Tag Archives: xbl

Rad Raygun

RR1Rad Raygun is nostalgia. It’s not merely nostalgic; it’s constructed top to bottom entirely from dewy-eyed longing for the sepia-drenched days of yore – ‘yore’ in this case being the 1980s. I know, that might not be yore enough for some of you, but considering there are documented cases of five year olds playing Call of Duty online, there’s a significant chunk of the game-playing audience for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Roman Empire happened around the same time.

If you never played on Nintendo’s original green-screened Game Boy, the endearing charm of Rad Raygun’s visual style will probably be lost on you. I enjoyed it, but I harbour no illusions that it was down to anything other than the warm ‘aww, this is how I remember platformers’ sensation. For one cosy hour, I relived the days I spent playing Asterix in the back of my dad’s car. If you don’t have these fond memories, then Rad Raygun is already losing ground. Memories of your own, that is. I’m fairly confident that you weren’t in my dad’s car, unless…Dad?

RR2

Master Chief was having a bad day.

RR isn’t the first Xbox Live Indie Game to try its hand at Game Boy visuals. Punishment platformer Slick tried it too, as did teeth-gnashingly obtuse puzzle-platformer Treasure Treasure: FFEE. Recreating the style of yesteryear is one of the things XBLIG developers like to attempt, whether it’s bleaching out the colour to simulate a Game Boy, drawing the art in primary coloured blocks to mimic an Atari 2600, or making everything as monstrously hideous and cumbersome as possible to ape an Intellivision. The difference here is that Rad Raygun actually pulls it off. It reproduces not only the visual and audio style but also the feel of the gameplay, with a little bit of modern polish subtly applied in a few places so that it doesn’t play like a complete wreck. Make no mistake, most 1980s portable games haven’t aged well.

Some of these determined concessions to faithful ‘80s-ness stray beyond stylistic affectations to impact the gameplay. When Rad leaves a room, the action will freeze as the camera shifts over to the next area. While this sort of break in the flow wouldn’t be acceptable in a non-retro game anymore, it’s perfectly valid here and doesn’t cause any inconvenience.

RR3

“It’ll probably fit in if I give it a good shove.”

The same can’t always be said of the other conscious Game Boy-isms. The jumping in particular is a bane; rather than leaping with any kind of practical arc or sense of weight, Rad sharply twitches a mile upward at the slightest nudge of the jump button, and whatever you do you will never succeed in making the horizontal distance equal the vertical. The result is a jumping sensation that feels awkward and clumsy, not to mention frequently impractical as you find yourself brazenly stuffing your head right into overhead enemies’ lines of fire.

The other influence here aside from the Game Boy is Mega Man. Mercifully RR doesn’t even begin to approach classic Mega Man difficulty, but it’s full of nods to that series – the gun arm, the robotic main character (he’s actually a distorted Game Boy, but close enough), the slide ability, even the types of enemies. I loathe and despise Mega Man games for their cheap shots, but Rad Raygun mostly doesn’t stoop to that. In fact, it’s distinctly easy for the most part. All in all the game will probably run to about an hour of play time, maybe an hour and half, so it’s not a particularly enduring experience. Fortunately, this is one of those cases where brevity is a good thing.

RR4

Call the Daily Mail! Handheld video game console destroys White House!

Rad Raygun doesn’t just imitate the games of years past, it’s also crammed to bursting with humorous contemporary references, whether it’s jingoistic fear of Communism, Rad’s mission to bring down the Berlin Wall or Ronald Reagan’s gurning face giving briefings. 80s names and events spill out from Rad Raygun like Ready Brek from a Thundercats bowl. Dependent as it is on nostalgia and referential gags, it would be easy for the game to outstay its welcome, but the relatively easy level of challenge and the short overall playtime ensure that it all wraps up just before the gags start to grate.

That’s the key to enjoying Rad Raygun, really. The bold and ridiculous 80s-ness of it all kept me smiling most of the time, and I was able to forgive its couple of awkward gameplay affectations because I’m desensitised to them from the real 80s. If you don’t remember the 80s or have enough awareness of pop culture and world events from that decade, then the largest part of the entertainment value is gone. You’re left with just the gameplay, which is a decent enough but easy and unremarkable platformer with a jumping motion that might you grind your teeth down to stumps. Rad Raygun is less an 80s-themed game than a lighthearted nostalgia slideshow with some simple gameplay inserted to keep you occupied. That’s not to say the gameplay isn’t fun, but aside from the odd detour into impromptu Tetris it’s too short and too generic to be worth recommending to anyone who lacks glasses of a suitably rosy hue.

RR4

I’m sorry but building my name in the sky goes beyond fanboy into goddamn creepy.

If you do remember the 80s, though, Rad Raygun is an entertaining use of an hour. It avoided boring me by providing enough reference gags to prevent the gamplay getting tedious, and vice versa. I can’t complain at getting 60-90 minutes of “Ha! I get it!” moments stitched neatly onto a “Aww, I remember games being like this” backdrop for 80 Microsoft points.

If you’re Rad Raygun’s target audience you’ll like it, and if you’re not you won’t. You probably already know which category you fall into. If you want out, just follow the smell of broadband and dubstep to the exit. Otherwise, pull up a pogo ball and try to avoid making eye contact with Erasure.

Null Battles

First person shooters have become so ubiquitous, so close to the default game genre, that I have to fight off a weary sinking sensation whenever one crosses my path. Now and then they defy my torpid scepticism and turn out to be fun – Section 8: Prejudice and Battlefield 1943 spring to mind – but for the most part I’m sick of the damn things. As with so many genres, though, the hope for diversity and bold reinvention lies in the indie side of development. The early build of Shootmania Storm on PC has already begun injecting new life into the flaccid multiplayer FPS, and the Xbox 360’s Null Battles is joining that crusade.

The closest real world experience I can think of to compare to playing Null Battles is something like leaping between giant magnetic Lego bricks in zero gravity. Each match takes place in a room full of large geometric shapes, usually randomly laid out (though this is customisable from the options menu – including the coveted treasure of a genuine level editor). From your team’s base halfway up one wall, you leap out into the arena where you will automatically adhere to the surface of whichever platform you touch. The platforms being 3D shapes, this often means suddenly finding yourself upside down or otherwise bizarrely orientated. It also means that as you spring from surface to surface in the chaos of combat, your perspective will flip and whirl in a way that makes it very difficult to aim reliably. Fortunately, this is where the fun comes from.

Null Battles feels a little like the adversarial FPS games of yesteryear, emphasising energetic lunging and spraying rather than hiding behind a wall and making precision headshots. It also reminds me slightly of the aforementioned Shootmania Storm in that it simplifies weapon selection down to a minimum, and relies on the frenetic pace and unique twist to keep it engaging.

The collaboration between Genesis and Daft Punk confused audiences

You have two weapons: a laser-type gun for ranged combat (assigned to RT) and a standard short-range sidearm (assigned to LT) that acts more like a melee attack than the usual backup pistol. There is no ammunition but, as in Mass Effect, your ability to rain brightly coloured destruction upon your opponents is limited by the build-up of heat in your weapon. Continuous fire will cause the gun to overheat and leave you in the humiliatingly disastrous position of being completely defenceless for a few seconds. In a game this fast paced, having to spend vital seconds running around and whimpering like an alarmed hamster (or an unusually resolute sheep) can be fatal.

How much you enjoy Null Battles will probably be determined by how much you demand precision performance. If you’re the sort of person who derives enjoyment from painstakingly training yourself to shoot microscopic dots in their microscopic heads after aiming for only a tenth of a second, then Null Battles might annoy you. That’s not to say there’s no place for skill here, but the randomly generated terrain layout and haphazard convulsion of gravitational direction lead to a more messy and manic play style. You can’t train yourself to make crack shots reliably because you can’t memorise the randomised maps, and when you move you can’t count on being the same way up half a second later.

Halo 4 really felt the budget cuts

If, on the other hand, you appreciated the frantic, unfettered chaos of ‘90s deathmatching, or you just like the sound of it, Null Battles could give you much more than your 80 Microsoft points’ worth of fun.

Unfortunately Null Battles bears a heavy burden. Like many multiplayer-focused indie games, particularly on the Xbox, it runs a constant risk of suffering from lack of community. There are options for both local and online play, with options for up to four teams for real carnage, but the only way you’ll play other human beings is if you arrange a session with friends. Fortunately the AI picks up the slack here. Much as in Take Arms, the AI participants are reasonably competent and don’t behave too conspicuously unlike real people. That’s even more the case here than in Take Arms, as the erratic nature of movement around the maps means that even human players don’t behave like real people.

Disney’s Knights of the Old Republic III

For some players, just the knowledge that there aren’t genuine gooey biological brains behind the figures they’re shooting in the face is enough to put them off. Weirdly, the same people will happily play Modern Warfare 3, which frequently also doesn’t involve much in the way of brain-driven opponents.

For those who have indie-playing friends or, like me, don’t mind playing against bots as long as they put up a fight, Null Battles is a perfectly sound purchase. It will never dislodge the big-name titles but it’s not intended to. As a 60p diversion with a novelty twist, it offers easily enough customisation options, headless chicken panic and disorientating chaos to justify a purchase. Will I be playing it a year from today? Perhaps not, but I am playing it now, and that’s enough.

Origin X

I don’t understand Origin X. That’s not to say I don’t comprehend how the game is played or what I’m meant to be doing, but even as I carefully strove to ensure the survival of my planet I found myself continually muttering “I don’t get it”. To be understood and yet remain deeply confusing is quite an achievement, but not of the sort that pings and awards you points.

The idea of Origin X is to populate planets in a solar system. This is simple enough to grasp. Having selected a planet, you place housing for people to live in, build mines so they can work and earn you money, and construct food supplies and storage so they don’t die horribly in the grim throes of starvation. This is no sim game, though. You won’t build and carefully manage your colonies in Origin X. It’s all very simple, just plonking down one from a list of half a dozen structures, and watching the population and food numbers at the side of the screen. Disappointingly, the colonists themselves aren’t represented by anything beyond their figure on the HUD.

Considering other Xbox indie games, such as Lexiv, at least represent the population as scurrying dots, it’s a shame that Origin X doesn’t make the effort. It leaves the colonies feeling dead and sterile, and when you absent mindedly allow people to starve to death there’s no sentiment about it at all. You don’t see fewer and fewer dots wandering around the houses and mines; you just notice a number diminishing. This might be more excusable if the game engaged with the player in other ways, but this indifferent detachment is pervasive throughout.

Gigantic fireballs are bad for your miners

Privation and exposure to the savage cosmic winds that flay the surface of these barren planets aren’t the only dangers for the colonists. Surprisingly enough, bone-melting heat and Plutonian frigidity also aren’t very good for their health, so you have to make sure none of your inhabited planets drift too close to, or far from, the sun. The mechanic for maintaining a comfortable temperate environment is one of the most awkward in the game, and yet perhaps the one you will use most. This is where the already slightly stale Origin X starts to become Irritation X.

Unlike many sim, management or strategy games, Origin X doesn’t cast you as an invisible overlord guiding events from afar. Instead you control a comet that flies around the solar system, and you must physically visit any planet that you want to manage. As a celestial body you exert a gravitational force that affects any planet you approach, pulling it towards you. This is the means by which you must ensure planets stay at the ideal distance from the sun. Unfortunately it is so imprecise and unreliable that it’s more harmful than helpful. Bear in mind that you must physically fly to a planet in order to build anything on it – with your comet’s gravity in constant effect, visiting a planet immediately dislodges it from its position. You can’t perform any management tasks without endangering the entire world as you accidentally start it plunging into a star or drifting into deep space. Nor can you simply stop its movement by positioning yourself on its opposite side. That could cause it to reverse its direction towards equal danger, or twist it off to one side, or not have much of a noticeable effect at all. This tiresome ordeal is exacerbated by a map that occasionally takes it upon itself to be completely black for no reason, so you have no idea where you and your wayward world are in relation to the sun.

I once played a game of Origin X in which I spent three quarters of my time chasing around after my main planet, trying to drag it back to a safe position, only to make things worse and worse until everyone died. It wasn’t lack of skill that caused the demise of an entire civilisation; no amount of dexterity could suffice to wrangle a manageable effect from the erratic and uncooperative gravity-steering system.

Xx5ithVaderzzz misunderstood the game

Although this planet positioning nightmare ordeal is the main cause of defeat in Origin X, it’s not the one that officially ends your game. Even after everyone is killed off by living half a mile from the surface of the sun, your game will continue trundling along. There’s no hope of regaining lost ground; no matter what I try, I’ve never managed to start a new population once the original one has died out. You’re not a deity, and can’t create people from thin air. The title Origin X is a little ironic, not to mention inexplicable, since originating anything is completely beyond your power.

The thing that will actually finish your game is alien attacks that steal all of your cores. Cores are glowing white blobs that orbit one of your planets, and aliens periodically try to steal them. That’s all I can tell you about it, as that’s all I know. The game doesn’t explain any of this – what the cores are, what they do, why aliens want them, or why losing them all is the end of the game. All it tells you is that you must protect the cores. In fact, it’s entirely possible to continue defending the cores without any colonists at all, through a combination of ramming them yourself and building automated turrets on the planets to shoot for you.

At first that makes the whole management/strategy side of the game seem redundant. The problem is that reaching a population goal seems to be the only way to complete a level. The success and failure criteria are unrelated, and that just adds another unwholesome globule of frustration to an already awkward and confusing experience.

Origintown was populated entirely by agoraphobes

Notice that I said reaching a population goal seems to be the only way to complete a level. That ‘seems’ can be applied to everything I say about Origin X. I’m all in favour of doing away with condescending tutorials that laboriously steer you through every element of a game down to the most obvious basics, but some guidance would be nice. The only things Origin X tells you are that you have to protect the cores and make sure the planets stay at a safe distance. Everything else has to be figured out as you go. What are cores? Why do they only orbit one planet? What are these buildings? What do they do? How do I get money? How do I move the planets? How do I fight off the aliens? How do I succeed or fail? What the hell is going on?

That is Origin X in a one-word nut shell: “What?!” Nothing is explained or even outlined, there’s no tutorial or instructions of any sort, and you are left alone to work out the entire game on your own. Even now, I might be missing something. I’ve put multiple hours into Origin X and think I finally understand how it works, but I can’t be certain. It’s also worth noting that, uncomfortable though it is for me, I haven’t got past the first level. I don’t like to review a game when I haven’t at least played most of it, but however many hours I put into Origin X I just can’t keep the planets in a safe orbit for long enough to sustain population growth. Sooner or later everyone dies, and then I just sit and let the aliens steal my cores to bring on the blessed relief of a game over.

George W Bush longed to press ‘A’

When a game is so confusing and poorly realised that it takes hours to feel remotely confident that you even know what’s meant to be happening, and on top of that is so poorly designed that hours and hours of play are too little to enable a 25-year gaming veteran to complete level 1, I think “back to the drawing board” is a dizzying display of understatement. I like the idea of Origin X – part simple management sim, part basic real-time strategy, and part alien-ramming minigame. Sadly the whole package is such a mess that I can’t possibly encourage anyone to play it. Between the totally absent game information and the scream-inducingly unmanageable mechanics, Origin X totters right to the very brink of being effectively unplayable, and has the cheek to affront us with bleak presentation and a glitch map while doing so.

Weep for the missed potential if you care to, but make no mistake: the only thing that Origin X originates is its own deletion.

Uprisings and Updates

The Indie Games Uprising III is over now, and there’s plenty to review once I’ve spent enough time with the remaining games. In the meantime there are some quick look videos on The Indie Ocean’s YouTube channel.
I can tell you right now, though, that one of the Uprising games has displaced a regular diner at my Captain’s Table of the finest Xbox Live Indie Games. Congratulations to Smooth Operators: Call Centre Chaos, which offers us a management sim smooth, professional and addictive enough to rival the classic likes of Theme Park. And for only 80 Microsoft points! That’s almost offensively good value. If you’ve ever got even a moment’s enjoyment from a Theme, Sim or Tycoon game, go and take a peek at Smooth Operators.

Smooth Operators: Call Centre Chaos

City Tuesday (Indie Games Uprising III)

Out of the entire Indie Games Uprising III, City Tuesday was the game I was looking forward to most. It seemed poised to do everything that the finest indie games on any platform often do – challenge assumptions about what can be done with games as a medium, express something philosophical or emotional, evoke a mood and intrigue the brain.

I tried to not to hope for all this when I sat down to play. I studiously avoid hype for anything that interests me so that I won’t be greeted with crushing disappointment when I experience the reality. That’s why I haven’t played Skyrim. It couldn’t possibly live up to the hype.

In the case of City Tuesday, it helped that the promotional material didn’t make it clear how the game would work. It could have been a platformer, a puzzler, a point and click adventure – there was no telling. As it turns out, City Tuesday is a game of two parts.

One part is a terrorist attack on the anonymous city, and this part reminds me of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on the N64. Not aesthetically or in gameplay style, but in its approach to preventing the bombings. Streets, parks and buildings teem with people, all going about their everyday business. They walk the dog, go to work, eat, drive around and chat to each other. At the same time, terrorists move among them, planting bombs that all detonate at the exact same moment, wiping everyone out. The bombers are no fools; they hide their explosives in places that are hard to access: behind locked doors, buried under concrete, or stashed in someone’s car. If you don’t disarm these bombs by the end of the day, it all ends and…you start over. That is your power, and the reason that only you can save the innocent people of the city. You are unbound by time.

Including renting it from Blockbuster

On subsequent attempts, the day plays out the same as the first time. If you’ve ever played Majora’s Mask or seen Groundhog Day (or the earlier but more obscure 12:01 for hipster points) then it will make sense to you. You relive the same day, with the same people doing the same things, and through observation of their routines you can begin to work out how to tweak the pattern – and finally neutralise the bombs.

I love this part of the game. It’s a brave attempt to do something that isn’t often seen in games, and for the most part it does it well. I floundered around for a few minutes because the game explains very little about itself, but once I got a handle on how things work I began to really enjoy it. I can think of one or two changes that might be beneficial – in particular, forcing the player to disarm all the bombs in one go, Majora’s Mask style. Some events that occur during the day will make certain bomb locations inaccessible, but, once a bomb has been defused it remains defused even when the day starts over from the beginning. Personally I feel it would have been both more challenging and more interesting to reactivate every bomb upon restarting the day, so that the player has to not only work out how to resolve each individual threat but also slot them all together into an overall sequence so that all are disarmed in one flawless, heroic run.

But watch out for naked men on trains

I said the game is in two parts. The other part is the black sheep of the City Tuesday family. It’s not bad, not by any means, but it’s also nothing special. The whole of City Tuesday is divided into three stages. Stage 1 is a tutorial. It’s a short series of simple single-room puzzles; not particularly interesting or challenging, but that’s to be expected from a tutorial. Awkwardly, it actually doesn’t teach you very much, and at least one part is too cryptic to be helpful (a remark about security being unable to stop you that only makes sense once you already know what it means). We can disregard this tutorial as not part of the main game, leaving us with Stages 2 and 3 as the main body of City Tueday.

Stage 3 is the larger scale rewinding bomb hunt I discussed above. Stage 2, sadly, is basically a longer version of the tutorial. It is again a series of single-screen puzzles, most of which are very simple. There is one that made me think and actually forced me to go away and come back later, once I understood more about how the game’s concept works. The interesting ideas introduced in this puzzle, however, are never repeated. Standing alone it is enjoyable but too short and sorely under-used. The other screens in Stage 2 are pretty straightforward. Identify how to reach the bomb, then go and get it.

Museum terrorists are more sporting

This is City Tuesday’s big weakness. Two of the three stages are effectively little more than tutorial, then when the game hits its stride and begins to unfurl into something more majestic in Stage 3, suddenly it’s over. It feels like ­City Tuesday is a quarter of a great game. If there had been another two or three stages after Stage 3 that played in a similar way, and revisited or built upon some of the ideas introduced earlier on, this could have been one of the best games on the Xbox indie channel. As it stands, I really enjoyed City Tuesday once it got going, but was left hollow and disappointed by the whole thing suddenly jumping ship and calling a halt after what is, to all intents and purposes, level 1.

I still recommend City Tuesday. When it actually gets on with doing what it’s meant to do, it is a very good game that would stray into brilliance with a couple of tweaks. Even in its truncated form it’s easily worth 80 Microsoft points to get a glimpse of what’s possible in indie games. It’s just a crying shame that City Tuesday is content to remain only a glimpse – an introductory trailer for a grander project that doesn’t exist.

Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 1 (insert ‘Oozi 9mm’ gag if desired)

I wasn’t very optimistic when I decided, late one night, to try out Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep 1. I thought I’d gone off platformers with time. Whether it was because maturity had taken me beyond the simple pleasures of hopping from ledge to ledge, or because the more complex and gritty games of today make platformers seem redundant, or because people don’t make them like they used to (so to speak), I couldn’t tell. All I knew was it had been a long time since I’d last particularly enjoyed one.

Recently, though, a little thought had been nagging at me. It was a pink, inflatable thought that squeaked when prodded. No, not that (shame on you, reader!). This thought was Kirby. You see, some fifteen years or more after I first played it, I still enjoy Kirby’s Adventure. So one cold, windswept North Welsh night, as the clock ticked away the seconds to 8.17pm, I realised its battery was dead and checked another clock. As this second clock digitally pulsed away the seconds to 4.00am, I decided to try and find a good indie platformer on the Xbox.

Don’t say Super Meat Boy. That is exactly what I was not looking for. My theory was that Kirby’s Adventure retained its appeal because it was simply fun. It didn’t require pinpoint precision or split second timing, and it didn’t penalise me with every ounce of its might every time I was a millimetre off target. I hate Super Meat Boy, and the others that have accompanied it in the oily wave of so-called ‘punishment platformers’. You know what’s the key thing about punishment? It’s not fun. There had to be a fun platformer on the indie marketplace. There had to be.

My response to a glance at Oozi‘s info page was a wholehearted ‘oh go on then, it looks kind of pretty at least’. It was pretty much just the absence of affected 8-bit visuals or Atari 2600 pretensions that nudged me into downloading the trial. When the trial ended eight minutes later, I immediately hit ‘unlock full game’. I had already got 80 MSP of enjoyment out of it; I would certainly get more. At that point, I couldn’t have told you why I so recklessly splurged 50p. It’s rare for me to buy a game as soon as the trial ends. Usually, even if I enjoyed it, I play the trial another couple of times to be as sure as I can that the game is up my street. I can, and will, explain it now, but all I knew as I slumped sore-eyed in my chair that blackest of nights, awash with the green glow of Oozi‘s environments, was that I was having fun and wanted to carry on having it.

"A snail's pace" means something different in Oozi's world.

When I returned to the game the next day, I felt a minute tremor of trepidation. Had my enjoyment of Oozi‘s trial been late night delirium? Had it been merely relief at playing a more forgiving game in the wake of several puppy-kickingly brutal punishment platformers?

No, surprisingly enough.

I give Oozi zero out of ten for originality. It does nothing that hasn’t been done a thousand times before. Its levels are forested areas and well-lit, vaguely cave-like populated by cheery-looking snakes and spiders. Nothing to get excited about. The main character (presumably the eponymous Oozi, though that could instead be the world he’s stranded on for all I know) is distinctive but not memorable – a squat, vaguely humanoid creature with a big grin.

It doesn’t matter.

It does nothing new, but it does all the old things very well. In contrast to almost every Xbox indie platformer, it doesn’t look barely a step above a Game & Watch. I don’t like this word in reviews, but I can’t think of a more apt one, so: the environments are…lush. Warm, soft greens and enemies that are brightly coloured without being garish. There’s no murkiness either – every object is crisply distinct from the others. Perhaps most strikingly, the animation is excellent. There are small nuances in the movements of character sprites that add a warmth and life to the feel of the game. The gaming world has changed, but fifteen years ago this would have been professional-standard stuff.

Try not to get hit by angry nuts while sliding on the vine. .....sorry.

This extends to the backgrounds too. The leaves of the ferns that Oozi wanders blithely by during the forest stages wave minutely, and the ranks of trees that spread into the distance flaunt parallax scrolling that early-90s gaming journalists would have wet themselves over.

And perhaps that’s the key here. Where most Xbox indie platformers aim for an NES/Atari age that conveniently doesn’t require much effort on the presentation front, Oozi: Earth Adventure feels like a Mega Drive game. It’s a throwback to a time gone by, but not in a lazy way. It doesn’t even give the impression that this was intentional. Whether or not this is true, what Oozi‘s developer seems to have done is simply set out to make a fun 2D platform game. Nothing punishing, nothing complex, nothing that breaks the mould – just a game about jumping and collecting, that is gentle, pleasant and enjoyable to play.

The presentation is the most striking aspect, but all the glossy visuals in the world wouldn’t matter if the playing the game was a chore. Fortunately, Oozi himself handles very smoothly. Where almost all indie platformers suffer from jumping that has you either floating like a leaf on the wind or lurching like a crack junkie trying to climb up a downward escalator, Oozi stikes a balance. Similarly, the grinning little alien neither stops dead in an instant nor skids onward for half an hour after you release the stick. Whatever it is that other indie developers are missing, Oozi‘s developers have it. For once, jumping is actually a functional way to traverse the levels rather than an impediment that must be overcome.

I'm no geologist, but something isn't right about this cave. We'll find out for ourselves in episode two.

On the broader gameplay front, the level designs, like the rest of the game, won’t win any prizes for original thought, but should win some sort of accolade for doing something uninspired very well. The levels are quite linear, but there is room to explore isolated corners for extra stars (Oozi‘s collectible ring/coin substitute). The ‘normal’ difficulty setting shouldn’t give anyone with platforming experience too much trouble, but it isn’t a total cakewalk either. In the venerable tradition of 16-bit platforming, it’s on the easy side, but not laughably easy. I died a few times per level. Besides, there’s a ‘hardcore’ setting for anyone who feels insulted by ‘normal’, and there are challenge modes to keep you occupied once you’ve finished.

Having said that, you might well need those extras. The main story mode is very short. Not the shortest I’ve played in an XBLIG game (at this stage, that probably goes to The Adventures of Captain Becky) , but short nonetheless. You see, Oozi is episodic, and this is evidently episode one. Not a problem really, but whether the full game will be worth shelling out for each individual installment remains to be seen.

It’s also worth noting that the final (well, only) boss battle is unsettlingly silent. Music plays, Oozi grunts and squawks as usual, but the boss itself makes not the tiniest sound. Not a major issue, but worth remarking upon, since it’s a strange experience that I’ve never seen elsewhere.

All in all, though, whilst Oozi: Earth Adventure is in many ways unremarkable, its all-round competence lifts it a couple of rungs. Though its general design doesn’t particularly set it apart and its gameplay tries nothing outside the established platforming formula, the way it’s all executed makes playing Oozi a pleasant, welcoming experience. It could do with being longer and sorting out a sound effect or two for the boss, but I’d still recommend it for a gently fun platforming experience. You probably won’t revist it, but for 50p that’s not so bad.

Unlike Super Meat Boy, Platformance and many others, Oozi doesn’t hate you. It likes you and wants you to have fun. Playing Oozi is a scenic adventure with a friend. And it is fun, at least for its brief duration. What else do we need?

Dummies vs Fun

I shouldn’t have let KGB: Episode One get my hopes up. ‘If one indie developer can make a decent first person shooter, surely others can too’, I said to myself. I may be right, but Mummies vs Gunn.S is not the game I was looking for.

This title has to be a typo. It has to be.

Really the title should have tipped me off, but I was delighted to see some form of b-movie undead monster that isn’t a zombie that I hurried to overlook the ridiculous ‘Gunn.S’ travesty, and ill omen that is ‘vs’. Very few things, games or otherwise, that feature ‘vs’ in the title have much chance at quality. Still, remembering the generally enjoyable Plants vs Zombies (two bad news  words in one title!) and Alien vs Predator (the games, not the tiresome films) I pressed on into the abyss.

In fairness, Mummies vs Gunn.S isn’t the worst XBL indie FPS. That honour is reserved for another, yet to be reviewed simply because I so desperately don’t want to play it again. Mummies seems to be well-intentioned at least in the beginning, but it makes very little effort to do anything distinctive and it shows signs of very sloppy design that cost it a lot of ground against its competition. This is a first person wave/horde survival game, and there are a few of those on the indie marketplace. They are still vastly outnumbered by identical twin-stick shooters that seem to be the same game in different skins (possibly programmed by the same guy in different hats) and grotesque, cynical mockeries of games that eagerly pander to the social ineptitude and girl-phobia of their thirteen year old boy target audience (Don’t Be Nervous  Talking to Girls? Ugh.) but the few first person shooters there are on here are mostly wave survival. The leader of this grubby pack is Nuclear Wasteland 2030, a competent (if solo only) Nazi Zombies-a-like from the developer of KGB.

The point is, if you’re going to attempt an Xbox indie FPS, making it a wave survival game puts you straight into direct competition with several others, so you need to make sure you pull something special out of the hat to set yourself apart. Unfortunately for Mummies vs Gunn.S, the thing it pulls out of its hat is a mouldy cheese sandwich stuck to a dead cat.

If I walked into an ancient pyramid and saw floating visions proclaiming 'total kills' and 'lapsed seconds', I'd poo myself.

Upon first playing MvG, I was pleased with the setting. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but I liked the gloominess of the mystery room, probably intended to be the inside of an ancient pyramid. A pleasant change. Within a couple of minutes, though, boredom had firmly taken hold. This gloomy pyramid interior is the only room in the game, at least for as long as I managed to force myself through it. You shoot mummies, more spawn, you shoot those too. Competent wave survival games add small features to keep things interesting – barricades, items, unlockable weapon depots. Just walking backwards around the room and shooting the zombies as they fall into line gets old very quickly. And yes, I said ‘zombies’. Title aside, there’s nothing to distinguish these ‘mummies’ from the lazily programmed zombies in various other sloppy FPSes.

But after another couple of minutes, boredom wasn’t such a problem anymore. Instead, boredom became something MvG could only aspire to in its better moments. You see, this is where lazy predicability gives way to shoddy, thoughtless design. It’s evident very quickly that the mummies are insanely resilient. At first this is a boredom-enhancing chore, but it really becomes a gruelling grind as their numbers begin to stack up. I don’t think I’ve seen a zombie (or zombie-type enemy, insert theatrical sigh here) soak up this much damage in any other game. The poor weapons only add a sandpaper caress to this open wound, presenting us with an eye-catching performance in the form of incongruous red flashes. Oh, and a bomb. What a treat.

Possibly the most grating design choice, though, is the way ammunition is handled. Firstly, it’s unlimited, revealing a willful refusal to grasp even the basics of providing tension in a survival game. Secondly, there’s no on-screen magazine indicator, which means you will always be oblivious to the imminent need to reload unless you count the shots (having first counted them already to determine the size of the mag). This just reeks of thoughtless design, implemented by someone who really doesn’t care about the game or how it plays. Mummies vs Gunn.S lacks the effort to even simply directly copy others in its field. It is too lazy to be lazy.

It's a zombie. Don't pretend it isn't.

One more niggle, though this one is more of a pet peeve and won’t annoy many people. Still, to me it’s an infuriating omission. There is no option to invert the y axis. Yes, I’m one of them. I know, you probably can’t grasp how I manage to play anything with inverted controls, but that’s beside the point. The way you feel about using inverted controls is the way I feel that way about using non-inverted controls. I’m sure you can imagine the layer of unpleasantness this smeared onto an already unsavoury experience.

Long story short: Mummies vs Gunn.S is rubbish. First person wave survival games are not generally great when executed in indie form, lacking the variety of settings and other things that make their big budget counterparts more enjoyable, but MvG can’t even be bothered to try. I suggest you return the favour.

Evil shampoo: for stronger, fuller Lair

In a similar vein to the fractionally more recent and vastly more publicised PC indie The Binding of Isaac, Going Loud Studios’ Lair of the Evildoer is half twin-stick shooter and half roguelike, with a distinct humorous streak.

The tone of the game is established right from the outset, with your choice of character name being scorned by your creator, the evil genius Dr Odious, who then renames you something that he considers more fitting. The tutorial section (skippable if you prefer) really drills the sense of humour home, having Dr Odious swapping the usual encouragement of tutorial guides for derision of your measly achievements.Indeed, his disappointment with your performance of the basics is the instigator of the game proper; deeming you a worthless experiment, he orders your unceremonious execution, but overlooks the convenient stairway that will lead you out into the evil scientist’s wider complex.

If that isn't the face of evil, I don't know what is.

The central mechanics of Lair of the Evildoer are straightforward enough, and will be familiar to anyone who has played twin-stick shooters before. Most such games simply use the right stick to open fire, but Lair of the Evildoer employs the same system as one or two others such as Zombie Estate, in that you aim with the right stick and fire with the right trigger. In Zombie Estate this is a little redundant and clunky, that being essentially a wave survival game that seldom requires you to stop shooting. It’s more functional here, since Lair of the Evildoer emphasises exploration and progress rather than simply pouring bullets into an advancing horde.

This is where the roguelike elements begin to make themselves felt. Dr Odious’ maze of laboratories is always twenty floors long, and is procedurally generated (‘randomly generated’ to old timers like me) so although a complete run through the game can be quite short, the details of the experience differ each time. Moreover, the brevity doesn’t mean that the game is easy; in true rogelike fashion, the difficulty ramps up quite rapidly after the first few floors.

Dr Odious should stop taking on temps. They have no sense of proper work attire.

A small selection of attributes that can be levelled up, a healthy rate of weapon drops (with weapon stats easily compared by holding the left trigger while standing over a dropped weapon) and maps layouts that are revealed only as you explore all round out the roguelike contributions to the game. The fusion works very well. Essentially, this is a traditional roguelike with better combat, and with a bright veneer of goofy humour that gives the game its own  character.

In some respects, though, Lair of the Evildoer‘s indie origins show through. While the visuals are chunky and colourful, there is very little variation in enemy models. There are numerous enemy types with an assortment of special abilities, including the very annoying immunity to projectiles, but they are usually represented by the same character models either with a different coloured glow, or sometimes with no difference at all. It’s not a huge problem, but it does add additional repetitiveness to a game that is already somewhat samey by nature.

Similarly, there isn’t all that much variety in the environments either. You will trawl through lab after lab, and though there are alterations, taking you into offices on the lower floors, many of them are hardly noticeable. This repetitious pattern extends to the weapons too. Their stats and efficacy in different situations are quite varied, but for most of the game you are limited to a handful of broad types: shotgun, SMG, bat, and so on. The final few floors see the introduction of a few odd weapon types though – perhaps most bizarrely a gun that is represented by a unicorn’s head icon and that shoots fairies.

Only superior ankles can sate these choosy midget zombies.

Regardless, these criticisms feel a little churlish. Going Loud Studios ask a mere 80 MSP (around 50p for my fellow UK-dwellers) for Lair of the Evildoer. That’s less than a small bar of chocolate or a sixth of a pint of mediocre ale. This addictive and challenging shooter/dungeon crawl hybrid is easily worth that sacrifice, and it’s better for your health.

Like many of the better XBL indie games, Lair of the Evildoer‘s occasionally readily apparent budget shouldn’t be held against it. There are numerous full Xbox Live Arcade games selling for 1200 MSP that offer less challenge, less accessibility and less fun than this little indie title. Between its smooth combination of styles, the replayability provided by its randomly generated levels, and its charmingly silly tone, Lair of the Evildoer is easily recommendable at this miniscule price.