Xbox Live Indie-Dome: August 2nd – 8th, 2010

Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst… so you don't have to!

Welcome back again, everybody. Rob Rich is taking a break this week, as he was a bit under the weather. So, being the good boss that I am, I stepped up to relieve his burden by handling the newest Xbox Live Indie-Dome… only to find such a small week of releases that he probably could have done it standing on his head in his own deathbed.

Oh well. Let’s get on to the games, shall we?

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As always, not every release will get more than a few sentences. The games with multiple paragraphs have basically managed to stand-out due to their entertainment value and/or shockingly amazing awesomeness (these will feature the *Must Play* tag) or because they’re so incredibly terrible potential consumers deserve a warning (these feature the *Utter Failure* tag).

Remember, the Indie-Dome (like all reviews) is an opinion piece. The comments (or lack thereof) made throughout convey the reviewer’s thoughts on the overall quality (or lack thereof) of the submissions in a given week. These comments are not directed towards the developers, but rather their games. Seriously, we know most of you folks put a lot of hard work into these things, so please don’t take it personally.

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Block Puzzle’s Revenge

(Developer: Apoxxle – 80 points)

*Must Play*

Think you’re a fiend at Tetris? Well, can you juggle four games, side-by-side, at the same time? Now imagine that if you neglect any one board for too long, penalties begin to accrue — the side rows become invisible, you can’t rotate or fast-drop pieces. That kinda stuff.

Welcome to Block Puzzle’s Revenge.

I wasn’t expecting much when I went in, but I was fairly blown away. It’s not actual Tetris (the pieces are all shaped differently, of course) so your tried and true formulas won’t work here, but you’ll start memorizing them in short order. Music and visual style changes periodically, a la Lumines and you have both a classic mode (one puzzle only) and a 2 player mode to choose from as well, but the star of the show is the four-puzzle version. Seriously, check this one out.

萌めくり (Moe Mekuri – “Moe Flip”)

(Developer: kohei – 80 points)

Okay, say whatever you will about this game, but the developers of Moe Mekuri get at least some points for 1) providing a list of the limitations of the demo version right off the bat and 2) allowing you to play the game with the text in either English or Japanese. Thanks for being international, you guys!

Basically, you have a grid of tiles covering a picture of a generic teenage anime girl. When you click one tile, you make all the others surrounding it disappear. You get all the panels turned off, you get to see the picture and move on to the next one. Simple stuff. If you’re Travis Touchdown from No More Heroes or anyone else obsessed with painfully cute anime girls, this may be $1 well spent. For the rest of us… maybe not so much.

Also, ad for SHOOTING CHICKEN REVENGE! SO AWESOME!

Graviton

(Developer: Silvan – 80 points)

The notes to this one say that it is based on Gravitation from Net Yaroze, which this magical thing called the internet tells me was a PlayStation 1 hobbyist development system from the late ’90s. Seeing as I never had any experience with the thing they’re referencing here, I’m just going to take Graviton on its own merits.

You race your ship around courses, hitting checkpoints, in what appear to be a sequence of time trials. There’s a two player deathmatch mode, which incorporates weaponry, but we didn’t honestly test that part out. Your ship has two other controls – thrust and rotate left/right. The walls of the tracks seem rather hungry to draw your ship into them (the gravity effect of the title, one would assume) with a nice metallic “THWANK!” Not much to comment on here. If you know what the Net Yaroze was, then you’ll likely have fond memories of playing something like this. For the rest of us, I dunno. It does have some nice use of particle effects on the thrust, however.

Dragon Chess

(Developer: Wantao – 80 points)

An official $1 digital version of a $40 board game, Dragon Chess certainly isn’t bad in the value department. Take standard chess, add some extra spaces to the board and a new piece (the dragon, which sit on the outside of the rooks in the back row and which can move in all directions like a queen, but only up to three spaces each way) and you have the basics. Definitely an interesting variant on the classic game and certainly not bad if you want a 2-player game, but it could stand a few tweaks.

First, the camera controls are slightly disorienting and you can NEVER seem to find an good angle from which to view the board — not a great idea for planning strategy. Secondly, while having 3D models is all well and good, it also would have been nice to have an option for a good old fashioned, top-down, 2D version as well. Finally, what could have been hurt by throwing in regular vanilla chess as well? Huh? Still, my old inner chess club geek briefly flared up for this one. Yours might too.

Go Avatar Go

(Developer: PlayItLoud – 80 points)

*Utter Failure*

Robot Unicorn Attack, Canabalt, it seems running/dashing/jumping games are hot these days and there’s a good reason why. They’re simple fun that brings back memories of arcade-y goodness when split-second timing and lightning reflexes were the only thing that stood between you and spending another quarter from the rapidly dwindling pile in your jeans pocket. However, Go Avatar Go doesn’t do the genre a lick of justice.

You try to get from A to B in as few attempts as possible, picking up balls along the way. You only have one control, the A button, which does… well that’s kind of the rub. It’s context sensative — on some levels in makes you jump, on others it makes you stop running and stand still, on still others it makes you drop down to a lower platform. The problem? You have no idea which until the first time you press a button, meaning you will pretty much NEVER pass a level on your first (or second, or third) try. Also, some levels require you to be standing on a special pad to be able to jump, unlike others where you can jump freely (freely being a loose term, as every jump has the same arc, trajectory and hang time, no matter if you tap the button or mash it down till your thumb falls off).

It’s a frustrating, annoying game with borked, highly imprecise controls in a game that requires tons of trial-and-error. Here’s a protip for you indie devs out there: shitty controls are not a substitute for challenging gameplay. Ever.

Unplugged

(Developer: Murudai – 80 points)

Top-down, twin-stick shooters are a dime-a-dozen on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace. But how many of them allow you to take on the role of a kitchen sink stopper, firing projectiles at incoming food that threatens to plug up your drain? Looks like only Unplugged fits the bill, by my count.

At first I was totally willing to write this off as being a standard unremarkable twin-stink until the first boss fight happened. After taking down an irate wedge of cheese, I thought I’d seen it all. Then the second stage hit and I noticed the vector of my shots was being skewed by the ever-present swirling of the background as it headed down the drain. Then things got interesting. Definitely worth a look.

So Many Girls So Little Time

(Developer: Silver Dollar Games 2 – 80 points)

So, while I was prepared to totally bag on So Many Girls So Little Time, based on its cover and premise alone, once I got past the Announcer-Voiced Teapot Genie Guy (who warns you very adamantly against pissing off the girls in the game), I found something a bit different than I expected. By “a bit different,” I mean “not total and utter drek,” mind you.

What this game essentially is is an exercise in plate spinning. Different stock photos of generic girls will call your iPhone-like device and want you to take them on dates to different places. You have the option to reset the date for another time, can decide how much time you spend on each date with them and how much money to spend on them. Bigger expenditures (obviously) have bigger boosts to their mood. Likewise, standing a girl up or talking about a topic she disliked (a trial and error process to figure out) lowers her mood. Now imagine doing this with five or six girls all at the same time.

The game isn’t a bad exercise in time management, but it’s also not a very good one either. You’ll basically find yourself frantically mashing buttons as portraits shuffle around the screen and forgetting which generic looking female likes talking about work and which one likes video games (Oh, gamer fantasies — when will you change? The average peroxided blonde who wants you to take her to the bar and liked to talk about shopping isn’t going to want to hear about your 1337 Halo Skillz. I hate to break it to you). So Many Girls So Little Time is better than I thought it would be, though that’s not saying much.