Team Shuriken has done it again. They’ve got a game-of-the-year, summer blockbuster of a sleeper hit on the Marketplace. It’s another classic to add into their ever increasing hall of fame of surefire winners.
Venus Explorer has everything a choose-your-own-adventure-type game needs! Boobs, semen jokes, art from their fap folder, and an actual lack of meaningful choice if you actually want to progress in the game.
You may be asking yourself why you aren’t playing this right now, and I’d have to ask the same question of you.
*Deactivate Strong Sarcasm Mode – Resuming normal levels of sarcasm…*
At the very least, these guys aren’t even trying to hide what the game is: a cash grab for suckers who see big boobs on the cover art. I can respect that and, unlike subtle sexism that is common in media, here it is front and center for us to oogle at.
“Boobies!”
The game begins with a cut-scene of you being a lonely teenage boy in the 80s looking for a game to…be thrilled by, if you catch my drift. You don’t? Okay, he’s horny.
What follows is an attempt at emulating old adventure games on the PC. “Will you go north, west, or east?” “Will you shoot the robot in the brain or torso?” “Will you try to jump into the semen bath with the buxom babe or make a comment about how it stinks?” The thing is, for most of the game, it’s all an illusion of choice layered over a direct path to the end. If you choose the route the game doesn’t want you to take, you will be killed and forced back to the checkpoint. Oh god the checkpoint system.
Imagine you’re running a 5k race. Okay, scratch that, we’re gamers. Imagine you have an extremely perilous staircase that leads to the bathroom upstairs. There are 20 stairs filled with traps and pitfalls trying to prevent you from relieving yourself in a civilized manner. Thankfully these are magical stairs that have checkpoints to revive you should you die. A fair system of checkpoints would bring you back to life say, every five stairs. You’d think that was decent while you mentally chewed out whatever being cursed your staircase.
Restarting the human race from two people is a silly notion. There has to be incest!
Well, in Venus Explorer, those checkpoints are on stairs 1, 18, and 19. In a game that forces death upon you at every wrong turn because you aren’t following their story exactly, this is both a case of frustration and boredom. I flopped on the couch, barely paying attention to what I was lazily pressing as I made my way back to where I died so I could hopefully make the “right” choice.
Along the way to the end, there are some minigames and an arcade game to play. The minigames are halfhearted at best. One has you avoid moving objects while you fly up about 50 feet in a spacesuit. Another tries to emulate R-Type but gives you no weapons to fire, only more objects to avoid. That arcade game I mentioned? It’s a half-assed attempt at making a fighter by having you decide, “Dodge left, right, or center as your opponent comes at you with a flying kick.” You also are only allowed to play it only once every 30 minutes unless you do some fancy button-pressing that isn’t worth it. Not one bit.
Spoiler warning—I’m going to reveal the ending of the game to you. You get to make babies with the only other surviving human, a woman who saves you at the last second from certain death.
If anybody needs me, I’ll be in my bunk…regretting the loss of my $1.
Oh, and I got this screen after finishing the game. I suspect it’s a true statement as I don’t know why anyone else would bother putting the time into it that I did.
This isn’t going to be my most glowing review. So before I get to the guts of this game, I want to talk about the game’s developer. His name is Daniel Navarro, and he’s a class act all the way. I stupidly downloaded Super Broken Games off the Xbox marketplace without screening it. I took a look at it and thought “oh hey, it looks like WarioWare! Fucking sold!” But, as it turns out, the game was not remotely accessible by me due to my epilepsy. I later found out that some of the effects were able to be switched off, but the way that was laid out was confusing, and it didn’t catch everything.
Daniel showed tremendous concern for me. He patched the game for myself and potentially others who live with photosensitive epilepsy (if you do, you should consult your doctor before attempting to play any game, as there is no such thing as “epilepsy safe” if you have it). Within a week, Super Broken Games had its potential triggers rendered optional. Not removed from the game. I’m not trying to activate a Jester’s Cap on developers and remove the fun stuff for everyone else.
Effects switches (or “The Switch” for short, which I’m trying to get popularized in gaming lexicon) are becoming more common, but I always get very emotional when a developer includes one. I didn’t like Super Broken Games, but I have much love and respect for Daniel. Thank you.
Now then, Super Broken Games. The idea is a series of dexterity tests that require you to move a ball (or balls) into a goal. The hook is there is some sort of control quirk in every stage that brings the difficulty level somewhere between “hard” and “homicidal rage-inducing.” The controls are awful, but it really is by design. Super loose, designed to aggravate, and maddening to a fault. Sometimes it involves the cursor moving too fast. Sometimes it can’t move in a straight line. Sometimes you’re controlling two at once with the left and right sticks. No matter what method (except maybe the dual-stick stuff, which isn’t so bad), you’re going to be screaming in emotional agony.
I appreciate Super Broken Games for its truth in advertising. Given the circumstances, I wish I could say I had fun with it, but I didn’t. I don’t know if the effects I had to turn off to avoid the epilepsy risk add a lot to the gameplay, but I found SBG to be sterile and dull. I’ve never been a fan of any game that’s only goal seems to be to cause a spike in your blood pressure. A multiplayer mode doesn’t help because finding other people willing to play a game that’s entire hook is having mangled controls is next to impossible.
I have nothing against games that are difficult, but they need to have more than just difficulty going for them. Super Broken Games only has hardness going for it. You know those things they have at carnivals where you have to take a hoop and run it across a bent piece of mental without touch it? Super Broken Games is as frustrating as one of those, only without the reward of winning a teddy bear if you succeed.
Approximately nine hours ago, I started watching the new Hobbit movie with Brian. Weirdly enough, the counter on the television indicates that we only began watching it one and a half hours ago. I tried to alert scientists of the world of the bizarre vortex in space and time emanating from our living room, but they showed little interest. Probably because checking it out would require them to watch the Hobbit as well.
Thankfully, I was also playing an Easter-themed XBLIG called Bad Bunny. It was a bit disappointing in one regard: the cover art made it look like it would have a lot more personality than it did. Take a look.
Not bad-looking. I figured it would be like an XBLIG version of Naughty Bear. Which, granted, was one of the worst games of the last generation, but at least it had an interesting concept. So I ponied up a dollar and fired it up. Needless to say, it was not Naughty Bear.
Yeah. So instead it’s another fixed-position wave shooter, only this time the enemies are rabbits firing Easter eggs at you. Honestly though, Bad Bunny not bad at all. It’s not good or memorable either, but it didn’t feel like a complete waste of a dollar. There’s not a whole lot for me to comment on. The projectiles fired at your stationary turret could stand out a little more, so that you could better defend yourself. And they could have really used more power-ups to keep things interesting. And online leaderboards as opposed to just a local one. And it could have used more than one ordinary play mode. Bad Bunny isn’t remotely ambitious and you’ve played a million games like this before.
BUT, it is fun for an hour, and fun is all that has ever mattered in my books. Bad Bunny is a totally harmless, borderline charming arcadey throwback and yes, I do like it a little bit. Let people moan that I enjoyed this half-assed shooter and didn’t like something ambitious and thoughtful, like Deadlight. Am I saying Bad Bunny is better than Deadlight? I guess technically I am, though that seems somehow wrong. How about “I personally enjoyed the overall experience of one hour with Bad Bunny more than I did several hours with Deadlight.” Besides, it’s just one person’s opinion. It’s not like it’s notarized by the Pope or anything. I actually did try to get it notarized but he stopped taking my calls when I wouldn’t stop calling him “Super Mario.”
$1 Has no clue how we got from Jesus being beaten, executed by crucifixion, then returning from the dead to bunnies and colored eggs in the making of this review.
Like my new logo? The gentleman who designed it, Kenneth Seward Jr., is for hire! Visit his site and check him out on Twitter. Reasonable rates, awesome work!
Earlier this week, I was browsing the XBLIG marketplace when I came across a game that caught my attention. It featured two lesbians on the cover making out and suggestively wielding bananas like they were dildos. I’m not kidding. The game, Banana Bananza, was pulled today from the XBLIG market place. I guess having two chicks make like they’re going to fuck each-other with a banana is just the sort of thing that gets you yanked. By the way, when that happens with an XBLIG you’ve already bought, they WILL remove your ability to play the game from your Xbox. Check it out. Here’s what it looks like on my “recent” tab from the dashboard.
Here’s what it looks like when you try to boot it up.
Sucks, huh? But that’s how it works. If MS deems a game unsuitable for the marketplace, they can delete your ability to play it. No refund. Welcome to the digital age.
I actually did buy it. I figured, why not? Among other things, I live in the San Fransisco Bay Area and I support gay rights, so I’m going to Hell anyway. More over, I can be just as cynical as game developers. These games get attention, and not just for devs. My most popular reviews are all, sadly, games with anime-style graphics and lots of boobies. If not for the fact that I’ve heard from a lot of regular readers who discovered me and the XBLIG scene from those reviews, I unquestionably would be leaving them alone. It makes me wonder if the boob games have been an overall positive for XBLIG as a whole.
I’m being dead serious.
Anyway, Banana was the worst game I’ve ever played in my entire life. I’m not joking. I found out it was based on a popular free web game called Cookie Clicker. The idea being you would press A to “pick a banana” and watch a counter go up. After picking enough bananas, you could spend those on upgrades that pick the bananas automatically for you. And that’s the entirety of the game. But here’s the weird part: people who were making fun of this lazy version of Cookie Clicker were also warning me to not actually try Cookie Clicker myself. For fear of losing me. “We know you. We know your addictive personality. Please don’t Cathy. We all love you.” I was thinking “oh come ON, any game that could have inspired this can’t possibly win me over.
The original marketplace page for Banana had no screenshots of the “gameplay” so I took one myself. This is the entirety of the game.
50+ hours later, with my index finger swollen from all the clicking, I have to admit, yea, they were right. I was legitimately addicted to Cookie Clicker, which is less a game and more a narcotic, only more legal and dangerous to your relationships.
So yes, you click a cookie to earn cookies which you spend on “buildings” that produce more cookies, or bonus items that increase the amount of cookies you can earn. I vastly underestimated how quickly and poorly the XBLIG clone was handled, because Cookie Clicker has a lot more going for it than just purchasing upgrades and watching cookies roll in. For starters, the XBLIG clone only had six possible things you could buy, and those things couldn’t be upgraded. Cookie Clicker has twelve, all of which can be upgraded multiple times to be more productive. There’s also bonus cookies that appear randomly somewhere on the screen that set off random special effects. There’s holiday-themed special events that unlock new upgrades. There’s even an end game involving the Grandmas you hire. Plus, you know, it’s free. As opposed to not free.
That thing in the corner is Santa Claus. Don’t ask.
Just playing Cookie Clicker earned me a lot of scorn and “you’re not a gamer” ridicule from the usual gang of idiots. I don’t understand it myself. How do we, as a community, broaden our horizons if we don’t explore every facet of gaming. Especially stuff that’s popular, and Cookie Clicker is popular. And I can totally see why. Some things are enjoyable on a level that defies explanation. Why do people just sit around and pop bubble wrap? I have no clue. And I have no clue why I spent so long watching a glorified number counter go up like I did with Cookie Clicker. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.
I booted up Super Dungeon Quest for XBLIG today. I selected the Barbarian, selected normal for a difficulty level, and started the game. I then immediately took damage, literally right as the screen faded into the first fucking level. There was an instruction overlay on the screen explaining what all the shit does, which required a press of the A button to get out of. The game was not paused during this, so the enemies, which spawned right next to me (levels are generated at random) immediately started munching on me. It was as if I was the embodiment of Old Country Buffet and the enemies were old people you see and shudder at that wait for the place to open every morning.
And thus a new Indie Gamer Chick record was set: fastest a game caused me to, as they say in the hood, “lose my shit.” 1.7 seconds. That’s how long it took me to realize that I had already lost a full heart and was still actively taking damage, as I was reading the fucking instruction screen that was on top of the fucking action. And lose my shit I did. I couldn’t even manage to swear. I literally shook my fist in anger (I didn’t know people really did that until just now) while letting out a primal scream. I’m not even kidding. At that moment, I fully believe I was capable of doing things to my fellow human beings that any rational person would label as “evil.”
All the levels are randomly generated, which is why they lack of the elegant complexity of Gauntlet. I think I would prefer developer-made stages for games like this, but randomly generated stuff is hot right now, so whatever.
Now, here’s a thought since I’m 99.9% sure the developer will read this: I’m a critic. So I felt an obligation to continue past this point. I originally didn’t. I was going to turn off my Xbox and write a review based on that 1.7 seconds of digital “fuck you” the game threw at me. But even my mother said “you know, that’s not very professional.” I guess she had a point. BUT, if I hadn’t been a critic, and this had been my first experience with your game, that would have been it for me. Presumably, I would have only been playing the demo, which I would never have touched again. You really do only get one chance to make a good first impression. And if you don’t fix this stuff quickly, you stand to lose a lot of potential players based on a bad first impression. That goes for all you indie developers. Even if the game stands to get unfair later, at least make sure the opening, ease-in levels don’t screw you right off the bat.
But, I pressed on, and I’m happy I did. I kind of liked Super Dungeon Quest (another new record set: most generic name in gaming history). Think of it as Gauntlet meets a rogue-like, only with much simpler levels, and no multiplayer (bad choice). You choose a class of hero, then hack-and-slash your way through enemies, collecting loot and waiting for one of them to drop a key to the next level. After about thirty minutes of this, the game ends. You can also play an arena mode, or an endless arena mode. And um, that’s really it.
Like any other game that involves stat-grinding, I decided to throw caution to the wind and abuse my upgrades. This time, I tried a different tactic: I threw all my XP into luck. Upgrading luck allegedly increases the odds of an enemy dropping rare items like life-refills or defensive shields by 1%. So, in theory, I should have seen a 5% increase in drops, once I maxed out my luck upgrades. Instead, enemies were dropping shit for me like waiters at a banana peel convention. Throw in the fact that the Paladin’s “special power” is being able to refill his own health, and I was able to cruise through the game on normal difficulty with minimal effort. Then I went into the endless arena mode, and lasted nearly two hours, clearing 25 stages, before I succumbed to boredom and let myself die. Had that not happened, I would still be playing it.
By the way, I attempted to play endless arena on hard with the Paladin and crashed the game with a code 4. I took it as a sign and quit trying.
In fact, I got no less than four “Code 4” crashes on this screen alone.
I feel the groundwork for a really spectacular game has been laid here, but the product that’s out now is just okay. It’s also infuriating in its unfinishedness. I think that’s a word. I crashed the game more than once. I sometimes passed right through gold or other items, unable to pick them up (the developer is aware of this but has no clue why it’s happening). Enemies would be spawned on the other side of walls and couldn’t be reached (thankfully none of them ever had the keys needed to make progress, but in theory, it could have happened). And the game is lacking some features that I felt like it needed: more upgrades, more levels, multiplayer, online play, leaderboards, and a larger variety of enemies. What I played feels more like a proof of concept. I *did* have fun with it, so it’s at least worth a look, and possibly a purchase. But Super Dungeon Quest needed more time to cook. All spit and no polish. I don’t think that actually makes any sense, but what do you want from me? I’ve been playing Fez for the last few days and had to go to the doctor to remove a used condom from my ear on account of my mind being fucked.
$2.99 nearly froze the game during 20 odd levels into endless mode by rounding up all the enemies into one cluster in the making of this review.
Super Dungeon Quest is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. I see no reason why, with more development time and more modes of play, this couldn’t be a top 25 game, so get to work, Smoodlez!
Twin-stick shooters. I’m willing to bet that I’ve played more of them than anyone my age on the planet. I’ve reviewed over a dozen here alone, and that’s not counting the ones I sampled for a few minutes before realizing that there would be no unique hook. I get why they exist in the numbers they do. It’s a relatively simple genre to pull off successfully. It’s perfect for a new developer who wants to get his or her feet wet in the whole game creation process. But I’m to a point where I’m so over twin-stick shooters. They need something that makes them stand out, or I’ll bore quickly.
E.Y.E.R.I.S., God bless it, really does try to be different. Unfortunately, it takes the art-house route to get there. There have been artsy TwickS in the past. Hell, I would say the grand-daddy of all XBLIG hits I Made a Game with Zombies is an artsy example of the genre. Here, the art vibe is less subtle and borderline pretentious, as you get motivational snippets of guidance that seemingly have no relevancy or anchor of any sort to the goings-on. Maybe it means more to the guys who made this, but for me, I just couldn’t get a feel for what concept or feeling they were trying to invoke here. It just came across as snooty.
Wait, without vision your path is revealed? How in the fuck do see the path? Without vision, I’ll end up walking into walls!
There is an actual game here though, and it’s a decent one. Of course it is. It’s pretty fucking hard to botch a twin-stick shooter. In E.Y.E.R.I.S. (I have no clue what it stands for, and the game doesn’t tell you) you start off on a stage where you have no ability to shoot and have to avoid the baddies for about a minute. Once you finish that, you’ll be given a choice of what the next stage will be. All the stages are the same, as far as I can tell, with the only difference being what gun you’re given. Repeat this three more times, adding additional weapons and shields with each new stage, and afterwards the game ends and simply cycles back to the opening screen, with no explanation of what this whole thing was about. I made up my own and assumed I was fighting off some kind of aggressive eye-infection.
Bad picture for the marketplace. It makes it seem like the soft-focus will be a major element in the game. It isn’t.
Again, it’s pretty hard to screw up a genre this simple. I spent a lot of time on the fence, trying to figure out how I felt about E.Y.E.R.I.S., and I came to the conclusion that it’s a decent game, and for those not burned out on the genre, or for those that get all touchy-feelly about games like this, you’ll probably enjoy it more than me. I don’t feel strongly about it one way or another, which means it gets to hang out at the bottom of the Leaderboard, but a decent game is a decent game, even if it sniffs its own farts.
$1 has no idea why I complain about people sniffing farts when I’m a world-renowned fan of picking one’s own nose. Mmm Hmmm, few things in life as satisfying as picking one’s own nose in the making of this review.
Hey, I wash my hands afterward. And I don’t eat any thing that comes out of it. Hello? Gross.
If you’ve been browsing the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace, there’s a chance you might have noticed a fairly convincing Zelda clone pop-up over the last month. That is, if you can see past the dozen or so Flappy Bird clones littering the new releases. Then again, you might have missed it. After all, it has box art that looks like this:
Insert Tom Hanks and/or Gilligan’s Island joke here.
And it has a name that isn’t likely to inspire thoughts of the game whose legacy it tries so very hard to invoke. Shipwreck? Seriously? Still, it caught my attention, even though I’m not all teary-eyed nostalgic over Zelda. Chances are, it meant more to your childhood than it did mine. Don’t get me wrong. I love the series. Link Between Worlds was my favorite game of 2013, which I’m just as shocked by as anyone else. And I admit, the thought of a really good Zelda clone had me a bit excited. But it was all for not. My rule is, if I like a game 50.1% more than I dislike it, it gets my seal of approval. Shipwreck hovers around 40%. Maybe 45%. Close, but no cigar.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The idea is, you’re a chick whose ship crashes and you have to gather four magical elements and defeat a ghost inside a lighthouse so that you can get a new ship and return home. The graphical style, sword-swinging animation, and castaway theme of the game is clearly aimed after Link’s Awakening, which I’ve always felt was one of the more overrated Zeldas. Still a solid game, mind you, but just not all that. Shipwreck still does a good job of emulating the feel of it. But then some glaring flaws pop up.
Credit where it’s due: it looks the part.
For starters, the overworld has no enemies in it. For real. You just wander from place to place, looking for the next dungeon. There’s also no hidden caves, secret passageways, or surprises of any sorts. It’s an empty, sprawling, lifeless world. That worked in a game like Shadow of the Colossus (which mind you, still had SOME collectables, like the fruit or lizard tails), but in a 2D Zelda style game? It’s just so boring. Given the fact that Zeldas have been based around secret doors from the very start of the franchise, neglecting to include them in a Zelda tribute seems to miss the point of the series entirely.
There’s also not many items to collect. I got a shield (which you have to equip and activate, just like in Link’s Awakening), a crossbow, a lantern, and a pick-axe. That’s it. The game’s dungeons (one starter, four “gather the holy trinkets”, and one finale) don’t contain special items that you need to solve puzzles or advance further. Really, the more you play Shipwreck, the less tributey this Zelda tribute feels. It’s missing so many key elements of the formula, with only the boring stuff that anyone can do left in. It would be like if at Shaquille O’Neal’s hall of fame induction, they left out his four championships and focused on Kazaam and his free-throw shooting. Why would you even do that? And why would you leave the best parts of Zelda out of a Zelda tribute?
It does a lot of other fundamental stuff wrong. There’s no overworld map. The enemies “blink” when they take damage and don’t recoil enough. They also all seem to take two shots to kill. Except the boring bosses, which are spongy as hell. Oh, and you know how in some Zelda games, in order to get to where you’re supposed to go in a dungeon, you have to fall through the floor? Yea, Shipwreck does that too. Only in Shipwreck, you take damage for it. What a horrible idea! And why the FUCK does it only use two equip buttons when there are four face buttons on an Xbox controller? No, it doesn’t matter if you’re paying tribute to a two-button game. Not using all the resources at your disposal is just obnoxious.
The first boss is a giant crab monster. Of course it is.
Yes, Shipwreck does a lot of things right. I like how, instead of enemies dropping hearts (even when you have full health), they drop apples that you can save and use later. Now that’s a good idea. I liked the desert dungeon. And…….. well actually that’s the only stuff that really stood out to me. Everything else never got brutally awful or anything, but Shipwreck was bland and boring from the start and never really picks up steam. It will find an audience because it looks Zeldaish enough to warrant a purchase. I’m also not this game’s target audience, and I’m sure children of the 80s will probably enjoy this a lot more than I did. But, taken on its own merit, Shipwreck is just a dull video game experience. And taken as a Zelda clone? No secrets. No clever puzzles oriented around items found in dungeons. All that’s really left is the combat and some aspects of dungeon exploration, and even those are quite a bit off. Let Shipwreck be a lesson to everyone: when paying tribute to your favorite childhood classic, looking the part should take a back seat to feeling the part. Shipwreck is to Zelda what Lucky Charms would be without the marshmallows.
When people mock the 80s, they tend to mock synthesizers, tall hair, and movie montages. When games mock the 80s, they joke about how we accepted a lot of shit when it came to video games. Strangely enough, it’s not all that common for games to mock the other big event from the 80s, apart from New Coke of course. By that, I mean the Cold War. Finally someone has stepped up to the plate. Enter Rad Raygun.
I previously hadn’t read up on the game much other than to see that it looked like a Mega Man clone. I haven’t played one of those since Vintage Hero so I was ready to give it a shot.
After a few minutes, it was clear that I was wrong in that it isn’t a Mega Man clone but more of a Mega Man-inspired game. It has some similarities in that you’re a robot with a blaster and that it’s a platformer with boss battles at the end of each stage, but there are many differences that make this title stand apart.
White House Down!
In this trek through 198X, you are Ray Raygun, a robot on a mission to bringing the war Soviets have started back to Russia after they attacked Washington DC. In your adventure which takes you to the Berlin Wall, Chernobyl’s nuclear plant, and the Kremlin, you’ll encounter the cutest little Soviet robots and missiles to destroy in this light-hearted look at the Cold War.
Setting itself apart from Mega Man, rather than copying the abilities of the bosses you defeat, you gain abilities as you find them on the ground such as a slide maneuver to sneak under things, a mid-air moonwalk that allows you to cross gaps, and an aimable cannon shot that helps you reach enemies placed at an angle your blaster has trouble reaching.
Poking fun at the 80s era of video games is a tried and true method to get a few laughs. Right away you’re treated to a joke about how enemies will reappear the instant you backtrack even a few pixels. While typically annoying in the games it’s mocking, it’s not a big deal here because none of the enemies are overly difficult and serves its purpose as an amusing quirk.
There is a fun nod to Tetris while inside the Kremlin where you can actually play the classic game in order to, I assume, gain bonuses to your power-ups. I only assume because while it is a cute nod, unless I’m missing something, controls for this mini-game were brutally difficult in that every few seconds, a piece would fall in a certain location depending on where your character was on the board and which direction he faced. If you want a piece to fall where you are standing, you’re out of luck for there is little you can do to get out-of-the-way before the piece comes crashing down. It would have been nice if the player could control when the piece fell rather than let it be a timed event since a game like Tetris requires careful placement of blocks.
The levels are laid out in a fashion along the same vein of Mega Man with a few key differences.
The game makes it a point to simulate the way stages, as in Mega Man, would “scroll” when you reach the border of an area, but it forgets one thing. Enemies and enemy attacks that occur during the scroll should be forgotten by the game and disappear. Something so seemingly minor in text here comes off as quite an annoyance while playing. I encountered a few areas where an enemy was able to fire homing missiles at me off-screen and I would have to flail about to avoid the attacks.
A Tetris minigame found in Moscow.
While there is never a dull moment in fighting off the sheer number of baddies in Mega Man, many of the areas in this game are devoid of any life at all. These areas are purely for aesthetic reasons such as, “A cooling tower is tall so we will make it tall in our video game.” This is all fine and dandy but give me something to shoot! No one wants to walk through an empty game where they’re encouraged to kill all the things and there are no things.
I encountered a few bugs along the way but nothing game-breaking and not really worth mentioning other than one that was a bit strange. If backtracking and you cross back through one of the “scroll” areas and were hit while the game scrolled, crossing back through that scroll would cause you to take damage again, even if there were no longer enemies there. While I did die to this once, the game is easy enough and lives are plentiful that it wasn’t anything more than a small annoyance.
It may seem like I’m picking on a number of things here but actually, I had a lot of fun with this title and children of the 80s and those with a little knowledge about the global politics of the era will laugh at the nice touches the devs added to make this title stand out. It’s a cute homage to the time of my youth that, for the most part, does what it tried to do well.
At its cheap price ($1), this is a fun title that you can finish in a short amount of time and I highly recommend it. Between the Tetris area mentioned above, Matryoshka Sputniks, and a lone red balloon floating, there was plenty to make me giggle with delight.
Full disclosure: Kris Steele, developer of today’s two games, is my friend. Our relationship got off to a rocky start. When I was brand new to the scene, barely two weeks after I launched Indie Gamer Chick, I interviewed Kris. By this point, I hadn’t won the respect of the community, but they were happy to have ANYONE covering XBLIGs besides the two or three sites that already did. I was someone new to talk to. Or, more accurately, someone to gossip to. At the time, I was interviewing developers for the second XBLIG Uprising event, and one of the candidates for it was Volchaos, a game by Kris. The only problem was Kris was also organizing the event, and there was skepticism on how good Volchaos was. (Side note: Volchaos did not make the Uprising. It wasn’t finished in time. The next year, the developer of Sententia organized the third event, and his game most certainly DID make it in, and it basically soured the whole thing). At the time, I was still kind of finding my identity, so when the time came for the interview, I was still in “pretend to be a serious writer asking tough-questions” mode. By the time it was over, I’m pretty sure he didn’t like. Nor should he have. I was a douche. Straight up.
But, he was never unkind to me. By the time I figured out that I should drop any pretense of professionalism and just be myself, he was still there and willing to help me. Even after I didn’t enjoy Volchaos, he was encouraging of me, and endorsed me to the community. Fast forward to today. Kris is my friend. A really, really good friend. I’m proud to be his friend. All bullshit aside, he’s a good man, and I consider our relationship a privilege. He’s always there for me to answer questions about game development, indie politics, or if I need his fingerprints on a bloody crowbar. It’s really a sign of his character that he became friends with me.
And now I’m going to put that character to the test by calling one of his latest games digital dog feces.
One thing I never imagined when I started Indie Gamer Chick is that I would form a close relationship with any developer. Today, I have just that with a few dozen. For many of them, I’ve reviewed at least one of their games. If that’s the case, there’s roughly a 55% chance I didn’t like their effort. At first, I was worried that people might accuse me of going soft on those that are my friends. Even if it’s not true (and if you ask Kris Steele or Dave Voyles, they’ll tell you it’s not. And probably cry), that perception is there. I take great pride in the fairness of my reviews. People might think that someone might expect their critic friend to show mercy on them. To those that believe that, nothing I can say or do would convince them it’s not otherwise. Anyone with real friends knows that real friends would never ask that of their critic friend.
So, what did my friend release recently? First up, I looked at Abduction Action! Plus on XBLIG and Ouya. I had heard of this game days earlier, when a child psychologist recommended that the average punishment for a disobedient child be changed from grounding to playing Abduction Action. Less timing consuming, faster results. No child will fuck with mommy and daddy again. Okay, I’m kidding, but it is a pretty awful game. The idea is you’re a UFO that must torment Earthlings for shits and giggles. Using a tractor beam, you’ll abduct humans, or crush them with various objects, or drop them from lethal heights. In theory, this is the game you give evil little children to break them of their habit of torturing ants for the lulz.
In Iowa, they call this “Tuesday.”
Unfortunately, Abduction Action! Plus is let down by poor controls. Many of the challenges in the game, such flying into birds, requires precision movement, and that’s not really an option. It gets bad when you’re forced to accelerate into objects using the turbo boost. For those watching me, it was probably comical. I tried to splatter a birdie on the UFO, and instead overshot it no less than a dozen times, until it finally flew off the screen. It was maddening. And that’s ultimately why I couldn’t enjoy AA+. It’s a game about lining up to do stuff. Line up to grab a rock and drop it on a jock’s head. Line up to pull someone up in your tractor beam. Line up bullets to turbo-boost through them. That shit is hard to do when the UFO only has two speeds: too fast and suicidally fast.
Then there’s the problem of having to remain stationary while you suck up the people and objects. If a projectile hits your UFO, the beam is deactivated and you drop whatever you’re carrying. This is kind of tough when you have people shooting you pretty much non-stop anytime you’re low enough to grab anyone. I’m not sure why a standard gun or even a shotgun would cause a UFO to do anything but laugh. You mean to tell me these things are designed to travel through space and torment any living creature they happen across, but a single bullet fucks their mojo up? I tried to find something positive to say about Abduction Action Plus’s gameplay, and I couldn’t come up with anything. That is unfortunate, because the writing is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny and the concept is solid. But gameplay is king, and AA+ controls like a game in dire need of an AA meeting.
What’s shocking about Abduction’s badness is Kris released another game recently, this one on iPhone, and it is fucking awesome. It’s called Hypership Still Out of Control. It’s a sort-of-sequel, but not really, of a couple earlier games. I reviewed both Hypership Out of Control for iPhone and Hypership Still Out of Control on Xbox Live Indie Games last year. Like Abduction Action, the XBLIG version of Hypership was overly-sensitive to control. On iPhone, the control was near flawless. Still Out on Control offers more of the same, only the levels are different. Same graphics, same control scheme, and the levels themselves progress seemingly the same way. The meteors are in the first stage. The eyeball wall things are the second stage, etc, etc. So, despite Kris’ objections, I’m basically calling this more of a DLC pack. A very good one, mind you. I highly recommend it.
Damn game won’t take the sky from me.
But, the honeymoon with Hypership is over, and now a lot of the glaring flaws are starting to be noticed. Stuff like how sometimes setting off a bomb is too hard. You have to double-tap the screen to do it. I don’t know if it prefers you to tap in the same spot or not. It’s sometimes a difficult thing to pull off, and setting off a bomb when you most need to is very challenging because the screen is usually too full to safely stay still long enough to detonate it. Also, when you’ve built up a stockpile of 3 bombs, which is the max, why doesn’t picking up a 4th bomb automatically detonate it? It wouldn’t make the game too easy, but it’s too hard to see the new bomb on-screen and react fast enough to detonate a bomb you’re holding before picking it up. Since you can’t use a finger on your spare hand (for those that have such a thing, and to those who don’t, you shouldn’t have played around with firecrackers like that) to set off a bomb, the system is just too busted. This is a game based around speed, lots of it. You probably won’t have enough time to safely take your finger off the screen for the less-than-a-second it takes to use it. I would kill to be able to play Hypership with a mouse or a trackball. The joystick controls of the XBLIG were too damn loose, while the phone version lacks buttons that would make the game so much better. A marriage between the two might make one of the best space-shooters of the modern era.
Don’t let any of those complaints turn you off. They’re here because I’m hoping like hell Kris gets the message and makes some fixes to his already excellent game. Hypership, no matter which version you get on your iThing, is a truly special game. One of my favorite iPhone games, indie or otherwise. One of the few space-shooters I’ve ever enjoyed. One of the few games on any platform I play on a regular basis. And my enjoyment of it isn’t based on my friendship with Kris. If friendship somehow softened my thoughts on his Abduction Action! Plus, then you should be scared because it might be so bad that it causes cancer. No, I like Hypership purely because it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. You know, I’ve had a bad break lately with health issues. I don’t know what my future holds. I don’t find out until February 27. I am lucky that I have friends who will be there for me. And here’s where the friendship thing matters to me: how fucking cool is it that one of my friends, who will be there for me through the worst of whatever I face, also is someone who made one of the best games I’ve ever played? It proves once again something I’ve known for a long time: I’m the luckiest person I know.
This is for Hypership. For Abduction Action! Plus, picture Sweetie with pock marks on her face, blood dripping out of her nose, the stench of death on her, with skulls and crossbones all around the edges saying “not approved for any use besides enhanced interrogation.”
$1.99 said Kris could remake the same game, only set it on I-80 in California and claim it’s based on a true story in the making of this review.
Hypership Still Out of Control is Chick-Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
Protip: when naming your game, don’t give it a name that is just asking to be mocked. Such is the case with Iota. If I wanted to be an unoriginal wiseass, I could say “I didn’t like Iota one iota.” But I’m above such laziness.
Well, then again, I’ve been updating only like once a week for a couple of months now. So fuck it. Laziness for the win.
I didn’t like Iota one iota.
Iota looks really good.. for an XBLIG. But typically, really good XBLIGs would look merely decent on Sega Dreamcast, which you’ll note is fifteen years old.
Iota is one of those XBLIGs that falls into the category of “looks too good.” It’s the curse of the platform. With only a few exceptions, the better an XBLIG looks, the worse it plays. Iota looks pretty dang good, which means the curse is especially potent here. The idea is you play as a robot that must go around stages collecting shiny balls of light. Collecting all of them opens up a shinier ball of light, clearing the stage. Oh, and the platforming is sort of like a stripped-down Outland, which itself could best be described as “Ikaruga with jumping.”
In the interest of fairness, I’ll disclose that I’m not wired to really like Iota all that much to begin with. I don’t like bullet hells, and I don’t like platformers that drink the bullet-hell Kool-Aid. But, in the case of Iota, the stuff I dislike the most has nothing to do with the bulletly hellness of it, and honestly the bullet-hell stuff isn’t even that bad, at least up to the point where I determined that I would never have fun with this and quit. Quick: what’s the most important thing a precision-based platformer OR a bullet hell would need? Tight controls, right?
Guess what Iota doesn’t have?
If Sega hit the Sake too much and made a platformer that controlled exactly like Sonic the Hedgehog, only heavier and starring Juggernaut from X-Men, that’s what Iota would feel like. Starting movement is too slow, stopping isn’t instantaneous, jumping feels too heavy or sometimes just doesn’t respond in time at all. In just the first three levels, I lost count of how many times I went to jump, hit the button long before I got to the cliff, and then watched as my character didn’t jump and plunged to his death. If it was less than ten times, I’ll eat my hat.
The 2.5D perspective also made calculating distances and heights annoying at times, but that’s hardly Iota’s biggest problem.
Another issue is the inconsistency of the color-swapping bullet hell gimmick. You switch the robot from red to blue, which allows you to pass harmlessly through bullets. Using the triggers as a sort of dash-attack, you can also knock out the enemies. Except the game is a bit fickle about the timing of it. Switching mostly allows you to instantaneously pass through the bullets with relative ease, but upon landing on the platform and dashing into the robot (which has to match your color in order to kill it), sometimes it would register me as still changing colors, resulting in a death. I experimented with this a lot (probably more than any play-tester did, judging by how bad it is), and it was bizarre how the bullets could be passed through instantaneously, but there was a lag in using it to kill enemies. I found out that the jumping and landing had nothing to do with the lag. I could situation myself on a platform, wait for the robot to come at me, switch colors, to the point that my robot looked fully like he had switched, dash, and die because it thought I was still the wrong color.
Level design was nearly my biggest issue, which is really impressive considering that I only played four stages. I don’t think the idea of collecting all the trinkets in a level to open up an exit works in a game like this. Maybe it was worth experimenting to find out, but really, a game based around one-hit kills and a broken checkpoint system should have simply been about getting from point A to point B. With all the backtracking, it bogs the game down, makes it less exciting. And then there was the third level, which is almost entirely done in the dark. It’s not a particularly hard stage, but because you have very limited visibility, you have to heel-toe it, nudging the stick one tiny bit at a time, like you’re masturbating the microscopic penis of a Ferrari owner. It’s shameful that the developers didn’t recognize this as BORING design. Because, above all else, your games should not bore. Every other aspect of Iota has potential to be a pretty decent platformer. But a stage like this, which can’t be played at a speed above molecular-degradation of an atom, never had potential to be anything but the most boring level in platform history. It’s only purpose is now to point and it and say “for fuck’s sake, don’t ever make a stage like this” to other developers.
Although I found nothing to like about Iota, I don’t deny this could have been something good. Certainly a foundation has been laid for something that could be entertaining. But Iota put a premium on graphics, and didn’t focus on the stuff that really matters in a platformer of this sort, and the result is a game with limited value. Tighter controls would have made a world of difference here. And stuff like the all-dark level should have never entered into the thoughts of the developer. Ten seconds of research would have shown that the number-one gripe of the vast majority of Spelunky player are the dark stages, and in Iota, the visibility a player has is much worse. Thus, Iota serves as a reminder that, with the freedom indie developers have, the flip side is you end up with level design such as this that nobody in their right fucking mind would attempt. I absolutely can’t believe the developers didn’t second-guess some of the design choices here. Ultimately, Iota’s only hope is to lure people in with its impressive graphics. Except, Iota really only looks good for an XBLIG. And that’s like saying melanoma looks good as far as cancer goes.
Venus Explorer was developed by Team Shuriken.
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