|
Derek Yu: 9
Greg Costikyan: 10
Caspian Prince: 8
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# 2
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Urban Legend
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| 7.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 6
Stormtroopers
have better accuracy than the goons you'll work with in this game! I'm
talking about "can't hit a juiced-up punk rocker with a shotgun from
one step away" type accuracy. Which wouldn't be so frustrating if you
had more ammunition, more action points per turn, and/or shorter load
times. The bottom line is that Urban Legend is competent because the
presentation is good and because the games its based on (Laser Squad,
X-Com, etc.) are extremely fun, but it lacks the tactical depth or
intensity of its source material.
Greg Costikyan: 8
Starting
URBAN LEGEND is a bit like firing up an old friend, at least for those
of us who doted on turn-based strategy games like JAGGED ALLIANCE. I'm
back in the old paradigm, taking advantage of cover, waiting testily
while the enemy moves, and wincing when one of my expensive mercs
dies. Can't think of a better way to kill an evening, really; UL
certainly hits the right notes, and it's nice, too, that the story is
somewhat humorous in nature (if appropriately bloodthirsty).
The controls are smooth and easily learned, the obvious pitfalls of
games like this (dull mission design and poor pathfinding algorithms)
are avoided, and if the AI isn't that smart, that fits into the game's
fantasy well enough--your men are supposed to be something of an
elite, after all.
Innovative? No--but a nicely polished effort in a favorite genre that
major publishers don't publish any more. Nice.
Caspian Prince: 9
Ah, now here is a game crafted with love. Beautiful pixel artwork, frantic
caffeinated music, and the sort of sense of humour they just don't
understand in the US. It plays rather like the X-Com games in
pseudo-realtime, and like the X-Com games, it's good fun and I got quite
thoroughly absorbed in it. The only reason I couldn't give it a 10 is
because of its similarity to X-Com in fact. I strongly recommend trying this
game out if you're a fan of the genre - money well spent.
# 3
Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery
($19.95)
by Grubby Games
| 7.3 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 7
Professor
Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery is almost identical to the original
game, with the addition of a few new items and a new "step counter."
Like the original, it's a fun, if not very daring, puzzler. Good
graphics, fun puzzles, cute theme... although the story seems less
inspired this time around. If you wanted to play more of the first
game, then that's what this is!
Greg Costikyan: 7
I
like the original PROFESSOR FIZZWIZZLE game, so its no surprise that
I'm happy with its sequel. And there are enough new elements (heat and
ice guns, bat bots, etc.) to provide somewhat different puzzles than
the original. And it's polished, with cute graphics, and the ability
to undo moves and restart levels, as well as simply view the solution,
so the frustration you sometimes feel with puzzle games is minimized.
The only reasons I don't rate it higher, really, are that the
back-story is nonsense, and well, it's more of the same provided by
its predecessor.
John Bardinelli: 8
The first Fizzwizzle was good, and this one somehow manages to top it in
every way. Molten Mystery rejuvenates the familiar action/puzzle formula
with more items, over 200 new levels, and plenty of other extras. The step
counter is an interesting new addition, allowing you to compare the number
of steps it took to beat each level with other players from around the
world. Accessible to all ages (yup, even the kiddies), excellent
presentation, and oh-my-stars addictive gameplay once again. How do they
do that?!
# 4
Kudos: Rock Legend
($22.95)
by Positech
| 7.0 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 5
Despite
this game's lame presentation (complete with frightening Poser models)
and really hackneyed portrayal of being in a band, it's actually kinda
entertaining, because, well... it's fun to be in a band, and it's fun
to keep playing bigger gigs and make more money to buy more stuff!
It's the same principle that makes level-grinding in RPG's enjoyable.
Hit a button and get a pellet. Eventually you get bigger pellets. To
be honest, the customizable parts of the game are pretty nifty (I
still crack up when I think about some of the tracks I made), but
overall this is pretty bad. A game about being a musician should have
more than one irritating song in its soundtrack! But okay, so it was a
bit of a guilty pleasure.
Greg Costikyan: 8
I
loved the original Kudos game, in which you played a chav with no
particular skills trying to survive and eventually build a better life
over a period of a few years. Like this game, it was a pretty simple
resource management game, the main resource being your time, carried
mainly in text but dressed up with attractive graphics.
I was a little skeptical that the same basic gameplay would transfer
well to a game about rock-n-roll strivers; much of the charm of the
original is in the pathos of the character's difficult start in life,
and doing a music-themed game in which music is not central is
potentially fraught with difficulty. But actually, it works quite
well--there's a sense of slow progress as you develop skills, write
songs, and play bigger venues. The gameplay isn't identical, either;
the song-writing mini-game is mildly entertaining, although the
mini-game based for practicing your instrument--essentially a
stripped-down beat-matching game--is somewhat tedious. Still, there's
enough here to hold your interest--I wound up playing it for many
hours more than really necessary for purposes of this review. I would
have liked there to be actual drugs and groupies, of course, but I
guess if there were, a lot of places wouldn't carry the game... too
bad.
Caspian Prince: 8
Cliff Harris does it again with another of his oddball unique simulation
games. Mind you I've not even seen Democracy or Kudos before so I came to
review this with an open mind. We'll get the boring stuff out of the way
first: the graphics are functional and some of them are pretty nice, but I
think a bit more work on style is required. The sound though, is pretty much
superb - recorded by session musicians I think. A good thing too, given the
nature of the game.
I found that the game was strangely engrossing and before I knew it I'd
twiddled away for over an hour. There's an awful lot of stuff to juggle
around in the game which will ensure no two goes are alike - though there is
indeed so much stuff it'd take a long time to figure out a successful path.
I really liked the little subgames where you arrange songs to improve them
and the musical skills practice which has you tapping keys to replay a
melody correctly.
In the end, the sheer scope of what Positech was trying to do ultimately
means that this game feels like it has much missed potential. I'm rather
hoping that there will be a slick and ultra stylish sequel one day with tons
more graphics and music, and oozing style.
# 5
Pathstorm
($19.95)
by CaveBug Games
| 6.0 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 4
Pathstorm
is an okay puzzle game that involves a lot of bouncing balls. I could
see that if you're a big fan of puzzle games like Sudoku you could get
into this, since it requires the same kind of basic deductive
reasoning and process of elimination. But that's about all it's got
going for it, since the presentation is really quite underwhelming.
The other thing is that there's no real penalty for doing poorly on a
level so you can totally brute force your way through. I think I
cleared one level with a score of negative 160,000. So where's my
motivation? Oh yes... "trophies." No thanks!
Greg Costikyan: 7
I'm
a sucker for well-designed puzzle games, and Pathstorm qualifies. It's
quite abstract, which is booth good and bad: Good, because there's no
metaphor confusion, by which I mean that puzzle games with objects
that hav6e real world analogs can be confusing when the behavior of
those objects in the game follows 'puzzle logic' rather than
conforming to real-world expectations, while with an abstract model,
you know that things work as they are described. Bad, because part of
the charm of games like Professor Fizzwizzle is in the cuteness of the
characters and framing device, which is something you don't get here.
(Indeed, while there is a framing story, it's basically pointless, and
the kind of thing the ESC key is designed for.)
Other good points: A well conceived level-by-level tutorial that
introduces new objects intelligently; a nice range of user-selectable
difficulties; and careful level design. What's not to like?
John Bardinelli: 7
Oh, how I wanted to take this game and run away for a discreet (yet
tastefully implemented) marriage. Pathstorm is a lot like picross, which I
adore, and thus I was immediately taken by the sleek visuals and
mysterious gameplay. But then I settled down and got to know her a bit and
realized the relationship wouldn't work in the long run. Pathstorm runs
out of fun after a few dozen levels, at which point you will feel either
bored or frustrated. The game isn't a bad idea, and for what it's worth,
it was crafted very well. It feels like it should be a Flash game rather
than a downloadable title, however.
# 6
Membrane Massacre
($0)
by HopeDagger
| 5.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 3
I'm
pretty sure what we have here is a programmer who wanted to build an
entire game around a couple of algorithms. That's the only way to
explain why deformable bodies and destructible terrain exist in this
crappy shooter. The controls are just plain terrible. (This is almost
exactly like the type of game example you'd find in the final chapter
of an Andre LaMothe programming book!)
Greg Costikyan: 6
A
straightforward shmup with a twist: your opponents are not enemy
spacecraft but bulbous organic amoeboid creatures (the back-story
being that your spaceship has been miniaturized and injected into
someone's body, FANTASTIC VOYAGE-style, to battle disease). Beyond
that, there are the essentials you expect in a game like this:
multiple weapons, waves of attackers, increasing levels of difficulty.
Nothing too fancy-pants, or particularly innovative for that matter,
but the fact that the environment is destructible (so you can
sometimes catch opponents off guard by blasting your way through a
retaining wall) and the visuals of the opponents different from the
norm makes it good clean shooting fun. I'm not sure I'd pay for this,
but since it's freeware, well, who can complain?
John Bardinelli: 8
This one took me completely by surprise. At first, Membrane Massacre
screams "AVERAGE SHOOTER!!!", but after just a few minutes of playing it,
you realize it's so much more than that. You play a small, well-armed ship
navigating a biological organism destroying enemy bacteria and blasting
holes everywhere you see fit. There's a very cool shooter-turned-spy
feeling to the game, as at all times you're both hunting cells and running
from cunning foes around you. You get a new weapon every few waves, and
they get more impressive as you keep playing. A very well-balanced and
interesting shooter that will hold you for quite some time. More games
should take place within the body, it's ripe with war-like themes and
other nifty sci-fi potential.
# 7 (tied)
Alice Greenfingers
($19.99)
by Arcade Lab
 |
Website |
 |
Download |
| 4.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 4
I
hadn't been playing this farming sim for long before I realized that I
was growing crops to make more money just so that I could buy more
crops to grow. This isn't a game... this is busywork, pure and simple!
You know what really drove it home, though? It's when I got a new item
in the store that was just a stack of 5 boxes... "for my convenience."
(You start off only being able to buy one box at a time.) Essentially,
I got an upgrade that just saved me a few mouse clicks. Sheesh. At
that point I just paid an illegal immigrant to play the game for me.
Greg Costikyan: 2
I
found this game basically tedious as hell. You run around watering
plants, filling boxes, and stocking your store, a mini-map where
animated character wander around and occasionally buy a box of
vegetables from you. In short, it's a tycoon style game with no level
progression, no real challenge, and a series of unchanging but dull
activities (click to water! now click to pick tomatoes!) that feel a
lot more like busy work than actual gameplay. I suspect it'll be a
commercial success--the lack of challenge and topic are well
calculated to appeal to the casual game market, at which its
aimed--but I can't imagine an actual gamer finding this entertaining
for more than ten minutes.
John Bardinelli: 8
Gah! Make me stop, make me stop! This is one of those games that would
make you say "Oh c'mon mom, just ONE MORE before bed". Before you know it,
an hour has gone by. Alice Greenfingers takes the crop raising/selling
formula from Harvest Moon and simplifies it by taking out all the
adventuring and chore-doing. What's left is a simple casual farming game
where you sow seeds, sell crops, and try to rake in a fortune. The game
progresses quite nicely (though a tiny bit slow at first) and adds new
seeds and items at just the right pace. Few games manage to take my brain
by the lobes and hold me down for long stretches of time, but Alice pulled
it off. The visuals look a little grainy, though, and after a long session
my eyes were thrilled to see my sleek desktop environment once again.
# 7 (tied)
Meanwhile
($0)
by Peter Brinson
| 4.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 4
The
idea that a player's actions can alter the game for EVERYBODY is
awesome. Unfortunately, when you're actually playing the game there's
very little indication that there's any kind of interaction going on
between you and other players. What you're left with is a platformer
with mediocre graphics, poor level design, and slippery controls. What
I'd like to see is a better game take this idea and just go completely
wild with it. What else could players affect other than the basic
attributes of the player character? The potential is huge!
Greg Costikyan: 5
The
good: nicely minimalist black-and-white graphics and a stick figure
protagonist, and smooth controls; in a world filled with glitz over
gameplay, it takes a certain fearlessness to go this route. The bad:
alt-tab out, or hit the menu key accidentally, and you'll have lost
the cursor and controls when you come back (I had to reboot at one
point, since I could neither quit nor get to another application). A
little buggy in other words. The clueless player: I suck at
twitch-action side-scrollers like this, and couldn't really get into
it deep enough to make a fair judgment, hence the middle-of-the-road
score I'm assigning. I recommend you trust the judgment of reviewers
who don't suck at this type of game over mine.
John Bardinelli: 5
An interesting and ambitious idea that I just couldn't get into. Meanwhile
is a single player platform game with an avatar who has shared statistics
affected by other players around the world. Running speed, jump strength,
and spell recharge constantly shift levels as players vote/earn them up
and down. You'll have to play the game over the course of a few weeks to
notice any significant difference. I dig the presentation (who wouldn't
love that old-timey look and feel?!), but the controls are so jittery I
wanted to scream. Or cry.
# 9 (tied)
Turret Wars
($9.95)
by Sector 3 Games
| 3.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 2
This
game is so all-around dull that I think I actually became a duller
person by playing it. Seriously, this game has made me less fun at
parties. If you enjoy listening to bad techno and watching missiles
move slowly toward their targets in 3d, then you may enjoy this. But
if that's the case, you're probably already pretty fulfilled watching
the mildew collect around your bathtub. For everyone else, just play
Wendell Hicken's Scorched Earth - it's free and it's a better game by
about a googleplex.
Greg Costikyan: 5
Another
game it's hard for me to rate, since it's another game style I don't
much enjoy. There are cannon games I like, but they're 2D and humorous
in intent--like Worms and GunBound--and I've always felt that more
gets lost with 3D, for this genre, than is gained. And a science
fiction setting, for me at least, makes suspension of disbelief more
difficult--elevation and trajectory calculations are what computers
were invented for, and it's hard to believe that in the future we'll
be judging shots by eye, since we haven't done so for more than a
century now.
But those are, of course, personal prejudices, and TURRET WARS seems
nicely polished for what it is: the 3D settings are reasonably
attractive, I like the way the camera follows your shot in toward the
enemy (which since you're often firing over the horizon is very useful
in ranging), and there's enough variety in arenas, cannon types, and
power-ups that it's pretty clear there's a lot of gameplay here--for
those who like this kind of gameplay. Which isn't me, but if it is
you, well, sure; check it out.
Caspian Prince: 4
This game came as a zip file, which is very naughty and lazy on the part of
the developers! My mum wouldn't have a clue what to do with it. But then, my
mum doesn't play 3D battle simulations, which this game is. It's a realtime
3D take on the old "Tanks" game. Sadly it is rather lacking in an array of
deadly weaponry (only four basic turrets) and the landscape doesn't blow up
when you drop bombs on to it. Also, it's rather crying out for some better
sound effects. But the thing that's most disappointing is realising that you
really ought to be playing versus friends over the network rather than
computer AIs. It's kinda fun for a bit but you realise that the strategy
versus the AIs more or less involves finding them one by one and blowing
them up. If two of them start shooting at you at the same time it's game
over although mysteriously that never happened to me.
What Turret Wars needs is more silly weaponry and deformable landscapes and
network play. Then it'd be really good fun for office lunchtime play. I can
imagine the insults flying across the room as fast as the shells.
# 9 (tied)
Lunar Domination
($19.99)
by Valen Games
| 3.7 |
| COMBINED SCORE |
Derek Yu: 3
I
heard the name "Lunar Domination" and it conjured up images of
power-hungry moon kings waging war and sending out legions of space
aliens and moon soldiers to fight bloody battles in foreboding moon
craters. Instead, what I get is M.U.L.E. minus anything that made
M.U.L.E. interesting. Mobsters dig graves that are less shallow than
the mechanics of this game, and it fails miserably both as a conquest
sim and an economics sim. Worst of all, Lunar Domination uses a
palette that is basically made up of every shade of gray in the color
spectrum. This is a game where you and your dog can play together and
share the exact same experience.
Greg Costikyan: 3
I
wanted to like this game, but alas, its flaws are considerable. LUNAR
DOMINATION tries to combine the construction elements of an RTS with
the multiplayer dynamics of a "Eurogame" (multiplayer board games ala
SETTLERS OF CATAN), but the combination is disappointing rather than
tasty.
The basic problem is that good strategy games need to involve
tradeoffs--what Reiner Knizia refers to as "a handful of choices, but
difficult ones." In LD, the basic dynamic is expand, expand,
expand--as aggressively as possible, and there isn't much variation in
how you go about doing so. It doesn't help that the "levels" (such as
they are) involve simple variations in terrain and board layout--not
enough variation to hold your interest. As a result, if you play it
several times, it feels like much the same thing all over again.
There's the germ of a good idea here, but not much more, alas.
Caspian Prince: 5
Hm, I'm rarely a fan of games that involve twiddling numbers. In fact, I ran
away from a job programming local government performance management software
to be an indie game developer programming games that involve blowing stuff
up. This game pushes all the wrong sorts of buttons for me, but then again I
rather feel it didn't try too hard to push them. Maybe that doesn't bother
the kind of player that normally likes number twiddling games but it won't
fool Cas's Consistent Score-O-Meter, oh no. So while it installed and ran
fine and it's basically original in that I've never played a turn based
moon-mining resource management game, the graphics are rather bland (the GUI
reminds me rather of a Linux application and the anti-aliased fonts looked
grim stretched out on my TFT display), the sound is sparse, but the music is
pleasantly soothing; the style suits the genre; and I can't see why I wasn't
able to play this game in a window.
|
... |
The
July Illustrious Panel:
John Bardinelli -
bardinelli.com
As a freelance video game writer, John thinks he's done something
pretty clever by combining his two greatest addictions into a career.
Now, among other projects, he spends much of his time scoping out the
latest and greatest casual/indie games for Casual Gameplay.
Caspian
Prince - Puppygames
Cas first started with indie games with the release of the much
maligned Alien Flux. After learning that listening to everyone's
opinions gets you exactly no where, he changed his focus to making the
best retro-flavored goodness he could come up with.
Derek
Yu - TIGSource
Derek is the, ahem, slightly vocal editor-in-chief of The Independent
Gaming Source, as well as the author of a few independent games
himself. Currently, he's working with Alec Holowka on Aquaria, a
massive 2d underwater fantasy adventure.
Greg
Costikyan - Manifesto Games
Greg has designed more than 30 commercially published board,
roleplaying, online, computer, and mobile games. He has written
extensively on games, design, and industry business for publications
that include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal Interactive,
Salon, Game Developer magazine, and The Escapist.
|
Scoring Scale: |
||||||||||
|
| Game of the Month | ||
 |
Immortal Defense |
|
| Award Winners This Month: | ||
 Average score of 9+ |
 Average score of 8+ |
Average score of 7+ |
| Immortal Defense | na |
Urban Legend Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery Kudos: Rock Legend |
* Reviews and scores are the opinions of the reviewers and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of GameTunnel.
By: The Illustrious Panel
Posted: Monday July 30, 2007
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