Footboholics

I’ve never understood why we turn the suffix “holics” into a catch-all for addicts.  It only applies to alcohol, people!  See the whole “H-O-L” part?  That comes from alcohol, just like babies and broken sports cars.  If you eat way too much chocolate, you’re not a chocaholic.  You’re just a glutton.  Smokers are not called Smokeaholics.  When you get down to it, the term “alcoholic” is a recent development coined by someone who couldn’t pronounce “dipsomaniac”.   Probably because they were drunk.  So the name of today’s game makes no sense unless they were addicted to a substance called Footbohol.  And for all I know, maybe they are.  It would explain why the dude doesn’t shit his pants and run away screaming when he encounters the living dead.

Thankfully they used “Footbohlics” instead of the working title: “Concussion Magnets!”

The concept of Footboholics is you’re a dude who must carry a football through four different themed worlds.  I would like to note for my non-North American readers that I’m talking about American Football here, which Alan C reminds me is called “rugby for pussies” by the rest of the world.  For some reason, our version of football predominately involves using your hands.  I know.  I can’t explain it either.  Hey, we got basketball right.  That involves a ball and a basket, so gold star for us.

Footboholics is sort of like one of those dodge-everything-in-your-way endless runners, only there are levels here.  Forty to be exact, plus endless modes for each stage, which I guess means there technically is an endless runner in this not-quite-endless runner.  You start out on a football field and various tackling dummies show up that you must avoid.  If you run into them, your dude drops the ball.  Drop the ball three times and its game over.  Seriously, if you’re a football player and you fumble the ball just from bouncing off a tackling dummy, maybe you should rethink your choice of sports.

Other traps are thrown at you, such as actual football players that run in preset patterns, roadblocks to jump over, and machines that fling footballs at you.  The real challenge is trying to get a feel for depth and where you have to move your dude in a way that you don’t make contact.  When I first started playing, I couldn’t quite get the hang of it.  It would sure look like I should have enough clearance to run past a barrage of tackling dummies, but I would be a pixel or two off and take damage.  After a little bit of experimenting, I started paying attention to only my dude’s feet and whether or not they were on the same plane as whatever I was trying to run past.  Once I got used to that, Footboholics became downright easy.  Especially once I bought two extra health points from the store for a measly five points each.  Sure, there were a couple of stages that I did kick the bucket on, but I breezed past the rest of the game in an hour or so with minimal fuss.

The only time I died was when I hit one of the item generators and it gave me a controller-killing trap instead.  I hate it when games do this.  When is it ever a good idea for an item box to randomly shit in your mouth?  Footboholics is very much a skill-tester, so luck should not factor into things.  You can buy better luck from the store, but of course I being me, the minute I pumped up my luck to maximum level, the next three items I got were all traps.  The same thing happened to me when I played Sequence, which led to the perplexed developer admitting that the chance percentages in the game were not accurate and you actually have more luck than it says you do.  To which I say, I have an uncanny knack for beating the odds.  Or, more accurately, having the odds beat me.

Christ! I knew the Raiders were in bad shape but I had no idea it was this bad!

There’s four stage types, but really, the enemies in the other stages are just reskinned versions of the same ones you already encountered.  And even that doesn’t last.   In the park scene, there’s tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you.  In the next stage, set in a graveyard, the tackling dummies are now thorny stumps, the football players are now skeletons, and the tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you are tiny little flowers that fire bullets at you.  Why weren’t they reskinned too?  Not that it matters, because Footboholics starts to wear thin by this point.  A lot of attack patterns start to repeat throughout the game, or stages go on too long.  I still found $1 worth of entertainment here.  It might sound like damning praise, but at best Footbolholics is adequate time-waster that probably should have been on iPhone instead.  Yea, it’s kind of too easy, but I’ve always insisted that too easy is preferable to being too hard.  Would you rather have company with the village slut or the village Viagra addict?  Excuse me, Viagraholic.

Footboholics was developed by Silent Union

80 Microsoft Points’ team would be playing for the National Championship if the zebras hadn’t fucked us against Notre Dame in the making of this review.  THAT WAS A FUCKING TOUCHDOWN!!

Footboholics is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  If you’re an XBLIGholic, you should check it out.  Personally, I’m not a fan of XBLIGholic.  I like the term XBLIGer myself, even if it sounds like some kind of misguided racial slur.