Archive for February 16th, 2010
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The world is in peril and has been drained of all its colors! Its denizens have abandoned all hope and staged an exodus of Biblical proportions leaving their once beautiful home behind. As Tint, the protagonist in developer Morsel’s Kaleidoscope, you have choosen to remain behind to aid in the recovery of all the lost colors of the world and to stop the problem at its source!
Gameplay
Kaleidoscope is an adventure platformer with many of the usual staples of the genre. You jump on enemies to return them to their docile state by coloring them , use platforms sprinkled through the levels to get to your objectives, collect objects scattered across the stages, and do a fantastic little dance once those objectives are achieved. In addition to these normal mechanics there are also included a shield, a slow fall, and a speed boost. Each of these basic mechanics go into finding your way safely through the levels by allowing you to deflect projectiles or make great leaps or slow y our decent through a maze of spikes.
There is not a signifigantly high degree of difficulty in the game, which works well for it, allowing you to go through and really take in the environments. The extremely generous check point system often puts you within just a few obstacles of where you just expired with no load time whatsoever. This makes it a very low frustration game and is greatly appreciated since I’m anti-frustration.
The only real issues within the gameplay of Kaleidoscope that I encountered were some strange physics when on horizontally moving platforms. Jumping from these platforms seems to cause a an excessive loss of momentum and this lateral force seemed to be somewhat applied to your character even while just walking on it. That said, it wasn’t game breaking and was just a “that doesn’t feel quite right” moment as if you had just picked up a glass that you thought was full but wasn’t.
Audio Visual
This is the category that brings home the bacon for Kaleidoscope. The game is an absolute treat to look at. Each level starts out in gray scale and as Tint progresses through the level and collects little colored balls of pigment the environment slowly begins to regain its color. Collecting a few blues fills in sky and a few greens fills in the leaves so on and so forth until the world is this bright vibrant color orgy.
The levels themselves each have a stylistic motif. One level has smooth elegant lines and bright pastel swirls adorning the tree branches. While another level has a distinctive pixel cubist look that makes you think of the pixel art days of old. Another level yet is in stark contrast to all the others comprised of dark silhouettes with lanterns lit up in different colors hanging from the trees throughout the levels. It feels like you have just played through an artists exhibition.
The creature designs are all very simple and endearing, in this case less was more when it came to their detail. Tint himself appears to be a black cherry like shape with two spindly legs dangling about and two little white dots for eyes. It just all works for this game.
The soundtrack for Kaleidoscope is just as impressive as the visuals and is great on every level. They’ve got the full soundtrack available as a torrent here. (Big thanks to Anosou the music dude for dropping the link and cluing us in on the wonderfully dynamic nature of the Kaleidoscope soundscape!)
Summary
While the game is a little short, in the neighborhood of just a few hours for initial run through, it is easily worth the asking price of three dollars on the Xbox Indie Marketplace. I rate this one a buy with no reservations at all, but if you are still having trust issues because I didn’t explicitly tell you NOT to buy “Fish Listening to Radio” then just go check out the free trial and fall in love for yourself.
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The harsh reality of the world is that you typically need money to play games. Unfortunately, Brooks and I spent all of ours on Nendoroids and fancy hats. This puts us in a position where we must pick and choose which games we can purchase and write full reviews of. But hey, just because we only played the demo doesn’t mean we aren’t going to tell you all about it! This series of posts is dedicated to those games that we played the trial of, opted not to buy, and why. We reserve the right to be wrong in our snap analysis and encourage our readers to tell us why, who knows maybe we’ll go back and take another look. If you are a developer and feel slighted, feel free to either make your demo better or give us a free serial code so we can try our best to hate the full version.
Absorb(indie) |
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Developed by Right Now Games, Absorb is uncategorized on the Xbox Indie Marketplace and sells for 80 Microsoft Points. Personally I think 80 Microsoft Points is a bit much for a game that was probably made as a midterm project at one of those schools you see advertising on G4TV. The objective is simple and only derives a shred of challenge from making your caffeinated brain interested in remembering the rules. The various colors interact with one another in an array of ways and as a result you are to change the color of your controlled dot to absorb (get it?) these other dots and thus grow your dot. As your dot grows you get more points, and we all know arbitrary point systems are reward enough. |
Asylum(indie) |
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This one is developed by Silver Dollar Games, the folks that brought us hit titles like “Don’t Be Nervous Talking to Girls“. How can it not be good? I don’t know the answer to that. All I do know is that it’s not good. Your goal is to escape from the asylum by using these “monsters” as cannon fodder and I suppose slink on through while that’s going on. As I speculated yesterday it is in fact the exact opposite of a tower defense game. Rather than blowing up the monsters you are the constructor of the waves released through a series of predefined turret arrangements. This approach to the tower defense style game gives great insight into exactly how bored your computer must be while it is unleashing the waves on you. |
Impossible Shooter(Indie) |
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Impossible Shoota, it has an “a” instead of an “er” at the end showing it is super trendy, may not even belong on this list. I guess if you are looking for a really difficult top down shooter with an aesthetic capable of triggering the yawn reflex it could be right up your ally. Me personally, I appreciate what they got going on there but it isn’t getting my green back. If you are a shooter lover, check out the demo and decide for yourself. |
Nega(Indy) |
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Nega is not bad in concept but the game just doesn’t have a look that makes it worthy of a buy. You are tasked with leading around a moving gem to hit targets by placing other gems that attract it. In one version the only gem that moves is your projectile, but in other modes as much as everything on the screen can move at once, no doubt adding considerable difficulty. It is a neat and challenging spacial game and at 80 Microsoft Points it isn’t outlandish. It’s just that it looks like a point and click flash game you’d use to avoid going through your Outlook Inbox. Oh and, wtf is with that background? *cringe* |
For the Love of Pie: The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom tomorrow.
February 16th, 2010 |Posted In: Gaming
The Odd Gentlemen’s paradoxical P.B Winterbottom curls his stache and dawns his proper hat tomorrow in the search for pie. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, published by 2k Games, will become unstuck in time for 800 Microsoft Points. Oh and there is a trailer for your 360!
Swiping the mysterious Chronoberry Pie changed everything for our beloved Winterbottom… one bite made him more than an ordinary pie-grabbing humbug. That first taste changed him into something quite extraordinary, granting him the ability to break the rules of time. With these newfound time recording tricks up his cufflink, and with the help of his time clones, Winterbottom can now snatch pies with the greatest of ease. But on his journey to devour every pie, Winterbottom must mind the signs… the perils of being unstuck in time. Join Winterbottom on his award winning debut Misadventures as he chases pie through over 75 unique puzzles.
Oh right, you guys like videos..
If you don’t already know Who this is you are hopeless. This excellent Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor figure comes with perhaps the creepiest face I have ever seen, but it still gets it’s day here on 2F. Check out that hat and scarf of ultimate badasserry.
So I’m heading on in to the Indie Marketplace tonight and I pull up “Most Downloaded” and at the top of the list are these two little gems “Don’t Be Nervous Talking to Girls” and “Who Did I Date Last Night”. That’s when I had it, my WTF moment of the evening. Seriously these games have been rated over 9,000 times and that doesn’t even begin to account for the far greater number of downloads without ratings. In the WDIDLN title’s defense it at least sounds like a trashy version of Guess Who. I am guessing those ratings are fairly generous…
In any event I have the feeling that the main reason these are hanging around at the top is due to some system Microsoft uses to discount download totals the older a game is. I really don’t want to link these games just so that you crazy bastards can go off and help support shovelware so instead I have replaced the links in this article with good games.
FUNimation has just announced that it has acquired all sorts of fancy licencing rights to the hit television Anime series Trigun. They speculated that we should see it start to hit shelves once again this fall. Being one of the first Animes that I was exposed to it has a pretty high ranking on my list of favorites. In fact I still have the box set that I bought during its last release by Pioneer and am happy to see that more will have the opportunity to experience the sci-fi/comedy.
