Trailer Park King 3DD

November 21, 2012 by 6 Comments

What can I say about the Trailer Park King games that I haven’t already said here, here, or here?  Nothing has changed for the third (or fourth) installment.  Horrible voice acting.  Ridiculous, nonsensical plot.  Lack of actual gameplay.  Humor so crude and forced that it would make Seth MacFarlane blush with shame.  By all rights, these are games I should hate.  So why do I keep coming back to them?  More importantly, why do I keep adding them to my Leaderboard?  Granted, not one game in the series is in the top 100, but still, shouldn’t I be lining them up against a wall and gunning them down like Al Capone?  These are bad games.  I’m known to clean and gut bad games and mount them on my wall.  So what the fuck, Cathy?

Doctor House would diagnose the nurse with explosive jug syndrome. Or it could be lupus.

I think part of it is how much Trailer Park King revels in its subject matter.  The characters are all so uncouth, shallow, and flat-out stupid that you can’t help but laugh at it.  Another part of it is developer Sean Doherty is Canadian and it strikes me as a potentially offensive look at how our neighbors to the north view the poor of our country.  It straddles the line between parody and socioeconomic bigotry, but it’s so damn absurd that nobody could possibly be offended.  It’s also one of those “raunchy” games that other developers burn in effigy.  I see where they’re coming from, but Trailer Park King doesn’t strike me as particularly sexy.  The characters here are so.. well.. trashy, that I can’t believe anyone could get off on this stuff.  If these were real people, you could probably get an STD just by thinking about them while jerking off.  Never mind that the characters are grossly malnourished and their tits are obviously fake.

It’s rare that games on XBLIG are so bad that they’re good, but that’s the best way to summarize the Trailer Park King series.  They’re guilty pleasures.  The series might be running out of steam though.  This time around, you have to prove that series antagonist Truck is not a zombie.  How do you do this?  Well, zombies can’t dance, can’t be hypnotized, eat brains, animals don’t like them, and most important, they can’t be anal probed.  So you run down those things like a checklist and see if Truck takes the bait on any of them.  It’s as dumb as it sounds, but it’s still funny in a self-aware “I’m playing a game where someone shoves a large anal prob up a dude’s ass to prove he’s not a zombie” sort of away.

The only minigame in Trailer Park King carries on the tradition of being needless and dull.

For the third (or fourth) episode in the series, there’s only one mini-game: a shooting gallery where you must fire on wanted posters that have descriptions like “skank” or “dumbass.”  Prior knowledge of the series is probably required, or you can just wait for dumbass to pop up and shoot the posters of Truck like I did.  It’s not the most well conceived, but it’s better than the sliding puzzle of Cherry Poke Prison.  Otherwise, the game seemed like the shortest of the series (it took me about thirty minutes to finish) and the jokes are starting to wear a bit thin.  I still enjoyed Trailer Park King 3, but I won’t be reviewing any more games in the series.  Quite frankly, I’m running out of stuff to say about them.  They are what they are.  You’ll either hate them on principle, or you’ll enjoy them for being utterly bad, yet oddly compelling pieces of shit.  And hey, white trash is totally an in thing right now.  If Ted Nugent is looking for someone to make a video game about her life, she should ring up Sean.

Trailer Park King 3DD was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points said watching Honey Boo Boo is now medically defined as self-harm in the making of this review.

Trailer Park King 3DD is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  Check to see where it’s fapping at.

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Breasts, Avatars, Crafting, and You

June 16, 2012 by 14 Comments

Sex sells.  It’s an expression as old as the concept of mass-marketing.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my year as Indie Gamer Chick, it’s that the expression is absolutely true.  I’m closing in on nearly a year of having this site, and I’m on the cusp on having 200,000 lifetime views for it.  This will be the 300th item I’ve posted on my site since launching on July 1, 2011.  As tough as this is to admit, I would have just over half of those 200,000 views if not for three game reviews: Don’t Die Dateless Dummy, Temple of Dogolrak, and Trailer Park King.  What do these three games have in common?  Well, they’re graphic adventures.  They all are kind of lame.  The writing isn’t particularly good.

Oh, and they are about tits.  Or space twats. And this really infuriates other developers of Xbox Live Indie Games.  There is an undercurrent of bitterness among developers who work hard on their fine-tuned platformers or RPGs who have to sit and watch their games get buried on the sales charts by games that offer little more than static-pictures of anime breasts.

Although I can’t blame those developers for being sore, I have to side with the smut peddlers on this one.  Yea, I haven’t exactly loved the quote-unquote “sexy games” I’ve reviewed here, but that’s on account of the games being no good.  If the gameplay was decent, I would have probably cracked a joke or two about the content, but I’m certainly not offended.  I know that there is a market from them.  I’ve had over 40,000 views come from search engines, the top-10 of which are as follows:

don’t die dateless dummy 2,707
temple of dogolrak 2,506
indie gamer chick 2,190
trailer park king 2,159
indiegamerchick 747
dont die dateless dummy 491
dead pixels game 373
trailer park king review 286
dlc quest 272
trailer park king game 248

As you can see, the top-10 is dominated by those three games.  If I ignored all other search results, the six hits off “boob games” account for over 20% of all search terms in my site’s history.  Oh, but it’s actually far more.  In fact, it’s around 25,000 of those searches, or over 60%.

Pictured: the game that has generated 10% of my total views.

But you didn’t need me to tell you this is what sells on Xbox Live Indie Games.  When I reviewed Apple Jack 2 yesterday, I pointed out that only 2 of the 90 best-selling games Xbox Live Indie Games were punishers.  Although I admit that what constitutes a punisher varies (Alan pointed out to me that Soul, which I have not played, would count as a punisher in his book due to extreme difficulty).  Still, I think my point is valid: punishers are an over-represented genre on Xbox Live Indie Games.  For all the bitching people do about Minecraft clones, avatar games, or raunchy stuff, you can’t say that the market hasn’t spoken, and spoken clearly.  Minecraft clones dominate the top of the charts, while games with the word “avatar” in the title represent 21 of the top 90.  Meanwhile, stuff featuring women on the cover (including pregnant women) account for 14 of the top 90 sellers.

The people have spoken, and they’ve done so with their wallets.  So while I sympathize with those developers who feel they can’t compete with Avatar Boobcraft, I would like to point out that you asked for this.  This is what all real artists go through.  You don’t think there’s some dejected filmmaker out there who poured his time, money, and life into his project only to watch in agony while something completely shallow and empty like Transformers 3 out-grossed it by over a billion dollars?  You don’t think talented singers started measuring themselves for the noose when Ashlee Simpson’s albums went triple-platinum?  Artistic success is rarely a measurement of talent or effort, which is why the average person my age can name all of the Spice Girls but none of the Three Tenors.

Yea, I don’t like it when these games totally half-ass it, but I don’t like it when ANY game half asses it.  Also, I find it obnoxious when games put women all over the cover, yet the game has little or nothing to do with sexuality.  This was the case with my latest review, Superdimension Iliad.  The actual game starred a blocky avatar and was about platforming and shooting your way through gaming history.  The game looked like this:

The cover looked like this:

In cases like this, I’ll side with the crybabies.  There should be some kind of “cover art that actually represents the game” rule for Xbox Live Indie Games.  If you allow developers to shameless pander to the pocket-pool enthusiasts even when their game is about as erotic as watching an old man sleep on a hammock, the results could get ugly.

Oh who am I kidding?  This would be on the top 90 in a week or two.

Thanks to Michael Wilson for the (completely fictional) box art above. 

Filed under Editorials Tagged with , , ,

Cherry Poke Prison

June 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

Cherry Poke Prison is a spin-off of the popular Trailer Park King games, which are popular because they have digital boobs.  And no, for you guys coming here from Google, there is no nudity or sex acts in this game.  Sorry, you’re going to have to settle for one of the three trillion, two-hundred and forty-eight billion, six-hundred and thirty-three million, two-hundred and four thousand, five-hundred and one other options you have out there.  Yea I know, life is cruel.  You know what else is cruel?  This is the only point and click series on XBLIG I actually give half a squirt about, and developer Sean Doherty dropped the ball here like it was lubricated in Crisco.

In Cherry Poke Prison, you play as Clyde, the cousin (hopefully just cousin and not also brother or something) of King.  He gets sent to a women’s prison because he’s a womanizer and um, yea.  Have I mentioned the stories in these games are the most outlandish, incomprehensible, brain-rotting, yet somehow charming pieces of shit ever?  I hate saying anything is “so bad that it’s good” but that really does apply to the Trailer Park King series.  As one-dimensional, crude, and quite frankly stupid as the writing in these games are, they’re kind of endearing.  I like the characters.  I think this would make a great webcomic.  As a game, it’s not as good.  It’s just typical point-and-click crap.  Only the logic has to be insane enough to match the writing, which leads to things like needing to stick tweezers in an electrical outlet, which causes the TV to turn on and not kill you.  Thus the game devolves into rubbing object A against object B and hoping it works, practical reasoning be damned.  I wish someone would make a  clicker where the logic is actually logical.  Actually, no I don’t.  I just thought about it and it still doesn’t sound fun.

But, I’m willing to slog through something that barely qualifies as a game if I’m entertained by the plot.  Like the previous two games, I admit that I was satisfied with Cherry Poke Prison.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad.  Oooh, yes, very bad.  I have to wash my ears out with bleach just for listening to it.  But, I wanted to see what happens next.  So I pressed on for a half-hour or so, and then I got a sliding puzzle.

What?

Actually, “Why?” is a better question.  I don’t get why game developers insist on including boring elements into their games.  Sliding puzzles are boring when they’re corporeal objects made from cheap plastic.  In video games, they’re fucking busywork and nothing more.  They’re certainly not fun.  Of the endless options the developer had to choose from, why did he pick this?  I love puzzles, but I hate THIS kind of puzzle.  It really has no place in a video game.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same stuff.  The absurd banter between the characters still provides a few smirks, with maybe a small “muuhuh” type of laugh for the ending gag.  I wasn’t a big fan of Clyde, mostly because his personality isn’t really distinctive from King.  It might as well have just been him.  I was half-expecting a weird “it really IS King” twist at the end, but that didn’t happen either.  So the main character wasn’t really needed all that much, and I won’t be sad if he is absent from the rest of the series.

I’m not going to take the easy way out and say that Cherry Poke Prison isn’t really any better or worse than the previous games.  The truth is, it is worse, because the chosen “minigames” are not as strong.  Both the slide puzzle and the weight lifting crap feel like chores, and they don’t fit in with the overall theme or tone of the game.  It’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not really good.  Not that it matters what I think.  I’m guessing most people who read this review got, ahem, stuck, after the first picture.  Hey guys, there’s more review down here.  Guys?  GUYS?

YO!  Over here!

Okay, now that I have your attention.

Cherry Poke Prison was developed by Freelance Games

80 Microsoft Points said “hasn’t anyone ever told you guys that doing that so much makes you go blind?” in the making of this review. 

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