Power-Up

September 25, 2013 by 1 Comment

The timing on being asked to look over this game was impeccable as I recently watched the movie “100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience” which featured a section on the classic Japanese bullet hell shooters. I have had a craving to play one ever since, and Power-Up helped fill that need.

Powerup1
Power-Up is a throwback to the classic space shoot ‘em ups of yesterday such as R-Type and Gradius. There are aliens, upgrades to your ships or weapons, and bullets galore to dodge. It’s a tried and true formula and a general description of most of these games that have come out over the past thirty years.

In Power-Up there are five weapon types that you can select at any time: straight ahead, straight back, straight up/down, a forward spread, and a plasma weapon that… does something? I’ll get back to that in a moment. Each weapon can be “powered-up” to give it an incremental boost from items that fly onto the screen as is tradition. From what I could tell, for the most part, these upgrades only increase the rate of fire and lengthen the beam for each shot. If weapons actually do increase in strength it was a small enough increase that they never felt stronger to me. Enemies appeared to take just as long to kill as with “weaker” weapons. The upgrades you collect also don’t appear to be based on anything such as killing a particular enemy; they appear on a set schedule. It took me a number of plays to realize this: “What did I just do to make the bonus points appear? Did I kill something to spawn that power-up?”

Although there are five weapons, you really only need two of them to advance far into the game: the forward spread and the reverse laser. I was able to cheese my way easily through the first three chapters by upgrading my spread weapon before I touched the reverse-firing weapon. It wasn’t until chapter 4, and those little assholes running around on the ground shooting at me, that I needed to work on the up/down-firing weapons. I felt severely outgunned when trying to play with only the single forward shot, and even worse, I never quite figured out what the plasma weapon was supposed to be good for. Its firing range is extremely short so you have to get very close to enemies to be able to use it. I thought perhaps it would deflect bullets like one of the weapons in the classic game 1942 but nope. It felt useless except to fill my screen with a pretty purple.

Purple lasers of ???

Purple lasers of ???

One final problem with the weapons: the fully-charged shots all make the outside of the screen glow white when fired — the faster the shot, the more intense the flashing. I could usually ignore it under normal conditions, but when I was playing while tired one night, the flashing really got to me to the point that I had to turn off the game.

The story isn’t going to win the award for the next Lord of the Rings (that’s an award, right?), but it feels like a classic shooter tale. You’re one of the last humans alive, trying to destroy the people who destroyed Earth. The pilot is a bit easy to rile up and gets himself into trouble. It’s amusing listening to the pilot talk with his computer AI as they determine what to do next.

You don’t have access to a high score list like I would have hoped. The game keeps track of your high score, but the only time you ever get to see it is when you lose all of your lives. It would be nice either to see this score on the title screen or to be able to see a list of them somewhere.

This is beginning to sound like a long gripe-fest but to be honest, I had fun playing this game and it’s a good piece of work for a one-person entry. There are a number of things I feel could be improved upon, but it’s a good value for the price and there is plenty of fun to be had. None of the issues I describe above really make the game bad in any sense. If you’re a fan of shoot ‘em ups, definitely give this one a try.

xboxboxartPower-Up was developed by Psychotic Software.

IGTlogo-01For $1 you, too, can shit yourself when the logo appears at the launch of the game.

Power-Up has earned has been awarded the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval by Miko. Leaderboards for Indie Game Team are coming soon.

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Mechanician Alex and Pablo’s Fruit

September 16, 2013 by Leave a comment

I’m baffled when unambitious games come along that strive only to look and play kind of, sort of like the classics of ye olden days.  All I can think of is: why?  Why not make them better, or at least give them a different hook?  Especially since those old games already fucking exist and have been played to death.  Hey, not everyone is creative.  But even if you’re uncreative, you must have actually played the games and know what works in them and what doesn’t.  I don’t expect perfection from an indie developer, but I also expect that, as gamers, they know the difference between fun and boring.

I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. This is Mechanician Alex, a game that from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that fans of PC games from the 80s would have shit on. In the 80s.

Mechanician Alex, a game from 2013 designed for fans of 80s PC games that 80s PC gaming fans would have shit on.

Then you get into the realm of pure raving insanity, where you try to ape a gameplay style that wasn’t all that good to begin with.  Mechanician Alex wants to be one of those old-timey, single-screened platformers from the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum era.  I know a lot of my readers are still gaga over them.  When I reviewed the official XBLIG port of one of the all-time cherished members of that genre, Manic Miner, the old farts that read me were less than receptive to my take on it.  Fine.

But would those gamers be receptive to a game that looks like it could have been a lost game in that series, and plays almost like them, only everything is a little worse?  I’m guessing not.  Strip away the attempt at making a player nostalgic, and Mechanician Alex is simply a bad game.  The controls are atrocious.  Unresponsive controls are a signature of these type of games, and getting used to the wacky delayed timing is supposed to be part of the charm.  I guess if you’re playing a game legitimately made in that era, that’s acceptable.  Well, at least if you’re a child of that era looking to reclaim your youth.  But fans of those games aren’t in denial about the controls being shit.  Why the FUCK would a game made in 2013 try to emulate that?  Manic Miner fans aren’t going to Tweet each other saying “Oh my God, this game controls even worse than Manic Miner.  IT’S FUCKING AWESOME!!”

Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik's Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)

Mechanician Alex was developed by 3T Games ($1 got a teeny tiny chuckle out of the level where enemies consisted of Rubik’s Cubes and the female symbol ♀. Perhaps the developers were not fans of me or Xona Games)

And the levels are poorly designed too.  The game has a real issue with height.  For example, on one stage you’ll be walking on a cloud that is bumpy, like clouds tend to be.  There’s almost no clearance, and an enemy is scooting back and forth above your head.  Unfortunately, the collision detection is spotty enough that you’re bound to burn lives just trying to get a feel for it, and there’s so many variables on the height that never seem right.  It immediately stinks of a stage that was rushed through production.  Beyond that, if you slip off the cloud, you can’t finish the level regardless of whether you land on a platform or not.  This is really fundamental level design stuff and I shouldn’t have to have explained to you why its bad.  It’s a worst game of the year contender.

Sadly, the same developer recently went on a release spree, and they also brought out a side-scrolling platformer called Pablo’s Fruit, and it’s even worse.  Taking it a step further than Mechanician Alex, it’s a contender for worst XBLIG ever made.  Every gameplay aspect of Pablo’s Fruit is terrible.  Here, the idea is you have to collect all of the fruit in a level to open up an exit.  Movement is slow and jumping is floaty, which makes playing through the levels a tedious chore.  And then you get to the technical issues.  When you take damage, you don’t recoil from it, and you don’t get much (if any) invincibility to prevent further damage.  Thus, it’s conceivable that you could go from 5 “lives” to 0 in a second just from getting pinned next to an enemy.  That’s just utterly lazy, sloppy programming.  This is coupled with poor level design.  In one stage, the level opens with a fruit above your head, out of reach.  At the end of the stage, by the exit, there’s a teleporter that drops you back at the start.  You collect the fruit, but you have to walk all the way back to the exit.  All enemies you’ve taken out are still gone, which begs the question: WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MAKE SOMEONE DO SOMETHING SO FUCKING BORING?  Didn’t it occur to anyone making this piece of shit?

And it’s got dumb logic too.  Enemies are beaten by jumping on their heads.  But it’s not always clear which enemies will die when you do it and which ones you’ll pass-through, taking damage along the way.  I made a video to demonstrate.

What the fuck?  By the way, that vulture that’s flying back and forth?  You die from jumping on it too.  Why the hell does a ghost (hypothetically a transparent, dimensional being) die from being crushed but not an insect or a bird?  Is this some kind of PETA subliminal message?

An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that contentiously fly around. They're supposed to be in the background, but it's done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.

An annoying aspect is there are these butterflies that continuously fly around. They’re supposed to be in the background, but it’s done poorly and thus they often look like enemies in the foreground.

If I sound too negative, please keep in mind that I actively, for days, tried to think of something nice to say about these games.  I came up completely empty.  The sad thing is, both these games are courtesy of the developer of Naoki Tales.  I didn’t like it either, but really, its only true sin was being boring.  These games represent a gigantic step backwards.  Pablo’s Fruit came out a day after Mechanician Alex, and those came out a few days after another game by the same guys, Paper Galactica.  I’m not doing a full review on that (click the link, because Tim Hurley did), but it was pretty fucking boring as well.  Three games, all released in one week.  If I had to ask these guys a question besides “have you ever actually played a video game?” it would be “why didn’t you guys focus on one project?”  Granted, it’s possible that all three games sat in peer review purgatory until the community came out of a coma and put them through to the market.

Pablo's Fruit was developed by 3T Games ($1 asked if Pablo washed his ass in the making of this review)

Pablo’s Fruit was developed by 3T Games ($1 asked if Pablo washed his ass)

Actually, I would have one more question, and this is the most obvious one: would you actually want to play these games if you hadn’t made them?  Would you pay money for them?  Hell, would you play them if they were free?  Yea, that’s three questions, not one, but all of them are valid.  Look, these games suck.  You’re not going to make a lot of money on them.  They don’t even have the absurdity or the charm of Silver Dollar’s low-end, quick cash stuff.  Bad games DO make money on XBLIG, but your stuff isn’t falling into those niches that have such potential.  So don’t rush your games out.  Polish up your work.  Do something wild and creative.  I’ve played four of your games.  Not one of them managed to entertain me or any of my colleagues for a single second, nor did any of them display the slightest bit of creativity.  If I had to guess, I would guess the developers were bored silly making these.  Their existence seems almost cynical.  Both are trying to capitalize on nostalgic memories.  But unless it’s a port of something, you’re not going to lure in day-dreamy nostalgic types.  Being primitive shouldn’t be confused with being a classic, and these games are so primitive that they sacrifice virgins to the sun gods.

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Magicians & Looters

September 11, 2013 by 15 Comments

UPDATE: Magicians & Looters received a Second Chance with the Chick. To say it improved the game is an understatement. I now consider this to be the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made. Click here for my updated thoughts.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Xbox Live Indie Games, where expectations are so low that there’s not sufficient clearance for microbes to hang themselves from it.  Because of this, sometimes games that are just not that good end up getting elevated beyond their actual value.  Take Magicians & Looters.  Here’s a really ambitious first effort by a group of developers with not a whole lot of experience, and it’s not terrible.  It also has, for my money, the best comedic writing ever seen on an XBLIG.

M&L is a Metroidvania.  I fucking love those, but XBLIG hasn’t been the best source for them.  LaserCat is my favorite.  It was the original #1 game on the old, ten-games-only Leaderboard.   But it’s a different breed of Metroidvania.  There’s no combat in it, only avoidance.  It’s also easier than boxing a newborn paraplegic orangutang .  But that was pretty much the cream of the crop.  Other attempts were nowhere near as successful.  There was Astroman, a Metroid-inspired adventure that came very close to hitting the mark, but wasn’t quite there.  Still, this is probably the genre that, if done right, I like the most.

Mom?

Mom?

I try not to get hyped for games, and I certainly try to avoid hearing what my fellow XBLIG critics think of a game that I intend to play.  Unfortunately, becoming good friends with them means sometimes you hear things.  Like, say, Tim Hurley putting Magicians & Looters at #5 on his Leaderboard.  Or Jed Presscott calling this game “better than Symphony of the Night.”

Hahahahahaha…………. no.

To get the good out of the way first: Magicians & Looters isn’t broken or glitchy or likely to physically materialize like that spooky chick from The Ring and murder you after seven days.  In fact, all the ingredients seem to be here, fully functional, and primed to present one of the best values a game could have.  But, for me at least, it just never came together.  By far the best aspect of Magicians & Looters is the writing.  The story is a sort of spoof of Harry Potter.  You play as three teenagers enrolled in a wizard’s school.  It gets overrun by evildoers and you must band together and save the day.  They’re also all, to put it politely, type-A personalities.  They spew out non-stop sarcasm, have endless disdain for one-another, and almost seem to speak in the language of a sitcom.  I always hate games like that.  It’s one of the things that turned me off of musical RPG Sequence.  Here?  It works.  Even better, the jokes don’t rely on referential humor.  No callbacks to bad game dialog.  No “remember that movie you’ve seen?  We’ve seen it too, and we’ll demonstrate that by quoting it verbatim, but you should laugh because we’re going to do it in an unexpected way” type of stuff.  Hell, they don’t even directly reference Harry Potter, and the game is a send-up of it.  I mean, damn.  Standing ovation right here.

The sharp writing is the ONLY thing that kept me playing, though.  Mechanically speaking, I just found Magicians & Looters to be boring.  Mostly because of the combat.  I give them props for wanting to do something different.  Here, touching enemies doesn’t inflict damage on you.  Everything is handled by actual hand-to-hand fighting.  You attack a few times, then hold block, wait for them to miss, and then continue on.  That sounds great, but there’s a reason why 2D games typically don’t do that: because it’s slow and it makes combat a plodding chore.  Of course, there’s no real reason to fight enemies.  The leveling-up system is handled entirely by finding hidden trinkets, which was another dumb idea.  For almost any game, combat will stagnate after X amount of hours.  The grind of leveling up could very well be the only thing that keeps your average player from just running past enemies.  In M&L, they do drop money that you can use to buy better weapons, but progress on that is too slow as well.

The main hook is switching between three characters, each with their own unique abilities.  Unfortunately, this also is bungled, because two of the characters (the guy and one of the girls) are too slow.  For a game that already has severe pacing issues, this one really got to me.  Most of the time, I wanted to be playing as the near-naked chick, who was faster in movement and could jump significantly higher than the other two.  But she was especially crappy at combat.  So, you have to switch between the three to open up the map, but playing as the other chick, who was so slow that I was wondering if she had Lou Gehrig’s disease, was torturous.  Also, in order to switch characters, you need to go back to a save-station.  They’re liberally scattered throughout the world, but the needless backtracking when a Castlevania III like on-the-fly switcheroo would have been so much more preferable and obvious just adds to the dullness factor.

Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn't make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night's combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.

Again, the game has all the right parts of a good Metroidvania, such as a very well done map. Unfortunately, being fun just didn’t make the cut. I think this is mostly on the dull combat. For everything it borrowed from Symphony of the Night, the thing it needed the most was pushed aside in favor of something slower and blander. If it had been remotely close to Symphony of the Night’s combat? Probably a top-5 XBLIG game.

My dislike for M&L has nothing to do with the hype I got from my buddies.  If anything, I spent more time with it than I would done with any other game because I was trying to find the game they both loved so much.  If you hear something unequivocally called better than one of the best games ever made, it catches your attention.  I also wasn’t looking for reasons why it’s not.  That’s what lifeless fanboys do.  No, I wanted to see what they saw.  I looked hard for it.  Instead, I found dull combat, bland level layouts, and just an overall slowness that I couldn’t get into.  I tip my hat to the guys at Morgopolis Studios.  I typically discourage first efforts from being this ambitious.  Ambition wasn’t what went wrong with Magicians & Looters.  Truth be told, it’s a well designed game.  Results will not be typical, I guess, considering that my colleagues are shaking their fist in anger that it’s a digital-download game and not on disc, meaning there is no hole for (remaining review censored by Brian for the sake of Cathy’s parents.  I don’t want them to know I taught her what THAT is)

xboxboxartMagicians & Looters was developed by Morgopolis Studios

$1 (still censored.  Sorry folks.  Her filth bled into the money joke) in the making of this review. 

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Magic Racing Rally

August 26, 2013 by Leave a comment

I don’t mind racing video games, but I’m bored silly by any real form of automotive racing.  So naturally, I ended up with a boyfriend that’s a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth Formula One fan.  Magic Racing GP 2 was made for him, not me.  It was a game with old-school top-down gameplay, and that’s fine.  Where the game made itself inaccessible to me was in the insane attention to detail of the nuances of racing.  You had to calculate and adjust for every thing, right down to the types of wheels used.  Yea, not for me.  Then again, Brian and his F1-loving friends liked the concept more than the execution.  The controls were pretty rough for GP 2.  If they had been smoother, I think Brian and Bryce would still be playing it to this day.  Hell, I think a lot of people would have.  It had such raving devotion to the simulation aspect of F1 that I think people might have used it as an honest-to-God league, in the same way people set up Madden leagues or even Tecmo Bowl.

This is one of those games that looks better in screens than it does in motion.

This is one of those games that looks better in screens than it does in motion.

Magic Racing Rally is a much more simple game.  There’s still a wide variety of race classes and cars (based on real cars but with thinly veiled name changes) with different attributes, but it’s nowhere near as terrifying for non-fans of the sport.  Also, the controls seem more manageable.  But, I was still quite bored by it.  Mechanically, it’s just too basic.  From a graphical point of view, it reminds me of one of those preschool race car toys with the magnets.  Just a static screen with the cars and the skid marks they leave behind being the only moving parts.  It’s quite low tech and not very stimulating, even though the courses are well designed.  Hell, some of the courses are downright beautiful, but when you superimpose a little eight-bit car on them, it kind of looks silly.

The big draw of Magic Racing Rally is the sixteen-player online racing.  Giggle snort chuckle ha.  Look, kudos to them for thinking to include support for sixteen players, but you’re more likely to see Sasquatch rollerblading on UFOs before you find sixteen players at the same time.  The best I could do was three players.  Unfortunately, even with what felt like better controls, all of us kept crashing into the walls repeatedly.  Only on the slowest class were we able to come somewhat close to staying on the road.  Otherwise, it was like trying to trace a doodle in the middle of an earthquake.  I’m sure with patience and practice, I probably could have gotten the hang of it, but I was not engaged enough to want to get good at it.  I hate doing this, but I wasn’t Magic Racing Rally’s target audience.  I think fans of rally racing might enjoy it, assuming that any of the dozens currently available titles from that genre no longer “do it” for them.  The weird part is, the racing was never the best part about their original game.  It was the simulation aspect.  With that significantly toned down, I wonder who this was made for?  I didn’t really like it, and actually Bryce didn’t like it either, and he’s into this kind of stuff.  Oddly enough, as intimidated as I was about Magic Racing GP2, I think that was the better game.  The marginally better controls don’t make up for the lack of customization.  I do think the audience of devoted GP2 fans might enjoy this, but otherwise, this race is permanently stuck in a yellow flag.

xboxboxartMagic Racing Rally was developed by Magic Studios

$1 said “Rest in Peace, Microsoft Points jokes” in the making of this review. 

A review copy of Magic Rally Racing was provided by Magic Studios to Indie Gamer Chick.  The copy played by Cathy was paid for by her with her own money. The review copy was given to a friend to test online play with her.  That had minimal feedback in this review.  For more on this policy, consult the FAQ.

Gameplay footage via Splazer Productions

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One Finger Death Punch (non-review review)

August 12, 2013 by 8 Comments

I’m a dumbass.  I attempted to play One Finger Death Punch, the final Dream-Build-Play winner.  Both the developer and my boyfriend had declared the game off-limits to me due to my epilepsy.  However, that didn’t stop me from playing Charlie Murder, and I still had all the equipment I used to make it through that game (an older, fading projection TV and extra lighting in the room, in addition to sunglasses I was wearing), so why not?

Well, because it still wasn’t safe for me.  That’s why.  One Finger Death Punch was much more intense in its effects than Charlie Murder was.  I was only able to play a little past the first world before a flickery background made me feel a little off and it was decided I shouldn’t play any further.  Rats, I say.  Rats, because I was really enjoying it up to that point. The basic concept is using only two buttons, you kung-fu your way through wave after wave of stick figures.  You don’t even move your character.  All the action in the game is done using only the X and B buttons.  When an enemy enters your attack range, you hit them.  The violence is over the top, but really, One Finger Death Punch reminded me of Nintendo’s Game & Watch line of titles.  It’s just about timing and patterns.  Gameplay boiled down to its purest core.  Yet, OFDP is a total reinvention of some extremely old concepts, and it works well.

Theory #1 why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say "we'll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game. Yeesh."

Theory #1 on why this game bombed in sales: the screenshots are obnoxiously saturated with sales pitches for the game. I speak on behalf of all consumers when I say “we’ll read the sales blurb for that shit. All we want to see is an unbranded, uncovered, unblemished pictures of the fucking game!” Yeesh. That goes double for all you iPhone developers.

At least it did until I got to the part that simply wasn’t compatible with my medical condition.  So I can’t vouch for the game completely.  That wouldn’t be fair.  I can say this: it seemed good enough that I think I would have ultimately awarded it the Seal of Quality.  I mean, you never know.  I really did suck at what little I got to play.  Once enemies started to come in different colors (green enemies take two hits, blue ones dodge your first hit and jump into the other button’s range, and I’m sure more colors were coming) I started to fail with more consistency.  I also was downright embarrassing against the first boss, losing three times before getting it right.  But I was enjoying my mediocrity.  I wish I could have played further.

Either way, One Finger Death Punch is, according to developer Silver Dollar Games (yep, those guys), a total bust in sales.  What sucks about that is this was their most expensive production, and their most critically acclaimed title.  These guys have been lambasted by the community, including me, and yet in the end they proved that they were real artists with real talent.  Let it be said, even though I couldn’t finish their game, Silver Dollar today made me proud that I’m Indie Gamer Chick.  Perhaps they’ll be the final reminder of how Xbox Live Indie Games cultivated talent.  These guys went from being demonized for their, how shall we say it, less than play-value-chalked titles to being demoralized by their best game doing poorly at the point of sale.  It’s almost like a microcosm of the XBLIG community as a whole.  Don’t let this get you down, guys.  You made a believer in me.  Stand up, lick your wounds, and go make something else spectacular.  I have no doubt you can do it.

Oh, and that spectacular thing you’re going to make?  Yea, can you do me a solid and try to make it something that won’t potentially kill me?  Thanks.

Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of generic cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don't screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.

Theory #2 why it bombed: the box art sucks. Part of the charm of the game is its minimalist characters (literally stick figures), and this captures none of that. This looks like the type of cover you would expect on a clone of an Avatar: Last Airbender game. XBLIG developers are already screwed by not having trailers at the point of sale. Don’t screw yourselves further by making the box art look generic. Well drawn, but generic nonetheless.

One Finger Death Punch was developed by Silver Dollar Games

80 Microsoft Points are really bummed about this because the thing that made me feel ill was a darker, wavy-pulsing background effect.  Not my typical trigger.  Shows how unpredictable this shit can be in the making of this non-review review.

This review will not count against the Leaderboard’s percentage.  For a full review, check out my amigo Tim Hurley’s thoughts on One Finger Death Punch at TheXBLIG.com

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Fist Puncher (Xbox Live Indie Game version)

August 4, 2013 by 8 Comments

And the award for worst timing ever goes to………..

FIST PUNCHER ON XBOX LIVE INDIE GAMES!!

Team 2Bit stands up and takes a bow.  Tsutomu Yamaguchi rips up his program and walks out of the auditorium in disgust.

You see, I think Fist Puncher is probably better than your run of the mill brawler.  Think of it as Castle Crashers without having to equip weapons.  You level up.  There are a variety of special moves and combos you can pull off, and you can earn more as you make progress.  Levels aren’t always about smacking some twats around, walking ten feet to the right, then smacking more twats.  Sometimes you’re in a poisoned subway.  Sometimes you’re riding motorcycles.  This is all set in a decidedly mature world with adult themes and occasional voice-over narration.

Sadly, it’s hard for me to get excited about this when I started playing upcoming Xbox Live Arcade brawler Charlie Murder about an hour before trying this.  I haven’t yet formed an option on that game, but playing it undoubtedly soured me on Fist Puncher.  Both games intend to take brawlers in a more progressive, modern direction.  It’s as if they’re both in a race, and Fist Puncher is running at a pretty decent pace.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Charlie Murder is using quantum time displacement magic to have already finished the race, give Fist Puncher a wedgie, and sleep with its wife.

Oh shit, it's Scientologists!

Oh shit, it’s Scientologists!

All games should stand on their own.  I still believe that.  But, I really am having trouble separating these two games from the same genre which released this close together.  One of which is extremely modernized and the other of which is still has some firm roots in tradition.  If I hadn’t just played Charlie Murder, I think I would have liked Fist Puncher a whole lot more.  Not too much more.  I hate brawlers and I can’t hide my contempt for them.  One of the worst times I’ve had as Indie Gamer Chick was playing the Simpsons Arcade Game with my boyfriend.  It wasn’t even an indie, but I had never played it and figured I could get a decent review out of it.  Then I dragged Brian along for the ride.  I hated every moment of it, but I thought Brian was enjoying it.  Then after we finished, he said “well, that sucked.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“When was I supposed to say something?  You haven’t stopped complaining this entire time.  I’m actually surprised you could complain that much without stopping to breathe.”

The thing with 2D brawlers is, most feel like the same game with different skins.  Even popular ones.  Look, I played Streets of Rage and its sequels when they were in Ultimate Genesis Collection.  I played Final Fight on Capcom Classics Collection.  I’m happy you old school gamers still enjoy them, but I don’t get it.  It’s just button mashing the same guys, walking to the right a few feet, then button mashing more of the same guys.  Repeat this until you run into a boss with an unfair attack pattern and button mash him.  Then maybe you watch a static cut scene before repeating the whole process for seven to eight levels.  It’s boring.  Having a variety of fighting styles doesn’t take the edge off either, because usually there’s one attack that just plain works better than everything else, of which you’ll use it so much that you’ll wear out the buttons you have to hit to activate it.

Fist Puncher, God bless it, does its very best to break up the monotony by including different objectives, branching paths, and fairly short levels.  There’s also an upgrade system that, in the tradition of Indie Gamer Chick, I attempted to abuse by simply putting all my stats into strength.  Didn’t work, because enemies become downright cheap.  I encountered a boss that has a murder of crows surround you.  If you’re unable to run away, those damn crows will stun lock you and utterly drain your health.  At this point, I had maybe two points spent on defense and I didn’t last too long.  Of course, that’s my fault and not the developer’s, but I was still pretty peeved at the cheapness of it.  Not to mention that some of the levels are clearly designed with four players in mind, like a subway that fills with poison.  You have 90 seconds to clear a few waves of bad guys and a boss.  Now, by the time I played this stage, I had nearly filled my strength meter to the brim.  It didn’t matter.  Enemies were spongy as hell, and there was only one of me to finish a stage meant to be played with friends.  The amount of enemies probably should have been scaled back a bit to accommodate solo play.

Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored chairs shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin' words!

Since I missed the narration due to a glitch in the sound, I filled in the blanks myself. in my version of the story, the guy in the yellow is attempting to sell multi-colored toilet seat covers shaped like giant assholes. Someone off-screen claimed to match his low prices and he pulled a gun on them, because thems fightin’ words!

When you play with friends, it does take the edge off.  But while the fighting style consists of more than punches and kicks, Fist Puncher still has a relatively low ceiling before combat gets too repetitive.  And while occasional minigames (such as a batting cage where I swear to Christ I could not line up to hit the fucking balls correctly) or hidden keys do try to make this something more, I just found Fist Puncher to be the type of generic brawler that has been done hundreds of times before and will continue to be done until the end of time.  Plus, the XBLIG port of the PC title is loaded with some awful glitches.  I died during one section of play and had to be brought back to life by being given CPR, which is done by hitting button prompts.  Once I was brought back to life, Brian was still bent over in the CPR position, unable to stand up.  This was not by design.  Weirdly, he eventually stood up, but none of the action buttons would work.  He had to intentionally let an enemy knock him down before anything would work again.  In addition to all of this, the sound effects (including the voice over narration after the first stage) would cut in and out, sometimes leading to playing whole stages without the satisfaction of hearing your fist smack against some asshole’s face.

I’m not scoring against the glitches (unacceptable as they are), because I didn’t like Fist Puncher regardless.  Indie Gamer Guy did, and it would seem many long-term fans of the genre disagree with me as well.  Having played through it, I do admit that Fist Puncher is a well crafted tribute to one of the industry’s most revered game types that does try to do a little bit more than they did.  But I never liked brawlers to begin with, so I was not who this game was aimed at, and Fist Puncher does absolutely nothing to try to convince people like me that we have it all wrong.  Its only ambition was to satisfy fans of games like Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it seems to do that well.  I’ll never understand why games like this are still popular when gaming has come so very far since the mid 90s.  If anything, brawlers are having a revival, and not one of those ironic ones like people watching movies on VHS or pretending to like My Little Pony.  I’m talking honest-to-God elation.  I don’t get it.  A lot of people my age don’t get it.  Then again, people of their age don’t get how we could convince our parents to murder each-other on Black Friday to score the last booster pack of Pokemon cards for Christmas.  It’s a generational thing.

xboxboxartFist Puncher was developed by Team 2Bit

400 Microsoft Points have no opinion of Charlie Murder yet, except that it does try to do more with brawlers, and that’s a step in the right direction in the making of this review.

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Vintage Hero

July 27, 2013 by 5 Comments

I should preface this review by noting that Mega Man’s classic NES games have no nostalgic value for me, and the franchise as a whole I consider to be of little relevance to modern gaming.  I thought Mega Man 9 was alright.  I thought Mega Man 10 was alright, albeit slightly less so.  I tried and failed to get into the Battle Network series as a kid.  And if the amount of shit that I gave when Mega Man was announced for Smash Bros was any smaller, it would only be able to be studied at the Hadron Collider.  I’m not saying the series is a bad or that the games aren’t worth playing.  I’m saying Mega Man probably means a lot more to you (assuming you’re my average reader) than it does for me.

With that being said, Vintage Hero does Mega Man very well.  Mimicry can’t be as easy as people think.  If it were, there wouldn’t be so many classic gaming tributes on XBLIG or other platforms that completely miss the point of what the originals were about.  With platformers, it gets especially difficult.  Typically, even a game that comes really close to the original still has something off about it.  And once you latch onto what that one not-quite-right thing is, it’s all you notice.  Vintage Hero doesn’t have that.  It is so close to Mega Man in terms of gameplay and physics that it’s almost creepy.  Like one of those stories you hear where a famous actress meets an adoring fan who has built a life-sized statue of her made out of mayonnaise and caulking, and she has to smile through her teeth while waving to her agent to start filing for the restraining order.

Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. Lab assistant. I'm not sure who wins on points there.

Lloyd is a janitor. Mega Man was a lab assistant. I’m not sure who wins on points there.

Vintage Hero’s controls are perfect Mega Man mimicry, and it makes this title a joy to play.  Of course, the spooky doppelgänger stuff comes in other forms.  The hero (with decidedly unheroic sounding name Floyd) has an arm cannon, just like Mega Man.  It fires bullets that look just like Mega Man’s bullets.  His running, jumping, and climbing animations look just like Mega Man’s.  When he dies, he explodes into smaller dots of energy, just like Mega Man.  Seriously, King Louie wants to know his secret.  If Vintage Hero had left it there, doing a very convincing Mega Man impersonation, that would have been enough to satisfy gamers.

But developer Frog the Door Games didn’t stop there.  Instead of phoning in the level design, he took it in original directions not seen in Mega Man titles.  Instead of leaving the basic gameplay mechanics intact, he added in a modern RPG-like upgrade system.  As a result, Vintage Hero stays fresh through-out.  Of course,  it’s about half the length of a Mega Man title.  There are four standard bosses (and yes, you acquire a new weapon after killing them), then two finale stages, one of which includes a boss-rush.  Is it too short?  Perhaps.  It’s sort of hard to complain when everything before the end credits is about as perfectly handled as any game designed like this could be.  If the developer ran out of time or money or patience, at least he had the good sense to stop before the game started to stagnate.  Me?  I always prefer ninety minutes where I can’t stop smiling to three hours where my mind occasionally wanders, if not outright gets bored.

Vintage Hero isn’t flawless.  I think the biggest issue it has (besides length if that matters to you), is that the game does the copy-cat thing so well that it fails to have a personality of its own.  I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I didn’t enjoy the characters, the enemy design, or especially the bosses.  It all felt a bit generic.  The story told between missions I found to be predictable, especially the big twist reveal.  It was so poorly handled that I questioned whether it was just dead-panning parody.  Then the bleak ending made it clear that this was all meant to be serious, and I just sort of shrugged.  Of course, they couldn’t just rip off the charm of Mega Man’s absurd enemy design.  Vintage Hero already straddles the line between loving tribute and lawsuit waiting to happen.  But you simply can’t replace the lunacy of “why did Wily make such impractical things like Robo-rabbits that shoot robo-carrots to kill Mega Man?” with doodles of red tentacles growing out of the ground, or things that look like hastily-drawn fetuses.

You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

You can see what I mean about the enemy design. This yellow fellow here looks like a reject from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

Because of that, Vintage Hero would need to have exceptionally sharp and rewarding gameplay to really stand out.  And it does.  It’s been over a year since I’ve had the privilege of saying this about a new game, but Vintage Hero is the best Xbox Live Indie Game ever made.  Here’s a game so married to an established franchise that it by all rights ought to have been saddled with the label of a well-meaning tribute, and nothing more.  Instead, it serves as an honorable homage, and a game that can fully stand on its own.  Its gameplay is fine-tuned.  Its levels inspired.  It actually pays tribute to vintage Mega Man better than Mega Man 9 or 10 did.  But most important, it’s a game that anyone can enjoy.  By the time I was on the gaming scene, Mega Man’s time as an icon had pretty much passed.  Nostalgia didn’t factor into this review.  Pure, unbridled love of gaming did.  And from that point of view, no XBLIG has ever been as well made as Vintage Hero.

(spits out Vintage Hero spunk, pops a breath mint)

xboxboxartVintage Hero was developed by Frog The Door Games

Seal of Approval Large80 Microsoft Points actively wonder why Lloyd doesn’t change colors when he equips a new item in the making of this review.  Well I take it all back, this is a shitty Mega Man ripoff.  It was all about the color swapping.

Vintage Hero is Chick-Approved and is the new #1 game on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  You should probably still click the link to bask in its #1ness anyway. 

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Avatar Physics: Running

July 23, 2013 by 2 Comments

If I pulled out a gun and shot myself right now, then reincarnated, I’m pretty sure I would be running in my new body faster than I would as my Xbox Avatar if I just stayed alive and kept trying at Avatar Physics: Running.  Based on the popular (and free, and slightly less impossible) flash-based game QWOP, Running is a simple 100 meter dash, only you have to manually work the legs of your avatar to get there.  Of course, doing so is complicated in a way that makes the Impossible Game look like a preschool admission test.  After over thirty minutes of playing, the furthest I had made it was a little over two meters past the starting line.  Mostly, my character just stiffened up and fell down, like she had simultaneously suffered a stroke while catching a glimpse of Medusa.  Take a look at this video from my amigo Splazer Productions.

Splazer did better than I did.  Hell, I typically ran further backwards than I did forwards.  The only value Avatar Physics: Running has is bemusement at your own failures.  This is obviously meant to be the primary draw of the game, as evidenced by the one and only marketplace picture featuring an avatar that has cocked things up about as bad as you can.  The problem is, laughing at how hard this game is only lasts about, oh, two minutes.  After that, it’s just frustration and tedium.  I’m certain someone out there can finish the full 100 meters.  I’m also certain someone out there knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.  It doesn’t make him any less dead.

xboxboxartAvatar Physics: Running was developed by Bwoot Games (blog hasn’t been updated in over a year, always a good sign)

80 Microsoft Points could have used some performance-enhancing drugs in the making of this review.

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Fishy Warfare

July 21, 2013 by 2 Comments

Fishy Warfare in the brook –

Why does your game have no hook?

Games like Fishy Warefare have historical importance.  The Atari 2600 launched with Combat (based on the arcade hit Tank), a game where players stood on opposite sides of the screen, taking shots at each other.  The first video game to have a microprocessor (as opposed to discrete logic) was Midway’s 1975 hit Gun Fight, which was later upgraded to a similar game called Boot Hill (which hit the Atari 2600 as Outlaw).  You’ll notice these games all came out in the 70s and really don’t hold that much relevance today.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t attempt to reinvent this formula that existed a decade before my father was a US citizen.  I’m saying that you have to give it some kind of hook to make it relevant today.  Or at least attempt to be better than those moldy oldies.

Fishy Warfare is a worst XBLIG of the year contender based entirely on uselessness.  It looks ugly.  There’s no multiplayer.  The AI is brain-dead.  The gameplay is boring.  The upgrades are dull.  The final nail is the insulting 240MSP price tag.  All this for a game that was hardly ambitious in concept to begin with.  You’re on one side of a screen.  Your AI opponent is on the other.  You shoot until one of you is dead.  Then you upgrade your ship and do it again.  The game presents nothing resembling a challenge until you fight a giant alligator thing that has some kind of laser-firebreath thing that can kill you in one hit.  Until I got to it, I never needed upgrade my ship.  After dying against this, I had enough money to get the best weapon, ship, hull, and propeller.  So I did.  Then I had to fight my way back to the Alligator, because the game sends you backwards and makes you replay previous fights when you lose (just to make sure maximum boredom and repetition is achieved).  At which point, it instakilled me again.  Grumble.

This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don't spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.

This is the instakilling Alligator instakilling a dude piloting the frog. Familiarize yourself with this, because it will happen to you too. You know, assuming you don’t spend your Microsoft Points on THREE better games that have actual polish to them.

Despite what people think, I do look for good things to say about even the worst games.  But, I couldn’t find one for Fishy Warfare.  The graphics look like they were drawn in MS Paint.  The backgrounds are a bit on the loud side, which sometimes makes the projectiles hard to see.  The highest upgraded weapon is also the most visually uninteresting of the whole lot.  That’s extraordinarily nit-picky, but for some reason that stuck with me long after I finished playing.  Maybe because it sums up everything wrong with Fishy Warfare.  Everything feels so rushed and not handled with care.  I don’t know what else to say.  Boring.  Bad.  Overpriced.  You could probably buy a couple actual fighting fish for the same price and make them fight to the death, then eat the loser.  And then eat the winner too, because it probably is meatier and yummier.

xboxboxartFishy Warfare was developed by Elemental Zeal

240 Microsoft Points could buy the top three games on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard for the same price as this in the making of this review.  I don’t have a joke to go with that, just thought I would state the obvious.

 

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Man, I Hate That Indie Game!

July 16, 2013 by 4 Comments

I get Man, I Hate That Indie Game.

I don’t like it, but I get it.

I think.

Hate That Indie comes from the developers of Don’t Die Dateless Dummy!, which is far and away the most popular review I’ve ever done here at Indie Gamer Chick.  It has more total views from search engines than the next thirteen highest games do combined.  This statistic has led to various developers threatening to jump out of windows.  And yet, that review is also responsible for me converting many Looky Loos into long-term readers.  Incidentally, that’s also why I won’t be shaking any of my fans’ hands at game conventions.  I know where those hands have been, and it ain’t pretty.

This follow-up to Don’t Die Dateless Dummy comes at a time when the views for it were finally dropping off.  The cynic crowd is decrying it as another soulless boob game designed to attract the genital tug-of-war crowd and make a quick buck.  But actually, Hate That Indie is more of an indictment against various gaming factions.  The anti-feminist crowd, cynical indie developers, and boob games (I shit you not) are all satirized in an insanely over-the-top fashion here.  The basic idea is a group of girls that are part of an indie development club recruit you to help them with their projects, and you’re put in the middle of a power struggle between them.  Your.. girlfriend I guess?.. wants to make a game just for the fun of it.  The other two are looking for profits.  And this is where the game gets touchy for some folks.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called "Google" now that you can use to look for boobs that don't cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

For you pocket miners out there, the title screen is pretty much as erotic as this game gets. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, they have this thing called “Google” now that you can use to look for boobs that don’t cost Microsoft Points. Some of them come from actual human females and not from drawings made by guys who will never actually see a female naked.

There’s the Ex-Indie Developing Cynic who hates indie games because nobody tries to make good games and developers are all geeks who speak in techno-babble and make games with animated boobs.  His girlfriend is the optimistic go-getter who has no actual game design talent, and he calls her out on it.  Her two friends either want to make games for money by copying existing games or cloning stuff based on what’s trendy, or simply to build their computer science portfolio.  Dialog trees only have two options, a good one and a bad one.  If you choose the bad one, you verbally tear into the girl in just about the most mean-spirited, online-bully speak possible.  This is rubbing people the wrong way.

Guys, come on.  This is clearly a satire.  And I’m not joking about that either.  I’m not playing the sarcastically oblivious game reviewer here.  This was obviously a joke.  And, in a way, it might be brilliant.  I’ve probably talked with close to five-hundred different developers or would-be developers in the two years I’ve done Indie Gamer Chick.  Trust me, there are a LOT of people like the main character.  Jaded.  Bitter.  Fed up with the culture and ready to pack up their shit and quit.  The main lead, when you pick the “good” answers, is a near-perfect caricature of dozens of guys I’ve talked with.  It’s so spot-on that it’s spooky.

As for the “evil” dialog, again, come on guys.  You can’t be that thick.  It’s the type of over-the-top sexism that is all over the gaming community.  The kind that nobody really should take seriously.  I went two years without it, and now I’ve been getting it by the boatload ever since I announced that I was working with Indie Royale on an XBLIG-themed bundle with my name on it.  The evil options in Man, I Hate That Indie Game! sound just like the stuff I’ve been getting.  It’s uncanny.  And it’s also clearly parody.  The guys take swipes at themselves frequently in the dialog.  They make fun of boob games, when in fact this game is itself a boob game.  Get it?  This was spot on.  Perhaps too deadpan though.  There’s Leslie Nielsen deadpan and Sean Penn reading the local obituaries deadpan where anyone listening wants to crawl into a hole and die.  They did the Sean Penn thing, and it makes the game kind of depressing.

Don’t worry though, you won’t have to do too much of it.  I followed the “good” dialog and finished the game in under ten minutes.  No, really.  There are multiple endings of course.  I played a few times and got one where I died alone, one where I stole a girl’s game engine and used it for myself, and finally one where I shacked up one of the girls.  This ending even made a joke about doing a time-jump, which seemingly skipped entire chapters of the game.  Since I played Don’t Die Dateless Dummy several times and never once got an ending that didn’t die with me becoming an all-powerful virginal wizard (which is the bad ending for some reason), getting laid after approximately six minutes seemed like the total victory of Mount Midoriyama to me.  Yea, go figure.  I finally play one of these fucking games where I might give two squirts about the story and where they’re going with it and it turns out they don’t really have all that far to go with it.  My theory is they needed to make sure the game ended before the blistered hand brigade climaxed.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character "John Conner" and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

After I saw this picture on the marketplace, I named my character “John Conner” and pretended that one of the girls was secretly building Skynet instead of an indie game. It was almost fun.

The biggest problem is that everything wrong with Don’t Die Dateless Dummy from a purely mechanic point of view is still present.  When the game ends, you can’t go back to just try the other parts of dialog.  You have to start from the beginning.  Unless you save, which is a very slow, clunky process that is also quite unresponsive to the controller for some reason.  The main draw is still clearly presented as still images of school-aged anime girls.  Combine that with the satirical take on indie gaming culture being too short and unrealized (plus an absolutely asinine $3 price tag) and there is simply no reason to get Man, I Hate This Indie Game!  You know what?  I do hate this fucking game, but not for the reasons people would have thought.  I hate it because they actually had a good idea here and didn’t take it as far as it seems they could have.  It felt like I was being pitched on this hilarious idea for a game, then the person cut themselves off after a minute by pulling out some piano wire and garroting themselves.

xboxboxartMan, I Hate That Indie Game! was developed by cupholder

240 Microsoft Points.. seriously, that’s too fucking much.. will be playing the first game by the guys behind this and Don’t Die Dateless Dummy sometime soon in the making of this review.  You know what?  It’s an RPG that actually looks good!

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