Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Today's demos...
Bangai-O HD: Bad demo. I've played the game on DC and DS before so I have a good sense of the mechanics--try to get big chains, use the hold-and-explode counter move to make big carnage, etc... but I guess I wanted a way to practice before really diving in because it's been a few years. If I pick tutorial I get a tutorial that's mostly about motion through a series of near-empty areas. If I pick the mission mode, I've thrown right in without really a clear objective or a good sense of what I should be doing. I think the gameplay and graphics and stuff are pretty great, but I can't imagine many new players would have a good experience with the demo.
Bankshot Billards 2: An older, top-down pool game. Lots of modes (more than Pool Nation), very clean but I guess a little boring graphics. I never really got the hang of the controls versus Pool Nation--it's easier to shoot because you just press A, but it's harder to shoot well. I liked all the modes. I like that it has a trick pool mode, that's really cool. The demo limits you to 2 minutes of playtime so most modes you can't play a full game.
Boulder Dash XL: What the hell is this? The remake graphics here are so incredibly garish. I don't really think that Boulder Dash is a classic anyway, but yikes these graphics. You can thankfully turn off the remake graphics, but when you do... you get another set of less garish but still totally gross pseudo-3d graphics. This really really doesn't work.
Call of Duty Classic: I've never played Call of Duty (1) before. I chuckled a little about how it still started with the same boot camp level, how when you die you still get the stupid "War Sux Lol" quotes from military figures. I only played a few levels of the campaign. There are no checkpoints, so I died in the second level like 10 minutes in, which was pretty frustrating. I'm assuming there was a mid-level save function that I missed or something. I didn't notice any infinite enemy waves spawning until I crossed a point, and I largely liked the level design. I notice you have limited health, which I don't think works in this game--since there are tons of health kits every 10-15 seconds, the only purpose of limited health seems to be preventing you from healing DURING a firefight as opposed to encouraging cautious play across the level. It felt like a circa-2002 or so game, which makes sense. $5 maybe, but not $15.
Centipede and Millipede: Not my favourite set of classic games to begin with. Basically you have a screen. At the top of the screen, a centipede made of many little sections spawns and runs down the screen Space Invaders style. There are gazoodles of mushrooms on the screen, which you can shoot and destroy. If the centipede hits a mushroom, he moves down a row... so the more mushrooms he hits, the faster he gets to the bottom. If you shoot a chunk of the centipede, it will die and the remaining chunks will operate autonomously. The remake graphics are fine, but the demo only lasts 30 seconds maybe. In a longer game where you do better it's about managing the mushroom field and trying to aggressively triage what you need to be shooting at any given second, but you don't see that in the demo. Again like Asteroids+Deluxe, Millipede is a sequel that doesn't really do much. I haven't played enough of either to have a preference. Millipede has DDT bombs you can shoot and a few other item/character changes (I remember special mushrooms that immediately send the centipede dashing downwards to the bottom of the screen, but I didn't see these in the demo)
Death Tank: I know this is held up to be a sort of classic real-time scorched earth/tank wars, but this demo doesn't show it. Your tank moves and shoots very sluggishly, aiming controls for shooting are not ideal, the landscapes don't look half as nice as the boxart of the game makes them look, and more to the point, it's a multiplayer-only game with a dead community. Pass. One of the first victims of launching at 1200 msp.
Retro City Rampage: I had two totally opposite reactions to this game. The first was that the quick and easy movement seemed like it would make for a pretty fun open world game to have a rampage in, like GTA1 and to a lesser extent GTA2. The second was that the game besides that seems pretty profoundly unfun. The jokes--references, really--come fast and furious and aren't really all that funny. The main plot seems to involve a bankrobber who murders Doctor Who and steals the Tardis and goes back in time or something. Or maybe it's a Back to the Future reference because when you go back in time you meet a guy who is clearly Doc Brown. The actual missions you play don't seem very engaging. If Hotline Miami says a lot by saying almost nothing, Retro City Rampage says almost nothing by saying a lot. I think I'd be willing to pick it up for 400 msp and just ignoring the dialogue and most of the main missions and just going on a rampage. The frame rate is very nice and clean, though, that's a good thing.
Rocket Knight Adventures: I never really got into Rocket Knight or Sparkster, but this was great. A nice little simple platformer, lots of loot to collect, good enemy designs and having flying + ground levels gives you some level variety. It did seem on the teaser page that the game has relatively few levels, so it's probably short, but there's replays for collectible stuff I guess. 1200 msp is a steep entry price.
Space Invaders Extreme: I've played Extreme on DS and this XBLA version seems to be a good port. For those not enlightened, Extreme is a Pac Man CE style remake of Space Invaders that both adds a lot of gameplay depth and improves the visuals. The gameplay depth encourages you to eliminate invaders in a particular order (row by row, column by column, colour by colour, shape by shape). Doing so gives you powerups and also allows you to shoot special UFOs which trigger FEVER MODE which allows you to rack up a big score. Easier to play it yourself than have it explained, but it works, basically.
Uno Rush: It's Uno, but you can lay more than one card at once, but you need to keep your hand organized left-to-right and you can only lay from the "top" of your hand. I don't really think it works as a game because it moves fast enough that you can't have any real strategy, only perfect or imperfect play, and ultimately it's still the same Uno randomness. I say stick to regular Uno.
Tiqal: Tetris, but with a wider playfield and your objective is to make squares of four dots of the same colour rather than full lines. Load times and interface response times are a little slow, which gives the whole thing a sluggish feel. The gameplay is fine but it's not really all that new of a territory. I don't think this would be in your top 10 arcade zen-trance score attack type games. Has a sort of Tiki Mask Amazon/south Pacific theme.
Trouble Witches Neo: 2D horizontal scrolling shmup where the risk-reward mechanic is to let enemy bullets get close to you, freeze them, and then kill the enemies. Didn't seem very difficult even if you didn't do any of that and just treated it as a straight shoot-em-up. Okay, there, I've said all the objective, descriptive stuff I'm going to say. Good god what a horrible aesthetic, stupid looking idiotic anime girls with dumb names and dumb clothes. Ugh. I played on mute but I could almost hear the shrill KAWAII DESU NO KYOOOOOOOT voices they no doubt had drilling through my skull. Safe to say, this is not my favourite chosen aesthetic. If you want a cartoony shoot em up, play Parodius.
Ugly Americans Apocalypsegeddon: Side-scrolling twin-stick type shooter based on a show or web series or something. The "joke" appears to be that the characters look stupid and the enemies look stupid. I had a gun that shot golf balls, and I kept being able to pick up other guns that shot, like, snowglobes and stuff. I could level up. I found a demon baby in the trash which I guess did something to help me. The boss I fought kept yelling catchphrases. As a game this sort of just seemed like a passive way to kill time, nothing really grabbed me. I can tell that it was designed for fans of whatever this is.
FWIW People should feel like it's okay to make a new thread for a particular deal if one happens that's notable. New threads for new news, of course. I don't really think that 50% off RDR DLC for the 19th time or avatar tattoos 33% off is really a notable deal, but if it's the first major discount on a popular game or really interesting stuff, yeah, absolutely choose to make a new thread for it.
(Hence there being a thread about the GoD sale!)
The only reason why I steered away from weekly threads is that I sort of feel like a weekly thread that gets 30 replies is not very useful at all in terms of the stated goal of having new threads--expanding the audience that can participate in the discussion by making it easier to get involved. Let's be totally honest, XBLA is in "decline" as part of a natural end-of-generation decline. It has been for a few years. You can see it bigtime in the length of threads about every game on the platform, the number of games that go unnoticed, etc.
Another reason why we discourage weekly threads is because then someone needs to do a thread every week and it's a bit of a burden. kassatsu does the PSN ones reliably (in part I think because he runs a PSN website and so there's synnergy between the two things, both in terms of self-promotion LOL and in terms of cutting down on effort involved). But even with the Nintendo threads being monthly, there's still been 4 or 5 switchovers in terms of who does the threads and what their format is. We want stuff that's self-maintaining and self-moderating
Bangai-O HD: Bad demo. I've played the game on DC and DS before so I have a good sense of the mechanics--try to get big chains, use the hold-and-explode counter move to make big carnage, etc... but I guess I wanted a way to practice before really diving in because it's been a few years. If I pick tutorial I get a tutorial that's mostly about motion through a series of near-empty areas. If I pick the mission mode, I've thrown right in without really a clear objective or a good sense of what I should be doing. I think the gameplay and graphics and stuff are pretty great, but I can't imagine many new players would have a good experience with the demo.
Bankshot Billards 2: An older, top-down pool game. Lots of modes (more than Pool Nation), very clean but I guess a little boring graphics. I never really got the hang of the controls versus Pool Nation--it's easier to shoot because you just press A, but it's harder to shoot well. I liked all the modes. I like that it has a trick pool mode, that's really cool. The demo limits you to 2 minutes of playtime so most modes you can't play a full game.
Boulder Dash XL: What the hell is this? The remake graphics here are so incredibly garish. I don't really think that Boulder Dash is a classic anyway, but yikes these graphics. You can thankfully turn off the remake graphics, but when you do... you get another set of less garish but still totally gross pseudo-3d graphics. This really really doesn't work.
Call of Duty Classic: I've never played Call of Duty (1) before. I chuckled a little about how it still started with the same boot camp level, how when you die you still get the stupid "War Sux Lol" quotes from military figures. I only played a few levels of the campaign. There are no checkpoints, so I died in the second level like 10 minutes in, which was pretty frustrating. I'm assuming there was a mid-level save function that I missed or something. I didn't notice any infinite enemy waves spawning until I crossed a point, and I largely liked the level design. I notice you have limited health, which I don't think works in this game--since there are tons of health kits every 10-15 seconds, the only purpose of limited health seems to be preventing you from healing DURING a firefight as opposed to encouraging cautious play across the level. It felt like a circa-2002 or so game, which makes sense. $5 maybe, but not $15.
Centipede and Millipede: Not my favourite set of classic games to begin with. Basically you have a screen. At the top of the screen, a centipede made of many little sections spawns and runs down the screen Space Invaders style. There are gazoodles of mushrooms on the screen, which you can shoot and destroy. If the centipede hits a mushroom, he moves down a row... so the more mushrooms he hits, the faster he gets to the bottom. If you shoot a chunk of the centipede, it will die and the remaining chunks will operate autonomously. The remake graphics are fine, but the demo only lasts 30 seconds maybe. In a longer game where you do better it's about managing the mushroom field and trying to aggressively triage what you need to be shooting at any given second, but you don't see that in the demo. Again like Asteroids+Deluxe, Millipede is a sequel that doesn't really do much. I haven't played enough of either to have a preference. Millipede has DDT bombs you can shoot and a few other item/character changes (I remember special mushrooms that immediately send the centipede dashing downwards to the bottom of the screen, but I didn't see these in the demo)
Death Tank: I know this is held up to be a sort of classic real-time scorched earth/tank wars, but this demo doesn't show it. Your tank moves and shoots very sluggishly, aiming controls for shooting are not ideal, the landscapes don't look half as nice as the boxart of the game makes them look, and more to the point, it's a multiplayer-only game with a dead community. Pass. One of the first victims of launching at 1200 msp.
Retro City Rampage: I had two totally opposite reactions to this game. The first was that the quick and easy movement seemed like it would make for a pretty fun open world game to have a rampage in, like GTA1 and to a lesser extent GTA2. The second was that the game besides that seems pretty profoundly unfun. The jokes--references, really--come fast and furious and aren't really all that funny. The main plot seems to involve a bankrobber who murders Doctor Who and steals the Tardis and goes back in time or something. Or maybe it's a Back to the Future reference because when you go back in time you meet a guy who is clearly Doc Brown. The actual missions you play don't seem very engaging. If Hotline Miami says a lot by saying almost nothing, Retro City Rampage says almost nothing by saying a lot. I think I'd be willing to pick it up for 400 msp and just ignoring the dialogue and most of the main missions and just going on a rampage. The frame rate is very nice and clean, though, that's a good thing.
Rocket Knight Adventures: I never really got into Rocket Knight or Sparkster, but this was great. A nice little simple platformer, lots of loot to collect, good enemy designs and having flying + ground levels gives you some level variety. It did seem on the teaser page that the game has relatively few levels, so it's probably short, but there's replays for collectible stuff I guess. 1200 msp is a steep entry price.
Space Invaders Extreme: I've played Extreme on DS and this XBLA version seems to be a good port. For those not enlightened, Extreme is a Pac Man CE style remake of Space Invaders that both adds a lot of gameplay depth and improves the visuals. The gameplay depth encourages you to eliminate invaders in a particular order (row by row, column by column, colour by colour, shape by shape). Doing so gives you powerups and also allows you to shoot special UFOs which trigger FEVER MODE which allows you to rack up a big score. Easier to play it yourself than have it explained, but it works, basically.
Uno Rush: It's Uno, but you can lay more than one card at once, but you need to keep your hand organized left-to-right and you can only lay from the "top" of your hand. I don't really think it works as a game because it moves fast enough that you can't have any real strategy, only perfect or imperfect play, and ultimately it's still the same Uno randomness. I say stick to regular Uno.
Tiqal: Tetris, but with a wider playfield and your objective is to make squares of four dots of the same colour rather than full lines. Load times and interface response times are a little slow, which gives the whole thing a sluggish feel. The gameplay is fine but it's not really all that new of a territory. I don't think this would be in your top 10 arcade zen-trance score attack type games. Has a sort of Tiki Mask Amazon/south Pacific theme.
Trouble Witches Neo: 2D horizontal scrolling shmup where the risk-reward mechanic is to let enemy bullets get close to you, freeze them, and then kill the enemies. Didn't seem very difficult even if you didn't do any of that and just treated it as a straight shoot-em-up. Okay, there, I've said all the objective, descriptive stuff I'm going to say. Good god what a horrible aesthetic, stupid looking idiotic anime girls with dumb names and dumb clothes. Ugh. I played on mute but I could almost hear the shrill KAWAII DESU NO KYOOOOOOOT voices they no doubt had drilling through my skull. Safe to say, this is not my favourite chosen aesthetic. If you want a cartoony shoot em up, play Parodius.
Ugly Americans Apocalypsegeddon: Side-scrolling twin-stick type shooter based on a show or web series or something. The "joke" appears to be that the characters look stupid and the enemies look stupid. I had a gun that shot golf balls, and I kept being able to pick up other guns that shot, like, snowglobes and stuff. I could level up. I found a demon baby in the trash which I guess did something to help me. The boss I fought kept yelling catchphrases. As a game this sort of just seemed like a passive way to kill time, nothing really grabbed me. I can tell that it was designed for fans of whatever this is.
FWIW People should feel like it's okay to make a new thread for a particular deal if one happens that's notable. New threads for new news, of course. I don't really think that 50% off RDR DLC for the 19th time or avatar tattoos 33% off is really a notable deal, but if it's the first major discount on a popular game or really interesting stuff, yeah, absolutely choose to make a new thread for it.
(Hence there being a thread about the GoD sale!)
The only reason why I steered away from weekly threads is that I sort of feel like a weekly thread that gets 30 replies is not very useful at all in terms of the stated goal of having new threads--expanding the audience that can participate in the discussion by making it easier to get involved. Let's be totally honest, XBLA is in "decline" as part of a natural end-of-generation decline. It has been for a few years. You can see it bigtime in the length of threads about every game on the platform, the number of games that go unnoticed, etc.
Another reason why we discourage weekly threads is because then someone needs to do a thread every week and it's a bit of a burden. kassatsu does the PSN ones reliably (in part I think because he runs a PSN website and so there's synnergy between the two things, both in terms of self-promotion LOL and in terms of cutting down on effort involved). But even with the Nintendo threads being monthly, there's still been 4 or 5 switchovers in terms of who does the threads and what their format is. We want stuff that's self-maintaining and self-moderating
