me interested. The only reason I trudged through to the end is the game is as easy as a bowel movement after an all-night Taco Bell bender.
I’m also not saying the game lacks questionable design decisions. Things like “why can I jump on pigs and cats but not birds? Shouldn’t birds have, like, softer, more squishable bones?” Granted, there are way fewer birds than other enemies, so maybe the damage you take is to your soul, because the birds are endangered or something. That doesn’t explain why it’s kosher to throw what I think are mushrooms at them. Mushrooms which are so plentiful that there really was no point in making you pick them up along the levels, because you’ll never come close to running out. And then there are annoying levels where you have to retrieve a key on one end of a stage, walk all the way back to the beginning to activate something, and then walk all the way back again. Thankfully this form of level design isn’t used extensively, but it just adds to the problem of not doing enough to be fun. Naoki Tales is one of those rarities on XBLIG that works fine, looks good enough, but just isn’t that fun, and fun is all that matters.
Sigh. You know, despite having played literally dozens of games just like this, when I saw screens for Zombie Estate 2, I got excited. I know that I sometimes bitch about being fatigued by the endless zombie games on XBLIG, or the endless twin-stick shooters, or especially combinations of the two. But, just the prospect of a decent one gets me excited. Yea yea, I’m supposed to be too hip for this kind of stuff and not admit what I just said. It would be like admitting that I’m a fan of nose-picking. Which I’m not, even though there are few things in life quite as satisfying as picking your nose. Especially when you get a particularly stubborn booger that’s lodged way up there. When you finally yank it out, it’s practically nirvana.
I’m guessing all those invites I get to gaming conferences just dried up. It’s just as well.
It didn’t take too long into Zombie Estate 2 to realize the game would have big, big problems. Not among them are the graphics, which offer some charming 2D visuals. Can’t get enough of those. Okay, so the text is too small, which is about as common a problem as you’ll find on the XBLIG scene. My television is so big that God had to first move it out of the way before creating light, and yet I practically had to sit on top of the screen to make out some of the words. Still, games with graphics that do this good a job of putting a modern twist on blocky, low-resolution 80s pixel art are typically pretty high in quality. Maybe Zombie Estate 2 would be no different, but it has one very glaring issue: the difficulty is so intensely out-of-bounds past the point of reality that it simply can’t be enjoyed.
There are a ton of goodies to unlock in Zombie Estate 2. I just wish the game you have to play to unlock them was fun. It’s just frustrating.
ZE2 is a wave-shooter with enemies that are spongy and move much faster than you. And it’s not just a few zombies either. It’s having large portions of the screen saturated with the fucking things. The game doesn’t send out just enough zombies to make up the wave. Oh no. Let’s say that the object of a level is to kill 100 zombies, and you have 99 killed. How many zombies would you expect there to be on the screen? Just one, right? Try dozens. All of which are grouped together. When you kill the last one, the rest just vanish into thin air. This gives you a chance to pick up those items. Unless they’re about to blink out of existence themselves, which they do too quickly.
In order to better fight off the hoards, you can buy new weapons or upgrade existing ones. Sounds, great, except picking up item drops (such as money) is a chore itself. When you kill a zombie, chances are it’s part of the pack that’s closing in on you. As soon as it drops something, whatever it is gets immediately covered up by dozens of enemies. Your character sucks up items, but the range and speed it does so is so negligible that it might as well not do that. And besides all that, enemies rarely drop valuable money or health packs. Mostly, they drop ammo. This would be fine, except they mostly seemed to drop ammo for guns I didn’t have. It’s around this point that you realize if there’s such thing as a game that is an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, it’s Zombie Estate 2. It’s not lovable or fun to be around, nor does it make any effort at doing so.
I played with one friend, but we quickly grew tired of the spongy enemy spam that made item-drops unobtainable. Not alone either. People on Twitter are alerting me that with four players they couldn’t make progress either.
Over the course of 48 hours, I played Zombie Estate 2 three separate times, and ended each session in utter frustration. How can a game with all the fundamental mechanics for a pretty good time be so thoroughly destroyed by reckless design? For God’s sake, there are fire enemies that can spawn right on top of you with no warning right in the middle of the fucking map! No matter how much I bobbed and weaved around the level, they would appear on me, and I would start to lose health. What the fuck, Zombie Estate 2? Were you abused as a child? Mind you, this is on the easiest difficulty setting. You can go ahead and call me a shitty gamer too. I think if I’m defined as being a bitch because I don’t think you should have a game where enemies randomly spawn on top of you, I can live with the label. Or the tired “you just suck at games” label that is the be all, end all excuse horrible game enthusiasts throw at me when I say “this game is not worth buying.” And Zombie Estate 2 is not worth buying. Too difficult. Too concerned with making the game excruciating instead of entertaining. It resists being fun. It looks like it will be good, and it sounds like it will be good, but it just is not good. It’s the Kwame Brown of video games.
80 Microsoft Points figure it’s yet another case of a developer getting to good at their own game but didn’t mention it in the body of the review because they don’t want to sound like a broken record in the making of this review. Seriously though, why is the game so fucking impossible on casual mode? And why do the flame guys spawn on top of you? And why doesn’t the game drop more money? These questions should probably be answered since they all make the game less fun than it can be. Games are supposed to be fun, right? If not fun, entertaining. Difficult can be fun. Unfairly difficult never is.
I’m probably not the best person to review today’s games, all of which have multiplayer in mind. Even though I’m building up a base of friends (hey Bryce, Cameron, and Syd!), it’s not as if I have access to them at all times. And then, when I actually do, XBLIGs are rarely high on their itinerary. Even when I know an Xbox Indie is top quality, it’s tough to sell to them that our limited time together should be spent playing it instead of the latest mainstream title. It’s like inviting people over for steak and lobster dinner, then trying to convince them to eat McDonalds instead. Sure, McDonalds is occasionally delicious, but the steak and lobster is right there and the more sure-fire bet.
First up is Ultimate Dodgeball, which is a more or less straight telling of the actual sport. And that’s the biggest problem with it. Dodgeball doesn’t really lend itself well to video games on its own. Without having over-the-top wackiness sprinkled on, such as the case in the still-popular-to-this-day (though I don’t understand why myself) Super Dodgeball. Ultimate does have some power shots and special moves, but as a digital sport, it’s light on the excitement and gets old quickly.
Yep, that’s Dodgeball. Look at it, all Dodgebally.
Don’t get me wrong. Ultimate Dodgeball is fundamentally a well made game, with intuitive controls. Except when it came to catching the balls, which neither myself nor my playing partner (hey Cameron!) could get the hang of even after hours of practice. There’s online play as well, which is the reason why this review is delayed by several months, as the original build was not stable. All problems with it seem to be fixed, and we were able to enjoy a few rounds. While it can be fun, it just doesn’t have staying power. I guess I’m leaning towards a tepid recommendation. But really, this game doesn’t need to exist. I think there are much better options for games on Xbox 360 where the object is to launch projectiles at enemies to, ahem, eliminate them.
Ultimate Dodgeball was developed by K-Dog Games (80 Microsoft Points miss the Dodgeball league they had on Gameshow Network).
A review copy was provided to Indie Gamer Chick for the purposes of testing out online multiplayer. The copy played by the Chick was paid for with her money. The review copy was given to a friend who had no feedback in this review. Consult the FAQfor how review copies work at Indie Gamer Chick.
Next up is Avatars on the Edge, which is sort of a skateboarding-race game that feels like a bad Mario Kart clone. This is one of those titles where you play it and feel like the potential for something a cut above average has been laid, but it’s not ready for primetime yet. The biggest problem is that the track layouts are confusing. Avatars on the Edge does an admirable job of giving you a sense of speed, but you often have no idea which way you’re supposed to go. The only help the game offers is a red beacon, but otherwise you have to trial-and-error your way through each course, which is not the type of gameplay I’m looking for in a racer. Even worse is the insane requirements to unlock each new stage. You have to hit a target time in order to progress, but those times are too short, probably from the developers being too good at their own game and not realizing that the rest of us haven’t spent our lives practicing at it.
Props to the team behind this for the graphics and frame-rate, which only had a few brief hiccups. However, some of the courses look awful, with too much blacks and not enough texture. Gives the game an unfinished look.
Avatars on the Edge also has problems with fairness. I played an online race set on a monorail track. Because your character moves so fast and the controls are so loose, making narrow turns and taking sharp corners is frustrating. Still, I was doing pretty well on this particular race. Then the train came around again. The strip you have on the side of the track is far too thin and leaves no margin for error, and thus I got smacked by the train. But then, when I respawned, the train was still there and I got splattered again the very moment I came back. Hmmph. Finally, I respawn for the second time in a row, only it put my character on the edge of a cliff, and there was no way I could correct it, leading to me dying for the third time in just a few seconds. That whole sequence pretty much sums up everything wrong with Avatars on the Edge. Crappy stage layouts, overly difficult requirements placed on players, and unfair mechanics. With a lot of patchwork, something good might come of it someday, but for now, this game sucks.
Finally, Terranon Worlds. It’s the first game I’ve played on XBLIG that uses Asteroid style controls, which I’ve never been a fan of. I think gaming has come a long ways since 1979. Since that time, there’s been an amazing innovation called a “joystick” that allows for more precision movements. Here, the stick is used just to aim you, while you have to manually fire thrusters. I didn’t make it too far into Terranon Worlds though. The enemies are too small, your are bullets too slow, and aiming is too imprecise. Worst yet, the amount of enemies ramps up so quickly and they’re so picture perfect in their movements and aiming that the game quickly becomes unreasonable.
Plus, the upgradable stat thing is bungled horribly. The worst part is how you have a limit on how many bullets you can fire at once. This was an utterly awful idea given the sheer volume of enemies, and how tough it is to line up an accurate shot. You have to spend the majority of the game running away from enemies while you wait for your bullets to refill. You can upgrade these things, but the game becomes too overwhelming before you have enough points to put an acceptable amount of muscle in them. Having said that, there’s a “free mode” where you get a ton of money right out of the starting gate to upgrade stats, and I still never found the gun was well done, even fully pumped up. At best, I didn’t have to worry about my bullets running out. Shooting was still too difficult because the enemies are too small and too fast. I don’t know if multiplayer takes the ease off either, because nobody was willing to dive into this with me. Can’t say I blame them. If I got swimming through raw sewage, come out smelling like shit and complaining about how nasty it was, it’s hard to convince people to join you the next time.
Well, at least the enemies look like they get bigger. Wait, why did the game start out with the smaller, harder to shoot enemies? Shouldn’t the bigger ones that make easier targets have been the tutorial-level baddies?
While I dig Terranon Worlds’ neo-retro vibe, it just isn’t fun. Some older concepts can be done today with modern sensibilities and become spectacular. Look at We Are Cubes. Look at Orbitron. Look at Minigame Marathon. These are games that take tired ideas and make them work again. You can’t just dig up antiquated game mechanics, throw upgradable stats in, and expect it to still be relevant in today’s climate. The developer of Terranon Worlds did that, and his game suffers for it. He should have asked himself what could be improved with the original formula. The tiny enemies, for example. I always hated picking off the last tiny fragments in Asteroids. Some kind of aiming bar, or cross-hairs, or homing shots might have improved that. Instead, you have to watch while your bullets miss and the enemies leave you no room for second chances. That’s what frustrates me about Terranon Worlds. The formula wasn’t worked with enough to make it palatable. Also known as Pepsi Next Syndrome.
Terranon Worlds was developed by Snargosoft (80 Microsoft Points think whatever chances that Asteroids movie had of being made were probably sunk by Battleship in the making of this review).
Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising is another University of Utah student game. It’s really hard to believe it comes from the same pool of classmates that ultimately gave us Magnetic By Nature, one of the year’s best and most refreshing games. Avatar Trials is one of this year’s worst XBLIGs, and one of those rare games where my biggest challenge with it is trying to find anything positive to say about it. After having a few days to think about it, I couldn’t come up with a single nice thing to comment on. Avatar Trials is without merit in every way possible.
Starting with the graphics. Not only are they ugly, but they get in the way of gameplay. Because of the colors selected for backgrounds, it causes severe problems in judging distance between platforms. As a result, Avatar Trials comes across like an evil eye exam developed by an unscrupulous optometrist who wants to pad his wallet by making every patient he sees think they’re going blind. Combine this with one of the most spastic, uncooperative cameras I’ve encountered in years. At the most inappropriate times, it will swing around and zoom in on a wall. Not even a pretty wall, either. I mean, if it was a close-up of the Great Wall of China or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, I could understand why the camera would focus on it. It would be pretty fucking cool to see. These walls? They look like someone threw a box of crayons and a blank piece of paper into a cement mixer and scanned the results into the game.
None of the screen shots from Avatar Trials selected for the market seem to show actual gameplay. Just shots of the map.
These problems might be worth looking past if the controls were well done. However, movement is extremely loose and jumping is too floaty. In a game where judging distance is already an issue, having anything less than pin-point precision in movement would be a fatal blow. That’s the case here. Platforms will be overshot even when you feel you’re being conservative in jumping. Or sometimes you’ll get right up to a ledge and leap for it, only to completely short what looked like a small distance. Plus, the that damn camera never stops being a bastard, so sometimes you’ll make a straight across jump only for the camera to swing wildly to the side, throwing off your angles and causing you to fall to the ground, or sometimes to your death. And, if you manage to somehow get past all these issues without swearing off games in disgust, Avatar Trials will throw some nifty glitches at you. The most common one seems to getting stuck hanging on walls that aren’t there. It happened to me several times, and apparently it happened to Timothy H. Hurley Esq. as well. But, I have Hurlmeister topped, because sometimes when I was hanging on the invisible wall, I would let go and get stuck, or outright fall through the world geometry. I’ve played some truly inept 3D games on XBLIG, but I can’t think of one that is this bad on this many levels.
Look, it’s a student project. I get it. And believe me, I get no pleasure pulling this thing apart like a vulture does with carrion. But, Avatar Trials: Ninja Uprising was dead on arrival and my job is to explain why. Also, regardless of whether this is a student project or not, it’s also a commercial game that costs real money for people to own. Maybe I expected too much from this, on the grounds that it comes from students who apparently took the same courses as the team behind the increasingly better looking Magnetic By Nature. I’m not sure why the quality is so low that it can only be reached by submarine. I would think maybe the team behind this partied too hard and studied too little, but we’re talking about the University of Utah here. I think their idea of a party is sneaking a caffeinated beverage into the dorms. Perhaps I’m completely wrong about the intentions though. Maybe the assignment was to create the most broken, unplayable game possible, and then after it was released, fix it. If so, A+ on the effort for part one. Having said that, I would sooner believe the Titanic could be seaworthy again before anything could be salvaged from Avatar Trials.
80 Microsoft Points noted that all the students and educators involved in the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts and Engineering program have been class acts and are deserving of encouragement and support in the making of this review. Just don’t buy this fucking game.
Magnetic By Nature is the latest game from students attending the University of Utah. I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, wait a second. What do people from Utah know about having fun? Didn’t they ban their only form of that in the 40s?” Actually, inappropriate polygamy jokes aside, they know plenty about fun. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell discovered the medium of games as a student at the University of Utah. So in essence, we owe the gaming industry as it exists today to their beautiful, boring, Pac-10 devaluing institution. It makes me happy that the science of creating games is taught there to this day. It would be wrong otherwise, like if Harvard stopped teaching law, or Fresno State stopped teaching binge drinking.
In M-B-N, you play as a robot who has to make his way across levels by using magnetic powers. I played a game with a similar hook last year, the beautiful but frustrating to the point of not being so fun Lumi. Magnetic features more intuitive controls and faster-paced gameplay than that disappointing Dream-Build-Play winner. I actually expected nothing more than a glorified sampler here, because the team behind it is actively using crowd funding to prepare a larger PC release. Combine that with the XBLIG version coming in at 80MSP and featuring the subtitle “Awakening.” Which, by the way, is about as unimaginative a subtitle as you can get. I look forward to the sequel, which will no doubt be called “The Return.” Or, if they’re feeling frisky, “The Revenge.”
Show of hands: who is sick of games with the Limbo/Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet-like silhouette thing? Let’s see, 1, 2, 3, 4..
Anyway, the XBLIG version of Magnetic most definitely does not feel like a sampler, even if the devs say that’s what it is. You’ll get a complete experience that will take about sixty to ninety minutes to complete. Levels range from dexterity-based platforming challenges to physics-based puzzles, the latter of which there aren’t nearly enough of. Mostly, the game centers around precision flinging of the protagonist. And it really is flinging. Even by time the game ended, I had never gotten fully used to the physics, or had a comfortable feel for trajectories and speed. In essence, your character is a guided missile and you’ll often feel a sense of luck rather than accomplishment when clearing a tricky stage. In many games, that would be annoying. In M-B-N, it seems fitting. I had a little magnet play set when I was a kid and I remember how tough it was to push stuff across a table in a straight line using them. I thought of that while playing this game. It gives it an authentic feel. By the way, I had that magnet set for about a week, but then Daddy took it away after I showed him the pretty rainbow I made on the television using it. True story.
But, other control issues rear their ugly head. Movement without the magnets feels too touchy. Sometimes this combines with the magnetic gimmick to cause extra frustration, like a stage with a moving magnet and increasingly narrow rows of spikes that requires you to simultaneously feather the joystick and the magnetic circle. But at least stages like that are manageable. A pair of auto-scrolling stages with a deadly beam of light that I called the Kill You Bar were bungled about as bad as they could have been, simply due to the bar moving too fast. I’m also of the belief that these stages were in the wrong order. The last one of these was a brainless trial-and-error reflex tester. The first auto-scroll stage seemed to combine the best ideas of the game’s physics and had a climatic feel to it. In fact, it probably could have been the final stage of the whole game. Sadly, both these sections (the second one especially), were hampered by frame rate hiccups that seemed to get worse the more times you died. The lag became so bad that it rendered Magnetic By Nature completely broken. Then something weird happened. I found out that if you hit restart and have the game reload the level instead of just respawning after death, the lag becomes tolerable and I was able to finish the stage. It’s still inexcusable to exist like this, but the game is strong enough that you’ll want to finish.
..1,947,685, 1,947,686, 1,947,687, 1,947,688.. you know what, I think they get the picture.
On the bright side, the developers are aware of a couple of the more frustrating issues and are working on fixes. But even before they’re done, Magnetic By Nature is a surprisingly solid game. I’ve played several student projects since starting Indie Gamer Chick, and while some have been decent enough, none have outright impressed me. Magnetic By Nature does. I guess the reason for my surprise was, despite a cool looking trailer, I had low expectations going in. Physics puzzlers on XBLIG are typically disasters. Plus, I’m completely burned out on the whole silhouette-hero in a dark world thing, which is about as common a feature among indie platformers these days as the ability to jump. But I had no need to worry. Magnetic By Nature, despite problems, is genuinely fun and refreshing and you should expect to enjoy it. Bravo University of Utah guys and gals who made this and carry the legacy of the founding fathers of the gaming industry. But please, for God’s sake, stick with making games. Don’t open a chain of arcade-pizzerias with singing rats and shitty food. That’s a legacy you can live without.
Magnetic By Nature was developed by Tripleslash Studios
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