For the last seven months I’ve played hundreds and hundreds of trials for games released on the Xbox Live Indie Games service. I’ve done this to draw attention to the good games and to ward you away from the crap. With that in mind I have to tell you this will be the last time you find this column on NG. I will be continuing the column elsewhere but this post can be considered my Negative Gamer swan song. My thanks naturally go out to the entire crew who’ve made my tenure here enjoyable and to everyone who’s read and commented on the posts. Knowing someone pays attention to my writing is a great thrill and I hope that’ll continue to the recaps’ new home. I won’t say where that is yet, I’ll leave it for my heartfelt final paragraph at the end of the article.
Until then though we have the small matter of some games to deal with. 12 in total, including one I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. For the last time then, let’s do some recapping.
Jumper Robot
Angel Z – 240 Points
Cute, clean and functional platforming was seemingly the brief for this week’s opener. Jumper Robot is a Johnny-5 lookalike in a very simple game that owes a great deal to the Mario games. Power-ups are sprung from blocks with question marks on by head-butting them, grabbing 100 of the game’s coin equivalent gets an extra life etc. However I’m not one for punishing people who copy a classic formula when they can turn out a good game and Jumper Robot is a good game. The demo level displays a calibre of level design rarely seen in XNA games. Enemies aren’t everywhere for the sake of things and deaths never feel unfair while power-ups are handed out with a nice regularity, even if they are just score boosts. This goes on a par with JUMP from the Arkedo Series as one of the worthwhile platformers on Indie Games.
Crisis Nuclear Holocaust
Silver Dollar Games – 80 Points
Just that developer name fills me with dread. The renamed North Squard have yet to provide me with a game worth even a quarter of a toss and this isn’t the game to do it. A lovely gimmick of a real person playing the villain AI is hampered by the sort of acting that would have disgraced Night Trap. The actual gameplay consists of reasoning with the AI to convince her not to destroy humanity while a clock ticks in the background. This has a chance of working, if ‘reasoning’ wasn’t just a matter of choosing the right response in order to avoid a horrible quick time event hacking sequence. These guys remain a name to be avoided.
Xmas Taxi
FifaKane – 80 Points
Did you play Astro Taxi a few weeks ago? Well if you did then you’ve played this. The level designs are different, there’s some snow scattered around and the taxi now has a hat on but otherwise it’s the same slightly distracting inertia-hell flying game in slightly different packaging. I don’t reward repackagings.
Aesop’s Garden
Excalibur Studios – 240 Points
Gameboy graphics and bleepy chiptune music provide the charm for this block pushing puzzler. Your character has to activate sprinklers to grow plants, then get rid of the weeds that grow with them in order to move from screen to screen with the levels getting progressively harder as you go. Some of the later levels I found challenged even me as a veteran of the block puzzler as new blocks are introduced. I’d say this is one of the best puzzlers I’ve played on XNA, the 240 point price tag might not convince everyone though.
Inside Lacrosse’s College Lacrosse 2010
Carlo Sunseri – 400 Points
Most indie games that I love are joyful accidents that I come across in the process of writing this recap every week. CL2010 however is one I’ve been looking forward to for months after a few posts on The ‘Tak got me nice and hyped for it. I’m extremely happy to report that the finished article has more than justified my excitement. The controls are nice and easy to pick up and the AI on the default setting manages to be challenging without being unfair. I got beat down pretty badly in my first few games but once I had a handle on basic lacrosse strategy (a skill taught by getting scored on time and time again) I began scoring more until I felt comfortable upping the difficulty. The game is pretty bare menu and mode wise, season and friendly are the only actual game modes though upgrade options and a create team mode help to disguise that. I’d say CL2010 is a very strong start for what will hopefully be a new sports franchise.
Wool
Milkstone Studios – 80 Points
Herding games have been rather more common that you might think in gaming. The delightfully odd PC game Sheep and the equally odd and delightful Herdy Gerdy on the PS2 showed us how fun guiding things around into a pen can be. Wool thankfully continues that proud tradition by following what I consider to be the two golden rules of game design. Build difficulty gradually and keep things simple. Your only objective at any one time is to get the sheep from one point to another and the various hazards are introduced one at a time without the levels feeling like tutorials. Another one for the ‘rather excellent’ pile this week I think, especially at 80 points.
The Earth Move With The Moon
Kosei Wada – 240 Points
It took me a little while to grasp the objective of this one as much like all Japanese XNA games the instructions are a little vague. The basic idea is to use your gravity as the Earth to guide the Moon from the start to the level to the finish, both moon and Earth needing to be in the goal area at the same time to clear the level. That’s the basic idea anyway, in practice I found it was much easier to ignore the unpredictable gravity and just bat the moon towards the goal and hope I got there at the same time. It’s a fairly poor situation when a game breaking thing like that becomes the easiest way to clear levels because the core concept is too hard to work with.
Marvelous Galaxy
Darix – 80 Points
We’ve seen turn based strategy tried and failed on XNA before because of bad controls and even worse tutorials. Then they were killed off by bad graphics and a complete lack of any reason to play them. Thankfully this one stops just short of the bad graphics bit as it has rather nice cartoony graphics. This alone got me to push through the initial confusion and get to a quite decent turn based strategy game with plenty of base capturing, stat balancing and commodity harvesting fun. You may not have the same patience as me but if you are willing to put the effort in there’s quite a decent game here for strategy fans.
Aardvark
Idiot – 240 Points
It’s Breakout/ Arkanoid/ Alleyway/ the same freaking bat and ball block breaking game we’ve played billions of times through flash and over XNA. The difference with this one is really that there’s no difference. It’s just a bat and ball which forces me to ask what the point is. We have excellent examples of the genre round here with genuine unique points, there’s no reason to have this here.
Neo Terra
Mechaghost – 80 Points
This one avoids the big major pitfall of XNA strategy by giving a very good tutorial, however it falls down on a rather large problem with the game itself. There’s no strategy here. The basic idea is to send ships out from your colour planets to opponent planets in order to control every planet on the map. What this really means is that you’ll select all your planets and send an armada of ships out to any planet that’s a different colour to you until you hold each one. I tried this strategy with multiple opponents and the strategy got a bit more complex due to me having to gang up on a single opponent to eliminate them one by one. So really this is a strategy game that requires no strategy, therefore there’s no fun or point to it.
A Killer’s Dream
Silver Dollar Games – 80 Points
Silver Dollar again. This time you’re watching a cut-scene looking for letters in order to spell out the name of the killer. I’m not joking, that’s all the is to it. It’s not scary, it’s just horrifically boring.
Catch22
TrackThisOut – 240 Points
The concept of Tetris but with blocks falling from all sides has been done before, most notably by the Tetris series itself on the DS. With that glory in my mind it’s hard to find much enjoyment in this game as all I seemed to have to do was to catch the blocks until the level timer filled up I would hope things would get a little big complex as the levels progress but from the trial I get none of that, which just makes it boring.
Game of the Week is unquestionably College Lacrosse 2010, I was hyped up for a fine videogame version of a hugely enjoyable sport and I wasn’t disappointed. If you don’t like lacrosse then at least try it, you may end up liking it.
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.
With that ladies and gentlemen, the Indie Game Recaps on Negative Gamer come to a close. It’s been both hugely enjoyable and teeth-wrenchingly frustrating but now I must leave you, at least from this site. The recaps will continue elsewhere, on my Community Blog over at Destructoid to be precise. Still on Mondays and hopefully maintaining the same vicious nature I’ve come to enjoy. Goodbye everyone, and buy more Indie Games.
misleading title if ever
So how come you’re moving house?
@Ron Workman: It was the best I could come up with that didn’t sound melodramatic.