Tashi and Hom: Spirit Shrines

I'm convinced that the original name of this game was to be Tashi and Tom, but at the last minute, someone on the development team said "hey, you know what would be a fun idea?  If we replaced the latter of this perfectly alliterative pair of names with 'Hom.'"  and then someone else said "yeah, and how bout we add a subtitle that's also an alliteration, just to throw them off even more?"  Well, regardless...

Tashi and To-DAMMIT!

Tashi and Hom is a third-person 3D beat-em-up kind of similar to Nightmare but without the "boo! Ees scawy!" aesthetic.  You control two characters (whose names should be obvious); Tashi takes damage and follows your movement commands, while Hom attacks enemies.  Each level consists of about 10 rooms of gradually increasing difficulty (and by that I mean increasing enemy count) before you get to a boss battle.

With a game like this, I think it would be most helpful to explain my experience level-by-level.  The first temple, the Bull Temple, was relatively straightforward.  My only real complaint was that the all of the controls were explained to me textually, while all I really needed was like a signpost with the "X" button on it in the background or something.  Anyway, the level was well designed both mechanically and aesthetically.  Color me impressed.  Let's see the next temple.

The Bird Temple was rather unextraordinary.  The only innovations were annoying bird enemies that kamikaze into you like the Guay from Ocarina of Time but substantially more infuriating, and the new boss, who just literally rolled around the room spitting out its babies, unlike the first level boss, who had an interesting and difficult pattern that required you to think first and then act.  The Bull boss killed me like 5 or 6 times before I managed to conquer it, but I got the Bird boss on my first try.  It was here that I sensed the game was starting to lose some steam.

The Fox Temple confirmed that.  Now there are fox enemies (not as annoying as the birds, mind you) who rummage around in the ground for a bit before popping their little heads out like the most clubbable whack-a-mole.  The most tense part of this level, and arguably the whole game, was the room right before the boss, but that was just an empty room with like a million enemies and some haphazardly placed spikes.  It required no thought and it felt like wasted potential.  After all, other rooms were designed so that you could use the enemies' properties against them, like the narrow hallways that you can lead a conga line of bulls through to pick them off one by one.  That's rewarding!  Just kind of mashing attack while dashing through a room full of squishy baddies is...not so much.  The boss of this temple also smelled of fatigued developers.  It was just 2 bigger fox enemies who followed literally the same pattern as the little fox enemies, only these guys whip their tails around.  The pattern takes 2 seconds to learn, and after that, it's just a matter of not getting hit too much.  After I beat it, the game just kinda stopped.  There was no exit for me to go through...nothing.  I wandered around a barren level for a while before killing myself on some spikes out of boredom.

Now, you guys know that this blog is more of a "first impressions" thing than a collection of actual reviews, so I gotta ask.  Is this the norm for ending DigiPen games?  Because if so, I'm glad I don't finish most of them...

Here's an analogy for ya:  imagine you're taking a history test on, I don't know, the Alamo or something.  All the teacher needs is for you to tell him (or her, lest I be called a misogynist) that Jim Bowie once got into a nasty tussle with some other dudes at a sandbar, but you and your overachieving brain want to give him the exact date as well, so you write down "October of 1831," only to have your teacher cross it out and write "September of 1827," and mark you off two points.  If only you had just restrained yourself and only given the base materials, you wouldn't have lost those points.  Well, that's Tashi and Hom in a nutshell.  They tried to do too much with too little and the final project suffered because of it.  It's not a bad game.  It's designed superbly and has enough variety (especially with the powerups) to keep gameplay interesting for the most part.  I just wish they had focused on making a short but amazing experience, rather than a moderately long, decent one.

Wow, that was a long one, eh?  If only every game gave me this much to talk about.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay spiritual.

Links
Mashy and Prom: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25901

TankU and Tank Wars

I love how things work out sometimes, don't you?  You're running behind on your blog schedule, you need to figure out some way to review more than 1 game in a day as efficiently as possible, you look on the game gallery and lo and behold, 2 top-down tank shooters right next to each other, just begging to be compared.

Let's get this show on the road.

Well, let's start off talking about TankU.  It's a standard tank shooter.  Nothing too extraordinary.  There are 4 "cores" in the middle of the screen.  Blue tanks will try to steal those cores and everything else will try to kill you.  It's your job to make sure neither of those things happen.  You're given full range of all the stages from the get-go, which I thought was just a clever way of disguising the fact that DigiPen students don't know how to program an autosave, but I was pleasantly surprised when I opened up the game for the second time and my upgrades were all saved.

And that leads me into the upgrade system.  As you thrust yourself into battle, you gain experience, which you then spend on upgrades.  Blah-di-blah, nothing unusual here.  It's not a bad upgrade system, but I do have my gripes.  First off, what use is a "bullet rate" upgrade in a game that does't limit the amount of bullets you can fire per second by just mashing the mouse button as opposed to holding it?  Second, there's not a whole lot of variety and I didn't sense much of a difference with any particular upgrade.  It won't take long before you've maxed everything out, and even then, you won't feel much more powerful.

So, all, in all, TankU is a decently made game with no particular hook...but at least it's playable!

Tank Wars is just a badly designed game.  I'm sorry, I don't think there's any way around that.  I try to be as nice as I can, but what do you expect me to say when literally the only sound effect in a war arena filled with tanks firing cannons all over the place is the sound of my tank's engine gently revving?

The principle mechanic in Tank Wars is that as you land hits on your enemies, you get money, which you can spend on weapon upgrades and such.  I'll give you a second to think of the problem with that.  Got it?  Not too hard to figure out, right?  It leads to a scenario wherein whoever scores the most points in the first minutes of the game gets a tremendous advantage when they can afford to buy all the best stuff.

Here's a parallel.  Remember playing 1-on-1 basketball in the schoolyard?  Remember that one friend who refused to play anything but "winner's rule?"  No matter how many times you tell him that "loser's rule" makes the game more balanced by not throwing the game into an infinite loop wherein one person just keeps scoring, that friend wouldn't budge and you'd basically spend your recess watching him swish baskets for 40 minutes?  That's this game in a nutshell.

This is exactly what happens when you don't take the time to examine your mechanics before you implement them.  That's all I got for today.  Until next time, stay canTANKerous...heh...I did it...

Links
How to Make a Tank Shooter: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26017
How Not to Make a Tank Shooter: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=516

updates n shizz, yo

so I'm not posting a review today cuz I just got home and I'm not feeling up to writing, but the game for today has been played, and I'll try and get as much done tomorrow as I can, since Sunday is pretty much shot (comic con, biznatches! woohooo!).

Also, I realize my posting has been a little spastic lately.  I don't know why, but I've been forgetting to click the little "publish" button a lot lately...I hope I didn't confuse anyone.

Welp, see ya tomorra

Tag

As I said yesterday, my day isn't exactly conducive to writing a video game review today, but I'll try.

Tag is everything I look for in a game.  It's fun, creative, interesting and unique.  The long and short of it is, you must navigate your way around a city using nothing but a spray paint gun.  Standing on different colors of paint yields different effects: red makes you go faster, green springs you into the air, etc.

A man more cynical than I might criticize this game for trying too hard to be Portal.  After all, creating a fun and functional 3D platformer wherein your primary method of locomotion is a handheld device that you point at the walls to propel yourself to and from platforms is a very powerful bolt of lightning that might not seem like it can strike twice.  When all is said and done, though, Tag, with a bit more professional polish, a narrative, and some decent jokes strewn about here and there might actually give Portal a run for its money.  Now, I was never quite as big a Portal fan as some of the other more famous video game critics out there (*cough* Yahtzee *cough*), but still, if your game can be compared to Portal, you're on the right track.

Tag, of course, isn't perfect, though.  The biggest problem I faced was that any errant tap of a WASD key might send you flying off an edge you didn't know was there and down to your doom. Portal was kind enough to take place in a relatively closed and cramped laboratory, meaning launching yourself a tad too far or backpedaling a bit too much, more often than not, only sent you flying into a wall.  In other words, when you died in Portal, it always felt like it was your fault.  Tag is just a bit too comfortable snuggling up to cheap deaths.

Other than that, though, it's a fantastic game that I wish I had more time to play, and it definitely gets my seal of approval.  As it stands, though, I've got to write an Art History essay and study for a Psychology test, so that's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay vandalous.

Links
Teg, yur eet: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=1506

T.O.D.A.Y

Well, if there's ever been a description that's gotten my psyched to play a game, it's this one.  It must have taken a really long time to create a game that exists in dimensions human beings can't even perceive!  Yes, that's right, this game markets itself as "four-dimensional," which of course is game jargon for some kind of gimmick that I'm not familiar with.  Regardless, I was stoked to boot this one up, but then...

dun dun...dun dun...

NOT_REAL.exe

Why is it that all of the most interesting sounding games are completely unobtainable?  Hot damn, I tried everything to find a working copy of this game, but I'm convinced that such a thing does not exist.  I even googled Logan Starkenburg, one of the creators of this game, to find a personal webpage that he may have hosted a mirror on, like what happened with Crazy Cross, but all I found was the IMDB page for an extra from Terminator: Salvation.  Could they be the same person?  Who knows...regardless, I'm getting real sick of this false advertising, Digipen!

nope

So I was going to blog today, but then I got gang raped by school work.  It happens.

I might not be able to blog tomorrow either.  The weekend's not looking too bright, either, but I'll get content out.

And then there's next week...

help.

Tad Studbody

Tad Studbody and the Robot Rampage is a game wherein you beat the crap out of robots.  

G'night everybody!

...

Alright, fine, I'll do a real review.  Upon starting the game up, I was impressed by how responsive the menu screen was.  I use this phrase a lot, but it looks like it could have been professionally made.  Do keep in mind, though, I'm not talking about Atlus professional...more like THQ and Nickelodeon Games professional...

What I mean by that is that Tad Studbody's quality as a game, in my opinion, is not very high.  Its quality as a toy, however, is incredibly high.  I encourage you all to look up what others have said on the "games vs toys" issue, it's actually a very interesting subject, but for now, I'll give you the abridged version in the context of Tad Studbody.  

Like toys tend to do, Tad Studbody dispenses fun like Spiderman's neck dispenses candy.  What it doesn't deliver, however, is engagement.  Usually, when I stop playing a game after 15 minutes, it's because the game frustrated me in some way and I want to get back to playing [insert late-90s classic title or later iteration thereof here].  I stopped playing Tad Studbody, however, because it got repetitive and boring really fast.  

A true "game" would never leave me mindlessly approaching enemy robots and bashing them over the head a couple times to progress to the next area where I bash robots over the head a couple times.  It would constantly challenge me to think about what I've learned so far and apply the lessons to the situation at hand.

"Oh," but you may say, "that's just the nature of the beast.  Beat 'em ups are fun but repetitive.  They offer a chance for you to zone out and kill stuff for a while; sweet catharsis."  Well, that may be true, but what about a game like Starfox 64?  That game epitomizes catharsis better than any other game I know, but it's not just a conga line of Androssian ships waiting to be kersploded.  The enemy placement and level design force me to implement strategies.  That classic phrase "do a barrel roll" wasn't just in the game because it sounded funny.  It was there to remind you that you had a means to deal with a specific challenge and now was the time to implement that means.

Tad Studbody doesn't do that.  It just throws a bunch of robots at you and watches contently as you break them.  The controls aren't designed around strategy, they're designed around repetition.  But hey, if that's all you want, then go nuts.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay theoretical

Links

you get a punch, you get a punch, everyone here gets punchessssss: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=8729