Multitasking

Hello, old friend. It’s been a while. You look.. um.. great? You really wear dying a miserable death, barely mourned and unloved well.

Playing an XBLIG in early 2016 is like visiting a dying relative in hospice care. You know any visit could be the last you’ll have, but you go anyway in secret hopes that they’ll leave you something nice to remember them. For those confused by the situation, yes, Xbox Live Indie Games are still alive. The last rites have been administered and happy families have been notified that a donor for Daddy’s faulty platforming engine has been located, but it’s technically still alive in the same way Ben Carson’s campaign is still technically ongoing. For now. No new games will be uploaded after September, 2016 and the marketplace will shut down entirely after September, 2017. Will you be able to access the games you already bought after that? The fuck if I know.

I do know that here it is, nearly two years after my last XBLIG review and I’m still basically known as “that girl who reviews XBLIGs.” And you know what? I’m proud of that. Plus, a few last second hidden gems that savvy indie fans have come to associate with the XBLIG market are still showing up. Take today’s game, Multitasking. It caught my attention because it twists the formula of WarioWare (my favorite game ever) by making you play multiple microgames at the same time. My family had a terrific chuckle at the thought of me playing such a game. Some people have coordination that makes them capable of rubbing their bellies while patting their heads at the same time. Meanwhile, I have such good coordination that I once broke my ankle falling three-inches off a Dance Dance Revolution platform at a bowling alley. I wish I could say I was joking, but I’m not. Given that and the fact that I can’t chew gum and talk at the same time without either biting my cheek or gagging on the gum, they said maybe I should rethink my choice in games to play. But fuck them and their lack of faith in my ability to step up my abilities. I was determined to prove them wrong.

Four games at once? Ha, yea right. I couldn’t even do three games at the same time.

I failed. Not even with honor either. I was just awful at Multitasking. Except on Easy Mode, but this is one of those games where success there carries an undeniable shame with it. Again, the idea is “WarioWare, only playing multiple games simultaneously.” Your TV is divided into four screens. The top screen is controlled by the bumpers, the left screen with the left analog stick, the center screen with the face buttons, and the right screen by the right analog stick. The games are very basic, many of them lifted directly from WarioWare. The difference here is, instead of the speed increasing, the amount of games thrown at you increases. The games play fine and control solid, with one exception involving moving the analog sticks at bullseyes, which feels a bit too loose. It’s kind of annoying because I can’t blame being awful on the controls. It’s all on me.

For what it’s worth, Multitasking is fun. But, unlike games where my comical badness didn’t affect my overall enjoyment (Spelunky for example), I have to admit that my ceiling of fun was lowered here. I was damn near ecstatic about it at first, but the further I played it, the more I realized I just could not get better at it. God knows I tried, but no strategy seemed to work. The games are spit out at random, and my best runs by far were the ones where one of the games being displayed required simple button mashing with no finesse. If both games required my attention, I was screwed. On the rare instances where I made it far enough to have three games on-screen, I never survived the first wave of it. I’m just not wired for games like this. Multitasking is fine, albeit basic and kind of boring in how it’s presented, but fine. The online scoreboards suck to use (presumably to be corrected in the upcoming PC port), but fine. I probably would have ranked it higher if I could get better, but it’s hard for me to get worked up over a game that’s as impossible for me to play well. Yea, I love WarioWare, but I wouldn’t want to play two of them at once. I already feel like a douche for that time I played WarioWare Twisted using my GameBoy Player. This isn’t helping.

Multitasking was developed by yyrGames
Point of Sale: Xbox Live Indie Games

$1 jumped the gun so many times in the Wild Gunman minigame that she lost count in the making of this review. Though I do have to ask, when people had those duels in the old days, what happened if someone shot too soon and hit? Did the person shot get to come back from the dead so they could pace off again? If not, damn, I would have been the best gunfighter in the west! How come nobody else thought of the “just shoot first and say MY BAD” strategy before me? Someone get me a time machine, I need to try this shit out.

Multitasking is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.