Slug 'Em Up

What is it with snails these days, anyway?  This game came out during the 2010-2011 academic year, which I bet is around the time production started on Turbo.  What is so fascinating about the idea of duct taping machine guns and v8 engines to snail shells?  Back in my day, the most complicated you could get with the creatures is to have them say "meow," and that's the way we liked it.

In all seriousness, though, Slug 'Em Up is a 3D third person shooter but with snails.  That's about as complicated as it gets, really, and you know what?  I love it.  Why not snails?  Why do terrorists and CTU keep stealing the spotlight? To me, there are 4 points to this game really worth talking about, 2 good and two bad, which is basically every reviewer's dream.  I'm suitably excited, so let's get this show on the road.

I'll start off with the bad stuff because I kinda want to end this review on a high note (which is not something I usually do, so that should already speak volumes of my opinion on this game).  First off, why on Earth would anyone think it's a good idea to limit the input on a third person shooter exclusively to the keyboard?  This is what the mouse does best, aiming and clicking.  Instead, we have to deal with the notoriously finicky arrow keys, so good luck trying to turn to the left and shoot at the same time.  What bugs me most is that you can only use two weapons at a time, and guess how many buttons a mouse has on it?

The second thing that bugged me, though to a much lesser extent, was how the game went about conveying its controls.  Normally, when I complain about conveyance, I complain that a game holds my hand too tightly and is so terrified that I may have recently undergone a full frontal lobotomy that it has to explain every last detail to me in a way that doesn't allow me to spread my creative wings and fly into a few brick walls.  In this game, however, it's the exact opposite.  Here, you're not given enough indication of how the mechanics work.  I played three full matches before I realized that the little snail things that follow you are in fact your ammunition, which I guess makes sense for that one weapon that makes one of them grow to a gigantic size and crush your enemies, but how exactly does one take two slug creatures and convert it into a bomb in less than a second?  A simple picture of a snail next to the number underneath the weapon denoting how much ammo one round eats up would have gone a long way for me, and that's just one example.  It's not a huge problem, as I had a firm enough grasp on the controls to be competitive in the second round, but still.  Just because too heavily conveying your mechanics is bad doesn't mean you get to forget the idea of conveyance as a whole. 

All right, now for the good stuff.  Unfortunately, since I'm such a hypercritical little snark biscuit, these paragraphs won't be nearly as long as the previous two, but that doesn't mean I didn't value these qualities as much as I resented the others.  As I said, I want to end this review on a high note because I'm so impressed by the game.

First off, the visual design.  High poly count? check.  stylized characters and world? check.  Loads of bright, pastel colors to keep everything looking interesting?  check.  Characters leave a little trail of goop behind them, which is not only cute and fun to look at, but is a tremendous help when seeking out your enemies? check.  This game is definitely up there for the best visual design of any game on this list.  It's no Nitronic Rush, mind you, but I think it could nuzzle itself safely somewhere in the back end of the top 10.

Second off, the gameplay.  What's not to love?  The weapons are all very well designed and extremely satisfying to use and, more importantly, to have used on you.  Blowing someone across the map would swiftly lose its appeal if it weren't just as fun to be blown across the map yourself.  This game demands just the right amount of diligence in order to not get your slimy rear handed to you, and if you disagree, you can just modify the number of opponents to chance the difficulty in an impactful way.  

Long story short, this game is good.  Great, even.  It definitely earns my seal of approval.  Nice work, guys.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay salient.

Links

Squishy Vengeance: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24673

Short Circuit and Skip Lancer

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

Shoot 2 Kill

Shoot 2 Kill, as the name may suggest, is a shoot 'em up game.  More specifically, a side-scrolling shoot 'em up.  This is normally the time I compare the game I'm reviewing to Mega Man to appease the little critic in my head who says that any decent review will highlight a game's faults and strong points by comparing it to a popular title everyone can relate to, but you know what? no.  I'm not going to do that, because that would imply, at least to some extent, that Shoot 2 Kill was trying to be Mega Man in the first place.

Plenty of games on this list have marketed themselves as "unique," but very few have actually earned that title.  Shoot 2 Kill is one of the few, the proud, the games that make blasting through enemies with a zappy thing in space interesting and original.

Time for a pop quiz, ladies and gentlemen.  Since we're talking about Mega Man, one of the most distinguished game franchises out there, how did that game make itself so original?  Answer: by introducing a new mechanic that people hadn't seen before, namely stealing the boss enemies' powers for use in later levels.  Mega Man X distinguished itself with much different mechanics, namely wall-jumping and dashing, but it still used new mechanics to make itself unique.  Shoot 2 Kill understands that, so instead of putting all its energy into bells and whistles that make the game seem unique, like that triple-orb system in Shattered Core, that didn't in any meaningful way change how the game was played, it devised a new and interesting mechanic that the player constantly utilizes to clear the level.  That mechanic is "blinking," much like the ever proprietary mechanic from Dishonored, but here it's used for 2D side-scrolling platforming.

All things considered, the rest of the game is kinda substandard.  Shooting enemies feels about as rewarding as wiping piss off a toilet seat; probably because while you're laboring away at an enemy with your weapon, you're tanking damage from the million other enemies on screen that you'd rather blink to and slice with your far more powerful sword, so really the game is more of a hack 'n' slash than a shoot 'em up.  Although, some of the powerups for the gun do make it quite fun to use, especially the rocket launcher, which tears up everything in its path in a way that makes you feel like you're a demigod.

When all is said and done, zipping around the levels and slashing at enemies until they die is  a very enjoyable experience.  The enemies and bosses are varied enough to keep gameplay interesting.  The game doesn't look or sound half bad, either.  There are a few things that bug me, like why your character only moves at a speed that can be accurately described as "moseying along," which isn't really appropriate for the setting.  The main issue, though, is how impossible it is to dodge enemy fire, especially when you drop into the tractor beam of an enemy you couldn't see.  So yeah.  The game really is just reduced to blinking and slashing, with the occasional boom boom.  If that sounds fun to you, give it a go, but if you're more into the challenging shoot 'em up like Contra, which feeds your sense of accomplishment in addition to your primitive desire to see things blow up, rather than just relying on the latter, then maybe this one isn't for you.

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

Links
shoot to kill...now keep shooting...almost...there ya go: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25995

Shoot on Sight

Games are art.  That's a phrase that a lot of people like to plunge into a conversation, propelled by their undying passion for the medium.  When presenting their cases in the inevitable newly formed debate, gamers will often cite such works as Braid, which uses plenty of literary devices to present a narrative in such a way that would make high school English teachers wet their trousers with pretentious bouts of intellectual superiority.  Many might think that if I were to use a game on this list to make a case that the video game is just as legitimate as any other kind of narrative experience, I would examine a game like Oniro, a game that perfectly nailed the whole "narrative" part and delivered a story which almost moved me to tears, all the while explaining itself through its mechanics and never becoming dull or repetitive.

Yes, it is true, that games like this have a significant role in the distinguishing of video games as a form of art, but such arguments tend to ignore the mindless adrenaline drips...the games that sell like hotcakes during Christmastime. What about the shooter that makes no attempt to tell a story or utilize any kind of arbitrarily named literary device?  Should those be lumped into the same category as pornography under the title "things that make you feel good but you should probably keep to yourself?"  I don't think so.  I think there's just as much value to be had in a mindless but fun experience, and there's certainly enough opportunity for the developers to show their skill, which is what art is by definition.

And show off skill the developers of Shoot on Sight did.  Not so much in the visual design department nor in the gameplay balancing department, but the game certainly feels great to play.  It's a third-person shooter wherein you are armed with a pea shooter and a nuclear warhead launcher with infinite ammo and quick reload times...guess which one you'll be using most of the time.

Yes, the secondary weapon is quite hideously overpowered, but not so much that it breaks the game completely.  You can still have a lot of fun while limiting yourself to the peashooter, and the upgrades for it will keep gameplay fun and varied.  What it does do, however, is make the game a bit too easy.  Once you learn how to catch enemies within the insta-kill blast radius of your secondary weapon, your own splash damage is pretty much the only thing that threatens you.  There are little suicide bomber enemies that can take a good chunk off you if you're not careful, but your health regenerates fairly quickly, so all it takes is a little safe playing before you're ready to start jumping around lobbing pocket rockets at anything that moves.

And is that a bad thing?  Absolutely not.  In my book, this game is a success.  It set out with the goal of providing a fun and addicting (in the good way) experience, and that's exactly what it is.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay trigger-happy.

Links
Kill all sons o' bitches: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=1423

Shift

Puzzle games are great starting places for aspiring game designers, mostly because the term "puzzle game" is kind of redundant.  A puzzle is pretty much the purest essence of a game.  There's a clear objective, certain rules and regulations to which you must abide while completing the objective...and that's basically it.  When making a puzzle game, the designer needn't be bogged down by the burden of creating a story, setting, characters, etc.  In fact, there's really no need to be that creative whatsoever.

That might sound a bit harsh, but I swear I'm not trying to call out puzzle game designers for being uncreative.  Far from it.  All I'm saying is that a puzzle game can get away with just putting you in a maze and calling it a day as long as the maze is well designed.  I like to call these "lab rat games," and Shift is that in a nutshell.

The problem in reviewing lab rat games is that there's pretty much only one non-aesthetic factor to be weighed in determining the quality of the game; that's how well the levels are designed.  More specifically, how well the difficulty curve is designed.  There aren't really that many other ways to identify the quality of a level.  Shift's difficulty curve is very well executed.  Bam. There it is.  End review.

The most frustrating part about the game, I would say, is how easily you can fall off an edge and have to restart the level.  The game was already challenging enough without that, but at least I can see where the developers were going with it.  They don't want you blazing through the levels and stumbling upon the solutions by chance.  They want you to take your time and think about the solution before carefully planning every move.  If you ask me, that sounds more like limiting the playstyle than promoting success, but again, not a huge problem.

The part I liked most about Shift was the music.  I'm not quite sure who the composer was (given DigiPen's music bank or whatever), but whoever it was should be proud, because the music alone was enough to make me want to keep playing.

Long story short, pick this game up if you're bored.  You won't be bored much longer.  That's all I got for today.  Until next time, stay shifty.

Links
Caps Lock: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26703

Shattered Nocturne

Shattered Nocturne advertises itself as a "poetic experience," which basically means it's a regular game with uninteresting machanics anc about 5000% more xylophone and acoustic guitar.  I'm a firm believer that narrative alone is enough to hold up a game, hence my love for games like Chrono Trigger, which didn't have bad gameplay, but I think we can all agree that it was a narrative-driven experience.  The problem comes when games decide to forego interesting game mechanics for the narrative rather than use the mechanics to drive the narrative.

Unfortunately, this game does just that.  It's pretty much the same problem I had with Douse. Just pointing out a character and playing some placid music in the background does not count as a "poetic experience."  Poetry makes you think; you don't think because you're reading poetry.  See the difference? The thing you can do is walk around and collect little pieces of the moon.  It's a very similar game, now that I think of it, to Slender.  Both games give you only the ability to move and rely wholly on the atmosphere to make the experience entertaining.

Now, I'm not a fan of Slender, personally, but I can at least understand the appeal of it.  For all its flaws, the game does a pretty good job of maintaining tension for the most part.  In Shattered Nocturne, I feel no motivation to keep pushing forward.  The walking speed is mind-numbingly slow, the world is bland and uninteresting, and the whole game just feels pretentious as a whole.

So yeah, the mechanics get a big fat F- in my book, but as long as the game tells a good story, it might still be able to get a recommendation out of me.  You know what? I'd be lying if I said this game's atmosphere didn't have some kind of charm, especially toward the end when you walk on previously inaccessible, glistening water, but there's just not enough here to form any kind of decent narrative.  The game's description says that it is a metaphor for dealing with depression, which I don't understand at all.  Just coloring your world dark blue and making it incredibly boring to walk around in does not emulate the feel of tackling depression.  Depression is many things, but it is not boring, I tell ya that.  This game, on the other hand, is.

The best compliments I can give Shattered Nocturne are that it doesn't overstay its welcome and that it does look very nice.  The game is pretty enough to look like a professionally made game from 2008 and it's over in less than 5 minutes, so at least there's not a whole lot to get mad at.

That's all I got for today.  Until next time, stay nocturnal.

Links
Shut Her Narc Turn: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26679

Shattered Core

Shattered Core claims to "combine the best elements of successful platformers such as Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, and Mega Man with revolutionary new elements."  So yeah, I pretty much hated this game before I even started it, but let it never be said that I let my biases impede my judgement.  Upon actually playing Shattered Core, I felt there was a lot to love and very little to actually hate.  There was plenty to get annoyed by, but the game has a whole has its head in the right place.

First, exactly what elements of Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, and Mega Man do the developers think they've combined?  I'd have a hard time arguing that they even implemented the design features that made those games awesome, let alone that they combined them with "revolutionary new elements."  By "best elements," do you perhaps mean that the main character has a sword, gun, and the ability to climb walls?....and is also a robot?  Well whatever.  These aspects are purely aesthetic, so we can call them simple innocuous homage.

My second question is, what exactly are these revolutionary new elements?  I only got to play the first two levels before the game crashed on me (and, of course, there's no save feature, so that's as far as I'm getting), but I didn't see anything particularly striking about the game design.  Certainly nothing worthy of being called "revolutionary."  I'm assuming they're referring to the color-matching powerup system, which is fairly unique, yes, but revolutionary?

That said, let's get into more pointed criticism, shall we?  The powerup system works like this:  You collect 3 orbs of colors green, red and blue.  These orbs determine how many attacks of what kind you can perform.  For example, if you have a blue and red orb, you will be able to perform 2 consecutive attacks at the basic attack level.  However, the more consecutive orbs you have of the same color, the more powerful your succession of attacks will be.  So, for example, red, blue, blue will yield two attacks at the basic attack level and then one more powerful attack, etc.  This keeps the gameplay engaging for the entirety of the first level, but afterwards it stops being noteworthy and starts just being how the game is played.  The mechanics don't change at all depending on what orbs you've collected, so it amounts to nothing more than added spice on the fairly tasty meat pie that is this game's mechanics.

The thing that made me like this game twofold:  first, I love the variety of your moves, and second, I love how that variety is presented to you.  Much like in Nightfall, you use the arrow keys to move and WASD to attack.  "D" controls your gun, "S" controls your sword, and "A" allows you to stride, which is a rather overpowered but immensely satisfying evasive attack.  I'm sure "W" does something later on, too, but I didn't play enough to find out.

And that's the other thing I like about the game.  It rewards your progress with more complexity, not just more of the same thing.  Far too many games, platformer and otherwise, on this list and off it, are way too repetitive.  This game gives you a new power each level, meaning the mechanics aren't going to get stale any time soon.

Final verdict:  if this game had a save feature, I'd be interested enough to play it to completion.  That's all I got for today.  Until next time, stay versatile.

Links
https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=482

PS- when I went back a few pages in the game gallery to check the name of Nightfall, I noticed more than one game on the list that I hadn't reviewed, but were dated in past years.  That's just not fair!  There are 500 games on this list.  I'm supposed to leaf through the entire gallery to keep up with the new entries?  Whatever.  I'm sure I'll figure something out...just an update...