Today's demos:
Choplifter HD: I thought this was great, and I'm definitely going to buy it at some point. It's a 2.5d helicopter game where you fly across levels, pick up people to rescue, and fly back to base. You shoot at enemies on your plane, but also on a plane further in the foreground, so you rotate in pseudo-3d while moving in 2d. You need to balance quickly getting to, for example, injured people who need an evac while avoiding crashing your chopper, landing too hard, decapitating people trying to get on the chopper, etc. Really cool, and the up-sell screen mentions free DLC. Seemed like it had a lot of content.
Crazy Mouse: A single-screen 2d uh... platformer? Puzzle game? Mario Party clone? You're a mouse and you compete against other mice to get... uh.. cheese or something? It's really really slow, poorly explained. I'm told this is made by an independent chinese team and best of luck to them, but they really didn't make a good product here.
Crystal Quest: This is a remake of a classic(?) arcade game. It's a single screen 2d twin-stick shooter+avoider game where you pilot an orb and have to collect crystals before you can exit the screen. Really slick updated presentation, not as nice as Geometry Wars but much better than some of the other updates. I liked the risk-reward element; the longer you stay in a level, the more enemies spawn, but there's also an incentive to get all the crystals before going after bonus multiplier stuff. Definitely buying.
Domino Master: Surprisingly well presented domino game. I love that when you put your domino on the table there's a little shake all over the screen, like you're really slamming the domino down. Features 5 or 6 different modes. I'm not really into dominos, but this seemed pretty well made.
Double Dragon Neon: What. The. Hell. It's like double dragon, only re-imagined as this ultra 1980s camp thing. This has probably one of the strongest design visions I've ever seen in a game. Everything is 80s. You get cassette tapes that enhance your moves. Everything is neon pink and bright colours. There's a dedicated hi-5 button for when you play co-op. Very well animated. Pretty deep fighting system, they really worked to make the game justify existing in 2012. I'm not huge on beat-em-ups and I found it a little slow so I probably won't be buying, but I'm crazy impressed that they went through the trouble.
Dungeon Fighter Live: 2d side-scrolling beat-em-up based on some sort of web game or something? I had to skip through about a billion pages of story to actually play any game. There are three classes, and they seem to play pretty differently. I found the controls too complicated and the enemies took too many hits to die. I really wasn't digging the art style (although it was technically nice) or the story elements. Not buying.
Frogger Hyper Deluxe Edition: This is a Pac-Man CE style remake of Frogger, except they turned it into a party game with different modes. Only one mode is available in the demo and it's a multiplayer mode where you need to try to "paint" the road and river as you hop along and the person who paints the most wins. The presentation was nice, but the demo didn't give me enough to go on.
Frogger 2: This was a terrible, terrible "sequel" to Frogger. It features nice-enough but harmless 2D art and big, scrolling levels... but you're slow as hell, the sounds are infuriating, the level design wasn't very nice, and it's inexplicably rendered in very narrow tate with huge borders. Barf.
Gin Rummy: It's Gin Rummy. I found it a little slow and the presentation wasn't as lively as Uno, unfortunately. Also, you can sort the cards in your hand 4 different ways, but the game doesn't tell you what those ways are.
Gripshift: This seemed like a great little kart type game with a really cool "challenge" mode. The challenge mode gives you a little mini-course and forces you to a) beat a certain time limit, b) collect a bunch of junk, and c) go crazy-offroad to find a hidden token. Liked the grafitti kind of style. Liked the music. Loved the physics and being able to fly my car off crazy angles. I think Joy Ride Turbo is enough in the genre for me, but I really liked this.
Happy Tree Friends: Kind of like a Lemmings-type puzzle game in that there's a character you don't directly control and you intervene to clear obstacles for it as it moves through the level. Controls didn't feel very precise. I have no idea about the cartoon this is based on. The odd juxtaposition of bloody violence and cute characters was funny. Felt too slow.
Haunted House: A top-down exploration game that mostly takes place in the dark, really crummy production values. Feels like a movie license game it's pretty rough. I didn't play the Atari original.
Marathon: Durandal: One of Bungie's first games. Reminded me a lot of some of the weird mid-90s FPS games like Rise of the Triad and especially Star Wars: Dark Forces. Level design seemed kind of neat. Demo was short, only one level. I would consider buying this.
Matt Hazard BBB: 2d Contra-style shoot-em-up. The humour of the original game doesn't translate to this game. It was very busy, because enemies are constantly coming in from the background or foreground planes. Didn't like it.
MLB Stickball: This is very weird. You play baseball in an urban environment while holding a pool cue instead of a baseball bat. You get bases by hitting trees and cars or just hitting the ball, rather than running. Your team is made up of one MLB professional and a bunch of randoms. You have huge heads with, like, early-PS2 level face textures. The baseball itself felt decent, but I don't know much about baseball. Is this a thing people actually do in the real world? I don't think I'm going to buy this, but it was fun enough.
Mutant Storm Empire: Exploration based twin-stick shooter. Has a risk-reward element. Each enemy has a colour, you get more points if you kill enemies that are the same colour as the last enemies you killed. But if you try to only shoot enemies of a certain colour, more enemies will spawn, which makes it more dangerous to you. Seemed pretty primitive, I understand this was an early game. Wow there are a lot of twin-stick shooters.
Naughty Bear PiP: Very low framerate. My bear got killed about 10 seconds into the first level and then I got whisked to a stat customization page and store to buy costumes. Honestly the demo was pretty bad. I have no idea if the game is any different, I was hoping for something that felt more like Hitman?
Poker Smash: Poker meets Tetris meets Bejeweled. Very cool. Not sure if I'll buy it, but very cool.
Real Steel: More deep and less timing based than Punch-out, but holy shit are the robots ugly. I assume this is a movie license. Not really my thing.
Rush'n Attack: Ex-Patriot: This is a weird one. I liked it a lot. It's a 2d exploration platformer--doesn't seem to be a Metroidvania since there's no unlockable abilities really--with a stealth and melee focused combat system. You get more points for stealth killing enemies, which you can do in many ways. Demo felt great, lasted a while. And then I checked the reviews, and they're all uniformly negative. "Game's too short", "Totally buggy", "No variety"... I was just about ready to pull the trigger on a purchase before I saw that.
Scramble: Primitive arcade 2d shmup / avoider. You have a limited amount of gas which you need to replenish by bombing gas tanks on the ground. But you can't drop bombs straight, they move forward as the screen scrolls, so there's a timing element in terms of that. It's an enhanced port with a sort of fancy background but otherwise seems to be a straight old release. Felt late-70s.
Shred Nebula: Top-down 2d
twin-stick shmup actually you shoot with a button instead of with a stick. The tutorial had tons of nonsense text and it seemed like there was a ton of stuff you needed to manage without any corresponding death. Font and text presentation was terrible. Pass.
Time Pilot: Primitve arcade 2d shmup. You can scroll the screen in both axes. The background is plain. Enemies spawn everywhere. You shoot them. You get points for running over or rescuing parachuters. I didn't get much out of it, felt late-70s.
Wits and Wagers: A trivia game. You get a question, you give a price is right "closest without going over" answer, then you see everyone else's answers and bet based on who you think got it right. The presentation was abysmal and I felt the game wasn't really all that engaging because of the basic mechanic.
Word Puzzle: Word search, egyptian themed
Xevious: top-down vertically scrolling shmup. I've played this before, but not on XBLA. The XBLA version doesn't have much of a presentation update. Like Scramble, you can shoot flying stuff or bomb the ground, but bombing is pretty hard to get the hang of because of the timing element. Pretty simple, I'm sure there's better examples of the genre on XBLA.
Yo-ho Kablammo: A 2d competitive pirate-themed multiplayer arcade game. You blow up the other ship and collect coins. Your guns are on either side of your boat so you need to sort of wheel around to aim at the other guy. Presentation sucked and I never got the hang of the controls, it just wasn't all that interesting with two players.
Sales+Specials isn't in Canada.