Today's demos...
Age of Booty: It's a real-time strategy type game where you drive a pirate ship, capture towns, get resources, and upgrade stuff. Since it had hexes, it felt like a digital board game. It worked well enough, although it seemed a little attrition-based for my liking--you just kind of slog away at stuff and eventually break through. I would have liked more active management. I played online (the demo gives you 2 days of online play). Online play seemed a little more dynamic, but I got partnered with a terrible partner. Partners collect resources separately, but share them when it comes to spending for upgrades. So my partner sat at base and immediately upgraded his ship the second an upgrade was available, but didn't do anything else to play the game or help out. Meanwhile, my puny ship never got an upgrade, and so when the other team sensibly worked together to improve, we got crushed. What a jerk. I think it was a young kid but I still sent a message saying that hogging the power ups and not helping out isn't very nice.
Alien Breed 2: It's exactly like Alien Breed 1, a low-impact middling twin-stick shooter. The demo for this one did feature a turret section and a section where the camera was a little different, so it looks like they learned a little bit, but still quite dull and samey.
Babel Rising: It's a sort of tower defence type game where you're the tower, if that makes any sense. A constant onslaught of enemies is trying to get to a goal and you have to use god powers (lightning, fire, boulders, earthquakes, etc) to stop them before they get there. It ramps up a little slow in the demo and the survival mode didn't seem to ramp up much faster, so I feel like it'd be pretty dull. I noticed there are only 2000 people on the leaderboard.
BC Rearmed 2: It's Bionic Commando with jumping. But not really, because your jumping doesn't do much. It felt like a more robust experience than Bionic Commando and the level design seemed different. I liked the weather effects. Shooting still felt crummy. The demo was a bit too short to convince me it justified spending 800 msp to buy another Bionic Commando game, let alone the 1200 msp that the game costs. I know Capcom regrets not making the original 1200 msp, but compensating by making this one 1200 msp was a bad move.
Blade Kitten: It's a 2d platformer. It's based on a webcomic. The character is a cat girl. Most of the voice acting is one-line meme level stuff. The first level, which is the demo, easily lasts 20 minutes--it's just enormous and mostly empty with very little going on. It just felt like a slog. Hearing the same 2 or 3 one-liners from the enemies was so shrill.
Capcom Arcade Cabinet: 1943: This brought back bowling alley memories. It's only a quick demo, not long enough for me to consider buying it, but this is still a classic simple 80s-era shmup. I love the disappointment the game gives you if you fail to destroy your objective. Very disappointed dad.
Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Avenger: This is some very bizarre top-down beat-em-up. It felt really really bad, not sure why they put this game in the trial.
Capcom Arcade Cabinet: Black Tiger: This seemed like a robust exploration platform action game, like Magic Sword but with more going on. Unfortunately I found it a bit unforgiving and overwhelming as the demo limits you to one continue and I died pretty near instantly. I feel like this had the most promise of the three games, but since I've never played it before it wasn't able to hook me. In general I think a lot of these arcade port titles are not trying to attract a new audience with their demos, just get old fans to buy it. Too bad, there's an opportunity to attract a new audience if you just
try
Crazy Machines Elements: A simpler, more linear, uglier Incredible Machine. I actually mean that in a good way. I mean, it's really ugly and cheap, and the puzzles presented only have one solution, but it's mechanically very similar and it evokes the same mood. I think I'd rather TIM on GOG, but still a good time. I'd maybe buy this for 400 msp.
Droplitz: Drops drop from the top of the screen, you rotate various shaped pipes to make a path to the bottom, I never felt like I was fully in control and the presentation was pretty sterile in comparison to the creeping ooze of, say, Pipe Dream. Didn't do anything for me.
Deadliest Warrior Legends: It's Deadliest Warrior except with legenedary battle leaders rather than randoms from history. I played as Vlad the Impaler. The UI is a lot better than the previous game. I also liked the levels better--they had pits you could push people into. Pushing Alexander the Great into a THIS IS SPARTA style death pit is awesome. I still am not convinced that this is a
good fighting game, and I think Bushido Blade did "realism" and targeted damage better, but I had a good enough time.
Defenders of Ardania: Enormous file size and long load times. It's a top-down fantasy themed tower defence / tower offence game "set in the Majesty universe". I've played Majesty, but really, is the fanbase that strong and the universe that developed that this was necessary? The tower
defence elements of this game seemed pretty good to me, but then you need to send your own soldiers to conquer the enemy, and this sucked. It felt like total attrition. No combination of units seemed effective at breaking through enemy defences, even in these earliest campaigns, so I mostly just threw piles of units at it. Every so often one or two would break through and VERY SLOWLY drain the enemy building's HP. You can only pick from 5 units at the start, but I tried every sort and in every order, and nothing really worked. My defences held up well, though, so I'd win in the end, it'd just take forever. Wish I had a better sense for how the offence side would work.
Earthworm Jim HD: It seems to be a reasonably competent port of EWJ in HD. It's been a while since I've played and I don't think I really got the hang of the controls that well in the demo. Tallarico's music held up well, and there's obvious character and flavour to the game right from the beginning. The reviews seem to mostly say "It's a good remake of a unique but iffy game" which is basically what I feel about the original.
Garou MOW: I haven't played an SNK fighting game in ten years and I haven't played that many at all. The demo gives you two characters and you can play two stages with each. I liked the art, which felt like early 32-bit 2d--definitely better than the SNES, anyway. Characters seemed to control well, I like that the demo made the move lists available, and it feels like there's depth to the combat system, which seems pretty defensive and oriented around timed counters and openings. I like that you get a grade at the end of every round. I replayed the demo twice with each character. So for a 2d fighting game, I liked this a lot. I wish I knew more about the genre to be able to get a sense for what was unique here.
Puddle: It's a puzzle-platform game where you're a bunch of watery liquid and you tilt the world to encourage it to flow through pipes and around articles. The presentation is a little dark and dreary and the game feels a little limiting. I was especially frustrated that the water didn't really cling together, so just generally as I went through the level some of the water got ahead of the rest, it was very difficult to keep everything together. I've only played one other water puzzle game, Fluidity, and Fluidity was definitely the better of the two.
Sonic 4 Episode 1: Holy shit this is ugly. Man, people complain that Nintendo's overly clean CG Mario is bland, but Sonic takes the cake. This is one of the worst regular->CG model translations I've ever seen. They kept the stupid homing attack from the 3d Sonics, only it's a 2d Sonic. The level seemed to have some branching although not a lot--I played through twice, once trying to take the top path (typically the hardest but most rewarding path in a Sonic game) and once trying to take the bottom (typically the scrub path). The game claimed you could get a bonus stage if you finished the level with 50 rings or more and jumped through a ring, but I finished with 180 rings and couldn't find it. You get one act in the demo. I haven't played most of the later 2D Sonics (the GBA/DS ones), but this seemed pretty poop to me.
Sonic 4 Episode 2: So of course I downloaded the next one. Yay, a hideous Tails. You start in a winter level that has a casino in the background but it's not a casino level... I think maybe they've run out of themes here. Tails and Sonic can combine in a few ways depending on context, but combining wasn't really useful in the demo and sort of mostly got in the way. The level had less branching than usual and felt linear. The demo cut off mid-level, which I thought was weird. I played again and got further in the level and then it cut off again. But there didn't seem to be a consistent time that it cut off. The best moment was an avalanche, but I already played an avalanche level in Sonic 3. Meh. Also poop.
Space Invaders Infinity Gene: It's Space Invaders with super stylized freaky hollow polygon line enemies and trippy effects and different enemies and some more modern shmup flourishes and then after every level you evolve new abilities and at one part it was a 3d shmup with a behind-the-ship camera angle wtf. I think Space Invaders Extreme is the more natural evolution of the two, this was really surreal. I didn't dislike it though.
Super Contra: Definitely liked this less than Contra. Still pretty ugly (ugly filter, ugly original graphics with ugly backgrounds). One thing I noticed about this one was that as I moved I got totally swarmed by enemies running from the left or right doing nothing, so I constantly had to move a few steps, maintain my perimeter, shoot left, shooter right, and then move again. Made it felt like a slog, like the original Rush'n Attack did. I never played this game when it first came out so I can't speak to the appeal for long-term fans.
(I think I have 2 or 3 days left and then I'll actually have played every XBLA demo--I don't plan on giving reviews of the stuff I already purchased before now or on another platform, so that's a huge chunk. Coming up there's a ton of near-identical fighters and I'm not really sure if it's worth demoing them. I'm not fighter-literate enough to know the difference between them, the demos all roundly suck because they're limited to only a few characters for a few rounds. I'll probably still do it, but who knows? I will be saving the remaining Kinect games for last)
The last bit is because you think you need to play on the defense.
You don't!
You have to be aggressive and kill lots of creeps + opponents, then you level up faster and become more powerful.
I basically found that I couldn't kill opponents. I could wail away at them, but by the time I got half their health back they'd run back to base and I couldn't chase through the turrets. I confess I probably wasn't killing little creatures as often as I should have.
