Wow,
I am just two weeks into my proposed weekly review of the Xbox Live
Indie Channel and already I feel as though a small part of me has
died inside. This week follows in the footsteps of a number of
preceding weeks I can only guess at, where the entertainment value of
the games on offer is lower than that of watching paint dry. Not even
a colourful, vibrant type of paint, but just regular dull magnolia.
It is pretty soul destroying to have to wade through this shit every
week in the vague hope of finding something even mildly enjoyable.
This is also highlighted by the fact that there have been some
fantastic PC indie games for released over the last week, all of
which put this Xbox indie selection to shame.
This week:
- 2D Voxel Madness
- 60 Seconds To Park
- Dream Divers 2
- Project Gert Recon
- Retro Pixel Racers
- TrickyTreat
- Vampire Slayer FPS
2D
Voxel Madness is the follow up to the rather fun VolChaos, a
simple run and jump platform game that had you collecting gems
against the clock, and ever rising lava. Unfortunately the developers
have jumped on the mining genre bandwagon and thus produced yet
another boring 'hit the blocks and collect treasures in open world'
game. The ingredients of a good game are all there with these types
of game, 2D platforming, digging for treasures and secrets, and
jumping on bad guys. Yet the end result is incredibly tedious and
pointless. With dull level design, and no objectives to speak of 2D
Voxel Madness is another mining game to ignore while you enjoy a
proper platform loot adventure like Spelunky.
60
Seconds To Park is an absolutely criminal effort which should
never have seen the light of day. In the 'game' (I use the term
loosely), you have 60 seconds to.. guess what? Park your car. Yep,
that is it. You drive through a boring car park to locate the sole
empty space, which you must park in to move to the next, slightly
larger car park, ad infinitum. The game doesn't even require you to
park properly, removing any skill whatsoever. You are not penalised
for smashing into cars or walls, and you barely even touch the empty
space before the game stops and you are given the victory screen. If
they had made it about parking as accurately as possible, with points
for style, speed and care, it would have made more sense. You may get
60 seconds to park, but it will take you less time than that to
realise this game has no redeeming features whatsoever.
Dream
Divers is, yawn, another one of those animé babe games with
scantily clad pixie faced cartoon women for lonely acne ridden boys
to abuse themselves to. As is the standard with these kinds of games
the gameplay takes a back-seat to lame images of bikini clad girls
with enormous assets. In this game you begin diving into the sea
where you must navigate the underwater caverns to find stars. Find
them all to finish the stage and unlock more babes. Special mention
goes to one of the girls whose nipples are in such an odd place that
she was clearly designed by someone who has never even seen a real
pair of breasts. The game is ridiculously easy due to the fact that
lines of bubbles lead you to each star, so there is no exploration
here at all. Should you miss just a few bubbles your diver slows to a
crawl before drowning. It's a waste of time so let's quickly move on.
Project
Gert Recon is a 2D platformer also selling itself on the animé
babe ticket. It's not as obvious as Dream Divers or last week's Aah,
Halloween Pie, with just a lead character whose breasts bounce as she
moves. The graphics and sound are acceptable, if a little bland, but
the gameplay itself is completely soulless, jumping is floaty and
strange, and the sword based hack & slash combat is both unsatisfying
and inaccurate. There are terminals that can be used in-game that
take you to a single screen puzzle, but these are both dull and
unchallenging. The voice acting and hand painted images show that
some effort has gone into this title, but it's a shame that the
developers forgot to include any worthwhile gameplay.
Retro
Pixel Racers is an absolutely pathetic effort that lacks even the
most rudimentary of racing game requirements. The badly designed,
completely curve free tracks are a miserable sight and the car
handling is non-existent. Your car moves like a snail on vallium and
the enemies just drive a set route with no errors, even hitting into
them makes no difference to their speed or angle. The sounds are
overly loud and irritating and you will be bored before you have even
finished the first race. One of the worst driving games I have
experienced. When you can't even match (let alone improve upon)
Atari's 1986 game Super Sprint (a game this crap clearly tries to
emulate) then it is time to call it quits. Let's hope the developer
does just that and doesn't waste our time with garbage like this
again.
TrickyTreat.
This is a joke right... RIGHT?? Well, if it is I am not laughing.
This actually manages to top last week's Aah, Halloween Pie in the
shit stakes, unbelievable but true. TrickyTreat
starts with some of the most basic and sparse presentation I've ever
seen, literally a black screen with some text, before dumping you
straight into the game. You assume control of a completely rigid,
grinning 3D man who is clearly suffering from the advanced stages of
Rigamortis. You begin falling through the sky in one of the worst 3D
city landscapes I have ever seen, even worse than Superman 64 on the
Nintendo 64. You must then navigate the man around the game world
collecting candies, which are just huge featureless shapes. It is
completely impossible to control, I am not kidding, you will be
floating around, bouncing off every surface imaginable, spinning this
way and that, completely unable to get even a vague sense of
direction. You will spend most of the time stuck to a floor or wall,
or spinning wildly out of control. The left stick supposedly moves
the character and the right stick, the camera, with the shoulder
buttons rotating you. In reality though the controls are irrelevant,
you may as well use a pine cone, a hairbrush, or a bar of soap, all
of which will give you about as much control over proceedings as the
Xbox controller. It's a truly miserable experience that makes you
seasick and praying for a quick death. The techno music tracks that
play in the game also mix together in the most heinous fashion
possible, like a DJ having a seizure behind the decks. The game is an
assault on all of your senses and I fear playing it will seriously
damage your mental health, and as such should be avoided at all
costs.
Vampire
Slayer FPS is a very dull first
person shooter that pits snaggle-toothed coffin dwellers against
those who wish to destroy them. The graphics are absolutely terrible,
resembling an early mod for Quake put together by someone with no
experience of game design. The vampires can lunge forward and claw,
whereas the slayers are armed with shotguns, crosses, and stakes.
Neither is very much fun to play, and shuffling through the grim and
lifeless levels grows old after a few minutes. Why anyone would chose
this over Avatar Laser Wars, or the excellent Shark Attack
Deathmatch, is beyond me.
Well
that's a wrap. Not a single Xbox indie title worth playing, I can
only hope that through my pain and suffering I was able to entertain
you, however briefly, in my reported findings. Fingers crossed that
there will be a vast improvement in next week's selection. Hell,
there might even be a decent xmas game this year!
