But seriously, what the fuck is up with that name? I could find no connection at all with the name and the game. Yes, actually it would have. Bleed was developed by Bootdisk Revolution. October 1, by Indie Gamer Chick 11 Comments. I got at least one email a week and a tweet or two telling me how good it was. Their games typically play well and have high production values. Their recent title Sushi Castle received a, ahem, lukewarm response from Binding of Isaac fans check the comments.
Good games get cloned. I like to think of them as being like one of those really cool guys with a weird quirk. What irks me about Milkstone is their games are always just sort of there. I just needed proof of that. Depending on which camera angle you use, RACERS is a Sprint-like top-down racer, or a 3D one if you use the neat but significantly more difficult to play chase camera.
Brian actually stumbled upon that while we were playing it, and I have to say, damn. I still preferred the top-down view, because you can see the turns coming sooner and you need every edge you can get. Whether playing online or off, you earn money from races which you use to buy and upgrade cars. You then use those to race to earn more money to buy more cars to upgrade. You then use those to race to earn more money to buy more EGAD!!
I do believe this game might be a time sink. The controls? Silky smooth. The course layouts? Very well done. The difficulty is adjustable, progress is continuously made so the grind never feels like a grind, and buying the cars and upgrades feels surprisingly rewarding. Milkstone immediately agreed that I was right and promised to fix it during the next update. And then they stole my wallet. Brian kicked ass, winning a few races. Actually, the truth is I was trying to cause Brian to wreck.
Kind of hard to do considering that he was typically way ahead of me, but every time I had an opening, I tried smashing into him. It never worked, and I kept hitting the walls while he repeatedly asked me if I was drunk. Just stupid. And then I had to play it cool and act like I sucked yes..
Like that look. Woogity Boogity Boo! Find out where it landed on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. September 17, by Indie Gamer Chick 15 Comments. Smooth Operators is a time sink, and I mean that in a good way. I started playing yesterday around AM, and emerged around PM wondering exactly where the day went. Titles like this are the alien abductions of the game world.
When you try to explain to people that you just lost eight hours of your life playing a game where you operate a call center, people look at you with rapidly blinking eyes as if you just took that last step off the deep-end. As Brian pointed out to me back in July when this very site ran a contest to give Smooth Operators its name, the idea of a Sim Call Center is not original.
A free-to-play game called Corporation Inc has been around since at least November of Smooth Operators is perhaps uncomfortably similar to it, but hey, some companies make billions doing this. Just make sure you keep an eye on your wallet in its presence. Funny how some of the most addictive games sound like weaponized boredom on paper. Dante, in his infinite wealth.. But managing a virtual one is undeniably addictive.
First you have to build an operations center. Then you have to staff it. You also have to hire janitors, IT guys, managers, and cheerleaders. All that shouting and pompom waving is bound to be distracting, especially for a job that involves talking on the telephone. You just build and staff buildings to earn money to build more buildings to staff to earn more money.
So yea, time sink. But it works, and it plays relatively well. Shockingly, I enjoyed playing it more with an Xbox controller than I enjoyed playing the PC game it was, ahem, inspired by. The process is slow and cumbersome. Smooth Operators practically demands that you micro-manage all the dudes you hire, but as your staff increases, this becomes more tiresome.
In fact, all they do is make employees work longer without them becoming less happy. In a roundabout way, this actually made my employees less happy, as they were now clogging all the facilities and elevators in my building. What the FUCK is a potted plant going to do to increase morale when people have to wait two hours to get down one story on an elevator? If this game were made in the United States, that potted plant would be used to bludgeon the nearest authority figure. I guess people in Kyrksten like the increased workload and have more patience.
These are getting harder to work in. Because of the slowness of the upgrades, and the indifference of my employees to water coolers, my moral dipped to record lows and my employees started resigning on me faster than I could appease them. Now, if this was Sim City, I would have responded in a perfectly calm and rational manner. Meaning I would have sent Godzilla in to kill and eat all my employees and knock the building over.
Sigh, God damn Andreas. Those would have been easier to work in. So after I lost over half my employees, including most of my janitors and IT guys, I surveyed the remains of my once beautiful office building.
Trash scattered everywhere. Computers smoking. Employees swearing at the slowness of the elevators. Mangers swearing at the employees. Money drying up. Tasks being unfulfilled. I spent the last eight hours of my life doing this and this is all I have to show for it?
I turned my Xbox back on and spent another eight hours doing the same thing. Smooth Operators was developed by Andreas Heydeck. Smooth Operators is Chick Approved! September 15, by Indie Gamer Chick 23 Comments. Update : Gateways now includes an easier mode that will still eat your ass for lunch.
Halfway through Gateways, I had it pegged as the new 1 game on my site, and that Escape Goat had been slain. No joke. Actually, describing Gateways as essentially being a 2D Portal is way over-simplifying things. Portal was never this smart, nor did it give you this many things to do.
You had two portals and maybe a cube to drag along with you. Strange as this sounds, Gateways is actually too smart, to the point of turning off some of my Uprising comrades. As a kid, I always figured puzzlers were the product of a publisher pulling an Arliss Loveless, kidnapping top eggheads from around the world and forcing them to create puzzles, for profit!
One dude came up with all the puzzles in Gateways. One fucking dude, presumably with a brain that outweighs a Volkswagen Beetle. However, I still found the design somewhat problematic. That, or include the ability to warp at your will from save point to save point, like LaserCat did. Which brings me to the puzzles. But the difficulty of finishing them, ahem, scales. My biggest complaint with Escape Goat was that there was no difficulty curve. Gateways has no such limitations.
However, the curve of it was allowed to grow out of control. As a result, Gateways is possibly the most difficult platformer-puzzler in gaming history. Things start out smoothly with the simple portal gun. It plays more or less exactly like a 2D Portal game.
The first twist comes with the size portal thing, which allows you jump through one portal and come out the other end either larger or smaller. And then comes the Time Travel gun. The idea behind it is you place one portal and then wait for some time to pass. Then, you place the second portal and hop through it. When you come out the other side, you travel back to that point, with your former self doing whatever it was you were doing while waiting for the time meter to fill.
At this point, any sense of wonderment in the puzzles is replaced by conundrums designed to blow your cerebral cortex. See this picture? You will be expected to recreate it at some point.
Brian walked out of the room, complaining of a headache. Cameron buried his head in his lap and began to cry. And poor Bryce keeled over dead. Doc Brown would be thrilled with Gateways, which requires you to think 4th dimensionally. Although you can get items that extend how long the time portal works, it never really eases up on the tension of getting everything absolutely fucking perfect, with no room for error.
This is harder than it sounds, because moving from portal to portal is disorienting. Solving puzzles requires concentration, coordination, and cognitive thinking on a level no game in history has.
The first time I encountered a puzzle that used the time gun and required you to make clones of yourself that reflect a laser, I literally froze in my chair and processed the turn the game just made. It added more abilities and guns. By the end of the game, puzzles require you to use multiple guns, time windows, and abilities.
Mind you, even with this video, people are having trouble finishing it. I get a headache just from watching it. Now imagine trying to solve it yourself. Throughout the game, you collect orbs. First, you have to pay five orbs just to see if you have the equipment necessary to finish it, even if you already know the answer. Then, if you get truly stuck, you can pay 40 orbs to have the game take over the control and finish the puzzle for you.
I almost wish there had been some middle-ground option that steers you in the direction without outright playing the game for you. To solve some puzzles including the final one , I cheated by putting numbered masking tape on my TV so that I would know where exactly to stand. Maybe something like that for 10 orbs would be preferable to having the game solve itself for you.
Or most people actually. Or the many annoyances I experienced playing it. Not just the brain freezes, but little things. I found switching between the flashlight, mirror, and guns to be somewhat unintuitive, and that really makes the final few puzzles more annoying than they have to be. I found the flashlight stages aggravating. And I wish the game had a bit more personality. Brian wanted me to note that he did not find it difficult to cycle through the various items. Right before publication, my buddy Tristan of Clearance Bin Review became the latest of many players I follow on Twitter that threw in the towel at some point on Gateways.
It controls better, is more accessible to everyone, and has more personality. Gateways is hyper-intelligent, but that actually works against. It catches you by surprise. Click here to see where it landed. August 21, by Indie Gamer Chick 15 Comments. Spyleaks is part Loloish puzzler, part space shooter. I like weird, but this is a different kind of weird. Like someone making a peanut butter and cloves sandwich, where you wonder who in their right mind would see the potential in that combination.
Spies typically being people who can blend in. The dude in this game has buck teeth that would draw the attention of Stevie Wonder, but he makes up for it with the ability to push safes as tall as he is with minimal effort. James Bond bows at your feet. Obviously I did anything but ignore the story. Of course there are zombies. Spyleaks is the best of the bunch. Although the game closely reminded me of the three titles I spoke of above, Spyleaks changes the formula a lot.
Sure, you still shove crates, stun-lock enemies to use as crates, and ultimately try to open up an exit. Where Spyleaks changes things up is with its button and gate system. Levels typically have one or more different colored switches or buttons that you have to activate to proceed.
Those switches will activate corresponding gates. Oh, and if your head is in danger of exploding but you think you ought to try the game anyway, be a chum and make sure you live stream it. What can I say? Stealth also factors in. Some of the enemies are situated like guards who only give chase if you cross in front of them. Now if you walk right in front of them, they start to give chase. They could have been the basis of an entire game on their own.
Before this review turns into too much of a love-letter, I have some bones to pick with Spyleaks. All movement in the game is done one full square at a time. Thankfully, death here is treated with the dignity that typically befalls it, meaning your character does cartwheels in place and then shakes his head before flat-lining. Same thing happened to my great-great-great-great grandfather right before he died of old age.
Cart-wheeled right on his death-bed did he. I get it. Remember, purely hypothetical. You can click on the titles to read my reviews. You can also visit the Leaderboard to see what the remaining twenty games are. I really kind of did this in the wrong order.
I suck. Developed by DreamRoot Studios. Concept : Collect crystals while avoiding enemies in this top-down logic puzzler. Why I like it : Crystal Hunters is an intelligently designed game. Puzzlers on XBLIG sometimes forget to properly scale the difficult level, dumping players off in the deep-end early on. Crystal Hunters eases players into the mechanics of the game. Make no mistake though, the difficulty scales up hugely towards the end. If you like mind benders, this sucker will go all origami on your brain.
What could have made it better : The play control is pretty touchy. The graphics are small in resolution. Developed by Going Loud Studios. Concept : Fight various undead enemies while trying to escape the lair of an evil genius in this twin-stick shooter. Why I like it : Lair of the Evildoer is an intense, though very clever shooter. Games that feature randomly-generated levels tend to feel generic, but Lair of the Evildoer is overflowing with personality. With a wide variety of enemies, weapons, and customizable stats, this is probably one of the most intelligent shooters on the platform.
Why I liked it : In my original review, I absolutely scorched Wizorb. And I regret that I wrote that review the way I did, because I failed to articulate that I really did like the game. The only other brick-breaker that has done that for me is Shatter on PlayStation Network. The charming 8-bit graphics that are without a tinge of a modern influence are among the best of their breed on XBLIG.
Wizorb is really special. What could have made it better : The RPG stuff is mostly smoke and mirrors, so I wish they had gone further with the concept than they did. What could have made it better : Both Johnny Platform games feature a useless lives system that halts progress and forces replaying previously beaten levels for no reason whatsoever.
Developed by Andrew Gaubatz. Sort of like : Scrabble and Sim City had a beautiful baby that is potentially a genius and occasionally shits on you. And it still stands as one of the best dual-joystick shooters on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, period.
The titular theme song of the game is easily the most memorable aspect of the game, and is funny every time you play the game.
It's easily one of the best self-referential songs ever after Portal, and before 'Splosion Man. This alone is why you should buy the game, but it also still serves as a history lesson for players who are interested in the timeline of the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace.
Platformance: Castle Pain follows in the wake of masochist games like Demon's Souls and Super Meat Boy that hurt you deep down so good. As the title says, Platformance: Castle Pain is all about the platforming.
And the pain. Platformance only has one level, but it's truly a motherfucker to behold. Terrible traps, evil asshole birds, and lethal sea life are all your sworn enemies whom will stop at nothing to prevent your quest of rescuing the princess.
Death isn't a big thing in Platformance, as the numerous checkpoints will instantly respawn your brave little duder-in-shining-armor over-and-over again. The real threat is the giant ghost that follows you across the level which, while it moves super slowly, if touched will insta-kill your character.
The time pressure may not work for some, but it adds an incredible amount of tension for you to get past the lethal puzzles as quickly as possible with as few mistakes as possible.
The game also stands out for its beautiful pixel art, and cute sound effects which gives the game a charm that's hard to resist. Platformance: Castle Pain is the best challenging platformer on the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace, and you really should buy it for that reason if you're into that kind of game. SenatorSpacer This user has not updated recently.
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