GDC’s tradition of specially produced Mega64 videos continued this year, and their indie offering finally hit the YouTubes.
Thrill to the adventures of Indie Man, who sabotages mainstream games in an effort to help out independent developers.
Want to play some Jetpack Basketball? I had you at “Jetpack” you say? Excellent. This interesting little game and video comes from none other than Cream Wolf and Flywrench developer Messhof. The 1-2 player jet propelled basketball game was originally released in 2009 but just had a video reuploaded and we wanted to share the pretty colors. The game can be downloaded here.
It’s Monday XBLIG Update time, which means we’ve got several games that popped up over the weekend to tell you about. This weekends offerings were particularly avatar heavy and at least one of them looks amusing! By now you should know the drill, all descriptions of the games below are that of the developer. Our comments, if we have any, will be emboldened.
Avatar Cannon |
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It’s Safari time! Take you Avatar out into the wild and take on the the world. Avatar Cannon features hilarious 3D graphics, unlockable rewards and Global Scoreboards. Use over 10 animals to your advantage as you fly across the African Savannah.
Developer: SniperED007 Price: 240 Microsoft Points Pretty fun, Avatar Cannon plays a lot like Penguin Swing. Don’t act like you don’t know what game I’m talking about, everyone who’s ever sat in a cubical for more than three and a half minutes knows exactly what Penguin Swing is. The graphics are pretty impressive, and it lines your friends’ avatars up on the range so you know when you’ve beaten their best hits. Not sure it’s worth 240 MSP’s but they may have had no choice at 58 MBs. |
Spiders! |
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Spiders! Why did it have to be spiders? Fast top down 2D dual stick shooter. Features global scoreboards. Do you have what it takes to save the world from invading giant spiders?
Developer: BBQ Games Price: 80 Microsoft Points Little twin stick shooter featuring, you guessed it, spiders. The demo’s pace feels a little sluggish, but that may not be indicative of the full games play. May warrant further investigation. |
Avatar Bumper Cars |
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Avatar Bumper Cars is a 1-4 player arena battle game. Watch your avatar take control of a bumper car in one of 5 different arenas and face off against either your friends or the computer in an action packed battle! Use your car’s spikes to hit their gas cans and send them flying out of the arena. Will you be the last man standing?
Developer: Torturas Price: 80 Microsoft Points Mildly amusing, it could be a fun party game if beer were to be involved. |
Star Chart |
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Explore the visible universe from the comfort of your armchair with Star Chart for the Xbox360. Star Chart presents an accurate realtime panorama of the current night sky, based on your position on Earth. Sit back and zoom in to reveal the stars and planets in unprecedented levels of detail. Then fast forward through time and gain a true understanding of what is meant by “the cosmic ballet”.
Developer: Escapist Games Price: 80 Microsoft Points Not really a game, more of a chart with stars on it. |
Falling |
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www.yyrgames.com – Peppy the Penguin’s igloo is under siege in this action-packed puzzle game! Help Peppy dodge the falling blocks. Then, eliminate like-colored blocks by kicking or throwing them into each other. Watch out for Wally the Walrus, and crush him before he causes trouble! Enjoy authentic retro sound effects and worldwide score competition with Internet Ranking!
Developer: yyr Price: 80 Microsoft Points The demo of this one was pretty interesting. I think I am going to need to throw down some points and do a full review. |
The Impossible Avatar Getaway |
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Can you and your avatar do the impossible? Run, jump, slide and dodge your way along city rooftops. Never look back.
Developer: Ianthraxx Price: 80 Microsoft Points Even the name is a knock off of The Impossible Game. This one demos very poorly. |
Stick ‘Em Up |
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Stick ‘Em Up is a kick-ass run’n'gun adventure. It features co-operative four-player gameplay, retro vector-style graphics, and awesome physics. Oh yeah, and there’s a selection of weapons to choose from and four different vehicles to drive and pilot. If you don’t like your friends so much then you can also play 2-4 player VS, and team VS, too!
Developer: floatstarpx Price: 80 Microsoft Points Stick ‘Em Up is a side scrolling platformer with twin-stick shooter controls. The controls felt really wonky in the demo. It’s an interesting idea but the execution seems poor. |
I have, in the past, accused Silver Dollar Games as being a shovelware vendor. A developer who values quantity over quality at every turn in the road and games the XBLIG Marketplace. Well after playing through the latest offering from them I am pleased to report, that nothings changed. So in the spirit of things, I thought I could do a review of Catch Me If You Can following the SDG business model!
Review: Catch Me If You Can
Bad game is bad.
Of course, if I actually did this, people would potentially come to expect underwhelming reviews from me. More importantly, I would have failed to beat a perfectly good dead horse.
Catch Me If You Can, which I shall hence forth refer to as CMIYC, is a platformer on a treadmill similar to that of Canabalt. Unfortunately unlike Canabalt, it’s bland and uninteresting. Your objective in the game is to catch some nameless woman’s brother by platforming across a map until finally at the end you manage to tackle him and move on to the next level. Why did you let him run off to another level? Because not making sense is fun.
The game itself can be played with two buttons, which frees one hand so that it may do something interesting, like make a sammich or play Bayonetta. The “A” button will jump over gaps and obstacles, while the “B” button enables you to slide through narrow passages. Some obstacles will have a button on them, which will light up with either the “A” or “B” button’s designated color to indicate which you should press to traverse a particular section. If that sounds an awful lot like a quick time event to you, it does to me too.
The levels of CMIYC are made up entirely of blocks which will pop in and out of existence as you approach them. This effectively rewrites the map as you are running through, such that the obstacles the person you are chasing is confronted with are nothing like those that you are then presented with. This isn’t a terribly bad feature, though it does tend to deteriorate the game to simply being a reactionary twitch fest.
That is really the meat of the gameplay, there isn’t a whole lot to it. There are 30 levels that tend to seesaw dramatically in difficulty, some will take you a single try while others may require repeated attempts until its pattern is more or less committed to memory. In terms of functionality, the game is solid. I experienced no crashes, and only minor stutters from time to time.
I usually start this section talking about the graphics, but instead I’m going to jump right to the audio because it’s terrible. The music isn’t bad and even if it was particularly awful it can be turned off. The voice acting on the other hand is intollerable and cannot be turned off. Every time you start a new level, finish a new level, or fail a level you get some complete shit one liner out of a pool of about twenty. They were so bad in fact that I decided to write them down with the intention of sharing them with you.
In an effort to garner some enjoyment from these horrid catch phrases, I suggest playing the classic fortune cookie “in bed” game with them and by suggest, I mean I went ahead and added “in bed” to all of them. Here we go:
Bad fortune cookie jokes aside for now, what about the graphics? Well they aren’t to bad. I’ve actually seen a lot worse. CMIYC features two identical male sprites, some blocks, and a very simplistic parallaxed city scape background.
One of graphical and auditory quandaries of the game is the whole nature of the relationship of the sister, brother and you. This bothered me for about 25 of the 30 levels until I had finally figured out what was up. The thing is, one of the three of them just doesn’t belong. But, the actress who does the voice work is apparently some sort of staple in the Silver Dollar Games’ games, and obviously couldn’t have been omitted. The brother character is the main antagonist, so he couldn’t have been left out either. That leaves you as the odd man out. Why doesn’t the sister just catch the brother herself? I’ll tell you why, because that would have taken a whole ‘nother sprite.
In the end, if the game had possessed a little more interesting style, and the mechanics had been polished to the point that the QTE style play wasn’t necessary, I’d have paid three times what they are asking for it. But as it is now, I think there are better uses for your 80 MIcrosoft Points. Instead, I would strongly recommend you check out Canabalt for free or even look into The Impossible Game, which I haven’t had the opportunity of reviewing yet but it demos well.
The much anticipated WiiWare exclusive Cave Story has finally been released. The beautiful 2d side scrolling action adventure features tons of new content and artwork over its original 2004 PC release. But don’t fret, fans of the orginal, Daisuke Amaya(Pixel) has been very involved in the update contributing updated artwork to all of the major characters and more.
Cave Story is available exclusively on Nintendo WiiWare for 1200 “Wii” Points which is ((2499/2000)*1200) apparently $15. Unless of course, you purchased your Wii Points from Amazon for 20% off.
