Xbox Indie Games Recap: Twas The Night Before DBP

I’m excited my friends. Tomorrow we enter September and that is results month for the Dream Build Play contest. Run a Youtube search for Dream Build Play 2009 and you’ll find a load of excellent looking trailers for loads of the games that have been entered. I would make special note of Basketball Three, which is the first game I’ve seen to have Avatars as playable characters. The top prize for the winner is a fat cheque for $40,000 and any of the games could potentially become Xbox Live Arcade games like The Dishwasher. Keep an eye on the Dream Build Play website for the results through September.

Pastels Square
Nobusi – 400 Points

Last week a game went up and then disappeared called Matrix. It was a horrible puzzle game based around building a grid from falling lines. Pastels Square is from the same developer and based on the same idea, only now you’re constructing coloured squares which then disappear. This idea works much better for several reasons, the falling lines are now identical in shape, the instructions for the game are easier to understand thanks to some diagrams and a single screw-up doesn’t destroy your game. The only thing keeping me from a full recommendation is the 400 point tag. I’m not quite convinced it’s worth that.

Bed Time Nursery Rhymes
North Squard – 80 Points

Oh goody, another masterpiece from Indie Game shit-spreaders North Squard. Sure it’s pretty and the music is calming, but there’s so little actual coding effort here that it’s sickening. Not even the voice that reads the rhymes is good.

Shellblast HD
Optum – 400 Points

A game without screenshots or box art on the marketplace always makes me nervous. Are the devs too unsure of their game to not want me to see it? Is the game just a giant pile of turd? Well possibly the first one I think. Unlike every other bomb disposal game which is just sequence memorizing crap heap this is closer to Picross in its execution. Using a pair of lines you are charged with finding a certain amount of spots on a grid. The lines show you how many of these points they cover and then it’s a case of using logic and deduction to find them. Under a time limit this can get stressful and tricky, really quite a surprisingly good game. Well worth the cash I feel.

Puzzle?
MarkMD76 – 80 Points

A collection of word games with over 400,000 words says the game description. Well it certainly is a collection of word games, 3 to be precise. Most of them adhere to the ‘here’s a load of letters, how many words can you make’ formula. TicTacToe is thrown in here as well, for no decent reason. Other than the extremely basic formula there’s not much to fault, but there’s not much to complement either. There are just so many better word games around.

Deddora GO!
Zenryokutei – 400 Points

Tower defense time again. This one has an office setting, so your towers are cute anime office workers at desks. Where the classic formula is changed here is in the need to keep your workers maintained. Enemies will throw passing attacks at the workers, so keeping an eye on their health bars is important. This adds another dimension to your money as curing workers costs money. Also, in a long needed but small feature workers can be moved. These small additions make this another excellent example of the genre, however the text is all in Japanese. So ultimately you’re buying decision should be determined by whether or not you’re willing to figure out what does what by trial and error. That’s what keeps me from a full on recommendation.

Nasty
Chris Steele – 400 Points

Mr Steele has given us a review token for this game, so it will be getting a full NG review in the future. The reviewer is our dear Editor in Chief as well.

Streets of Fury
Cyrille Lagarigue – 240 Points

Mortal Kombat first used motion capture to provide some truly awful digitized sprites. It’s been nearly 20 years since then, and now Streets of Fury brings that glorious technique back for more beat-em-up fun in the Final Fight style. The idea here is to fight through each level beating up hoards of identical street thugs with a surprisingly deep fighting system. Counters, blocking and specials are all here and are complemented by a brilliant cast of swaggering twats serving as characters. The humour and gameplay work perfectly so look past the intentionally terrible graphics and you’re in for a punchy, kicky treat.

Octagon
Floor – 240 Points

Now for some shooty fun. The arena is octagonal and shots can be charged, that is important as bouncing shots off the walls can be critical to success. However as usual the single button forward shooting model doesn’t work in the arena shooting format. Bouncing off the walls helps this, but doesn’t make the game less clunky. The reason for the single button shooting is that enemies can only be destroyed by bullets the same colour as them. A fine idea, but executed rather badly. Make a note developers, you need a dual stick control method if you’re making an arena shooter.

Storage Inc
Stolpskott Studios – 400 Points

This surprised me, what seems to be a multiplayer focused point scramble is actually an increasingly frantic game based around storing and sending out boxes as they come into and have to be sent out of the warehouse. You do this using a cumbersome forklift which is controlled in RC style. The left stick moves forwards and backwards and the right stick rotates it left and right. It works surprisingly well but the only real problem is that in its early stages the game is far too slow. If you think you can manage to work through these glacier speed early maps then you’ll get plenty of enjoyment from this.

Downtown Smash Dodgeball
Miracle Kidz – 800 Points (wait…what?)

800? No, I don’t get it either but this is a full XBLA style 800 points. Basically this is a remake/copy of the old SNES game Super Dodgeball. Tournament and single game modes are available with lovingly ripped sprites. OK so I can’t beat around this particular bush any longer, this IS Super Dodgeball and nothing more. For 400 or 240 I may have considered it, but at 800? Not a hope in hell. The game is fine, but it’s a pure rip off. This sort of thing shouldn’t be encouraged. Find the SNES version somewhere or even better, track down the vastly superior GBA remake. Just don’t support this sort of behavior.

Hotel Danger
North West – 80 Points

How do you review a matching pairs game? Well that’s my challenge here right now. It’s not really matching pairs though, there are a few ‘killers’ scattered around and matching a hotel ‘guest’ with these will see them ‘killed’. Match 10 hotel guests without losing 10 to clear each level. It’s purely random and also insultingly easy at the same time. Let’s not forget of course, the fact that it’s incredible boring.

Balls and Blocks
Ben 3DX – 80 Points

It’s a fairly pretty game here with a basic concept. Use your big ball to push the little balls off the stage. Nice idea but pushing around the little balls seems like a pointless addition when the levels are enough of a challenge by themselves without having to get stupidly close to the edge. There’s not really much else to it really. It’s Super Monkey Ball with an artificial extra goal. Nice, but far from essential.

Track Architect
Victor Ortega – 80 Points

Trials. Yep it’s Budget Trials time with a little buggy, anti-gravity arrows and a weird habit of bouncing around on a perfectly flat surfaces. The Trials racing stuff works as nicely as you’d expect but the focus of the game is the track creation tool. Weirdly the pure 2D style makes the editor much easier to use than the Trials HD one. So basically here’s my thought, if you don’t have Trials HD yet, give this a shot.

Arrow Run
North Squard – 80 Points

Using the 360′s notoriously wonky and imprecise dpad the idea here is to press a sequence of directions before someone else or a computer opponent can. Nothing else here except mind-crushing boredom. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

15 Puzzle
Snowcap Games – 240 Points

Time for sliding tile puzzles. Very pretty sliding tile puzzles admittedly but still sliding tile puzzles. I can do this stuff on my desktop or in a browser. Why the hell would I pay 240 points to do it?

Hot Potato Online
Adam and Perusse – 400 Points

OK I’m in something of a moral dilemma here. All the profits from this game will go to Penny Arcade’s brilliant Child’s Play charity so if the game is turd then I’m going to come across as a dick for saying you shouldn’t give money to charity. However by the same token if I say you should buy it then I’m being overly forgiving for the sake of sick kids. Well screw that, this is a game about lobbing bombs around an arena trying to ensure either it explodes in the hands of or near to your enemies in order to score points or eliminate them. The inclusion of Xbox Live play is hugely encouraging as what would usually be a dull solo-fest should provide some heated multiplayer laughs as EVERYONE IS GOING TO BUY THIS GAME FOR CHILD’S PLAY, GOT IT?

Ninja Guardian
Phoenix Game Studios – 240 Points

Ninja time again. This time it’s about jumping up completely vertical levels slashing at enemies in order to save the environment from evil polluting shoguns. The premise is rather excellent and for the most part the gameplay holds up. The main problem I have is with the controls, the A button jumps at the start of the level, but A in mid-air attacks while double-jump is relegated to a trigger. This can get confusing in a fast based game where a single mistake means restarting a level. So the game is good, but the controls prevent me from giving a full blown recommendation.

Colotristar
Hacker Face – 240 Points

Puzzle time to finish up this week. Swap coloured stars around and form lines of 3 or more to have them disappear from the grid. However those stars aren’t replaced, so the puzzle style is more in-line with Peg Solitaire. By that token every move needs to be thought about and the grid analyzed in order to clear the grids. It’s a decent puzzle concept, but I don’t find it terribly fun. More hardened puzzle fans may well enjoy this as a change of pace though.

Oh man, a very very good week means an serious conflict over the game of the week spot. For it’s pure pisstake appeal however I am handing the trophy to Streets of Fury, I was honestly surprised how fluid and fun that game actually is.

Dream Build Play results start to come out this week hopefully. If you want to get started on a game for next year then check out XNA Creator’s Club or Kodu Game Lab. If you’re a developer who wants a bit more exposure for your game then feel free to send us a token, every game we get a token for will get £250 a full NG Review.