Today's demos
All Zombies Must Die: Cartoony top-down twin stick zombie shooter. This one is a little more polished than the others I've played, which I think reflects the way the genre has gotten saturated over a few years. I liked having an actual objective besides survival, I didn't really like that zombies took multiple shotgun shots.
Backbreaker Vengeance: This is so cool, why do I like this?! It's a football game where you can't play football. Instead you have three arcade style mini-games set in a football arena full of fans. One involves dodging tacklers and getting to the end-zone, one involves tackling a runner while dodging tacklers, and the third one wasn't unlocked in the demo. Really beautiful presentation, great physics, and I loved basically solving "puzzles" of trying to run over point zones while still completing my objective. Also there are showboating buttons, which if you press before you get into the endzone help you rack up big points but slow you down and leave you vulnerable to tackling. I had such a good time with this.
Faery: Legends of Avalon You play a fairy. You fly (flying controls are quite good, I thought) in a sort of small but open ARPG world. I really liked the world design. And then when you run into enemies, you start fighting in the world's most basic and slow turn-based jRPG battle system. The dialog is crummy and a poor man's version of a BioWare good/evil dialogue wheel (when you pick good dialogue, the game literally says "<the person you're talking to> loves you a little more"). When I finished the demo, I thought "This has got to be 400 points, I'm totally buying it even though the combat sucks"... and then it was
600 points for some reason. I'll pick it up on a sale.
Gel: Set & Match: This is a block puzzler with nice presentation--the right stick makes your character, some sort of anteater, dance--and some pretty novel mechanics. You need to push or throw blocks to make combinations of at least four blocks of the same colour... but you can also kick a block across the field, and if it brushes past other blocks to make the combination, it keeps moving but after a few seconds all the blocks involved including the one you kicked will be eliminated. But this allows you to chain combos by using the same block in multiple sets. There's also a mode where the screen scrolls left-to-right as a bulldozer chases you. If the bulldozer gets any blocks, you lose or lose points or something, so you need to eliminate the blocks as you go. Be careful not to make combinations of 4 and then find out that there's one remaining leftover block, because you'll have to sling it with you until you get to another set of the same colour. I liked this, but I think after Polar Panic I'm pretty much done with block puzzlers so I didn't buy it.
Golf Tee It Up: A clean, nice looking golf game. Features the three-click control scheme and cartoony non-avatar characters. Only had a few courses. I had a good time on the courses I played but it didn't really grab me.
Gyromancer: This had a bad tutorial but I heard it's a better game than Puzzle Quest. Basically it's Puzzle Quest with a Bejeweled Twist mechanic instead of a Bejeweled mechanic, and it's Square Enix and Popcap working together. Like I said, bad tutorial. 1200 msp. Would pay 400 msp to try.
Hard Corps Uprising: Contra with anime graphics, multiple characters, and purchasable upgrades. I had a really great time with this. I haven't played a real Contra-like since Contra 4, I think (unless you count the original Rush'n Attack that I reviewed above). My first run through of the demo I game over'd, which is pretty pathetic. I then used the cash I had accumulated--the demo accumulates cash at a 10x rate so you can demo all the unlocks--to buy a bunch of unlocks, including extra health bars. My second run through of the demo I got through it without dying once. I'm not sure if my performance improved, the unlocks made it easier, or both. I will definitely buy this the next time it goes on sale. I don't have a hope in hell of getting 200/200 on this.
Jeremy McGrath's Offroad: It's an off-road game. It looks decent. It had a weird scoring system--you get points for destroying fences and signs, but the game never tells you this so ordinarily you try to avoid them. It was a little weird that when I drove through the desert, I drove right through cactuses and stuff without damaging them, made the game feel like an old N64 game, clipping through scenery. Controls felt tight. Who is Jeremy McGrath? I liked that just like real offroading I had a voice telling me about upcoming turns. I assumed the voice was Jeremy McGrath. But then I passed him in the race, so he can't be in two places at once... or can he? There are multiple classes of vehicle but they're all locked in the demo. I was a little disappointed that only one track was available, I checked the list and the other ones look very interesting. I was more interested in this than I thought I'd be, but not enough to buy it.
Missile Command: Boy, this sucks. A lot. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I thought the aiming worked differently than it did. The updated graphics are absolutely repulsive, and you for some reason shoot chain lightning (!! from your Tesla Coils?!?) at the oncoming bombs. Classic mode is also available, and much less repulsive. This and Battlezone have been the two weakest classic arcade games I've played during this project.
Moon Diver: I'm not really sure how to classify this one. It's a Square Enix published game developed by feelplus (technical devs for Lost Odyssey, devs of Mindjack). It's a 2d side-scrolling action platformer where you mostly have melee attacks, so it's not quite a Contra-style game. The combat isn't robust enough to call it a beat-em-up or a combo brawler. It's got a dark style. It's got really really repetitive enemies. You can level up but it's not really clear what levelling up does. The level was very very long, too long. I especially hated that every minute or two I'd be stuck in a little combat arena which spawned hundreds of the same kind of butterfly enemy or standard standing-still grunt. The enemy variety sucked and the enemy AI sucked. The music was grating power-metal type stuff, and it was mixed way too loud; the volume setting I used for every other game basically blew out my ears in this game. So despite the fact that I've said nothing but negative stuff about the game, when I got to the end of the demo I kinda felt like purchasing it. Greater than the sum of its parts?
Rocketmen Axis of Evil: Top-down twin-stick shooter where you can play as Captain Planet (at least that's who I played as!). Comic book style story presentation which droned on and on. Not particularly engaging, definitely not the best of the top-down twin-stick shooters I've played.
Scrap Metal: Top-down racing game with a variety of modes. This was great. Controls felt great, graphics were great, seems to have a ton of content, I can see it getting pretty challenging, the different modes felt great. Actually at some points it almost felt like Blast Corps, which is a very good thing indeed. Loved being able to unlock and upgrade different cars. Would have bought at 800 msp, it was 1200 msp.
Tecmo Bowl Throwback: It's a very authentic 3d remake of Tecmo Bowl. So authentic that you can press a button and drop to 2d mode seamlessly. I love how switching transitions from 16:9 to 4:3 without impacting the gameplay. So, very good job on the remake. I don't particularly like the game though. Definitely the least playable least enjoyable football game I've played on XBLA.
The Warriors: SB: Terrible 2d-with-3d-models side-scrolling beat-em-up. No combat depth, overlong and boring levels, ugly models that take up way too much of the screen. Really didn't like this.
TNT Racers: Top-down cartoony racer. It played pretty well but there's a weird design decision--if a car leaves the screen, it is immediately killed/eliminated. So winning doesn't require completing a segment, it mostly just requires getting enough ahead of other cars to win. Sometimes segments would end in like 3 seconds. And every event is first to <x> points, so you play the same segment 4-5 times minimum. I did kind of like the powerups, the oil slick and smoke spray were particularly satisfying.
Vigilante 8 Arcade: Vigilante 8 was always a poor man's Twisted Metal. This is a poor man's Twisted Metal. Enemies have too much health, the levels are too big. There's no satisfying way to get behind an enemy and shoot him-- you basically need to run away from enemies and just spam the hell out of your weapon. If you pick up, say, rockets, you'll get like 20+ of them so you end up just wailing on the fire button the second an enemy is in your sights. Has a sort of 60s vibe to it. Didn't enjoy.
The Watchmen: The End is Nigh: This is a very visually slick 3d beat-em-up with fairly simple combat and basically no collectibles. The demo had a 30 minute timer but cut me off when I still had 18 minutes left (I guess I got to the end of the demo zone?). You play as Rorschach or Nite Owl--who would pick Nite Owl? You fight endless hordes of identical dudes. The characters quip over the action, but there's none of the writing or politics of the original or the film. Locations were repetitive and pretty simple. Despite this, I enjoyed it enough to pick it up. I remember seeing the PS3 version of BOTH Watchmen games + the movie on blu-ray at a Blockbuster for 4.99 used a number of years ago, so I figured this would be 400 points, being only half the game. Nope. 800 points? Nope.
1600 points. For half a game. What the hell.
Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3: This is apparently a sequel to a series I never played. It's a top-down twin-stick shooter. It was better than Rocketmen and had nice menu design. Shooting felt pretty good, but the vehicle segment in the demo was terrible with awful controls. Didn't pique my interest enough to buy it.
Wrecked: Revenge Revisited: So it has come to this. The worst demo on Xbox Live Arcade. Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is a car racing game where the objective is to wreck your opponents. The single player mode is not available in the demo. The multiplayer mode is dead. Thankfully, I have more time than common sense, so I decided to host a multiplayer game. After 10 minutes or so, a random wandered in, so I started a match. At first we raced a little bit, but he ended up machine-gunning me to death and scored a point. It's first to 10 or something, so we went again. This time neither of us really raced at all, both just trying to get weapons powerups and turning around and shooting each other. I got him. The next time he spawned near a powerup and I didn't, so I drove off. The second I got more than a screen separation from him, he died. All subsequent matches he kept going for powerups and I didn't. I won 11-1 or 10-1 or whatever. Now... is this a good game? I don't know. But based on the experience you just read about, would you have bought it?
Zombie Wranglers: Very crummy 3d open-world-ish zombie hunting and ghostbusting game. Stiff controls. Enemies have no AI and mostly rely on swarming you. The world is kind of gross looking. I hate the way you move. There is basically no response either on your side or the enemy side to being hurt so it feels very half-baked. I think this is a relic of devs trying to do a 3d game during the days where the development constraints on XBLA made it impossible to do a 3d game.
Audio is horribly wrong on both of these. I have no idea what they did. But the music was always a highlight for me. TRON is one of my favorite games and the physical arcade machine I've left high scores on the most to boot. I think I've only ever gotten to FORTRAN, though.
LOL Backbone
Any tips for the tank level? Playing the demo I had no trouble mastering the first level of the other three events, but the tank level is very tough for me. Even when I manage to shoot the other tank, he shoots me at the same time. There's no way to hide. :/
