Yeah, you can probably tell by looking at the title that there's at least one review today that's going to be rather anemic. I've always held that a critic should never be forced to contrive things to say for the purpose of meeting a certain length, but one sentence reviews just aren't fair to the reader, and I'm afraid I only have one sentence worth of review for Short Circuit. That sentence is "It's a tower defense game." I find myself feeling now a very similar emotion to the one I felt when my father asked me to discuss the tastes of 3 different wines when I was in my early teens. To me, they all tasted like grape juice gone bad, but there was apparently a wide discrepancy in the tastes that I just couldn't discern. If you've played any tower defense game on Newgrounds.com, you've played Short Circuit. It's probably a fine tower defense game, but to me, that's like saying it's not a badly prepared bowl of piss and vinegar.
So now let's get into the main course: Skip Lancer. I was delighted to see that Skip Lancer took a few cues from Starfox 64, which is the first runner up in my personal "best games of all time" list. Unfortunately, Skip Lancer seems to think that the best part about Starfox 64 was when it sort of resembled Superman 64, and decided to cook us up the former game from a different angle, but with a very generous portion of the latter game's strangely odorous garnish.
Alright enough with the food analogies. I'm making myself hungry. Skip Lancer is one of those "great premise, poor execution" kinds of games. There are a variety of levels, each testing a slightly different skill, which juice the game mechanics until they are nothing but rinds and you, the player, are left with a nice, tall glass of deliciousness...Damn it!
What I'm trying to say is that the foundation for Skip Lancer couldn't be better. My personal favorite level is the final boss, which is a lesson in absolute frustration, but never stops being fun because of its low iteration time and high-adrenaline gameplay. The game only really soils itself in the control aspect.
Much like in Starfox 64, you can do certain aerial tricks (boost, somersault, brake, barrel roll, etc), but doing so eats up your trick meter, which can only be replenished by running into balloons. The problem is that many of these tricks, braking in particular, take up so much trick energy with so little result that they barely seem worth it; yet it leaves me with the terrible feeling that if I would just torture myself for long enough to learn how to use these terribly implemented mechanics, I would have a much easier time meeting the merciless level completion requirements.
It also doesn't help that good ol' Skip apparently decided to down a few bottles of Captain Morgan before taking flight, because his responses to your commands are so incredibly delayed. Someone set the inertia way, WAY too high. I'm not sure how accurate a depiction of aerial mechanics this is, but it's about as fun as playing Starfox 64 with a controller with broken joystick and jelly beans instead of buttons.
The final nail in the coffin, however, is the hit detection on the rings. Sometimes I'll fly straight through the middle of the bastards only to have them linger there and taunt me with "missed me missed me now you gotta kiss me." Dealing with these rings is like dealing with that kid on the playground who always refused to admit that you landed a perfect shot on him with your invisible gun. "You missed," he would say. No I did not miss, you obnoxious snotsack, and this time I have FRAPS to prove it!
That's all I got for today. Until next time, stay sober.
Links
Short Attention Span: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26146
Crip Dancer: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=407
