I’ve been a bit ill this week, so it was with slightly groggy joy that I noticed my wireless adapter worked without a fight when I sat down to play these games this week. Small victories are always nice. So anyway, we have nine games to deal with this week and I don’t have some grand speech to make beforehand. Straight down to business it is then, let’s roll.
Lemonade Ltd
Steve G – 80 Points
The American tradition of kids selling lemonade on the front lawn has always been something I love, and not just because I adore American lemonade. I think it’s cute and it’s capitalism from an early age. This game is essentially the little bit from the Theme Park games where you set the prices and stock levels. I like that bit, there’s plenty of room for fine tuning in order to maximise profits while trying to make sure people still buy stuff. The same rules apply here, you spend money to make advertising signs and the lemonade itself, set the price and watch as the glasses fly off the shelf. Other factors like the weather make things a bit more complex, fewer people will want lemonade on a cool or wet day for example. The 30 day time limit for leaderboard purposes is quite nice, forcing you to be ruthless to get the most cash. For some this may be a bit too shallow, but I found it quite engrossing and I’d be more than willing to spend 80 points on it.
Avatar Rockets
SniperED007 – 80 Points
The game boasts full avatar support, but I’d hardly call it Avatar support. Your Avatar just sits in the cockpit of the rocket and unless it had Avatar in the title I doubt you’d notice it. The game itself is more basic flash game nonsense, using a trigger and analogue stick to fly a rocket as high as possible before running out of fuel. There are variations on the theme for Xbox Live play but as usual random Live games will be impossible to find. Ultimately the whole thing is pretty boring, as most of the flash games on Indie Games are.
Armor Valley
Janelle – 400 Points
Now this is impressive, a full 3D shooter/RTS hybrid that somehow manages to do both equally well. The shooter overpowers the RTS but it’s a nice change when you can summon a mountain of tanks to deal with ground targets while you’re dogfighting the super-quick aerial units. Getting more money for getting closer to the enemy base is also a nice feature, rewarding you for risking your own hide in the heat of battle. The bewildering controller diagram shown over loading screens is quickly made sense of by the excellent tutorial level. The combination of loads of good ideas, a great tutorial and some rather excellent graphics make this a really worthy game.
Flytrap
Kiwasabi – 400 Points
Shooting enemies with a water gun isn’t something I’d expect a venus flytrap to do. Nor would I expect it to then suck up the soaked, stunned enemy Kirby style. The basic premise here of stunning and sucking is fine, what kills the game however is the lack of reason to progress other than play for longer. There’s no score or other sign of progression other than faster versions of the same enemies and that just left me not wanting to play after five or six levels.
Starfield Battle
DeadlyEvilRyu – 240 Points
If you wanted to see what Geometry Wars would be like with none of the fun then step right up because that’s what this is. A painfully dull and plain arena shooter with no unique selling point, no charm and no speed. It’s just slow and dull, with none of the fun graphical effects of music that make other arena shooters fun. There’s just no imagination or effort here, and that can’t be rewarded.
y0m_fury
Jojito – 80 Points
First thing that irritates me about this colour based Pac-Man clone is that being caught by the enemies initiates a quick time event. Press X To Not Die finally comes to pure bare-faced reality without apology. Normally this wouldn’t annoy me, I like the idea of being able to get out of a screw-up, but when there are 20 enemies in a small maze and they’re all moving faster than me it starts to become a truly game breaking problem. It practically becomes the game because you’ll be doing it so much, especially when so many of the mazes contain unavoidable dead-ends. No amount of colour play can help this mess of bad level design.
Kissy Poo
The ZMan – 80 Points
Okay, if you’re marketing a game to small kids (which this game is) then putting a message to buy the game up in the middle of the screen during gameplay is probably not a good idea. So I’m against it already for that, the basic idea of moving around to kiss sad animals happy is probably something that’ll keep the little kids giggly for a few minutes, but so will your keys. If you don’t have kids then leave it alone, if you do then get them to play the trial before you drop the cash.
Alderman
Idle Han – 240 Points
There are beautiful 3D games on the service, Armor Valley from earlier on is one good example. This however is not a 3D action adventure as it says in the description but a scrolling shooter viewed from behind your character. Unfortunately that makes shots hard to judge, especially when you can’t shoot further than your knight’s lance will extend. After that the usual XNA shooter problems kick in, it’s too easy, the collision detection is terrible and the whole thing feels like it was made in five minutes.
Ultimate Arcade Chat Rooms
Raining Talent – 80 Points
“Want to chat to random people over Xbox Live?” No of course you don’t, that’s what IRC is for. This is just basic text chat which you can already do for free on the PC you’re reading this article on. Use that and leave this clunky piece of rubbish to rot on the digital shelf. I seriously doubt there’ll be that many people to chat to on it anyway. Even if there are people on there, people on Xbox Live are dicks. Go check out the Negative Gamer IRC, we’re cool there.
Game of the Week is Armor Valley, I think some major name developers should check this out for some advice getting RTS-style shooters to work. Everyone else should just check it out because it’s a rollocking good game.
If you’ve been struck by game-creating inspiration then check out XNA Creator’s Club or Kodu Game Lab for tools and advice for making that dream a reality. If you’re a developer who wants a bit more exposure for your game then you can advertise on the site by clicking the Project Wonderful links below any of the site ads or send us a review token for your game.
Hey Francis,
I’m Adam Coate, developer of Flytrap; I’m commenting because I noticed you gave my game a negative review.
You wrote:
“Shooting enemies with a water gun isn’t something I’d expect a venus flytrap to do. Nor would I expect it to then suck up the soaked, stunned enemy Kirby style. The basic premise here of stunning and sucking is fine, what kills the game however is the lack of reason to progress other than play for longer. There’s no score or other sign of progression other than faster versions of the same enemies and that just left me not wanting to play after five or six levels.”
There are lots of signs of progression. The backgrounds change after each level, and then after you complete each day (every 4 levels), you’re told “Day One Completed, Day Two Completed, etc”. Also, there’s the spiral which lights up a symbol each time you finish a day. There are only 7 symbols on the spiral, so you know where you stand in the overall progress of the game. So what does the game need in order to be fun enough for you?
Also, there are 9 different enemies in the game, so it isn’t just faster versions of the same enemies over and over.
“Leave to Die” is a pretty disrespectful thing to say to developers who have spent months or years on these games. I put over $10,000 of my own money into making this game as fun and good-looking as it is. I’ve also spent over a year of my life on this game. Some constructive feedback would be much more useful than just finding one reason to tell people to ignore an otherwise very cool and innovative game.
Anyway, I look forward to your reply.
-Adam