Category Archives: 80 Microsoft points

Games you can buy for 80 MSP

Super Killer Hornet

Super Killer Hornet is shooting by the numbers. That’s a joke. You’ll get it later.

The game feel like it should be controlled with one of those chunky old analogue joysticks, sticky from the sugar-saturated hands of a thousand fumbling twelve year olds. That’s my arty writer way of saying it feels like a 1990 arcade game.

The graphics are pretty straightforward, with adequately (but not extravagantly) detailed sprites and some very SNES-ish explosions that would have made Jaz Rignall gasp “ooh, pretty” back in the day. Not much in the way of backgrounds though, so it ends up looking a bit spartan (in the sense of minimalist, not the sense wearing only underpants). The music is better, and can be selected at the start of each level – a small but welcome touch.

The core gameplay is similarly…er…’streamlined’. Tap A to rapidly fire a spread shot; hold A to let rip with a sustained laser barrage that is more powerful but slows your movement in a classic power/survivability trade-off. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice you can spare your thumbs the dreaded RSI risk of constant tapping by just holding X instead, for the same effect. Nor does the power/speed trade work; the beam is quite wide so enemies mostly won’t get close to you, and the slower movement speed actually makes it easier to dodge incoming shots. This has been consciously built into some other games (Redshift) but it seems accidental here.

Yep, that will definitely kill a hornet

So far, so routine as retro vertical shooters go. Fortunately, Super Killer Hornet throws in something of its own to liven up the bare bones shooting. Remember that ghastly term that hung around the early-mid ‘90s like the inexplicable smell of cabbage in a pensioner’s living room? You know, the one that clutched test tubes full of wretched creations like Mario is Missing. That’s right, Super Killer Hornet flirts – in the most chaste and evasive way – with the lingering dread spectre of ‘edutainment’. This game, this retro arcade shooter, incorporates mathematics. Weirdly, that’s actually the best thing about it.

While blasting your way through the descending swarms of alien spacecraft, you will occasionally spot a mathematical function – a ‘3 X’ or a ‘7 +’, that sort of thing. If you collect that, a number will appear a few moments later. Collect that too and you’ll have almost a whole simple equation, maybe ‘3 X 9’ or similar. Plough on through the mayhem without being killed and soon three numbers will appear, one of which is the right answer to the mathematical problem. Grab that answer and…well, what happens next depends on the game mode.

Should have grabbed that 1. Easy money.

The two modes on offer use the maths element differently. Arcade mode is the one that leaves me yawning. You have a limited number of lives and the maths function just acts as a score multiplier. If you’re someone who is motivated by beating your previous scores this mode might hook you like a lecherous fisherman. Personally I find high score chasing only fractionally less appealing than filling in a tax return, so I lost interest in Arcade mode after five minutes.

The second mode, Black Label, is the one I choose to spend time with. It gives the maths element a purpose beyond making a meaningless series of digits at the top the screen change more quickly. I have no idea what the title Black Label refers to, but it’s an enticingly decadent name for a timed challenge. The Arcade mode’s meagre allotment of lives is traded for infinity, but don’t get drunk on the dizzying possibilities just yet. In place of finite lives, the game slaps a huge timer across the screen, unrelentingly ticking away every second until your ignominious demise. Your salvation comes in the form of mathematics; each complete equation extends the timer and buys you a little more life.

Get off! On arithmetic dogfight night, your embrace means nothing to me.

I quite enjoy this mode, and although it’s not interesting enough to sit and play for protracted sessions, it works quite well in short bursts. The use of contrasting brainwork – the observation and reflex of combat stapled onto the logical process of arithmetic – is surprisingly refreshing. I’m not accustomed to using my brain very much in this sort of game, and certainly not in this way. There’s also a nice side effect, in that when you die any incomplete equation is wiped clean, so even though you have infinite lives you can’t afford to be reckless. Death does have a cost, it’s just not as tangible and immediate as in Arcade.

I can’t in good conscience give Super Killer Hornet a recommendation, nor can I bug spray it into oblivion. With the Arcade mode alone I’d say this was too slender a package to be worth your time (shame on anyone who sniggered at ‘slender package’). With the addition of the Black Label mode there’s enough here to give both score chasers and score avoiders their 80 MSP worth of fun. Even with its unusual mathematical additions to gameplay, the Super Killer Hornet experience is just too bare and minimal to get the full seal of approval. It’s fine, but whether just ‘fine’ is enough for you will depend on your taste.

Birth Order

Xbox Live Indie Games has made itself a haven for various things, not all of them good. It’s particularly infamous for the malformed abominations churned out by certain apathetic developers with a taste for easy money. Among the more worthwhile types of game that have made the indie channel their home are retro 2D shooters and genre-twisting experiments. Birth Order grabs at both of these and hopes for the best.

I never really got into scrolling shooters the first time round. The likes of R-Type were mighty names that loomed on the fringes of my gaming awareness but never crossed my path. In that sense, I come to XBLIG shooters as a combination of fresh-faced shooter newbie and wizened gaming veteran. To my eye, Birth Order manages to do a lot of things right and I applaud its efforts.

From the outset Birth Order plays its cards close to its chest. The short tutorial explains the basic shooting mechanic well enough – enemies are marked with an image of one of the face buttons, and you must press the corresponding button to shoot at them. Your weapon auto-aims at the relevant enemies, leaving you free to focus on dodging incoming fire and deciding which enemy types to prioritise. Weirdly, this is the only thing the tutorial shows; all the other features and quirks have to be worked out for yourself. None of it is particularly baffling, but it’s an odd choice to have a tutorial that explains nothing except the one thing that doesn’t really need explanation.

Feeling star-struck. Ho ho.

Beyond the tutorial you find yourself on a game board, which is where the ‘Huh?’ moments begin. Each space represents a level, and you must survive these levels to pass beyond them. The entire board is hidden, except for a small area surrounding you, and another area that’s surrounded by locks. It’s mentioned in passing that you’re hunting your brother, but this has no connection to anything the game has told you so far. No explanation is given as to why you want your brother dead, or why he’s surrounded himself with locks then scattered the keys all over the world. Well, I suppose maybe you don’t want him dead. I’ve assumed you do, but maybe it’s just your birthday and this is some kind of large-scale treasure hunt that your sibling concocted for you. That would explain the Birth Order title. Either that or he’s demanding that you reproduce – but we don’t want to go there…

I’m blue, my brother’s red, it was never going to be a happy family life

The other odd feature that’s never really discussed is cards. It doesn’t take long to notice that enemies occasionally drop what appear to be playing cards, and it’s absolutely imperative to pick these up whenever possible. Your card collection can make the difference between success and failure, not just overall but in each individual level. Cards are accessed from the map/board screen, and have a variety of effects. Most will give you a bonus effect for one level, such a shield or a drone that grants you additional firepower. With no way to tell which levels will be tranquil walks in the park and which will be auditions for Ikaruga, you have to guess based on gut instinct, and it can be frustrating to use your last shield card on a level that a sleepwalking five year old could have completed playing only with their feet.

Other cards are more permanent. They might expand your ship, lay waste to a section of the board or bestow some of the mysterious stars that you’ll collect throughout the game (it’s not clear what stars do, but they’re shiny). Perhaps the most important form of card can only be obtained from the bosses that roam the board like belligerent drunks looking for a fight with the birthday boy. Assuming you can take them down (which often requires a card or two, at least for me) you’ll gain a key card which removes one of the locks around your brother’s treehouse—er, I mean evil lair.

When you said “swarm of Bs”, this wasn’t what I expected

I don’t know what happens once all the locks are gone, because I’ve never got that far. Birth Order is hard, let’s not be coy about it. The weird part of the difficulty is that it’s so erratic. The exact layout of the board and the contents of each level are randomised each time you play, so although the game does broadly start get harder as you go along, sometimes the first few levels will be surprisingly brutal just thanks to the randomisation factor.

Despite its quirks of unpredictable difficulty and lack of explanation, Birth Order is easy to recommend to those of you who enjoy 2D shooters. Even those who don’t might find enjoyment here anyway thanks to the replacement of shooter standards with button-matching and card-collecting elements. At 80 Microsoft points, Birth Order is both one of the better XBLIG shooters and one of the more successful gameplay experiments.

If you ever figure out why we’re meant to kill/hug/impregnate our brother, let me know…

Sushi Castle

Regular readers might have noticed that I like a bit of randomly generated exploration. Whether it’s Cursed Loot, Mega Monster Mania, Lair of the Evildoer, Dead Pixels or the newly released Spelunky, the phrase ‘randomly generated’ (or ‘procedurally generated’) sets my heart a-flutter like I’m a chaste maiden in a period novel. It doesn’t always work out, but the sheer animal magnetism is always there.

Sushi Castle, just released by Milkstone Studios (the developer of the delightfully antagonistic Infinity Danger), grabs pretty much everything I like about randomised dungeon crawling and throws it all together. In the manner of a roguelike, you have one solitary life in which to explore as much as you can of a series of randomised floors, killing everything that moves and picking up everything that doesn’t. There are a couple of catches, though.

The first catch is that the actual control works like a twin-stick shooter. None of this turn-based walking into enemies to damage them. Instead you open fire and circle strafe like it’s Infinity Danger all over again. The second catch is that in place of huge quantities of largely interchangeable loot, you instead pick up a small number of very different items that modify your abilities. Where many dungeon crawlers have you switching from Ragged Loincloth +1 to Reinforced Pantaloons + 3 as you pick up a modest junkyard’s worth of miscellaneous brick-a-brack, Sushi Castle doesn’t.  It eschews equipment in favour of one-offs that are usually found in special rooms only once or twice per floor, like the Ninja Cloud that enables you to fly and the stodgy snack that gives you a health boost but makes you walk like you have EA’s DLC catalogue strapped to your feet.

This guy is definitely wearing Back to Karkand sandals

The upshot of all this is that while many randomised dungeon crawlers promise replayability yet offer only repetition with minor variations, Sushi Castle is genuinely hugely replayable. The differences between playthroughs aren’t just a matter of fractionally different stats on your Orcish Linguini Spatula of Flaying but real, tangible changes that alter the way the game plays out. This also forces you to be adaptable. Sometimes you might be a damage sponge with a ton of health, while other times you’ll be a glass cannon with high damage but no means of defence. Sometimes you’ll rely on bombs to deal serious damage, and other times you’ll have to make use of your manoeuvrability. You have to be able to play in a variety of styles, because you never know how your character will end up developing.

The game’s greatest strength is its most conspicuous weakness. Some attempts can feel doomed from the start if you can’t find the right items to unlock shops, or you keep picking up stat reductions through sheer bad luck. The game’s scrolls and sushi have randomly assigned effects that can be very positive but also sometimes very negative, and it’s frustrating to have an otherwise successful playthrough suddenly fall apart because you unwittingly used a scroll that filled the room with live bombs.

The shoulder-mounted panda, a common sight in the Shogunate armies

This isn’t a huge problem though, and the benefits of this truly unpredictable approach to dungeoneering outweigh the drawbacks. For only 80 Microsoft points, there’s a lot of play time in Sushi Castle. In principle, you can play it indefinitely without having the same experience twice. I’ve already got my money’s worth out of it with hours of play time invested, and I’m still seeing new items popping up all the time. Just to add delicious icing to the cake, Milkstone Studios plan to add new features when they reach specific sales landmarks. It’s an interesting approach that is increasingly common in indie games, and personally I find it far preferable to demanding more money in exchange for negligible additions.

Oh, one more thing. I have to mention this or my journalistic credibility badge will be repossessed and used to fund nefarious criminal activities. For better or worse, Sushi Castle is Edmund McMillen’s Steam hit The Binding of Isaac. There are a few differences – the ability to fire diagonally, some of the bosses and one or two enemy  types – but 90% of the game is lifted directly from Isaac and just re-painted. The way the game generates everything in general, its item room/shop/gauntlet room set up, its bomb/key/special item system, the enemy types, the item effects – the majority of these things are exactly the same. Sushi Castle would be stretching the acceptability of being ‘inspired by…’ to its limits. Having said that, if your computer can’t run The Binding of Isaac, or you hate Steam, or you just prefer to play from your sofa rather than a rigid office supplies chair, this might be the game for you.

I recommend Sushi Castle because it’s good fun, it’s generally executed well, and the way it handles randomised dungeon crawling means it’s still entertaining after hours of play. For the price, you won’t get many better deals. It’s just a shame that all of its qualities are actually something else’s qualities recycled, with no voice of its own.

Zandri’s Revenge

I was looking forward to playing Zandri’s Revenge because the visuals remind me of Avernum and I have a nostalgic fondness for isometric RPG/adventure games.

Red text on a blank black screen said ‘Player 1 press A’.

Red text on a blank black screen said ‘Player 2 press A’.

You can’t even reach the title screen without two players. I am one player, and I don’t have a handy second player living under my bed.

Don’t buy Zandri’s Revenge. The whole idea of making a forced two-player game on a service that reliably has less of a community than the Colston Bassett branch of the McDonalds Nutritional Appreciation Society is ludicrous beyond the power of words to describe.

Next.

Vidiot Game

You know what I love? Stuff that’s not Vidiot Game. I wake up every morning in the warming rays of something that isn’t Vidiot Game and spring out of bed knowing with heady certainty that my day will be enriched by a persistent absence of Vidiot Game. Well, apart from that one day when I played it – the day when indie developer GZ Storm took the Jigsaw Killer-like step of making me appreciate the comfort of my daily life by exposing me to gruelling misery.

The game, such as it is, takes the form of a sequence of apparently randomly selected mini-game segments. Or it would if these segments required actual play, but fully half of them don’t. Like Baller Industries’ malodorous offal heap Rock Bottom, GZ Storm’s Vidiot Game seems like a showcase for the developer’s  attempts at scriptwriting (in this case, sketch show writing) that has been released as a game only because TV networks wouldn’t return their calls.

It’s depressingly obvious from the sniggeringly forced tone of artificial wackiness that Vidiot Game is meant to be funny. The humour here is that same sort of humour that you have to suffer if you spend much time around teenaged cousins – the “I’m so random, random things are funny, I like random things that are random, and being random”. It’s the Seth MacFarlane-wannabe zaniness that doesn’t understand why absurdity is funny, and equates just crowbarring unrelated objects into nonsensical situations with being uproariously funny – the sort of ‘humour’ that causes my soul to heave a weary, disillusioned sigh whenever I’m subject to it.

Spin the Wheel of Abject Despair! Where it stops, no one wants to know!

It might seem unfair to harp on so much about the tone of the game, when the gameplay should be all that matters. I quite agree – or would, if it wasn’t for the fact that there is next to no gameplay contained in Vidiot Game. It’s a montage of strained strangeness occasionally punctuated by a multiple choice question or a few stilted seconds of clunky interactivity. Even so, I couldn’t in good conscience completely write off Vidiot Game simply because I don’t find it funny. It’s conceivable that if you’re fourteen and you’ve watched one too many episodes of American Dad you might get a chuckle out of this. Shame on you, but fair enough I suppose.

More depressing than a real scratch card, despite the absence of the possibility of failure.

The biggest problem, though, is that even after you’ve sat through your allotted portion of tiresome zaniness and managed to wring some semblance of play from one of the game’s segments, it doesn’t matter. Whether you succeed or fail has almost no relevance to anything, and because so many of the (marginally) interactive sections are multiple choice scenarios with arbitrary answers that require blind guesswork, there’s no satisfaction in success or disappointment in failure – just a flat, monotone “whatever”. Without any real gameplay or actual fun content to back it up, Vidiot Game relies too heavily on its humour. Even if you find it utterly hilarious, there’s barely any game here. Lesson #1 in making a game: make a game.

I don’t bear GZ Storm any ill will. Whatever else their game is, it isn’t lazy or a cash-in. They clearly had something in mind that they wanted to attempt, and they did it in their own style. They get some credit for that, even if it pains me to say so. The game itself, though, is a nauseating trek through a slideshow of scenes that were probably assembled by picking nouns from a hat. I don’t know whether Seth MacFarlane was consciously the inspiration here, but I blame him and his carnival of mediocrity, Family Guy, for the spread of this sort drooling, malformed abomination. I curse you aloud, MacFarlane and Vidiot Game. A plague on both your houses.

Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes

Remember Super Punch Out! on the SNES? Yes? So do indie developers Dreamwagon, but not as clearly as I do. Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes is like a muddled recollection of one drunken night playing Super Punch Out! at the palatial squat of a total stranger you met outside a grimy nightclub in central London, who then insists on showing you ‘hilarious’ YouTube videos and regurgitating their kebab in your lap while you frantically use their rickety old SNES to distract yourself for those few fatal hours until the buses start running again.

The presentation is pretty grisly – all the more so because it’s kind of not bad, in its own misguided way. The visuals are a step above the ‘cardboard cut-outs on plastic’ XBLIG norm, but they shoot themselves in the foot with really hideous design. Look at any one of the characters and tell me they’re remotely appealing to look upon. Personally, every time I saw my protagonist I flinched like a cat in a strong draught. This only highlighted by the general overall resemblance to Super Punch Out! If Honey Badger didn’t ape its inspiration so shamelessly, it might have got away with this art style. As it is, the whole thing looks pretty depressing. If Super Punch Out! were to be disfigured by a savage beating, this is what it would look like.

Presentation isn’t everything though, particularly to me. A game could look like two meerkats fighting to the death in a bowl of porridge and I wouldn’t care as long as it’s fun. Sadly (and you might have guessed this by now) Honey Badger is not. In fact, two meerkats fighting in porridge is more or less how this plays.

Weep, fool! Weep for the souls of the developers!

Setting aside the offputting presentation, there are two major problems with Honey Badger. The most glaring one is the way it sticks to Super Punch Out! with glue that starts to wear thin and detach after a little while. I mentioned this on the visual front but it’s even more of a bane in the gameplay department. Honey Badger mimics its forebear closely but not accurately, which only serves to highlight all the ways in which the new pretender doesn’t match up. You can throw left and punches at high and low points using the four face buttons. Once you’ve landed enough hits you can unleash a more powerful punch with the right trigger. Nudging to the left or right allows you to dodge aside, and pushing up completely counter-intuitively causes you to pull back and block. Everything from Super Punch Out! is present and correct, then. All the boxes are ticked. Well, all the boxes apart from the ones marked ‘fun’ and ‘playable’. Fights in Honey Badger feel like luck. You just throw punches at random until your enemy falls over. There’s not much in the way of skill, and very little room to improve through practice. Sticking so closely to the Super Punch Out! template just draws attention to Honey Badger’s weaknesses.

Advancing age wasn’t kind to Sir Galahad

The second problem is the really awful enemy design. I don’t like to review games without having finished them, or at least played most of the way through them. Honey Badger stopped me dead on level three with a fight against a chubby man with a big stick. I just can’t get past that, and the reason is the design of the opponent.

Firstly, unlike previous opponents this one doesn’t flinch when you hit him, and he swings his stick at you almost continuously. This means you get hit a couple of times whenever you attack him. Far worse is his indecent infatuation with his special attacks. He has two: imperviously spinning around for an aggravatingly long time then whacking you, and equally imperviously murmuring into suddenly erratic lighting while punching you with ghostly fists. Dodging either attack is irritating thanks to some inconsistent timing, but that’s not the issue with them. You could probably nail down the necessary dodges with enough practice. The issue is that they both take so damn long.

That’s the worst case of carpal tunnel syndrome I’ve ever seen

Honey Badger’s bouts are subject to a time limit, and this guy’s stodgy attacks clog up the rounds like a block of lard in an artery. When 80% of the round is spent watching him laboriously charge up his stupid, smug, sneeringly badly animated special attacks while you just stand there unable to touch him, the one thing that’s guaranteed is that you will run out of time.

It’s poor design. Poorly designed fights, poorly designed visuals, a poorly designed title – and all of it bound septically together by the pus of its insultingly inadequate mimicry of a far superior classic. Playing Honey Badger – Slayer of Memes is like someone loudly hinting that your birthday present is something lavish related to your love of mountains and the sea, then presenting you with an upturned ice cream cone in a puddle of urine. There’s a similarity in the very broadest of strokes, but the attempt to resemble something so much better just makes the display of disgraceful grotesquery all the more insulting.

Miasma & Miasma 2

It’s years since the PS1 was at its height, but even now I keep going back to Front Mission 3. Partly that’s because I haven’t seen everything in its branching stories yet, and partly it’s because I haven’t found another game like it since. I’ve played other turn-based strategies, turn-based RPGs, and other turn-based games that are based on turns (or perhaps turning bases). I never really took to Advance Wars, Disgaea made me sob with boredom, and Agarest: Generations of War was fun but confusing. I never expected that it would be an Xbox Live Indie Game that would remind me most of my beloved Front Mission 3. Enter Miasma and its recent sequel, Miasma 2.

All games of this sort need some form of implausible plot. Here it’s the domination of the world by a mind-controlling corporation called Vilhelm Industries, or VI (which launched me back to 1998 with every mention of ‘VI soldiers’. Something about ‘VI’ ticks the ‘VR’ box in my brain. Damn you, legacy of Hideo Kojima). As usual in any evil corporation/government/empire situation, there is a rebel group controlled by the player. I always think Shinra and Avalanch, but there are at least ten thousand other examples. VI manages to be all of the above evil bodies in one, so it needs a particularly vigorous rebellion to offset it. What it gets is the adventures of a bald man, a serious man and a woman who tends to wear a business suit for no reason, spread across two games.

Standing next to a red barrel? Have you never played a game before? Amateur.

The original Miasma had been on my radar for a while, and the recent release of its sequel prompted me to go back and buy it, because I have a thing about playing/watching series in chronological order. I encountered it quite early in my Xbox indie dabbling, but was put off by the combination of the price and the inaccessibility of the demo. Being new to indie games, I didn’t want to gamble great wodges of points on games I might hate, and turn-based strategy games don’t lend themselves to Microsoft’s prescribed eight-minute window for demos. I backed away but kept it in mind for a revisit. Fortunately, that dilemma is gone now. Although the demo still gives barely any idea of the game, the point-wodgery has been cut down to just 80 MSP. That’s no gamble at all. As it turned out, both of the Miasma games have a lot going for them.

The first game, Miasma: Citizens of Free Thought sees an amnesiac protagonist leading a cell of the rebel group CiFT (an acronym that doesn’t quite work – Citizens…if Free Thought? …into Free Thought? …ignoring Free Thought?). The cell has been cut off from the rest of the organisation and they have to kind of make things up as they go along. The combat, which forms the bulk of the game, is turn-based but immediate. When you give a character an instruction to move, attack, or use an item or ability, they do so immediately but no one else moves. Then after you’ve done everything you want to do, all your enemies move. You get a damage bonus for attacking from the side or behind, and periodically you can use abilities like healing and disabling EMP pulses. It’s not complicated, but it does require a bit of thought to make sure your surprisingly fragile characters aren’t wiped out.

Four pellets to the face, and one pellet pops out to buy milk.

The sequel, Miasma 2: Freedom Uprising, changes this up a bit. It goes for the turn-based-but-simultaneous approach, where you give all your orders, the enemy commander gives all their orders, and then everyone moves at once. This took some getting used to after the first game, but it works well enough. It’s certainly more challenging, because you can’t guarantee that an enemy won’t move out of range or do something to counter your attack, like shooting you in the face while you’re still heaving your sniper rifle to your shoulder. It also means you can’t focus down enemies in the same way as previously. You can’t hit a mech or tank with everything you’ve got at once to take it out before it can act. In a way, this seemed to remove a lot of the strategy because too much depended on luck. In other games that use this system, like Flotilla, it can be very tactical because it requires you to try and cover all the angles. Here, though, you’re always hugely outnumbered so there’s no way of preparing for multiple eventualities.

I have mixed feelings about the altered combat system, then. Miasma 2 does have distinct improvements elsewhere though. The other component of both games, between combat, is conversation. In Miasma, this is handled through dialogue boxes against a slowly drifting shot of a building. I was fine with this – again, it reminded me of Front Mission 3 and its long text conversations in static rooms – but I can see why many people might not be, particularly those who aren’t wizened old game fogeys distrustful of any technology that speaks aloud. (Skynet!)

I like to imagine those options are all being shouted simultaneously.

Miasma 2 replaces this with a more palatable first-person wander around CiFT’s base, giving you the option to talk to whoever you choose, in whatever order you prefer. You can choose to chew the fat or just get down to business sorting out their upgrades. It’s a pleasant change of pace from the combat sections, and certainly more engaging than the static conversations of the first game. Having said that, the developers could do with working on their writing skills. When a character says almost out of the blue, “Hey, will you go to bed with me?” it’s more comical than emotional or interesting. It’s also a little jarring after having a near-identical (though actually better written) conversation with the same character in the first game.

The second game also suffers being almost continuously glitchy. Both games have their share of glitches, but while the Miasma has the odd one here and there, Miasma 2 is riddled with them. Characters models vanishing so you have to guess where they are, an enemy tank spawning in the same location as a friendly tank so the two merge and you effectively lose one of your most powerful units. A multitude of other oddities, too.

“I can’t shoot them, the ground isn’t red!”

This is symptomatic of the biggest problem with Miasma 2. It feels like the developers over-reached themselves. They clearly had ambitious ideas for improving on the first game, and while some of those ideas paid off, the price was functionality. That’s not to say Miasma 2 is bad or broken, but it is far too buggy and its increased interactivity depends too much on writing that isn’t up to the job. That’s why, advancements or not, I recommend the original Miasma over the sequel.

The Miasma games have kind of a Mass Effect phenomenon going on. The first game is slower and wordier than the sequel, but it’s also more competently executed. The second is more ambitious but maybe can’t quite pull off everything it aimed for, and whether its modified combat system is an improvement or not will depend on your taste. Regardless, both games are good, and worth playing if you have any interest in turn-based semi-RPGs. They aren’t long, but at 80 Microsoft points each they’re long enough. If you don’t like turn-based grid battles, these games might not be up your street. Even if you do, be prepared to humour their glaring flaws.

My Cat vs Zombies Ep I

When I saw My Cat vs Zombies Ep I listed in the new releases a few weeks ago, I pointed and laughed. I did, literally – I turned to the other person in the room, flung out my accusatory finger and made a “haw haw, what’s this rubbish?” kind of noise. I may also have rhetorically exclaimed something like “who would think that’s a good idea?!” or “what’s wrong with these people?!”

The title and cover are absolutely despicable. On Xbox Live Indie Games, the word ‘zombies’ immediately gives me indigestion. 90% of the time it’s like a rickety old flickering neon sign advertising bargain bandwagon rides (boarding hourly from outside the Creative Bankruptcy Motel). Expanding it to anything ‘versus zombies’ is an improvement in the same way that falling into a sewage processing facility is an improvement over faceplanting in a urinal. It’s more ambitious, but that’s not necessarily a welcome quality.

‘Cats versus zombies’ would be like falling into a sewage processing facility with the greatest hits of ABBA playing in the background. On their own, cats/ABBA are fine, but their sickly sweet presence is almost insulting when it’s tacked on to a horrible experience in a cynical attempt to dilute your misery. The final touch, making it ‘my cat versus zombies’ and having a LOLcat-style cover that was thrown together while waiting for a bus just adds a smear of self-indulgence, like a man in a huge foam Stetson singing along to ‘Dancing Queen’ off-key while the mingled excretions of a major city close over your despairing head.

So yes, I felt thoroughly justified in my pointing and laughing, secure in the knowledge that my obnoxious behaviour was positively genteel by comparison to this game’s many crimes.

Well the developer can point and laugh right back at me, because My Cat vs Zombies Ep I is pretty good.

The London Underground pre-apocalypse

The world has been overrun by zombies, as you might expect. What you probably wouldn’t expect is the immunity of cats to the zombie-propagating virus, and the consequent rise of cat colonies in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath the world’s cities. There’s a definite touch of Fallout 3 to the setting. You’ll journey entirely through tunnels, crossing disused stretches of track and stumbling across little isolated enclaves of survivors. There are also rumours of a larger, secure cat city known as Whiskertown, which put me in mind of the awed curiosity I felt whenever someone in Fallout 3’s wilderness mentioned Rivet City.

I also felt touches of the old SNES RPG Shadowrun in places, particularly when I was asked early on to deliver a shipment of hallucinogenic catnip to a junkie. The bleak ad hoc communities remind me of Fallout, but the slide into despairing depravity has Shadowrun’s fingerprints on it, intentionally or not.

In gameplay, My Cat vs Zombies Ep I is essentially a twin-stick shooter. Move with one stick, aim with the other, shoot with the right trigger. The emphasis on taking missions from NPCs, exploring the maze of tunnels for loot and making the most of relatively sparse supplies of ammunition give the game a more action-RPG feel than the control scheme would suggest. Fallout 3 rears its head again here in the form of perks that you can choose from each time you gain a level, mostly giving you either a damage boost or extra health.

In spite of all this, the game is far from serious. In conversation, characters are represented by amusing or cute photos of real cats, and the names of the perks make liberal use of the internet’s various cat memes. I never laughed aloud, but the tongue in cheek tone works fairly well and gives the game some personality.

I should shoot you right now for wearing those glasses

Aside from the largely uninspiring visual design (par for the course among Xbox indies), my only real complaint is the length. I wasn’t watching the clock, but I estimate that I finished My Cat vs Zombies Ep I in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and that included quite a lot of leisurely exploration. That still isn’t bad for 80 Microsoft points, and this game is clearly intended as the first in a series of episodes, but I’m no fan of the episodic release format. It irritates me when I have to stop playing just as a game is hitting its stride.

Still, if wanting more of the same is my biggest gripe, I’d have to say My Cat vs Zombies Ep I is a winner. Not a big winner – maybe a local raffle winner rather than a lottery millionaire – but certainly worth a play for its charming post-apocalyptic RPG adventure. It’s just a shame that everyone with any taste will be sent screaming in the opposite direction by the gut-churningly awful title and cover art.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2

A title like 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 has to be a marketing ploy. I never played the original 10 Amazingly Awful Games because I had enough faith in its self-assessment to save my time, but I’ve heard that they weren’t actually bad. On that flimsy basis, I thought it was worth taking a chance on the sequel, Volume 2.

The game’s developer said recently that his aim was to parody old low-grade game collections such as the infamous Action 52. I’ll admit I was a little curious as to whether this worked as a parody or merely retrod the same ill-advised path.

As it turned out, the contents of 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 were quite variable in quality. In the interests of clarity and satisfying my neurotic leanings, here is a blow-by-blow account of what I found lurking within. Buckle up; it’s a rollercoaster ride. One of those rickety old rollercoasters that you find in dilapidated, windswept coastal resorts that are decades past their prime.

In the order that they occur in the menu:

Blobby Blobby is a very basic one-hit-death platformer with clumsy controls, unclear hit detection and bursts of unreasonable difficulty that seem to be designed to catch you out. Platformers live or die by their controls, and Blobby Blobby controls like trying to balance a blancmange on a tennis ball.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2 - Blobby Blobby

Fruit Defender has you pressing the face buttons to pop fruit that approaches from the corresponding four directions. It’s executed perfectly soundly but feels depressingly pointless. There’s just no incentive to keep going.

Grid Warrior is basically a monochrome Space Invaders. A few negligible additions, such as enemy turrets at the sides and the ability to move up and down the screen, fail to enhance the experience.

I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit is one of the better offerings in this package. It’s a vertically scrolling twin-stick shooter with a few weapon pick-ups. Its title parody of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 gave me a chuckle but after that the experience went downhill. It functions adequately, and when I was seven years old this would have seemed like the best game ever. If you’ve ever played a twin-stick shooter before, though, this low-rent, entry-level attempt will just remind you that you could be playing better versions. As a rule, a game that parodies another game has to be either at least as good as the original, or amusing enough to compensate. The gameplay here is very basic at best, and the only humour to be found is in the title. The eye-scouringly horrible visuals don’t help, with primary school character sprites and backgrounds that look like the contents of a dinosaur’s stomach.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2 - I Madez a Clone Wiv Zombies Innit

Lame Defenders 2 is a side-scrolling space shooter. You shoot things. It’s more challenging than it seems and, like the zombie/clone game above, could be fun for a child who’s never played anything like it. I had flashbacks to my dad’s Atari 2600, in gameplay style if not in aesthetic. It’s still sinfully ugly though, and your spacecraft moves woodenly enough that it can be needlessly frustrating to manoeuvre.

Nastyroids is the classic Asteroids with weapon power-ups, a larger arena and occasional targets that fight back. If you’re someone who still longs to play Asteroids, you might enjoy this. I never really liked Asteroids that much, but this take on the formula does the job perfectly well. It gave me some simple fun for a little while. The expanded arena helps the classic clunky control scheme (rotate your ship with the left stick, then propel it forward with the right trigger) feel less frustrating, and its basic visuals are an upgrade over the wireframe graphics of its predecessor. Probably the best of the whole batch, by virtue of being a decent enough example of its type.

Seeker is a 2D explorer/shooter. I don’t know if it’s based on an old template like many of the other games here, but the game it reminds me of most is the dreadful Bit Crunch. Fortunately Seeker isn’t that bad. You roam around a randomly generated maze of rooms, dodging obstacles and shooting enemies, looking for keycards and the route to a computer that must be destroyed. Your health (or ‘power’ here) depletes over time as well as when you take hits, so the pressure is on. Seeker actually has some potential to be fun. If it wasn’t for a couple of glaring problems, it could be something I’d choose to play, at least for a little while. Firstly, it’s very easy to get stuck on corners. When leaving a room, I got stuck more often than I didn’t, particularly if I was hastily fleeing a group of enemies. Secondly, you can only shoot left or right, despite the manifest need to at least add up and down to the range of fire. It’s infuriating losing valuable points from my power meter just because an enemy approached from above and I had to manoeuvre across the entire room to be in a position to open fire. I think the lesson here is that the developer should give up on making batches of ten lazy, poorly designed games and focus on making one decent game. If he’d devoted the effort from the other nine games in this collection solely to Seeker, it might have been worth playing.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2 - Stormwheel

Stormwheel is a driving/shooting hybrid that reminds me very much of Action Fighter on the Sega Master System. The objective is to get to the finish line within the time limit while dodging hazards, shooting other cars and making blind jumps that require trial and error. As an Action Fighter clone, it’s fine. It does pretty much what that game did. The problem is that Action Fighter wasn’t much fun 25 years ago, and age hasn’t improved it. It isn’t offensively terrible but there’s really no reason to play it. It’s just not a fun way to spend your free time.

Terror Tunnel is a watered down Missile Command. Use a reticle to direct your fire against falling stuff. Hold the right trigger and move the left stick around. At one point I realised I was daydreaming about walking to the supermarket to buy lunch, but still successfully playing the game. Skip it like a flat rock on a tepid sea.

Viper Wing is a vertically scrolling space shooter. Hold the right trigger while weaving around. So bland that even its own description of itself uses the word ‘generic’. Presumably that’s a chortling display of the art of high parody but, as I said about I Cloned a Clone with Clones In It above, a parody still has to be a good game if you expect anyone to play it, or else be funny enough that people will forgive the mediocre gameplay. Going ‘ho ho, my game is intentionally generic’ at the beginning doesn’t qualify.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2 - Viper Wing

All in all, 10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 neither follows through on the grim threat of its title, nor really works as a fun parody. A couple of the games within are simple fun for brief periods, but there’s nothing here that can’t be found better elsewhere, usually very cheap. Admittedly you’re effectively paying a measly 8 Microsoft points for each game in the collection, but that doesn’t make it right. I wouldn’t forgo my lunchtime BLT in favour of munching down on eight boxes of toothpicks just because the price is the same, and you shouldn’t be tempted to buy ten games that occasionally manage to reach up and tug at the ankles of mediocrity. If you want all these games, it’s worth paying ten times the price for ten better versions.

10 Amazingly Awful Games Volume 2 isn’t amazingly, astonishingly, tourist-enticingly hideous. It’s just bad. I’d take one competent game over ten half-hearted ones any day.

 

[Originally written for The Indie Mine, using a review copy supplied by them.]

Spoids

There seem to have been a lot of tower defence games hitting Xbox Live Indie Games recently. Almost without exception, they have potential but are too flawed to be worth recommending. The Indie Mine has already looked at the well presented but otherwise unremarkable Union of Armstrong and the appealing but bug-riddled and barely functional Zombie Crossing. Now we have Spoids, and I wasn’t tremendously optimistic about its chances.

Well, I was wrong. Mostly.

Spoids is easily one of the most professional indie tower defence games I’ve played. It immediately makes a good impression with its outstanding presentation. Though it doesn’t go in for flashy cinematic sequences or pseudo-3D visuals, Spoids feels polished and professional from its opening moments, with a brief voiceover explaining that humanity’s colonised worlds are suddenly being assailed by an alien race dubbed ‘spoids’. It’s not a deep or detailed plot, but it serves its purpose as a justification for the tower defence format, and it’s used throughout to provide reasons for each mission, whether a colony begging for your help or a shady businessman offering to keep you funded in exchange for protection.

Voice acting is present throughout the game, and while this is generally something I’m indifferent to, here it works very well. The briefing for each mission comes in the form of a transmission from your next client, usually imploring you to hold off the spoid assault while they evacuate/retrieve their data/buy their groceries/walk their dog. This has no impact on the way the levels play out, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless, and I couldn’t help being a little less diligent when I was working to defend the shifty opportunist called Mosper while he boosted valuable gear from an abandoned facility.

Your clients also shout out suggestions or recriminations as you carry out your mission. Again this is a welcome touch of polish, and actually helps you notice if some spoids have slipped through the net. Your computer’s comments are far more practical, if less colourful. The types of spoids can be identified by their shape, but I generally can’t remember which ones are which, so having my digital advisor chime in “zoomers approaching” or “faders approaching” gives me a few valuable seconds’ warning to throw down a suitable turret.

This voice acting isn’t fantastic, but it’s leagues ahead of most indie games, and better than many mainstream titles. For the most part it’s at a Gears of War sort of standard – it’s not going to win anyone an Oscar, but it doesn’t feel like a high school drama class either. Some of the accents are a little on the hammy side, but no more so than the average Hollywood representation of non-Americans.

Tower defence games always see you placing turrets to defend against waves of enemies that vastly outnumber you, and Spoids sticks tightly to that formula. It doesn’t offer research options like Zombie Crossing, an ever-shifting attack route like Commander: World One or an open map with divertible assaults like Horn Swaggle Islands. This never feels like a weakness, though. Spoids avoids repetition by introducing a new mechanic, weapon or enemy type after every mission. Even the way this is done is appealing. The information is presented in an Intel directory that is reassuringly similar to Mass Effect’s Codex. This frequent use of the setting before, during and after missions prevents the game feeling like a series of disconnected stand-alone tasks.

Sadly, Spoids does have flaws. Only two as far as I’ve noticed, but one is puzzling and the other is problematic. Firstly, the game’s secondary play mode is hidden. If you perform well enough on a mission to earn a platinum medal you unlock ‘infinite wave’ mode, allowing you to fight off an unending army of spoids for as long as you can. This adds some welcome replayability after completing the main campaign, as you try to perfect your defensive strategy and beat your previous record. Confusingly, there’s no indication as to how to access this mode. It’s not listed in any of the menus or on the title screen, and if you select the mission again it has all the same briefings and objectives as before, including a finite length. In the end I had to ask the developers about it via Twitter, and they told me that if you play a mission for which you’ve unlocked infinite wave mode, it will happen automatically. That’s fine, but continuing to display a time limit for the mission when it doesn’t apply is very confusing, and surely easily remedied.

Secondly, and more importantly, the difficulty curve decided to take the elevator. With new enemies or turrets introduced every mission, the game wastes no time in becoming more complex and more demanding. By level six, you have to manage your turret purchases and placements almost perfectly or you won’t last more than a couple of minutes. Admittedly I’m a mediocre tower defence player at best, but my criticism isn’t that the game is hard – it’s that it shifted from manageably challenging to Battle of Thermopylae hard so suddenly that I got whiplash. Most levels required a few attempts, but I felt like I could see how to improve for the next time. Pretty soon, though, I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, and then at level six my progress slammed to a halt like someone had erected a concrete wall with ‘no playing beyond this point’ chiselled into it. It took me literally hours of playing this one level over and over before I even got close to succeeding. I’m sure tower defence maestros could overcome this obstacle, but everyone I’ve spoken to had a similar problem at around the same point. This is quite late in the game – the sixth of eight levels – but the change is shockingly sudden. However able you are, the difficulty curve in Spoids is just very badly conceived.

In the end, I give Spoids a recommendation with slight reservations. It would be easy to recommend wholeheartedly on the basis of its professionalism, polish and overall good design if it wasn’t for the bone-shatteringly sharp increase in challenge. Spoids is a good game, and reasonably priced at 240 Microsoft points, but it’s certainly not a game for tower defence novices. By all means play and enjoy it, but be prepared to never finish it.

[This review is also posted at The Indie Mine.]