Oct
31

Review: Hypership Out of Control

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Kris Steele and Fun Infused Games have recently released their third game titled Hypership Out of Control. I honestly can’t help but wonder if this game was inspired by the Toyota “uncontrolled acceleration” thing that was going on earlier this year. It wouldn’t be terribly challenging to draw some parallels, but I suppose there are lots of situations that could inspire a game about a Hypership perpetually accelerating into a gauntlet of doom.

Gameplay

Hypership Out of Control is a considerable divergence from the style of game that Fun Infused Games has released in the past. As you may recall both Nasty and Abduction Action featured a 2D side scrolling style of play. The first featuring some nice platforming and the second involving mostly dropping heavy things on people using a tractor beam. HOC, as I am referring to it from this point on as, features a vertical scrolling retro arcade style of play with a decidedly quarter hungry vindictiveness.

The mechanics are pretty straight forward: shoot, dodge, go faster, get points, and pick up power ups. As you progress through the game you will continue to go faster and faster until you hit your ships maximum speed or you die. The power ups are mostly what you’d expect, bombs, higher fire power, shields, invulnerability, and a speed reset. All of these mechanics feel pretty good, there is nothing really out of place and they all work as advertised.

The difficulty of the game is of particular note. As I previously mentioned this game feels quarter hungry. Now if your sneakers have never graced the sticky floors of an old arcade you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, and if your sneakers have, you may want to toss those old things and pick up some new kicks. The old games used to favor a mechanical difficulty that was only overcome by mastery of the game. So what I’m saying is, HOC would have totally blown through your Dixie cup full of Chuck’e'Cheese tokens by the time you had mastered wave 2. All that said, if the difficulty of HOC was any less it would be mind numbing, and if it were any harder, you’d cry and take your ball home. So it seems Fun Infused Games managed to strike a fantastic balance between the two.

The design of the games levels, or in this case “Waves” is pretty rock solid. There has been a good deal of care put into making sure you can zam through these levels at max speed in a good fluid motion. At the same time, there is almost never a single right route that will solve all your problems. This has a really nice feel to it as it lets you sort of explore for yourself the various choices and what works for you.

The framerates of HOC are typically solid. I say typically because there are some very obvious random clunks during gameplay where it will lock for a fraction of a second. The issue is fairly minor, it could occasionally kill you, but it doesn’t manifest itself terribly frequently. The menu screens feel pretty sticky as well but this is a very forgivable issue, since it doesn’t negatively effect the actual game play.

All things considered HOC is a pretty technically sound game whose quick play style and arcade feel makes for a good time. The game also has scoreboards and multiplayer so feel free to give your chums a good old fashioned score hazing.

Audio/Visual

Visually speaking, HOC has taken on a traditional retro aesthetic. I would love to tell you it’s the best retro art I’ve seen on the platform, but I can’t really do that. It isn’t really that there is anything overtly wrong with it, just that there are times when some things don’t feel quite right with this retro world, and hell that could be anything from using too large a color pallet to sneaking a gradient tool in there for shading. I will however, say that it looks just fine and does contribute positively to the overall experience. There is a pretty good amount of visual diversity from wave to wave. The backgrounds are alright. There is a fairly typical parallaxed star scape thing going on. Again it won’t wow you, but if it wasn’t there you’d notice the vacuousness immediately, so in that regard it does its job.

Now the sound on the other hand is a whole different story. The game sounds great. I quite literally found myself tapping my toe to the chiptune beats. The sound effects of the game are also very well done, there is a lot of repetitive sound effects as you may imagine in this style of game but they manage to never become a nuisance, and in my book that’s a win. There is one exception, the death laugh, whats up with that laugh anyways Kris? It’s hilarious because it’s bad.

Summary

A few blemishes here and there, but ultimately a great experience. The game is rocking the hard to argue with 80 point price tag and hell, I’d pay that much just for the game’s awesome music jam.

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Oct
30

Minecraft Halloween Update Now Live

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Minecraft’s update is now available! The additions that made it in are listed above in this wonderful illustration by Notch. I spent a little time running around, mostly getting lost, and so far the update is pretty rad. It has added a lot to the exploration aspects of the game to be able to see more diverse landscapes(snow covered peaks, cactus covered deserts, lush green forests). I’m also pretty excited to spend some time dangling my line out there and seeing what kind of blocky fish I can catch. You can find out more and pick the game up at Minecraft.net.

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Review: Radiangames Fluid

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I feel like I just reviewed a Radiangames title a few weeks ago. Surely that can’t be the case though because here they are with an all new game. Luke Schneider you’re an animal. Crossfire, JoyJoy, Inferno, and now Fluid have all been tallied up in the span of just 2010. We get it guys, you’re prolific!

Gameplay

I’m going to get this out of the way right here – Fluid inhabits a genre I don’t particularly care for. There I said it, I’m not a fan of precision time trial overhead pacman-esc style games. Why?  Because I’m bad at it. That said, it isn’t entirely impossible for me to divest myself of these preferences and to appreciate the production quality of a game like Fluid.

The game has a few pretty simple mechanics working together. The first is a booster tile which as you’d imagine serves to give you a brief but vital boost of speed. Secondly there are wurmholes, which will swallow you up and spit you out at another location on the map. The last special mechanic is a whirlpool it functions exactly as you’d imagine pulling all enemy’s into it for a set amount of time before rereleasing them to continue their persuit of you.

Now Fluid starts out simple enough taking its time to introduce you to  all thse mechanics. You simply collect all the shinies before the time runs out and profit. Easy peasy, then stuff starts chasing you, time limits get lean, and wormholes start to become commonplace. The first thing you’ll notice as this happens is that there is mostly a preordained path that will likely yield the best time results. As if a path were the starting point of each maps development and everything else falls in around it. I found this to be both good and bad, it meant there was a right answer, but it also meant that there were few alternative answers.

My guess is this was quite a challenge in development, to create a game that mimics the behavior of its liquid namesake. Making maps that you can flow through with elegance, but also don’t let you just ride the log ride. Lets face it if you just went where you needed to go by default there wouldn’t be much of a game here.

All this talk of elegant and free flowing design aside, there are a good number of levels where this guiding influence seems entirely absent. There may be momentary instances where you feel as though you just caught a wave of momentum and are riding it to the finish line, but more often than not it seems to break early leaving you paddling up stream.

There are a lot of cool things going on here though, the wormholes have a nice snappy feel to them and add a nice sense of complexity. The boosters add a nice sense of speed, and the red blobs that start to chase you on various levels add a bit of an improved dance. Mechanically everything in Fluid is very sound. It is just the map designs that may have benefited from a little more polish.

Audio / Visual

Visually this game has a ton in common with much of the Radiangames’ library. It is done in a very similar style to Inferno as it possesses much the same top down abstract ship centered sort of feel to it. This one obviously adds in some lovely rippling effects and a other cues to remind you your supposed to feel like you are in a wet world.

All said, the game is lovely. The minimalist aesthetic is functional as well as pleasing to look at. The bright white save screens on the other hand in a poorly lit room can be harsh on the eyes – but now I think I’ve wandered into the realm of nitpicking.

Fluid’s music and sound effects match it’s visual style and share much in common with past Radiangames’ titles. As you may expect this means there isn’t a whole lot to it, it doesn’t distract from the game in the least, and isn’t depended upon in any real communicative capacity. So it really does its job to break the silence and not bug the player.

Summary

Fluid is a mechanically solid, good looking, fine sounding game that plays pretty damn well. It is easily worth its 80 Microsoft Points. I would, however suggest you demo the game if you are unsure about the genre and just see what you think. If you find yourself looking for something a little different from them, but not too different, I would highly recommend looking into some of Radiangames’ other titles.

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Review: Explosionade

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Mommy’s Best Games, creators of Shoot 1UP and Weapon of Choice, both of which are some of the best games on the platform, is back again with an all new indie entry called Explosionade. Now, I can’t even begin to tell you how much I really wanted to reference the “Explosionade/Lemonade” joke, but unfortunately my tardiness has allowed all the early birds to get the proverbial worms.

Gameplay

If you like mechanics you’re in luck, because Explosionade has a lot of them. So many so that you’ll likely need a few playthroughs to really get rocking with them. There is a certain degree of depth to each of them that has a superficial and simple use that will let you breeze through chilled. But they also posses a secondary or third…dary…use that will need to be called upon to make your way effectively through the game’s harder difficulties.

Without a doubt my favorite mechanic of the game was the shields. Big deal, shields, even USS Voyager has shields, and it was just Intrepid Class. Hush, naysayer, these shields do more than let the Borg teleport right through them! They preserve momentum to allow for floating and will bounce off of solid surfaces allowing for some tricky jumping. On top of that the shields can also damage enemies, making you more or less a robot recking ball.

Oddly enough, for a game called Explosionade, the bombs seemed less nuanced than the shields. Yes they play a pivotal role but they are a rather simplistic arcing projectile with a sticky shot that clings to walls and a bouncy shot that bounces about, but that is really about all there is to them. The mech automagically produces bombs infinitely, albeit at a set pace, but will only build up to a complement of three. This does add a bit of sense that you need to manage your ammo, but accomplishes it in a way that it doesn’t become a distracting or nagging attention whore.

So while all this bombing, floating, bouncing, ball wrecking, and jumping/jetpacking is going on, Explosionade is also a fully functional side scrolling platformer with a familiar twin stick firing system similar to that of Weapon of Choice. It’s at this point that you begin to realize, you’re using a lot of buttons, which if you’re like me and suffer from stupid fingers, can be a bit problematic.

Fortunately, this issue is rather expeditiously resolved simply by putting a little time into the game. The functions of the character become second nature and you can really start enjoying the game while working on climbing that scoreboard. In addition to scoreboards the game also has multiplayer, which in typical Two Fedoras friendless style wasn’t played, so I am unable to comment on it in any meaningful way.

How does the gameplay stack up? It functions very well and has a good amount of polish to it. It feels solid and responsive and since it’s built around mechanical depth it has a lot of potential enjoyment baked into it.

Audio/Visual

I wish I could sum this section up with just “The game looks great!” but Brooks would say something like “yeah you need to write more in that A/V section.” He is often a Buzz Killington that way. In reality the game does look great. It has that wonderful destinctive style that MBG’s is quickly becoming known for even outside of the Xbox Indiesphere.

The mech’s sprite is well designed and pretty well animated. As far as the enemies and boss sprites go, forget about it. They’re great. The bosses are just as outlandish as you’d expect with exception of the obvious omission of another boobie boss. Alas, I suppose it would be fairly difficult to explain why a giant boobie monster would be in the sewers. So I suppose it can be forgiven, this time. All I’m saying is I may not be quite as forgivving if there’s not boobie gripping in Grapple Buggy.

Speaking of the sewers, their isnt a whole lot of diversity in the environments. So in this regard id deffinately doesn’t stack up to the environments of Shoot 1UP or Weapon of Choice. However, it manages to not detract much from the game.

On the sound front, it felt okay. I can say the explosion sound on the menu screen, was kind of annoying. You really only have to hear it a few times when you start the game, but it is so distinctive that it stands out a bit. The sound effects and music through the rest of the game are suitable, but sort of dissolve into the experience. There isn’t anything particularly memorable here on these fronts.

Summary

Guys, 80 points, seriously? This is probably one of the best entertainment units per dollar propositions you’ve been offered in quite some time. Enough of your excuses! You can pick the game up now, and if it’s your first Mommy’s Best Games title and you enjoy it, be sure to check out their other two games: Weapon of Choice and Shoot 1UP.

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Oct
22
Oct
18

’8 Bit Horse’ Turns 1

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Good news everyone! Our good friends over at 8 Bit Horse are celebrating their first anniversary!

♫ What day is today, it’s 8 bit’s birthday, what a day for a birthday, lets all have some cake. ♫

If you aren’t in the know, 8 bit Horse is a site dedicated to exploring the depths of the 2D gaming world, and if you thought that was funny, you are exactly the type of person that should be reading the site.

In other 8 Bit Horse related news, its alter ego Mommy’s Best Games has recently released an update to Explosionade, so be sure to go snag that and get your destruction on.

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Oct
12

The Cat and the Creepers and the Pixel Moon

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No idea where the above picture originated, so if you know feel free to drop a link in the comments. Otherwise, we are just going to go ahead and say 4chan made it, since well they’re responsible for something like 94.37% of hilarious things on the internet. In other news, if you can’t name those things chasing that kitten, you haven’t propperly been freaked the f*ck out by Creepers.

I guess I could also take this time to tell you all about whats been up on the gaming front. I’ve been playing a few things, most notably being Disgaea 3 for the Playstation 3. That’s right folks, I actually turned on my Playstation 3 for two different games in a month. I had written last time about how I wanted to continue plugging away at Final Fantasy XIII but that ended up being impossible once I put in Disgaea 3.  I soon realized I had just opened a several hundred-thousand hour world and that anything else would be devoured whole by this monster created by Nippon Ichi. As a result, I had to force myself to playing through the story and putting it on the shelf outside of reach from my chair.

Now that I’ve momentarily managed to pry myself from Disgaea 3, I’ve started playing 3D Dot Game Heroes, which is basically just Zelda in 3D. It has a substantial ammount of instant charm, but it seems to wear off fairly quickly. I suppose I’ll be relieved that I got it for around twenty bucks. Yeah it was used, sorry I ate your lunch Silicon Studio.

In other Geoff related news, I picked up Mommy’s Best Games’ new release Explosionade. I haven’t gotten to play with it enough to write a full review, but I can say without too much doubt that it is worth your points,  and you should probably go pick it up. Brooks and I are still playing rock paper sciessor while chanting jan-ken-pon at one another for the privilage of doing the full review. Hopefully we’ll manage to move beyond that at some point and actually get it done.

Speaking of Brooks, he’s off getting lost in the new Alan Wake DLC. I don’t anticipate hearing from him until he has a full arsinal of spoilers to unleash upon me — I do actually intend to play that game some day. He did, however, manage to find time to send me some math be damned Graveyard, Graveyard, Revolution flash rhythm game. This universe doesn’t have enough eons left for me to forgive him for that. Hell, it isn’t even worth making a Productivity Killer post out of.

Whats coming up? Well Super Meat Boy is sneaking up on us fast. I think it launches next week on Wednesday. That should be fun in some sort of meaty masochistic way. In addition, we are also hanging on notch’s every word regarding the Halloween Minecraft update.

In any event, that’s your update, deal with it sucka.

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Oct
11

Crossfire drops a patch and its price

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How about I cut you in on a little deal here. I know you’ve been pinching your pennies in anticipation for a month full of ridiculously hot XBLA titles and trust me, I’m right there with ya. So how about a little price reduction on a shooter from Radiangames, maybe Crossfire for example? How, bout 80 Microsoft Points and they’ll even throw in a little polish in the form of a update patch? Yeah I thought you might like that.

Here is the full list of changes:

Modifiers

Two new modifiers have been added: Speed Reduction and Better Damage. Speed Reduction reduces the enemy movement speed and firing rate by a significant amount. Better Damage increases the damage you do by a large amount (2.5x to be exact). You can turn these modifiers on/off in the pause menu in any mode.

Note: Both of these modifiers reduce your multiplier by 0.5x each, where the effect is additive. They also reduce the bonuses you receive at the end of the round. You’ll get 50% of the bonus scores with one modifier active, and 20% of the bonus score with both active.

Balance

Overall enemy movement speeds have been adjusted, so that the first 10 or so waves move faster, and the last 25 or so waves move slower. In addition, the Cross enemy type now only fires in one direction at once (towards the player). They’re still a challenge, but warping is no longer so dangerous when near them. A couple waves (43 and 49) also had some Shield enemies removed to reduce the amount of edge camping you have to do in those waves.

Also, you may notice a somewhat longer period of invulnerability when spawning or respawning, which went from 1.25 seconds to 2.0 seconds.

Other

I made a minor change to the ending (no longer says anything about Blaze), and I added arcade stick support. To make the game more playable for arcade sticks with no remapping, you can now warp using the Y button or the shoulder buttons and triggers.

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Oct
7