dancrane212
Member
Just added the game to my queue, for a buck I'll give it a shot.
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Xbox LIVE Indie Games - APRIL 2012 (We are all fools)
- Thread starter OnPoint
- Start date
Just added the game to my queue, for a buck I'll give it a shot.
My only warning is that the basic game itself is a bit simple and similar to the 48 Chambers game but with more collecting and exploring within a single chamber. Also there are some moments and mechanics where the movement gets a little bit rough around the edges, but it's easy to overlook it. Just want to lower your expectation from sky high to somewhere reasonable 
toythatkills
Member
Weird, I played this earlier and thought it was fucking terrible. I can't believe how during the development of the game they failed to notice exactly how fun it wasn't. The momentum of the character is just completely insane, it's like when you're running on ice in a dungeon in a videogame except the entire game is like that. Nobody has ever liked walking in ice dungeons. So you're constantly slipping into spikes and stuff and you can't even stop yourself. Then it starts hiding spikes inside destructable blocks that you have to go through so that not only can you not avoid them, you can't even see them. That's when I stopped. Absolutely awful. The gameplay has no redeeming features whatsoever, and for that guy to call it perfect is just utterly insane! Hopefully this helps lower expectations.
48 Chambers is far, far better.
The momentum thing is handled diffently in both games, pretty much the only tricky part in Septipus is that you have to hold backwards when hurtling off a moving platform or you will fly into spikes. The game is only an hour or less if you are good...I didn't figure out what the diamonds are for...the ending was pretty surreal, a little on meme side of humor but full blown ending (xblig > me3 it seems)
MikeHaggar
Member
gotta agree with toy here. i wasn't digging this one either for exactly the same reasons.
toythatkills
Member
Yeah, the thing with it is that in 48 Chambers I always felt in control, and I never felt in control in Septipus, unfortunately
Where the hell is Grapple Buggy
Grapple Buggy is kind of way on the backburner. I bring it up to Nate Fouts every so often, and last I heard he had to really re-work it a lot, and I don't think it' getting the bulk of his attention. Hope I'm wrong and I hope it's great whenever it surfaces again.
HadesGigas
Member
Sad. I actually have a Grapple Buggy t-shirt I won like... three years ago...
FunInfusedGames
Member
I have bumper stickers myself.
I always thought the hold up was trying to get on XBLA and then eventually having to spent time on other games to support the studio while waiting for that. I hope some day Nathan gets back to this game. I played an early build years ago and it was a lot of fun and seemed pretty far along to me. I didn't see anything obvious that needed reworking but there must be something significant I guess???
Septipus is a bitch on level 20, I lost 30 lives on the level and turned it off That stupid enemy I can't see so I can time the forced arrows. The game has similar handling t a gravitron game. What do I think?
I am not entirely sure, some levels seem pointless as you barely have to move to get to the exit, others your have to guess routes....
Turning it off and resetting that level meant I did it first time. Because the enemy got freed before I couldn't get passed him. The game has some collision detection issues too.
I am not entirely sure, some levels seem pointless as you barely have to move to get to the exit, others your have to guess routes....
Turning it off and resetting that level meant I did it first time. Because the enemy got freed before I couldn't get passed him. The game has some collision detection issues too.
Hmmm...I remember two hard levels and one of them was a bunch of moving walkway things and you just have to figure out which one to get on (trial and error). The other one has a bunch of guys hidden behind blocks you break and you have figure out which way to go after getting keys, actually that's about the only level in the whole game I died a lot on . I think I beat the game in like 30 mins or so. The ending is worth fighting it to
toythatkills
Member
48 Chambers is getting an update soon. A casual mode with unlimited lives if you just want to get to the end. A hardcore mode with one life. Online leaderboards.
Quiet Please is cool, I adore the transition from the title screen to the game, it's lovely. You just have to run around using items to solve puzzles to stop people making noise, because you're after some peace and quiet. So you need to find a way to stop a guy mowing the lawn, and get your dad to turn off the TV among other things.
Quiet Please is cool, I adore the transition from the title screen to the game, it's lovely. You just have to run around using items to solve puzzles to stop people making noise, because you're after some peace and quiet. So you need to find a way to stop a guy mowing the lawn, and get your dad to turn off the TV among other things.
I just played T.E.C. 3001 for the first time in months and wow...that game has been updated a huge amount since it was first released. I played up until the 8th or 9th level again and I think even the levels have changed??!?! It is way more extreme than I remember it, it's like a super challenging runner game...again for being done by some Croatian college students or something it's a pretty impressive game. I was happy to see it high on the top sales list, that's the reason I decided to check it out again.
A music game "A Band" was just released, the game was getting positive impressions from people beta testing it in the peer review process...it seems to have indie bands for music and some interesting challenges for drums so I am going to check it out as soon as I can take over the living room.
A music game "A Band" was just released, the game was getting positive impressions from people beta testing it in the peer review process...it seems to have indie bands for music and some interesting challenges for drums so I am going to check it out as soon as I can take over the living room.
When I turned it back on I did that level straight away. It was the only level that gave me an issue. It was simply because when the arrows forced me through blocks it released an enemy I couldn't see and got hit by it. Then because the stage saves your progress that enemy was blocking the exit of off the arrows (escalator thing)
The final boss I didn't really get, move around fire ....done...there was no challenge
Nice production in parts, posh music (which they are trying to sell), simple gravitron style manoeuvring gameplay...half an hour and you're done. Has some collison detection issues too.
It's not bad.
toythatkills
Member
It's been out on iOS for ages. I had trouble with the challenge levels, I couldn't really work out how to approach them because it deliberately holds back what's coming next. They're literally impossible the first time through because you can't know how many pieces you have. They're peculiar.
HadesGigas
Member
Aban Hawkins & The 1000 Spikes is getting a remake for 3DS/WiiU by Nicalis
http://www.revogamers.net/noticias/...spikes-es-nuevo-nicalis-wii-u-y-3ds-8407.html
http://www.revogamers.net/imagenes/wii/juegos/1001-spikes-2295.html
http://www.revogamers.net/noticias/...spikes-es-nuevo-nicalis-wii-u-y-3ds-8407.html
http://www.revogamers.net/imagenes/wii/juegos/1001-spikes-2295.html
That's awesome news. That game is one I put on every once in a while, do a few levels, then swear my way out of continuing until next time.
DaveVoyles
Member
Ashlands: Retribution is about the closet thing we are ever going to get to Super Stardust HD on XBLIG, and it looks awesome.
toythatkills
Member
Wow, I see what you mean. I hope it's good, I found SSHD to be basically unplayable on the DualShock3.
Trailer's worth watching for some amazing voiceover work. Not "good" amazing.
It is pretty darn blatant Super Stardust HD clone but tries to add some unique features like a story mode and even has some sort of in game developer commentary about the making of...
The game I got last night was some Spectrum ZX remake that was in my picks section called Earth Shaker...
The game I got last night was some Spectrum ZX remake that was in my picks section called Earth Shaker...
DaveVoyles
Member
I told him he was crazy for charging $3, considering the XBLIG marketplace isn't very friendly to many games going more than $1.
I played a few others last night too:
MegaCity
MegaCity is reminiscent of the 90s PC hit series Sim City. A similar soundtrack is provided, and your goal is the same: build the best damn city you can. This works more as a puzzle game however, where placement of your randomly selected buildings within the grid-based world is essential.
48 Chambers
The best way to describe this would be to by its intensity. 48 Chambers starts off slow, where you simply navigate your character through a maze, collecting time bonuses along the way to prevent your timer from running out, in addition to keys to unlock doors. Things really heat up when one-hit-kill traps force you to start at the beginning of the stage again, after youve carefully calculated and maneuvered your best course of action.
A Band
This is Rock Band for XBLIG, but only for the drums. And very well done! An original soundtrack is included, and I found it to be very catchy. If like me, you dont have a pair of drums, you can still use your controller, but I found this to be rather difficult.
I played a few others last night too:
MegaCity
MegaCity is reminiscent of the 90s PC hit series Sim City. A similar soundtrack is provided, and your goal is the same: build the best damn city you can. This works more as a puzzle game however, where placement of your randomly selected buildings within the grid-based world is essential.
48 Chambers
The best way to describe this would be to by its intensity. 48 Chambers starts off slow, where you simply navigate your character through a maze, collecting time bonuses along the way to prevent your timer from running out, in addition to keys to unlock doors. Things really heat up when one-hit-kill traps force you to start at the beginning of the stage again, after youve carefully calculated and maneuvered your best course of action.
A Band
This is Rock Band for XBLIG, but only for the drums. And very well done! An original soundtrack is included, and I found it to be very catchy. If like me, you dont have a pair of drums, you can still use your controller, but I found this to be rather difficult.
toythatkills
Member
Only in the same was as Tetris is reminiscent of Tomb Raider because they both have block puzzles. It's a strange comparison, that! It doesn't share anything in common with Sim City at all beyond having "city" in the title
TIC: Part 1 just cut its price to 80MSP, which is what it should have been in the first place for the content it offers. Worth getting, and maybe they'll make part 2.
DaveVoyles
Member
I don't know, I think it had more in common than that. The music was awfully similiar, as were the small vehicles moving around the map from location to location on the grid. Your main goal was to make the denizens happy, just as it were in SimCity, and placement of proper buildings within the community were the prime factor in determining how satisfied people were (ex: how high your score was), also similar to Sim City.
Yes, I saw that with TIC as well. Good for them, I hope to see it do well at this price point. A beautiful game with an impressive tool behind it. I know the team has been shopping around for a publisher for some time now, but am unaware of how it has been going so far.
DaveVoyles
Member
This is the first XBLIG now available in a browser that I'm aware of, but the guys at Xona games have ported their bullet-hell Score Rush to HTML5, and it is now available on Turbulenz.
toythatkills
Member
I can see how the goals are kind of similar it just doesn't feel like enough to say X is like Y. If someone downloaded the game expecting something related to Sim City somehow, I think they'd be disappointed.
They should get it though, because it's really good.
Hypership's been in HTML5 for a while. Score Rush with leaderboards sounds awesome though, and I like that the description begins with... "From Xona Games comes Score Rush, a Gamasutra's Top 5 indie game and winner of NeoGAF's Gold award."
HadesGigas
Member
Shouldn't you be aware of this considering it was in the promotion you organized and still have a picture of in your avatar?
FunInfusedGames
Member
You should know about this too: http://www.funinfused.com/HypershipOnline/
DaveVoyles
Member
That's Flash, not HTML5
You're right though, I had no idea this was done in HTML5 though. You guys are machines over there, with all of these ports at once!
I've also begun to document what it's like for me to learn how to code, as well as submitting my first XNA / XBLIG game to Dream.Build.Play. I don't expect anything to come of it, but it is a nice little push to get my to finally learn to code instead of concentrating on everything else.
What were your experiences like when you first learned to code? Did you begin with C#, and was XNA the first framework you worked with?
HadesGigas
Member
That's Flash, not HTML5
Still "available in a browser".
DaveVoyles
Member
I apologize, you're correct, I didn't say anything about HTML5 until after the fact.
Our weekly roundup of this week's games is up on Armless Ocotopus now, with the game of the week going to Vidiot Game.
Dan said: "To say this game is cut from a different cloth is an understatement. Vidiot Game is strongly reminiscent of the WarioWare series while presenting its own unique and style and charm."
Depending on whether or not Windows 8 takes off quickly you may want to start investigating WinRT/XAML, the thing with WinRT is that it puts C# and C++ on a pretty level playing field...
IMO people should lobby Microsoft to open XNA into an open source project. that would be all sorts of awesome
IMO people should lobby Microsoft to open XNA into an open source project. that would be all sorts of awesome
DaveVoyles
Member
MonoGame is working on way for XNA apps to work within Metro and Win8 at the moment:
http://monogame.codeplex.com/
DaveVoyles
Member
Today's Episode of Penny Arcade covers the guys at Zeboyd Games, and their journey with creating the newest iteration of RSPD.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/game-3
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/game-3
I think MonoGame does have potential to fill the gap for hobbyists. I'm still a little unsure what professional level devs will use if they want to be multiplatform and still support Windows 8.
At some point over the next 2 years or so the graphics of mobile games will start to look more and more like current gen PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Currently Unity and MonoGame produce pretty decent graphics but I think it will be interesting to see what hardcore and skilled devs can do with DirectX 11 and more fancy graphics hardware.
It's just my impression but OpenGL games from a long time ago tend to have a certain look about them. It's not necessarily bad, but when I was looking at the screens of PSSuite demo games I couldn't help but think...yeah..that's OpenGL ES right there. The best looking XBLIG games stomp all over them, but as we know those games that flex the system are also kind of rare.
So the upside of future things like Windows 8 tablets will be that we might get to see what talented devs like Cross Eaglet or Ko1mori (Revolver360 and Prismatic Solid devs) can do without having to fight garbage collection and have more access to hardware acceleration. From a business perspective, not a graphics one, using something like MonoGame makes a whole lot of sense...but it's always going to be the people who have custom engines for each platform that have the best looking games, and as far as I have read those small devs care more about their own satisfaction of creating the games so they will likely do it for whatever system they feel like. Maybe they will jump to PS Suite, maybe Windows Phone, maybe Windows 8...I doubt many of them will be coding in XNA 12 months from now.
I'm beating around the bush a little bit but I mean to say that there might be some benefit to understand DirectX and be able to wield it and give your game an advantage over crappier looking OpenGL games. WinRT is kind of like C# UI element layer to create menus / 2D elements and then you would have a graphics layer that can pretty much write to metal. When new middleware (not XNA obviously) that was written for Windows 8 is available it also might be pretty performance oriented and flexible.
I am still learning XNA myself, because I like it a lot and think it has some awesome tutorials and community members, I'm trying to learn this other stuff I'm talking about too though.
At some point over the next 2 years or so the graphics of mobile games will start to look more and more like current gen PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Currently Unity and MonoGame produce pretty decent graphics but I think it will be interesting to see what hardcore and skilled devs can do with DirectX 11 and more fancy graphics hardware.
It's just my impression but OpenGL games from a long time ago tend to have a certain look about them. It's not necessarily bad, but when I was looking at the screens of PSSuite demo games I couldn't help but think...yeah..that's OpenGL ES right there. The best looking XBLIG games stomp all over them, but as we know those games that flex the system are also kind of rare.
So the upside of future things like Windows 8 tablets will be that we might get to see what talented devs like Cross Eaglet or Ko1mori (Revolver360 and Prismatic Solid devs) can do without having to fight garbage collection and have more access to hardware acceleration. From a business perspective, not a graphics one, using something like MonoGame makes a whole lot of sense...but it's always going to be the people who have custom engines for each platform that have the best looking games, and as far as I have read those small devs care more about their own satisfaction of creating the games so they will likely do it for whatever system they feel like. Maybe they will jump to PS Suite, maybe Windows Phone, maybe Windows 8...I doubt many of them will be coding in XNA 12 months from now.
I'm beating around the bush a little bit but I mean to say that there might be some benefit to understand DirectX and be able to wield it and give your game an advantage over crappier looking OpenGL games. WinRT is kind of like C# UI element layer to create menus / 2D elements and then you would have a graphics layer that can pretty much write to metal. When new middleware (not XNA obviously) that was written for Windows 8 is available it also might be pretty performance oriented and flexible.
I am still learning XNA myself, because I like it a lot and think it has some awesome tutorials and community members, I'm trying to learn this other stuff I'm talking about too though.
Matthew Doucette
Neo Member
Thank you for this mention. Please, anyone interested, sign on and play and feel free to drop any feedback into the ultra-easy submission form on the main page of https://turbulenz.com/!
DaveVoyles
Member
This is pretty funny stuff. Machinima has a series titled "Two Best Friends Play......" and a recent episode was Xbox Live Indie Games. It has a ton of hits too.
toythatkills
Member
"Two best friends play the worst stuff on XBLIG so they can take the piss out of it, and purposefully overlook all the good stuff for the sake of cheap laughs."
I mean seriously, that video's 20 minutes long. Why spend so long playing (or watching a video about) games you know are shit when you could be recommending something good instead? It's like they've got their "XBLIG is shit" narrative and they're going to ignore any evidence to the contrary just so they can stick to it. It's so tiresome.
TEC is ace though.
toythatkills
Member
Dude, I'm sorry, but I was laughing pretty hard throughout most of that video. :LOL
Wow.
toythatkills
Member
Yeah, it was funny, but it's really easy to be funny when all you're doing is taking the piss out of shit games for being shit. Anyone can do that. I get the feeling they'd really struggle to be funny if they'd have been playing good games so they just didn't bother and we got another "everything on XBLIG is shit lol" video.
It's just boring now. It's been three and a half years of this.
Wow...why isn't this XBLA....looks amazing
I am close to wanting to fan sub the tongue in cheek weekly xblig roundup on nico nico douga, the humor might not survive the translation is my worry...it is easily the most entertaining thing I have seen about xblig games though, the guy doing it could be a comedian or something...he doesn't bash the games, the whole thing is about how they aren't rated fairly and he searches for the signs that they were made with love...like he always picks on the fact that so many games include a credit screen with a shout out to the wife or girlfriend...it is too hard to explain, dry humor..
I am close to wanting to fan sub the tongue in cheek weekly xblig roundup on nico nico douga, the humor might not survive the translation is my worry...it is easily the most entertaining thing I have seen about xblig games though, the guy doing it could be a comedian or something...he doesn't bash the games, the whole thing is about how they aren't rated fairly and he searches for the signs that they were made with love...like he always picks on the fact that so many games include a credit screen with a shout out to the wife or girlfriend...it is too hard to explain, dry humor..
DaveVoyles
Member
Wow, Apple Jack 2 does look great. Combines quite a few platforming elements, like the reverse of time, and picking up enemies over your head (Mario 2).
toythatkills
Member
Coming into this thread and saying you don't own Apple Jack is like going in to an Arsenal match singing Tottenham songs.
FROWNED UPON.
You really should buy it.