I’ve been wondering about this game every since I started really paying attention to the indie games on the 360. Once you get past the retarded “story” (the sun gets real irritated when someone steps in the sand apparently) it’s actually pretty good game, if a little shallow.

It’s a twin stick shooter, and literally all you do is go through each of the levels and kill everything that moves.

The game has a number of features that set it apart, mainly stemming from the replays it comes with showing playthroughs of each of the levels on the hard difficulty. But it also keeps replays of YOUR plays … which in my case is pretty embarrassing because I’m not all that great at the game. But either way it goes, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.

It’s also almost laughably easy on the Easy difficulty, ramps up to just fun levels on Medium … but on hard it’s just no fun because it’s just a little TOO insane for me. But that’s just me. I’m sure other people will have their opinions.

Graphically, it’s really nothing special. The cut scenes aren’t drawn all that great and the “story” is retarded. In game however, other than the main character which you probably honestly won’t be paying that much attention to anyway, the game looks pretty good. It’s the same boring backdrop every time, but the good variety of enemies more than make up for that. And when they die they explode in this glorious cloud of blood and guts, unfortunately it doesn’t stay on the screen. And the three bosses in the game fill a significant portion of the screen and look great. Especially when they finally die.

The sound effects are pretty generic, but they do work and don’t take away from the fast pace of the game. The music, while it is pretty good, isn’t anywhere near as good as the developers say it is. The one I’m reviewing here is the full version of the game with all the music, and there’s a light version specifically out there at the cheaper price (which, right now, is only a 50 cent difference) that has a little less music to make it smaller. And the Windows version of that lite version is available for free on the web site located here … but I’ve tried it on all three of my Windows machines and have never gotten it to run. And one of them is a fairly powerful machine. You would expect some kind of heavy metal rock music or something with this given how violent it is … but instead you get 16 bit era sounding stuff. Which doesn’t sound that bad, but I think I’d rather have some heavy rock music to go with it.

The gameplay should be of no surprise to anyone at this point. You use the left analog stick to move around and the right analog stick to shoot in whatever direction you wanna shoot in. That’s pretty much it. But if it works, don’t mess with it. And it definitely works well in this game. There are various powerups you can get such as one that makes a temporary shield around you that sucks up enemy fire and causes damage to anything it touches. Health, a rocket launcher (I’m assuming it’s a rocket launcher anyway), an extra high powered rapid firing gun that will help to clear the screen in no time. And against 2 of the bosses you get some sort of plasma gun or something that doesn’t have very good range, and adds to the slight difficulty of the bosses. When I say slight, I mean, once you figure out their patterns, they’re just kind of a pushover. But still a hell of a lot of fun regardless of that.

6.5 (rounded down to 6)– If you like these kinds of games, definitely pick this up. It offers up one hell of a challenge and is a lot of fun. The reason for the low score is purely on the fact that it has no multiplayer of any kind. It’s purely single player. And a game like this screams for multiplayer.

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Srikeforce-Psi (I have no idea what the “Psi” stands for) is a sidescrolling shooters that’s kind of along the lines of games like Contra and Metal Slug … although not anywhere near as good.

I managed to get through the game on one playthrough, and it doesn’t last very long at all. But the 4 locations in the spanning across the 12 levels don’t get tiresome and have a decently varied look to them. Otherwise I don’t think I could have finished it.

It’s weird with the two games that Star Lit Sky Games has released (the other being Sky Defender because the games aren’t really BAD per say (I still wanna know what happened with the 360 version of Sky Defender and why it lost everything that made the Windows version somewhat fun) … they’re just not particularly GOOD either.

They just seem to too basic for their own good I guess is the right phrase for it.

Graphically, the stages themselves actually look pretty good Like I said earlier, there are 12 levels with 4 different “exotic” locations. I wouldn’t exactly deem them exotic, but the backgrounds and whatnot look halfway decent. The animation is decent enough for what it is. And the developer must really like the two enemy types idea because that’s all there is besides your guy. The bullets are brightly colored, the explosions from the grenades look alright. But there’s nothing really special about it.

The sound is pretty much the same way. You have the typical bullet sounds, explosion sounds, the sound of bullets hitting the walls. And your character lets off a scream with he dies. That’s really about it. Nothing good, nothing bad. The music is the the same thing. Nothing good, nothing bad.

The gameplay is alright. You use the left analog stick to move around and aim. And you can use the right stick to aim as well. Either clicking the right stick or pressing Y will make your guy duck. The left and right triggers throw grenades and fire your run. The control is just fine. But the enemy A.I. … they’re about as smart as a 2×4. When they see you they’ll aim for you, but as soon as you get out of their sites, they resume walking back and forth. And with the way the levels are designed, in some spots you can just point your gun up from a bottom ledge and take them out that way. Play it, you’ll see what I mean. There are a few small puzzle elements, but nothing impossible or even remotely difficult. It’s just kind of like the rest of the game. Not good. Not bad.

5.5 (rounded down to a 5 here) – I don’t regret spending my dollar, and it does things like saves your progress through the levels and saves your high scores and whatnot. I could see people doing speedruns and whatnot through the game, and no death runs because it’s not that hard to do once you learn where the enemies are (that’s gonna be my reason for replaying it, to collect everything and keep from dying). It’s only 80 points, and while it’s not a great game by any means, it’s not bad for the price.

I think if it had more levels, more enemy types with better A.I than a Goomba and bosses it would’ve been a lot better.

Okay, as soon as I got the tweet from @xblaratings seeing the name, Iknew I had to click the link and check it out. I saw the screenshot and automatically thought of one of the best dual stick shooters I’ve ever played “I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1“.

It plays similarly to “Z0MB1ES” in the fact that you’re a dude, you have a gun and zombies are coming at you. That’s the only enemy type in the entire game. And they take a hell of a lot of shots to take down.

It’s played dual stick style, as you can probably guess from the screenshots … only you have to hold down either of the triggers to fire, hit either of the bumpers to reload (or the X button), and that’s about it.

This game is like a really terrible horror movie, and for that reason I just couldn’t stop playing it because I’m a sucker for that stuff. The first time I went through the trial, I stayed alive all the way through the 8 minutes. The second time, I deliberately ran into one of the zombies just to see what it looked like when you die.

The above shot pretty well sums up the game. It supports up to 4 players locally, the only music in the entire game is during the menu and the credits (not during the game oddly enough) and actually isn’t THAT bad … the sound effects are pathetic. It sounds like someone is literally doing a slurping noise when an enemy dies. :)

Graphically, it looks like an Atari 2600 version of “Z0MB1ES” right down to the little circular spurt of blood when you or the zombies die. Only when YOU die the screen zooms in, then shows your score and how long you managed to survive. I have no idea if it actually saves this stuff permanently (it didn’t save my score for running into the zombie, but it could be just a trial thing). The only thing over “Z0MB1ES” I can possibly give it is the fact that the blood stains from downed enemies stay on the screen. But then this doesn’t have the highly interactive background … the background along with the player graphics and animation is pretty simplistic.

This game is utterly terrible It’s insanely slow paced, which isn’t a bad thing because of the weapons. Your pea shooter shoots pretty slow, and the 3 way shot goes through the ammo like nothin’ and unless you have the powerup to reload instantly it takes forever to reload and you’ll be doing it a lot.

But for some odd reason, this game is so terrible I can’t stop playing it. I don’t know what’s up, but I’ve gone through the trial 4 times now until I ran out of time. Like I said before, it plays and looks like an Atari 2600 version of “Z0MB1ES”. If I had the points left over, I’d probably buy it and stick some remixed Atari 2600 or NES music in the background. :P

Just go and download the trial, near as I can tell the only thing limited in it is that you can only play 2 players instead of 4. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about. Once you get into it, you’ll see that it’s one of those really bad games that’s just addictive as hell if you’re anything like me. :)

If only it had more weapons with that graphic style. That’s the only shortcoming for it to me, only 2 weapons and they’re both pretty “meh”

If I were to give this a score I’d give it a 6 though just for being so damned ridiculously simplistic and weird. :P Which is what I gave it here since I have no choice but to give it a numerical rating. It’s almost strange to think that the guy who developed this thought it was complete enough to release.

This is another one of those games where I played the trial and just didn’t get it. But then one day, I had 80 points to blow and figured “Eh, what the hell.” and snagged it. And it’s another one of those games that surprised me on how much I like it.

The game has kinda the same casual feeling Uno has in the fact that it’s very simple to play, has a lot of random elements but does take a little bit skill to win (skill I apparently don’t have because I’ve only actually won a few games). But in the end it doesn’t really matter too much if you win or not since it thankfully doesn’t track your wins and losses, and it seems like this would be a very social game. All of the modes to it are exactlly the same, you can either play online with your choice of either 4, 8, 16, 24 or 31 players, which I can only imagine a 31 player game being pure chaos. Something I’d love to be a part of. Or you can practice with robots, and there’s a tutorial. But in the end they all play the exact same no matter what you do.

When you first start the game, you’re treated to jazzy type dance music and weird looking unrealistically skinny women dancing like idiots in the background and this is where you get the main menu and you can choose from one of the “modes” of play I mentioned above. I never play with the robots, I always go straight into starting an online game, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Graphically, the game is really smooth and servicable and really gives off the theme it’s going for nicely. The people at the beginning look a little weird, but that’s literally the only time you see them. So it isn’t really a big deal. There’s a nice variety to the cards at the top of the screen, the background looks pretty good even if it doesn’t ever change. Everything has a really excited vibe to it, and it manages to stay with that quite nicely. The sound is in the same boat, the music is halfway decent and matches the overall feel of the game, the sound effects do what they’re supposed to do. There isn’t really anything I can knock here. The music is timed perfectly to the timer and everything, which comes in handy since you can just go by the music on how much time you have left rather than constantly glancing at the timer. A little more variety in the music would’ve been nice, but not a big deal.

The gameplay is what I’m talking about with that casual Uno nature. No, it doesn’t like anything like Uno … it just has that same kind of feeling. The slot machine at the bottom rolls and comes up with 5 shapes of varying colors, and some wildcard shapes that do … well … what do you think. There are cards at the top of the screen that are selectable with the left analog stick, and you match the shape of what’s on the slot machine with shapes on the card kind of like Bingo. You can select the specific shape you want with the directional pad, because sometimes there aren’t any of what the slot machine pulls up up there. Esepcially later in the game when you have a lot of those cards already filled. Once you get a card filled, you are presented with one of a few different types of scratch offs. It could be simply selecting one of them and scratching it off, or matching at least 2 of a set number of points, or scratching off numbers until you hit an X then you get that many points. Another one does “magic” where whatever you scratch off is a shape of some kind and it automatically fills it for you. Another one halves the amount of points you get with another player. And of course a “race” in the middle of the screen that gives a certain amount of points to whoever hits it first. Sometimes you’ll see x2 or x3 appear on random cards, and if you fill in the shapes for that card, it’s basically a point multiplier. And that’s about all there is to it. Each game lasts 10 30 second rounds, so it’s pretty fast paced without being too out of control, and you slowly build up your rank as you go (as of this writing mine is 8 hehe) which builds regardless of whether you win or lose.

And it gives you rewards for doing various things in the game such as scoring more than 6,000 points in a single game (something that’s surprisingly hard to do), scratching a certan number of tickets and one for having NO matches in a round. Along with a ton of others, I believe there are 20 in total. And the awards you get you can put the picture beside your Gamertag in the game as bragging rights.

The only thing I can really find wrong with this game … that doesn’t really affect it much … is that on the card where you halve the points with another player, the message they get is “Player sent you %%%!” and I honestly don’t know if it actually gives them the points or not because it happens so infrequently I never think to check. :) It’s not a game killer of course, but still.

I love this game, and I didn’t think I’d ever like it. It’s even more fun when people are online to play it. Which, tragically, isn’t all that often (I think I’ve found games with maybe one person playing. And I think one person has joined the games that I start). I would love to see a full out 31 player game with this, and it has an award for player with a developer, which I haven’t gotten. Any of you developers wanna help me with this, then I’d just set THAT by my Gamertag for the game. ;)

8.0 – It can be played by anyone, and it’s one of those games that’s fun no matter whether you win or lose. With more people playing it, it’ll be even more fun. It’s only 80 points, just don’t go by the trial because it’s horrible. Just get it when you’ve got the points to blow. And find me online. ;)

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Apparently, this is the second in a series of Johnny’a “adventures” … beginning with the utterly terrible Johnny’s Minefield.

This game is slightly better, though still very simplistic. Johnny is in a plane, he lets go of his parachute, then jumps out of the plane to get it. Yeah, still extremely simplistic, but a little better than the first graphically, music etc etc.

When Johnny lets go of the parachute, he gets that surprised look on his face, then he jumps out and you see an arrow at the bottom of the screen go back and forth. Eventually, you’ll reach the parachute and hit A to grab it and use it. As you may have guessed, later on in the levels, the arrow starts moving faster.

That’s it.

The only real redeeming quality of this game is NOT getting the parachute and watching him plummet to the ground and slam into it face first.

So it’s worth snagging the trial just for that (and the reason I gave it a 6 here because I don't like giving ratings to trials on my site), but still not worth wasting 80 points on, even for the few seconds of entertainment value. And it makes me wonder how the developer is going to torture little Johnny in the next game. :P

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This is a vertical shooter that’s in the same vein as classics such as Galaga and Space Invaders. Even going so far as making the difficulty settings mainly things like affecting how much life you have, how many points you need to get before you get an extra life, etc etc. So the old school nature of this game isn’t going to appeal to everyone.

The roots of this game can be traced back to the Commodore 64, and it was going to be released, but the video game crash prevented that from happening. But it did eventually see releases for the Amiga, Windows 95, and now today, a Java game for cell phones and the Xbox 360. And I don’t know about the Java cell phone game (I don’t play them), but this 360 version is a port of the Windows 95 version of the game that came out in 1997.

It’s in it’s simplicity where people will either love it or hate it. There’s virtually no mention of any kind of story, the enemies have specific patterns that they bob around the screen with, and the level structure is always the same.

The graphics are actually halfway decent in the fact that the ships are nicely detailed, looking like it could have been a first generation SNES or Genesis game. The backgrounds are pretty much the same throughout, but never get annoying. The way the little space alien enemies die is pretty funny. The explosions suit the grahpic style well. When compared to other games of the genre, sure, they’re not good. But for the overall feel the game has, they do their job and they do it well.

The sound is equally as simplistic, all the sound effects needed are there, including voice samples of when you die, and audio queues of when you get an extra life and whatnot. The explosions don’t sound great, but they do fit the overall retro vibe of the game. The music, while there isn’t much … if there’s more than one song in the game, there’s only really one that stands out in my mind. And it doesn’t sound that bad and doesn’t get repetitive. Even though I did turn down the music volume of the game so I could hear the sound effects better.

The gameplay is, like the rest of the game, simplistic. You move around at the bottom of the screen, you hit A to fire your main weapon, you hit B to launch a bomb, and hit it again to detonate it. You have a few weapon upgrades, like being able to send off two shots side by side instead of just one, and a powerup to cut through the enemies like butter. There are 9 alien types throughout 20 levels, so it has a decent amount of variety. And they all have seperate attack patterns that never break. The level structure is actually pretty good. You fight through two waves of enemies, then you go through an asteroid field to get to your refueling station. Yes, there is fuel in the game, but I have NEVER ran out, and the only time you don’t get to go to the refueling station is if you die in the asteroid field. That particular part of the game is actually pretty fun and is a nice little diversion considering the asteroids don’t come in with obvious patterns. You just run through and blow as many up as possible until you get through it.

One part of the gameplay that really throws me off is the fact that the enemy fire moves at a very slow rate. Which one may think of as good, but it actually does affect how you play the game. There are three things about it I don’t like. #1) When you die, your ship is invincible for entirely too short of a time, which means you may end up spawning into an enemy without having enough time to get out of the way. And #2) When you kill the little space alien dudes, their ship blows up and you see a little green alien just kind of disappear into sapce, but those little green alien bodies for the short time they’re on screen WILL blow your ship up. And I don’t really understand the logic there. And finally, the weapon upgrades from downed enemies go entirely too fast, and you’re either going to miss it OR downgrade your weapon which is pretty irritating.

7.0 – I happen to like this game, because I’m kind of the target audience for something like this, even with it’s irritating faults. It’s simplistic, the retro style really brings me back to playing games like this as a kid, and it’s pretty fun for what it is considering it’s only 80 MS points. Give the trial a try to see if it’s your thing, because it actually does do a decent job of representing the game. If you aren’t into retro style shooters like this, you’re probably going to find it pretty boring though.

Adding this in as a little update, the comment I made about how slow the enemy shots are drastically changes later in the game. The pace really starts going as they move faster and their shots fly as fast as yours. And is a blast. :)

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This game surprised me. I didn’t think it would be so bloody addictive, and it’s quite possibly one of the more simplest games I’ve ever played as far as concept. It even has a story. When you start the game these two cute little … things … are doing whatever, but then the boy’s island starts moving away. So the girl snatches up a fishing rod and goes fishing to get him back.

Yes, it sounds stupid, but it works well for the game.

And it’s maddeningly addictive. After I went through the trial and unlocked the game I must have sat there for at least an hour just messing around. And it didn’t even feel like an hour, this is one of THOSE games. You reel the girls’ boyfriend back in, and you’re just like “okay, just one more”. And the game’s 10 minute time limit (which can be turned off) is perfect for stuff like that because you can easily play this just to kill a little time, and you can also play it for an hour or two and never get bored.

Graphically, even though it’s pretty simple, it fits perfectly not trying to do anything that doesn’t fit. Put simply, they’re gorgeous for what it is. The stage looks great, the fish look great and have their own cutesy style personalities and everything. Everything works and it works extremely well.

The sound is perfectly suited to this game. There is no music in the game, all you have is the sound of water and waves and whatnot which really lends itself to just how calming the game really is. The sound effects are just as minimal, but it doesn’t need loads of sound effects. What’s there fits perfectly.

The gameplay … you literally use 2 buttons in the entire game. You hold down A to charge up your initial cast, and you hold down A again to reel in your line. With the bigger fish, you have to tap A to reel it in. And it’s not the annoying furious tapping, you just tap the button. You aim for the orange floating balls in the water, and you can use money you’ve gotten from catching fish to get different lures to catch bigger fish and better rods where you can cast out further eventually snagging the island for the boyfriend and reeling IT in to reunite them. And you hit the B button to switch between your different types of lures.

Granted, it’s not much. But there are also badges in the game that you can collect for doing various things. Like buying each of the items from the store, or collecting so much money or catching each type of fish which really extends the gameplay quite a bit.

8.5 – (rounded up to a 9 for XBLARatings) This is a beautifully well done game that deserves your 80 points. That’s all there is to it.

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This looks and sounds like crap (on purpose), and has no options whatsoever. No scores, no saves … hell, you even have infinite lives.

It’s like a modern Atari 2600 game. You’re a little dude, and you run through levels trying to get to the exit.

The only thing that can kill you in the entire game is the red field (which I’m going to assume is lava).

Yeah, no enemies, you obviously don’t have any attacks due to that. It’s just platforming, puzzle solving and experimentation. But damn is it addictive.

The graphics, as I said, are complete crap because the game aims for as minimalistic as one can possibly get with a game. It literally looks like something that could have been done on the Atari 2600. And, other than a few weird little collision detection quirks (when you jump against a platform he kinda climbs up it a little bit) they work just fine.

The sound, like the graphics, are complete crap. No music at all and as basic as one can get and still have sound. It even has the low, gutteral sound when you die. But it works because …

The gameplay. All you can do is jump. But the levels are very well designed and take a bit of thought and experimentation to pass. The control takes a little getting used to because I’ve found that my little “pixel man” … the jumping isn’t quite as solid as it needs to be and it slows me down a little bit. It’s not MAJOR, and doesn’t keep the game from being enjoyable, but it is there.

7.0 – Give the trial a try, I think it has … 8 or 10 of the 30 levels with it. But don’t be put off by the fact that the graphics and sound are intentionally terrible, because the game itself is actually pretty good. Even though I’m stuck on level 25 as of this writing. :) In the end, it’s a pretty good little game and well worth the 80 point price tag.

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I’ll fully admit that I’m not that into tower defense games. Especially Desktop tower defense, which this game thankfully is not. This is actually the first tower defense game I’ve ever played for more than a few minutes. And I probably wouldn’t have ever bought it if it weren’t for the vector graphics. That’s what initially sold the game for me. If it has vector graphics, no matter WHAT kind of game it is, I’ll give it a try.

But, regardless of that, I’ve had the game for about a month or so now, and I have to say it’s one of the better games of the genre I’ve played. It isn’t a huge epic game like Sol Survivor of course, and the graphics are all 2D vector art, but it’s a little different in the fact that the gameplay fast paced arcade style stuff.

It’s apparent when playing the game that this was created by a guy who likes these games a lot, and put a lot of personality into it. I almost wanna put this game into an arcade cabinet with the look and feel it has. :)

Graphically, the game is very simple, yet stunning at the same time. Of course, I’m a little biased because I love vector styled graphics. But everything about this game looks great from the playfields to the menus. And the graphical effects that are here and there look great as well. There are some problems though. My television is an old style 480p 36″ with the 360 hooked up via component. Due to that, the text is almost too small to read since this was made with high definition televisions in mind. And, though it doesn’t hurt the gameplay that much, when there’s a lot going on onscreen, the frame rate plummets. It happens sporatically throughout the game, but I definitely noticed it in the last level of the game. Of course I tend to overdo it by a lot placing tons and tons of towers in when I probably don’t need to. The text being near unreadable for us SDTV owners, I think we’re getting pretty used to that. But the frame rate when there’s a lot going on … it might turn some people off. Other than that, the graphics are a visual treat if you’re a fan of that graphical style.

The sound is just as good as the graphics. The music is epic sounding and fits the game perfectly, and the effects themselves are perfect. From the laser fire to the explosions and bombs and everything else (especially the Doom Tower) it just sounds great.

But with all the graphical polish, the gameplay is also great. It handles just fine with the controller. I won’t get into all the little details here because if you’re reading this you probably know how to play tower defense games. You place towers down to destroy the enemies before they get to your base. There are six different types of towers in the game. There’s an EMP that will slow down enemies while they’re within range of it, there’s a Prism Tower that shoots a beam at a single enemy, and it can collect strength from up to 5 other towers near it. A Rail Tower that basically bombs the enemies and does some splash damage. Two different types of Laser Towers going from a basic one up to to an advanced one that has a frightening radius and deals a massive amount of damage. And my favorite, the Doom Tower. It’s expensive as hell to build, takes up 4 spaces and is slow to reload, but when it fires you know it right away. Of course, to build the advaned laser tower and the Doom Tower, you need to build a Tech Center first, and once that’s built you can use your money to research ways of making the various towers more powerful. All the towers but the EMP can be upgraded without the need of the Tech Center up to level 6. And the way it handles money is pretty neat too … it obviously has interest levels you can raise from your headquarters, but if you don’t have enough money to build something or upgrade something in the Tech Center, it’ll queue it up on screen and take the money out as it’s collected from the downed enemies. Which makes the game immensely more fast paced than the other ones I’ve tried and adds a level of strategy to an otherwise excellent game.

And there are the little options which actually come in handy. Because you control the selection curser with the right analog stick. But you use the left stick to zoom in and out and rotate the levels, which comes in handy because the cursor moves a little slow when going over large fields to get somehwere. Zooming out speeds that up quite a bit. And, while you can drag the cursor around holding the A button to select multiple towers … it doesn’t seem to work the same way for actually building them. Everything is placed in a grid form, and with the exception of the Tech Center and the Doom Tower, they all only take up one space on the grid. But you’ve still gotta go around and build them one at a time.

And, while there are only 11 maps total in the game without a map editor (man, that would rock) the level design is quite good and just feels right.

8.0 – Despite the frame rate problems this is a spectacular game that doesn’t get too involved with story (though it does have a pretty decent back story) or any frills like that. You have a 10 level campaign mode and a Skirmish mode with 11 maps that ups the replayability. Even though it is a tower defense game, it’s a much different feel than the awesome Sol Survivor, and if you’re like me and new to the whole tower defense thing, this is a solid buy at 80 points that has a great arcade feel to it and enough depth to keep ya going for a long time on the cheap. It unfortunately has no high scores list, and it’s only single player. But it’s cheap and fun.

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I was going through yesterday downloading trials for games that I just kinda disregarded at first … and somehow managed to buy the full version of this. So I figured it’d be worth mentioning. Sky Defender is a Space Invaders style gae where enemies go left and right at the top, and you’re at the bottom shooting them. No more, no less.

The main problem is, it doesn’t do anything else aside from that. I got to around level 24 or so and I finally just got bored of seeing the same two enemies over and over again.

There are some powerups in the game. It looks like your gun goes up two more levels to fire 2, then 3 shots instead of just one. Yellow orbs that are extra lives, and sheilds. Which, there is one thing the game does get right in the fact that these powerups float by on the screen and you collection them by shooting them instead of snagging them. Which makes sense since the screen is usually full of enemy shots.

The graphics are okay, but pretty bland at the same time. There’s no animations at all, just the ships moving left and right shooting. The ships themselves look alright, but there’s only the three ship types in the entire game. Yours and the two enemy types. There’s nothing else that differentiates the enemies other than their look.

It’s almost hideously slow paced, and there’s no real challenge to speak of. You just go through wave after wave holding the A button down to fire and moving out of the way of the enemy shots. And the enemies just seem to show up in random places. When you die … unless you’re on your last life, if you lose a life you don’t even know it. You get hit by one of the enemy shots, and your life counter goes down. Not even a sound to signify anything. It just kinda happens. And sometimes when the enemies spawn, they’re overlapping each other. That’s the whole game. It does save your high scores, and the engine itself it decent. It’s just doesn’t have a particularly interesting game attached to it.

The sound is equally as basic. It’s got the same crappy music looping over and over again, and you get a slight explosion sound. That’s about it.

But the weirdest thing is … Starlit Sky Games website (found here) has a Windows version of this for free … and it’s almost a COMPLETELY different game. It’s got the same boring background and basically the same ship types (i don’t know about your ship because the game runs windowed and my ship is cut off at the bottom of the screen due to my 1024×600 resolution) … but it’s actually insanely fast paced and FUN for what it is. The enemies swoop across the screen, the ships fly apart when they die, the entire screen shakes when you get killed. It has a heavy metal soundtrack. The enemy ships look a hell of a lot better. What the hell happened with the 360 version that goes from this rockin’ fast paced shooter to this slow paced meandering mess?

4.0 – Ignore the 360 version and snag the Windows version from the official site. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the 360 version.

If I were to rate the Windows version, I’d give it about a 6.5 purely based on the fact it’s the same basic gameplay, just a hell of a lot faster, better looking and sounding, and fun for the short time it lasts.

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I LOVE “The Typing of the Dead” so getting this was an easy thing for me to do after playing the trial.

Basically all you have to do is type what comes up on the screen with either a USB keyboard or the chat pad that fits on the underside of the 360 controller. Obviously, unless you text message WAY too much on your phone or something you’re going to want to use a USB keyboard, though.

It’s a really neat game, and once I get a USB keyboard and I’m not stuck using the borrowed one I’m using now, I’ll play it a bit more. But it’s got some substantial problems that really suck the fun out of the game.

There’s no real story to the game, you’re just in a plane, and you have to keep the killer letters and words from hitting your cities by typing them out. Which is pretty much what you do in The Typing of the Dead, only instead of words you have to keep zombies from hitting you. Which, automatically makes it a lot more fun.

Graphically, the game is pretty damned good. It’s pretty much an on rails shooter. The terrain looks great, even though it never changes. The letters are easily identifiable, and it uses a pretty generic font to make then easy to make out whether they’re upper case or lower case. The explosions look great. The ship automatically zooms into the last few words or letters on the screen if they’re far away. Even though it’s all you’ll ever see, it looks good. And the clouds in the sky, even though they look a little weird, have a nice close up view.

The sound is good. the shots sound great, the explosions sound great. There’s a nice audio cue for when a bigger word comes up for bonus points. There’s voiceover that tells you how you’re doing and whatnot that’s kind of Crazy Taxi-ish … which really doesn’t fit the overall serious look of the game. But at least it’s not terrible. The music though, I could take it or leave it. It’s just generic sounding rock music. But overall it sounds pretty damn good.

The gameplay, in theory is good. There are 5 different levels. You type what you see on the screen before it hits a city. You get a certain amount of points for each correctly type word or letter, and it varies nicely in upper case and lower case, mixing in with words later on and numbers. And there’s a lot of power in making a custom game where you can adjust the falling epeed, max letters and words at a time, the letter and word difficulty, the chances of getting a superword, the number of rounds, the difficulty increase, objects per round and starting objects. And hit has four differrent slots to save your custom game in.

The real problem with the gameplay comes in in the difficulty and the camera angle though. After the first level, the difficulty REALLY ramps up. I’m a pretty fast typist, and after about the second level it was really giving me WAY too much stuff on the screen to effectively type out before they hit the cities or the ground. Now if you want to just move your way through the game and not worry so much about the score, you can just ignore the letters, numbers or words that are about to just hit the ground if something previously destroyed a city. The problem is, it’s very hard to tell if something is going to hit either a city of a blank spot of rubble in front of it or behind it, which makes the game a lot more frustrating than it’s worth.

4.5 – It’s only 80 points, and if you’re a typing game freak, definitely get it. And it’s got some definite power in the way you can make a custom game. But the difficulty spike along with the lack of being able to tell where an object is about to hit on the ground makes it entirely too frustrating for it’s own good and really sucks the fun out of it. Me personally, I’m going to stick to The Typing of the Dead. It’s actually fun, and the difficulty increase is more gradual and doesn’t try to rape you within a few minutes. Even on the hardest difficulty.

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This is a vertical SHMUP, and while it’s not anywhere near as good as, say, 19XX : War Against Destiny, it’s not half bad.

For whatever reason you have to fight against multicolored space pirates across 5 planets. Put simply, blow as much as you can in the levels and make it to the boss, and beat the boss. They don’t go too much into story here, which is kind of disappointing, but hey. We can’t all be perfect. At least the title is kind of neat.

The game supports 1 or 2 players, local only, unfortunately. It also doesn’t save your game (which, there are only 5 levels near as I can tell right now, so it doesn’t really need to) OR your scores … which is a big downer. And there is only the one game mode, which is pretty much going through the “story”.

Yeah, I know. Not much in the way of options. It’s just a basic, run of the mill shooter with a slight gimmick in regards to gameplay. There are 5 different colored pirate ships. 4 of them correspond to the color of the face buttons, and a grey generic one. Certain colors are weaker against the shots of that color you can choose from, which are selectable on the fly using the face buttons. The Y button selects a yellow Minigun, B selects a red Laser Cannon, X is a blue EMP shot which doesn’t make any sense … and A selects the green Plasma Rods. You use the left analog stick to fire and use the left analog stick to move your ship. As you kill the enemies, you’ll notice various colored pickups that make your weapons more powerful, like the yellow one will make your Minigun more powerful, you can do the math here.

Graphically, there isn’t anything really special here. The graphics are decent enough, but not great. The weapon shots look alright, and change in the way of spread and size and whatnot as you get the pickups to make them more powerful. The enemy ships and bosses look alright, but are mainly just color swaps of the same thing over and over. And there really isn’t much variety in the enemy ships due to the fact that aren’t that detailed in the first place. The bosses look pretty good and fill the screen, but yet again, lacking in any real detail. The same thing with your ship, nothing special going on, but not terrible. The stages themselves all kind of look the same, but the game is so short you’ll barely notice.

The sound is kind of in the same boat. The sound effects themselves aren’t particularly special, but they’re not bad and they’re definitely funcitonal. Though I think the explosions are pretty weak. The music, while there is music in the game and it’s not terrible, you won’t notice it too much other than the title screen music. You do get a little bit of voiceover from a woman on your radio giving you little tutorials in the first level and telling you when a boss is approaching, and it doesn’t sound all that bad.

I mostly described the gameplay above, so I don’t have to get too much into that. There are some problems with the game. Even when your weapons are maxed out, it feels like it takes WAAAAY too many hits to kill the regular enemies. I’m used to player shooters like there where you can clear the screen of enemies if you want to, and you just can’t do it with this. And there’s no clear indication of when your ship gets hit other than it turning a shade of blue when it does get hit. Thankfully, you have one hell of a large life bar, so the game doesn’t use that one hit kill stuff that are in a lot of shooters that I hate so much, but damn. And the bosses, while they are large and intimidating, like other shooters like this, once you figure out their patterns (or safe spots) they’re just a pushover. And they take WAAAAY too long to kill just like the regular enemies. Your ship is entirely too big, i needs to be about half the size it is. If the ship were about half the size it is, the game could have easily accommodated 4 players.

And another annoying thing is that your life doesn’t recharge in between levels. And when you die, your weapons are set back to square one, which makes the game a lot harder than it needs to be. And there aren’t any health pickups at all. The only pickups you get in the game are to make your weapons more powerful. Given the fact that the enemies are a bitch to kill and you are almost constantly taking damage while TRYING to kill them a health pickup from time to time would have been nice.

Holding down the right trigger to fire is just retarded as well. You hold down the trigger, and use the face buttons to select your weapons. Ideally, it’d make a lot more sense just to hold down the face button of whatever weapon you want to use. But that’s just me.

And the lack of modes is a little disappointing as well. You have the story mode, which can be played with 2 players. That’s it. A buss rush would have been nice, and a survival mode in the least.

5.5 (rounded down to 5 for XBLARatings) – It’s not a great shooter, but for only 80 points I don’t regret getting it. It’s got it’s problems (like the enemies being annoyingly hard to kill) and everything regarding the presentation is just kind of average. But in the end, it can be fun for a little while, it has about an arcade length to it, so it won’t take that long to beat. And the color changing idea is kind of neat, even though you don’t really feel like you’re doing extra damage by shooting, say, a green enemy with the green weapon. The time it takes to kill the enemies really slows down the pace of the game and that’s ultimately why I gave it a slightly above average score. But all in all, it’s pretty fun for the 80 points it costs. If you’ve got the points just to blow on something, give this a try.

Now THIS is a great overhead racer for the 360 period, and at only 3 bucks it’s a steal. Halfbrick, from my understanding, has a pretty damned good reputation on the Indie Games section of Xbox Live by consistantly releasing good stuff. I honestly haven’t played the other games by them (yet), but if they’re even half as good as this, I’m in.

this is a pretty unconventional racer in the fact that with the default controls, literally the only way you have to fly your ship is with the left and right triggers. Hold down the left trigger to go left, the right trigger to go right, and hold them both down to go forward (since going straight in this game is damned near impossible). The only other button it really uses is Y, which you’ll probably find yourself using a LOT, because it causes your ship to explode and lets you retart the track.

When I initially downloaded this game though, I was really put off by the insanely steep learning curve. But after playing the full version, I can say that suffering through the learning curve is very very satisfying.

Graphically, this could very easily be an XBLA title, because they’re great. The ships, though they look identical to each other aside from the colors, have an awesome amount of detail to them with bars on each side that tells you how much power you’re giving each of your rockets. The tracks look great, the fire coming out of the rockets looks great, the frame rate is constant and never dips. Though the different colors for the ships work, I kind of wish they had a little bit more to differentiate them, though. Other than that this game is a visual treat.

And to top off the great graphics, the sound is just as well done with great bass thumping dance music that fits the game perfectly. I even find myself just starting a game sometimes and pausing it just to have the music in the background. Great sound effects though I’ve come to hate that THWACK that comes from hitting the wall because I tend to do it. A LOT. And the game supports custom soundtracks if the music isn’t to your liking. I would highly suggest a band like Godsmack or Disturbed if you want some great rock music that fits the game.

The main mode of the game is Time Trial, where you just go through each of the tracks and attempt to beat the pre ordained time in each track for either Bronze, Silver or Gold medals. The more medals you get, the more tracks you’re able to unlock. There’s a head to head mode for up to 4 players locally with, unfortunately, no Xbox Live support. And a “Hot Potato” mode where you pass the controller around. But, unfortunately, those are the only modes the game has. I would have loved to have seen a single player tournament racing against CPU controlled opponents in a lap style arcade race with the old arcade style timer that gives you a little more time every time you cross the finish line. There are over 40 tracks, so it’ll keep you busy for a while with different ways of racing. There are lap tracks, checkpoints and just very technical tracks that require a fair amount of finesse to finish. But I haven’t had a chance to play them all because of the game’s blistering difficulty. Make no mistake about it, this is an EXTREMELY difficult game that is almost infuriating at times. But it is oh so satisfying once you FINALLY get a gold medal on the track that has been haunting you for an hour. I’ve only managed to unlock the first 6 tiers so far, because to advance in the tiers you have to have however many medals are called for. Which is insanely difficult.

Which brings me into the gameplay. The control scheme to the game is actually very simple in theory. The default control scheme is Reversed. Which means your left trigger fires off the right rocket, the left trigger fires off the left rocket, and holding down both of them fires them both off. Which is honestly the hardest to use, but also provides the most control. Then there is Straight, which the left trigger fires off the left rocket, the right the right … you get the idea. Then there is (thankfully) a control scheme for beginners where your right trigger fires off both rockets and you use the left analog stick to control your ship, much closer to a traditional control scheme for games like this. And me personally, that’s what I would suggest you use to learn the game mechanics, because as I said. The learning curve for this game is extremely high if you want to do well. The ships are responsive, give an awesome sense of speed, the control is simply perfect, albeit difficult to grasp at first. You can boost off of walls for an extra speed boost as well which is great fun if you like to drift. The drifting mechanic in this game is totally flawless once you get it down.

But, aside from missing a single player tournament like I mentioned earlier (that’s just my thing though because I like that stuff) it really needs a way of previewing the track before you go on it. Yeah, you get a small image of it from the track selection screen, but an on screen minimap would’ve done wonders. Or a fly by at the beginning that shows you the track. Because when you get to one that you’ve just unlocked, it’s a lot of trial an error. I was tearing through just fine on one of them then all of a sudden “Oh crap, there’s a wall there!” and had to start over. A fly by or a minimap would allow for an easier way to strategize how you’re going to beat that Gold medal time. But I find myself stumbling through the ones I unlock for a while instead. Maybe even an option where a CPU controlled ship flies through the track showing you a way you can do it. Of course, Youtube will probably eventually be filled up with videos from players showing off their best times.

8.5 (rounded down to an 8 for XBLARatings just because the trial is crap) – Don’t go by the trial so much for this game, because honestly it’s not a very good representation of the full game. Yes, the learning curve is high, and yes it’s an extremely difficult game. But it’s satisfying as well, and is the single best overhead racer you’ll find on the 360. It’s only 3 bucks, and if you’re into racing games and you like drifting at extreme speeds, just get it.

Well, all I can really say for it is that it vibrates the controller to terrible graphics. It’s kind of pointless that this even exists to be honest, because it doesn’t have anything else with it to try to make itself worth the money. You can vibrate up to 4 controllers! Wow! Here’s the description for it.

“Shoulders and back getting stiff from 18 hours of straight Gaming? Try Rumble Massage! Put a controller behind your neck and feel the soothing vibrations of the Xbox 360 controller. With the ability to control the rumble intensity and pulse, relaxing after a hard day of gaming has never been easier.”

I don’t know whether to think this thing is trying to take itself seriously or not, but either way … why release it?

If nothing else, don’t spam the Indie Games section with this stuff, just release it on Windows and tell people to hook their controller to the Xbox. Of course they couldn’t get away with charging you if they released it on Windows as easily as they can on the 360.

I would try to describe the controls and whatnot, but screenshot pretty much says it all. Because that’s all you get. The needle shakes. Does that count? And support for anything more than 1 controller is disabled in the trial, as well as the “epic mode”.

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Help your cutsie little devil lookin’ dude find keys to unlock doors and save the world in this little puzzle platformer. You start playing it, and it’s oddly addictive. and your little being doesn’t even have any attacks whatsoever. He just moves around and jumps.

So why the hell do I keep playing this? It’s addictive trying to get through the levels in as short a time as possible. There’s only technically three levels, so the game doesn’t last very long at all. People who are better at these games than me could probably beat the entire thing in one sitting.

For me however it took me a while (and I still haven’t gotten past the last level) because I am by nature just not very good at these games. God damn plants throwing seeds or whatever it is they throw at you. When you first start the game, you see this fairly minimalistic game with a little red cutsie devil lookin’ dude standing there. Then this other little tiny dude with a big face and a cowboy hat pimps his way into view. This is Largon, and for whatever reason has captured Being’s friends and stolen the magical star pieces, then it going to work on ruling the galaxy. Being doesn’t like this of course, they finish their conversation then Largon pimps off. He doesn’t really walk so much as he’s got that pimp star action goin’ and is a neat little touch. I kinda hear the cheesy 70’s music going in my head as he walks. Then you start the game.

Okay, honestly not much of a story. But the game doesn’t try to hide the fact it has a crappy story. It’s just kind of there to be there to be cheesy. Then you just move through the levels jumping over pits, making your way across platforms, avoiding enemies and collecting keys to open doors, and ultimately rescuing your friends and grabbing the magical star pieces. There are also golden coins scattered throughout the levels, and some of them really are a pain to get, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Graphically, in all it’s simplicity the game looks really good. It’s got some gorgeous cloud backgrounds that I wouldn’t mind having as a desktop background (for all I know they could have originally been like that). The stages have a good amount of detail to them, though each of the characters only has about two frames of animation. But it works for what the game is. It kinda reminds me of the old SNES and Sega Genesis platform games, and is done very well.

The sound … the music is catchy and fits the game very well, but the effects themselves are pretty light. You get a little effect for when you collect things and get hit, and that’s about it. But given the minimalistic design around the rest of the game, it fits and thankfully the music is pretty good and doesn’t get irritating. But if I hear “Aaaw man” (it’s what Being says when he dies) again I’m gonna kick somebody. ;)

The control and gameplay is what you’d expect. You run around and jump. The only time you have to hit any other button but the A button is to open a door. You have 4 hit points per level, and when those run out you die. Which happens to me a lot because a lot of the puzzles and whatnot that have to do with the game involve enemies. And damned plants that throw things at you. Anyway, despite the game’s short length the levels are design very well and make up for the fact that you cana beat this in probably 10 minutes if you’re good enough. And there are 5 save slots, which is a weird addition that you don’t see too often in these indie games.

I would have liked to have seen a Mario-esque timer of some sort and points. Because that’s really only where the game is lacking. You just play it. There’s no points, no timers to see if you can speed run your way through it (I could definitely see people getting competitivve with this and just blasting through it). For some reason in platformers for me, it’s always satisfying getting points for things. And not having tthen makes you really not care about getting the golden coins that are scattered throughout the stage.

7.5 (rounded up to an 8 for XBLARatings) – Despite the fact the game’s extremely short length (and those damn plants) if you like old school platformers, give it a try. It’s only 80 of Microsoft’s space bucks, so it’s not like you’re going to break the bank to have some fun for a while. :)

Holy hell … I’m actually thinking about buying this one. Wha … wha? Yeah, you read that right. Yeah … it’s a damned massage app. The massage part of it is more of an afterthought though. All you can really do to adjust the vibrations is the rumble type and the intensity which you control with the right trigger. Check out the description of this.

“Combining musically adaptive psychedelic visuals with a virtually unlimited number of massage patterns that bump and shake with YOUR music, and featuring over 30 minutes of incredible indie soundtracks, Spectra Musical Massage is your one-stop source for all things controller massage related!”

Now just completely ignore everything massage related. The music this thing is talking about consists of 9 tracks by various indie artists and is GREAT stuff and damned well worth listening to.

But on top of that, the moderately customizable graphic visualizer that this thing comes with looks pretty damn good as well. Sure, there aren’t a lot of tracks, but you can stick your own music in here too.

But damn, the music it comes with is actually REALLY good stuff. And you can completely turn off the stupid controller vibrating mess. Download the trial, and when you get into the visualizer just set the rumble intensity all the way back and just check out the kickass music, the neat visualizer and the short artist bios.

Too bad the trials are time limited. :)

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When I first fired this particular trial up, it looked deathly familiar. The horrible menu, the complete lack of personality and graphics. The “Get the Ball” game … the “Hit the A button” game. Then it occurred to me … “Could this be the same guy?” I checked, and yes! It’s the same person who put out another terrible indie game on Xbox Live. The developer of the all time classic game “The Answer to Life” released this as well! I don’t really feel like downloading that again to see if there’s any differences between the two other than a poorly done “massager” (all it does is vibrate the controller and kill the batteries if you’re suing a wireless one) that goes at 49% power in the trial. Other than that, it looks like the same garbage as “The Answer to Life“, so refer to that particular trial impression to see what the other games entail. If there’s anything different between the two other than the fact that this has a shoddy massager rather than the answer to life, I don’t care to find out what because these two have to be the poorest excuse for ”games” I’ve ever seen. If you could even call them that.

There doesn’t even seem to be any modes (like pulsating, shiatsu, whatever) in this. The further down you hold the triggers, the more it vibrates. That’s it. There aren’t any graphics to speak of except for the background for the “Get the Ball” game that looks kinda neat.

The music is terrible and repetitive rock/computerish music.

Spend your 80 points on something good. I know that’s what I’m going to do since there’s nothing here (or in “The Answer to Life“) that even vaguely resembles a game.

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This has definitely got what it takes to be a good Breakout clone.

The engine itself is great, the graphics are decent, the music is catchy and doesn’t get annoying. It boasts “over 30 levels” … it has the content. But in the end, it falls flat.

One can’t help comparing this game to Bricks4Ever, because that is the single BEST Breakout/Arkanoid clone on the Xbox 360 period.

This is a very basic Breakout clone. The only thing it really adds from the original are the steel girders that can’t be busted.

No powerups, no “screw you” powerups that shrink your paddle. Just flat out block busting. And I’m a big fan of that. I’ve said before that I still to this day play Super Breakout for the Atari 2600. Even that had more modes than this game does though.

I’ve already summed up the gameplay. Block busting. That’s it. It looks like each level has at least one extra life. It has continues, but no save option. It not only saves your high scores locally, but also has a worldwide high score list. You can invite a friend, invite them to WHAT is beyond me since none of my friends have this game. Maybe invite them to watch? Because the game doesn’t boast any kind of multiplayer. You can show players … but it shows players of ALL Indie Games all over Xbox Live and not just for this game. I guess the developer thought it would show just people playing this game. And it has an “Advanced” control option that supposedly allows for more precise paddle control, but I’ve never seen it allow for anything other than irritation. But that’s just me.

The graphics are actually halfway decent. It has three different themes (that have no effect on gameplay at all) … a space theme, a sky theme and a retro theme that kinda makes it look like a really old school Breakout. But the other two themes are just kind of so so. The space theme sticks a space background in with a planet. And the sky theme sticks in blue skies. The paddle itself looks pretty neat, the ball itself leaves a constant trail of smoke (at least, I like to think it’s smoke). The bricks explode in this pretty cool looking fireball. Unfortunately, when there are multiple blocks being busted, that fireball obscures vision of the ball almost until it’s too late. And there’s been quite a few times where the game will just stop dead for a few seconds … and has actually caused the ball to go straight through those steel girders.

The sound effects themselves (other than the explosion) are pretty terrible, and don’t sound anything like they should. But the music, like I said earlier, is actually pretty good consisting of jazzy/technoish stuff.

But let’s get into the gameplay. Other than that slight hiccup with it stopping dead and weirding out from time to time, the engine itself is awesome. The ball reacts the way it should in a game like this, the paddle control is actually better than that of Bricks4Ever because it doesn’t go too fast or too slow. That’s the only complaint I really have after playing Bricks4Ever so much is that the paddle moves a bit too fast. In this, it’s perfect. It FEELS right and plays a great game of Breakout. Couple that with the high score system that gives off multipliers when blocks are hit without the ball hitting your paddle and you’ve got a score chaser on your hands.

The only real complaint I have with the engine is a rather large one. You don’t serve the ball yourself. The game does it for you. So no setting up your shots. Why change this? It’s been around since the original Breakout. It’s a rather stupid decision really.

And a Breakout game with an engine done as well as this one is only as good as it’s levels. And that’s where this completely falls apart. The levels are mediocre at best. The level design and layouts are just boring at best, ludicrously irritating at the worst. This game uses those invincible blocks to a rather annoying level which does make you worry about your skill shots … but couple that with the fact you can’t serve your own ball it just becomes time consuming and irritating and tends to lend itself to very shoddy level design. If the game didn’t use those invincible blocks as a crutch to make the levels seem interesting (and ultimately failing) it wouldn’t be so bad. But there’s nothing really impressive or fun about the levels. There’s no originality in them, nothing to make you go “whoa, okay. Now that’s cool.” Just a bunch of annoyingly placed steel girders. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the game because I was just getting bored with it to be perfectly honest.

5.5 (rounded down to a 5 for XBLARatings) – It has a great engine, decent graphics, good music. But mediocre at best level design with no originality or fun is what ultimately kills it. It’s only 80 points, and it’s not terrible by any means, but if you already have the superb Bricks4Ever, just get that and leave this be. Yes, this has a slightly better engine … but it’s not anywhere near as interesting and falls flat on it’s own merits.

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Okay, this one is so … well … it’s obviously and not obviously extremely perverted. I think it was done by a community member of the kickass gaming site Destructoid. Here’s the description.

“Take control of someone else’s controller to give them a soothing massage, either locally or over XBox Live. Solo mode lets you use your own controller to relax. Different vibration settings allow you to give the massage you want to give or receive. Supports voice chat so you can request the perfect massage. Great for long distance relationships.”

Of course you can’t do any of the Xbox Live stuff in the trial, and the “sessions” only last 1 minute in the trial.

You’ve got two different vibration types that are customizable using the right analog stick. The screenshot pretty much sums it up. The fact that it has Xbox Live support and voice chat support is beyond weird. If it had vision camera support I’d probably actually buy it. ;)

Otherwise, I really don’t care. It’s another controller vibrator.

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“Relax enjoying different automatic massage sessions using your pad vibrations. Or make your own message session with the manual mode. Take control on all other pads if you wish! The best Xbox 360 massager ever!”

Well, the trial only lasts for 3 minutes … and STILL cuts off features. It says it only has one player support, even though you can take control of other controllers. There’s a Program Mode which lets you choose between 4 10 minute massage sessions. Of course the 3 minute trial only gives you access to 2. There’s Tropical, Volcano, Ocean and Swedish. Then Manual Mode where you can use the left analog stick to adjust the roughness, the right to adjust smoothness, and hit A or B to go faster, even though there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference there. And a mode where you can make other controllers vibrate.

As of this writing, it’s 200 points. I’m hoping the trial only lasting 3 minutes is because of the old 4 minute time limit of the indie games … but why limit the features of it if the thing is going to last 4 minutes. And they’re honestly isn’t that much in the way of features anyway. Two of the Program Mode massage types are gone in the trial. Volcano and Swedish.

Utterly pointless. If I gave a shit about this stuff, it’s too limited. NEXT!

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This one came out earlier today, and I’m still trying to decide what to make of it. On one note, the graphics are complete garbage. But the gameplay is oddly addictive. It’s a match 3 puzzle game mixed in with a Geometry Wars style twin stick shooter. The patterns/enemies fade in and out through different colors and you have a bar at the right side of the screen with a circle color scrolling down. Once it reaches “shoot” it fires. If you hit a different color than what’s fired, it changes that color. If you hit a group, it makes that group explode. (You can also tell what color is coming up by the trail your ship or vehicle or whatever the hell that thing is supposed to be leaves) The more times shoot the same color the higher your multiplier gets, the faster the game seems to go and the procedurally generated music starts sounding like actual music. You shoot one of them and change the color, you lose your multiplier. If you touch any of them, you lose your multiplier. You hit the border, and the shapes you’re matching come to life and it becomes a rather simplistic version of GeoWars which is the only time you can really die it seems.

Apparently the game comes with 15 levels and 15 enemies. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get back to the main menu from the level select screen other than going into a game and quitting it again. The controls are just fine, it just uses the two analog sticks. The graphics, while functional have the most horrible looking color palette I’ve seen in a while. The sound … there isn’t much (it’s a little over 1 meg to download) … once the procedurally generated music starts sounding like actual music aside from a steady thump and a few random notes here and there it sounds like … well … music.

The above screenshot … yeah … I wouldn’t exactly say it’s action because once the enemies do come to life they just kinda move around aimlessly and tend to group up at the bottom of the screen. Everything about this particular game is either terrible or close to it but the gameplay which is surprisingly interesting. I’m still personally kinda on the fence about whether or not I wanna buy it … but it’s definitely weird.

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Okay, I’ll admit. When I first downloaded the trial for this and tried it out, I couldn’t stand it. I thought it was terrible, couldn’t get the gameplay, and deleted it. Then the other day the developer emails me with a code for the game asking flat out if I could review it. Now … being that I had only played the trial and I don’t get into puzzle games ANYWAY, my original thoughts on the game weren’t really relevant to the overall game … so I figured what the hell. If nothing else from the impression I had from the trial with my history of disliking puzzle games, it’s always fun to tear a horrible game apart. After playing the full version of this game however, it actually kinda surprised me. The description says “One of the most addictive puzzle games on the net is now available for your Xbox 360.” … which I have never played, nor heard about. But on that same note, I’m going to assume it’s some sort of Flash game or something, and I don’t play those. So I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The game offers different modes of play : Traditional, Battle and Party. Naturally, the first mode I tried was Traditional since I don’t fare too well in multiplayer modes. So when you first start the game, you select from one of five characters. They all have their own distinct looks to them. Chaz, the blue guy looks like he’s a rocker. The red guy looks like he’s about to tear someone’s face off. The purple character is a chick named Lena. The yellow one, Petey is my favorite just because he looks like a bat shit insane Pac-Man that’s had WAY to many power pellets. And the green guy Zeffer who’s the serious one of the bunch I’m assuming.

You start the game, then you see a screen with a neat looking background and a very basic play area. It says “READY? GO!” then your “orbs” start falling down the screen one by one at random. You press Left and Right to move them, and hold Down to make them go down faster. After a while, it throws up a random row of orbs from the bottom. The orbs themselves are the various multicolored characters in the game making weird faces. You have to attempt to make up and down lines of the same color, and every now and then an activator comes down that’s an arrow of whatever color your orbs are. You hit that line or colors and they all pop. There’s a red bar off to the side that you have to fill up to win the level. But if your orbs reach the top of the screen, it’s game over. That’s pretty much how the basics of the game work. This is also the mode that I like the least because it’s pretty boring.

The next mode is a bit more interesting, it’s a 2 player Battle mode where you square off against either a CPU controlled opponent, or a human friend. Whenever you pop a line of a certain amount of those orbs, it sends off a row of random orbs up from the bottom of your opponent’s screen. And there’s an attack bar at the bottom that fills as you pop the orbs. Once it’s filled up, you hit the A button and launch at attack. Which seems like it’s randomized, because I’ve seen it add orbs to the bottom, reverse controls and even make the controls unresponsive for a short amount of time. NOW we’re getting somewhere with the Battle mode, because this is actually kinda fun.

With the third, and best mode Party mode. It’s a 4 player game where you can play against CPU controlled opponents or humans, or a mix of any of them. It’s basically a 4 player Battle mode and this is the best part of the whole game. You pick whatever character you want and just go in and tear people up. It’s a lot more forgiving with the activators. Unfortunately, it’s more forgiving for EVERYONE for someone like me who sucks at these kinds of games. But there’s a certain feeling of satisfaction when you launch of an attack and see 1 or 2, or sometimes all 3 of your opponents just hit the top of the screen and lose. :) One of these days I wanna try it with some friends and see what they think. Will be more interesting since we’ll probably be drunk.

But there’s a slight hitch with the gameplay that really annoys me. When the orbs hit either the top of another row, or the bottom of the screen, it’s set in stone. There’s no sliding the orb over at the last seconds, which really makes it near impossible to pull a win out of your ass when you you’re near the top of the screen. It’s a nitpick, I know. But it’s worth mentioning. And a description of what the attacks do in the game itself would have been helpful. And while there are high scores and it does keep track of your wins, it unfortunately doesn’t save them. It would’ve been cool to see local (or global) win/loss records.

It’s hard to say anything about the graphics in puzzle games, because so long as they function and do what they’re supposed to do they’re good in my book. And that’s exactly what this game is, functional. The orbs don’t animate, the popping animation is pretty good. The backgrounds looks pretty cool, and they are nicely varied. When you do an attack, you get this neat wooshing sound effect, and your character comes up on the screen with a little pattern to let you know that something’s about to happen. The character select screens are pretty cool. They’re functional. Pretty good, but pretty basic.

The sound, I mean, there are various little sound effects and little what sounds like voices. They’re all perfectly appropriate to the game. The music however, while the music is good. There’s ONE SONG in the ENTIRE game and it repeats. Over and over and over and over and oh God. It’s enough to drive you crazy. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was a way to turn it down in game, but there isn’t. A volume control for the music and/or custom soundtrack support would’ve made this so much better.

*UPDATE* Honestly, custom soundtrack support is something I go by in the feature list for the game on Xbox Live since I’ve never actually used it. Until now. It DOES in fact have custom soundtrack support. Kinda. You just use your guide button and play different music that way. Thank God the developer told me about that. Instead of the damned repetitive music that the game comes with, play your own. I suggest either the song from I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1 or the soundtrack to Invincible Tiger : The Legend of Han Tao, which if you don’t have you can download here and here respectively.

Other than the slight gameplay gripe and the repetitive music, this game actually kind of surprised me. Because once you get past the damned repeating music the game itself is actually pretty good. It’s got most of the modes and options it needs to be fun, and while Traditional mode is pretty boring, the Battle and Party modes are actually a hell of a lot of fun.

Originally, I had given this game a 6.5 because of the repetitive music .. and a 7.5 if it had volume control and/or custom soundtrack support. Like I said above, it DOES in fact have custom soundtrack support, sorta, and I gave some suggestions on what to listen to. So yeah … 6.5 with the original music and a 7.5 with music that doesn’t repeat itself to infinity. Hearing that same song over and over makes me want to go out and buy Grand Theft Auto 4 just to kill hundreds of people without worrying about getting into trouble. And I’m not even a big fan of Grand Theft Auto 4. While that gameplay gripe is kind of annoying, it’s not a real big deal once you get the hang of it. Having it permanently track your win record and high score would help a lot too, and would make the Traditional mode a lot better. But once you get into Battle and Party, the game really becomes interesting. And if you’re an unpopular bastard like me, playing against the CPU opponents is pretty fun. Just don’t do what I did and judge it by the trial, because it sucks. right now the game is sitting at 200 points, which it may raise or lower with the new pricing structure. Who knows. But if you’ve got the points to spare, and can get past the music repeating over and over, it’s actually a pretty fun little local party game because the multiplayer really makes it.

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I like Breakout clones. Period. I don’t know why I had ignored this game for so long because I tend to play every Breakout clone I see at least once to give it a try. This game’s trial comes with one level out of 15. Right there is a problem. Only 15 levels? Anyway. It’s fine, because you know within one levels whether or not you’re going to like a game like this. And this game has some neat ideas, you get infinite lives, but you lose points when a ball makes it past the paddle. Each colored block is worth a certain amount of points, and you get a score multiplier when you hit so many of them in a row without losing the ball, which is a pretty damn cool idea and would lead to some monstrous scores from people who are good at the game. And it does track those scores, though I don’t know if it tracks them online or not. And it has a two player co-op mode that isn’t there in the trial. But that’s fine since I don’t have anyone to play the game WITH at the moment.

The graphics are pretty good, the backgrounds look good, the blocks look pretty good and shrink away with they’re broken. The sound is about typical for block busting games and pretty basic stuff. The music from what I’ve heard is pretty good, though I don’t know if there’s more. But wait for the gameplay …

The gameplay, well you should’ve figured out from “Breakout clone” that you have to bust all the blocks. This does it a bit differently, which I don’t know if it was deliberate or not. In a normal Breakout game going all the way back to the Atari 2600 … when you hit the ball anything but dead center on the paddle it’s going to go either left or right depending on the side it was hit on. The further over on the paddle the ball hits, the more extreme the angle.

This game however … the way it does it differently is that no matter WHERE the ball hits on the paddle, it will go straight up and down. Unless you hit the ball while the paddle is moving, THEN it moves off in a different direction. Which is a neat place to take the gameplay because the ball goes a LOT faster after you do that, even though it doesn’t feel quite right.

What breaks it however is that the hit detection for the ball and paddle is terrible. More often that not I found the ball going straight THROUGH the paddle, this losing my ball, losing points and resetting my multiplier. And that, and on a slightly lesser note but worth mentioning the fact there’s only 15 levels is what kills it.

It’s only 80 points, and if that problem wasn’t there I would’ve almost bought it at some point just because of the weird turn the gameplay takes. But Bricks4Ever is out there at the same price with more features, more levels, more everything. And this game just doesn’t quite feel right … neat ideas though.

*UPDATE* I saw a video trailer for this ... and near as I can tell the background you see in the screenshot is what you get. But seeing as how I've only played the trial, I can't confirm or deny anything. :)

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Yet ANOTHER match 3 in the Indie Games section. So what set this one apart from all the rest of them for me, if anything. I love Bust a Move, back when I had my Sega Saturn I’d sit and play that sucker for HOURS. Then I found the PC game Frozen Bubble and played that for quite a while. I went on a trial downloading spree a while back and snagged this one, even though the boxart caused me to ignore it for a long time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad and it’s quite original … but c’mon.

Anyway, when I finally got to this it was almost immediately recognizable once I got into the game, other than the way you launch the balls it’s basically Bust a Move with a story mode and all that (which I’ll get to in a bit). And I was quite surprised by what I played, when the trial ran out I spend 80 of the last 200 points I had on me at the time and played. Now, this isn’t the type of game that I will sit down and play for hours on end anymore, I tend to use them as more of a “play for a few minutes, quit. play a little, quit”. That’s how it works with most puzzle games for me.

The presentation of this game is pretty good, and it gives a nice chance to the typical way you would play a game like this. You hold down the A button, and your little alien/robot guy will press a button. You charge that shot to send it where it needs to go. And it works surprisingly well. The Easy mode gives you infinite lives, an infinite launch time to think out your shots and a handy-dandy guide that tells you roughly where the ball is going to land. Medium gives you 5 lives, a 10 second shot timer and the guide lasts for 10 balls. Hard gives you 3 lives, a 5 second shot timer and never gives you a guide. But don’t worry about it too much, you play through it on Easy and you’ll pretty well get how to launch the balls.

And this game has a story mode! Granted, it isn’t much, but it’s there. Aliens run out of gas, then get sucked into the orbit of (I think) it’s Earth then go mining for fuel while others fix the ship. And that’s where the gameplay comes in. Mining for fuel by matching blocks. Yeah, it’s a stupid story but hey. At least it’s there. My only complaint about the story mode is that it’s dead short for each playthrough. The reason I say each playthrough is because you have different paths you can go throughout the game, which really adds to the replay value. But I personally would’ve liked to have seen a HUGE story mode, even if the story itself kinda sucks.

Then there’s an Arcade mode, which I don’t fully get because it seems like it’s just the story mode all over again. Though I’m sure I’m missing something. Then a mode that helped me out a lot … PRACTICE. :) Where you get to practice every stage you’ve been on, which was an immense help with some of the later stages that get surprisingly difficult.

Throughout the game you can get various powerups that are pretty typical to games like this. Universal wild card color balls, a blank ball that when hit changes the color of all the other blanks to whatever color you hit it with. Balls that make the stage go up and down, bombs, balls that are unusable until you match 3 around them, etc. And they all work great for their levels and tend to make a lot of sense and changes the game considerably. I would’ve liked it better if you could LAUNCH these powerups like the wild card, but hey. Can’t win ‘em all.

The graphics are great. Your little alien dude in the corner animates pretty decently and has different things he does. Like he’ll roll his eyes when you’re taking too long, a cheesy little clap when you match some of the balls. A freaked out expression when the stage starts getting near the top. The backgrounds look awesome and are drawn extremely well. The sound, for the effects that are there (you honestly don’t need much in a game like this) sound pretty good and completely appropriate and, thankfully, didn’t drive me up the wall. The music fits the tone of the game perfectly and isn’t annoying like in some games like this.

7.5 (rounded up to 8 for XBLARatings) – The only thing I can fault this for is the disappointingly short story mode. But the game being only 80 points, that’s completely forgivable. If you like Bust a Move style games, give this a shot. There isn’t any multiplayer play unfortunately, and the score keeping is local only, but the addictiveness holds up and is a great change-up from the regular “point and launch” style gameplay that doesn’t take all that long at all to get the hang of.

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Hey, another fun “freebie”. Granted, it’s at 80 points, but here’s the description :

Have fun ^^. there are no restrictions to trial mode, you do not need to pay for it! In the Single player mode, you will be the winner if you kill at least 5 enemys! In the Split screen mode, you have to eliminate the leader of the enemys(1P/2P) if you want to win the game. Presented by wangjun360

That’s about it. The description pretty well sums up the game. And it’s pretty damn fun too, even though there isn’t a lot to it. It plays a lot like Star Fox 64, only it’s more or less a deathmatch game that I’m utterly terrible at. But keeps me coming back … mainly because I wanna blow someone out of the sky.

The game has a fair amount of replay value to it, even though I haven’t blown up ANY ships yet. I do seem to be doing a lot of ramming though. You have 2 weapons, a regular old gun and missles. You throttle forward by holding the right trigger, and if you wanna go even faster, you can hit X while you’ve got the trigger held down. Active reload is on the Left bumper, the directional pad controls avoiding and missile cameras. It’s all pretty basic stuff. You just fly around and try to blow up the other ships. It comes with 4 maps that are named with the incredibly genius name of “1st Map” “2nd Map” so on and so forth. And when you start the 2 player split screen play with one controller hooked up, the other ship will do nothing, and eventually float to the ground and blow up where you get “Team 1 win the game”

Graphically, the ships themselves have a light cel-shading look to them and look pretty damn good with a smooth constant frame rate that hasn’t dropped yet. The maps themselves look decent enough, but the textures are pretty hideously low resolution. Luckily, you don’t notice them that much. They’re of decent enough size for the number of ships they have, and it’s weird to see actual blue skies in a recent video game for me.

The sound, well, the effects themselves are pretty light but sound good. The missles sound decent enough, your default gun sounds like it does a lot more damage than it actually does. The explosions are done well. But the music is another story. You get this weird porno sounding music on the main menu that isn’t very long and loops itself which tends to get annoying. But the in game music is hard core Godsmackish rock music that’s just kick ass.

The gameplay is pretty good, except the CPU controlled ships are pretty tough. The ship moves along like you’d expect it to, it’s easy to aim and fire shots off. The missiles have their typical “lock on and follow” stuff going on, though with all the ships moving around as such a speed it’s hard to get and maintain a lock, so you’ve gotta learn to fire off the missiles AS SOON as that sucker turns red. Other than starting the 2 player mode for the hell of it I haven’t actually tried it, but the frame rate didn’t stutter at all, so there’s that.

6.5 (rounded up to 7 for XBLARatings) – This seems like kind of a test for a much bigger, better game to me. It’s definitely worth a download and worth trying out. But just imagine this game with a whole lot more maps, 8 to 16 player Xbox Live support, 4 player local with a campaign mode of some kind as well as other game modes. THEN it would truely rock.

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Uh … well … it’s an overhead minigolf game with horrible graphics, horrible sound, decent control and supports 1 to 4 players. With poorly designed courses on top of it. I got more depth and fun out of the golf game on the Atari 2600. I think I’ll go play that actually. What makes it even worse, is that it came out at about the same time as the MUCH better Avatar Golf. Don’t waste your time with it unless you’re either bored, drunk, stoned if that’s your thing, or all of the above. You probably won’t even make it through the trial before you just hit the guide button to exit as quickly as possible. Literally the only thing it’s got going for it is the fact that 4 people can play. But FINDING 3 other people to play this may prove difficult. Go get Avatar Golf instead and let this one rot. It’s the single best downloadable golf game on the 360. I don’t even know why this mini golf game was even released. If you wanna experiment with games, DON’T put them on the marketplace. Please? There’s enough crap on there without something like this making it worse.


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Are you sick to death of avatars like I am? Do you wanna send them hurtling to their doom? Well … you can’t do THAT in this game, but that’s basically how it works. It has support for up to 4 players either locally, or with CPU controlled opponents (although you can’t get CPU controlled opponents in the trial. I don’t know about humans because I didn’t try). They basically just fall using ragdoll physics downward, and you have to get them through hoops for points. There are balls to slow you down that slowly disappear and other ones that cause your avatar to bounce. That’s about it. You can hit the X button to make him or her do a flip if they get stuck. You can randomize the avatar in case you don’t wanna use yours (I chose a hot black chick). They have little grunts and whatnot whenever they hit things and scream when they get bounced up. It’s stupid, it’s weird, it’s got carny music. If I actually had more people in the house besides myself to play the 360 with, I’d probably buy it just for the entertainment value when alcohol is involved.

Kinda neat and definitely priced right at 80 points. I’m not going to personally buy it, but I’ll keep the trial around just because it gave me a good goofy laugh when I played it drunk. Give it a try. :)

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Why do I give a damn about the answer to life? We all know it’s 42. Of course in the trial for this, you don’t GET that and are almost suckered into buying it. It comes with a “get the ball” game where you’re a ball trying to get smaller ones. And a “hit A as fast as you can” for up to 4 players. Don’t waste your time. There’s a reason there aren’t any screenshots for it because it looks like crap. The music isn’t even all that great. If you want a collection of useless shit, get the “360 Mega App Pach HD“ It costs the same amount of money, has better music and more stuff to it and a sense of humor. And doesn’t try to trick you into buying it. It’s complete crap, it’s a waste of time. The author of this thing is just trying to screw you out of your money. Don’t download it, don’t even look at it. Avoid it like the plague. I actually feel like less of a person for having actually even thought about “playing” this.

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If you’re looking for a hardcore golf sim, you might wanna look elsewhere, because this isn’t it. However, it’s a great casual golf game that just about anyone can play.

My history with golf games is fairly recent. The first one I ever played just for kicks was back in the Nintendo 64 days with Mario Golf since it wasn’t one of those damned boring sports simulations. I prefer the non realistic style games just because they’re more fun. But I’ve always though golf games were the most boring of the bunch until I played Polar Golf or whatever it is, and now I like to play the more old school style games. Like, I play the original PGA Tour Golf on the PC in DOSBox from time to time. Other arcadey sports games I like are NBA Jam : Tournament Edition and WWF Wrestlemania (the one with the digitized actors like Mortal Kombat). Because they’re actually FUN. And this golf game is no different. This little game supports up to 4 players locally, and up to 8 over Xbox Live and even has System Link support. If you snagged the Xbox Live Arcade Game Golf : Tee it Up! and finally got bored with it, this may just fit the bill. And having avatar support means you have the possibility of playing golf with someone in a Star Wars storm trooper outfit, or with a member of the COG from Gears of War. It ALMOST makes me wanna waste the money on outfits for my avatar. Almost.

Graphically, everything is smooth and extremely well done with bright colorful courses, and of course the avatar support in a game that finally really takes advantage of them that’s worth playing. A Kingdom for Keflings did it, sure, but that game is complete crap. The courses are detailed, the frame rate is smooth as silk. The avatars look great on the courses and have their little animations and stuff of clapping and the look of complete surprise when you land a hole in one (Yay! Finally did it!), or the frustration and disappointment of bogeys or just giving up on a hole. A lot of it you’ve seen before in UNO if you play that. But they’re a hell of a lot better than Easy Golf’s robots, I’ll tell ya that much.

You can get a few different backgrounds such as a clear sunny day, in space, city lights, rain clouds and snow clouds. Along with different light weather effects such as rain and snow to go along with the typical sunny day. While they don’t make a difference at all in the gameplay at all, they look awesome. And you can change the conditions from normal to dry to lush and whatnot, but I don’t see how it has any effect whatsoever. Lush looks like it puts flowers in and whatnot, so I don’t think it’d make a difference at all.

The sound is the only real weak point. You don’t expect much in the way of sound effects in a golf game, but this is a little too light. I would have liked more sound effects, maybe little quotes or grunts or something from the avatars depending on the shots. And while the music is good and fits the game well, but it gets a bit repetitive after a while. But there’s custom soundtrack support, so just turn the music off and replace it with whatever music you want.

The gameplay is where this really stands out, because it just tries to be fun and player friendly. It plays almost identical to Golf : Tee it Up! to be perfectly honest, and has the same type of ball physics. Which is both good and bad, because the ball will behave the exact same way whether it’s on the fairway, in the rough, in the sand, whatever. Which that generally makes the game a lot easier and fun, but it’s still a little weird to see the ball bounce and roll freely in the sand.

The game uses the tried and true 3 click method for taking your shots, which is the way I prefer to play these games. And it works great, even having to adjust for the wind and slopes and whatnot. You can set your backspin and topspin. Aiming is really simple using either the left analog stick or the directional pad. If you wanna zoom out and get a better view of the course and your shot just press the Right bumper. The right analog stick is used for selecting the aforementioned backspin and topspin, or to get a flyover of the course. You use your Left and Right triggers to select your club if what you’ve got won’t work out for ya. It’s simple. It’s elegant, and can be played by anyone.

The course builder is one of the big selling points of this game as well. While the courses themselves aren’t all THAT big, being able to build your own with a very powerful and easy to use editor with TONS of ways to make your course your own and being able to share it with people online is simply awesome. And apparently you can play the course you’ve made online without having to send it to someone first. There are tons of courses that people have made for Easy Golf and I don’t see it being any different for this. Having that capability makes the replayability of this game damn near endless. Unless you’re someone like me

The online play is awesome, but can be a little problematic on rare occasions. I’ve twice encountered a bug where somehow the game just flat out crashes with an error 4 if I remember correctly. And there’s an option where you can turn off people being able to simply jump into your game while it’s going … which is fortunate because there’s been a few times where people jumping into the game causes the game to stop dead for about a second, which, if you’re in the middle of a shot, you’re screwed. Now these problems don’t happen all the time because I’ve played several online games just fine with no incidents, and they may very well get fixed soon.

BUT you can play up to 7 other people online, and you all play all at the same time, which is friggin’ awesome to see all these avatars all over the course taking their shots and really helps with the social aspect of the game a great deal. I just wish I could “accidentally” hit someone with the ball in the multiplayer. ;) The only annoying thing about the multiplayer is that when you jump into a game that’s already in progress, you see a list of people playing the game and a black screen you have to sit through until they’re done with the hole. Being able to watch the other people play would’ve been a nice addition instead of a black screen. And if you start a game with someone, you may wanna start a party first then start your game because when the game is over, it’s over and it boots everyone out. Even if you’re in mid conversation.

One last note, the game has quite a high number of titles you can snag for various things you do in the game. Like, for example, I just got a title for my 50th Birdie, and you can assign whatever title you get to your character. It keeps track of your statistics as well, for example, showing how many Birdies you got, or holes in one, or Eagles, or whatever. And of course it shows the course records. But there’s no leaderboards where you can see how other people are doing, and the only title you get to see is the one that they got assigned to them. Still, it’s nice to have those things PERIOD. Just a little bit of a letdown that you can’t share it.

8.5 (rounded up to a 9 for XBLARatings) – This game is 400 points. And is worth every penny. You get 6 full courses, a powerful and easy to use course builder, and 8 player online play. What more could you want. Just buy it. If you’re not into golf games, just download the free trial and give it a shot. You may be surprised.

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Okay, I don’t know what this is a remake OF of course, but it’s still kinda neat. Especially since the developer has this description : “Avoid obstacles, and Aim the goal! It takes only two minutes, and no restriction code, so you can play well in the trial.” So yes. I’m REVIEWING a TRIAL. Now this is only the second time I’ve ever seen anything like this in the Indie Games section of Xbox Live. The first game I’ve seen to do it was complete crap and more of a joke game than anything. A little RPG that you can beat in something like thirty seconds just by pounding the A button. But this on the other hand is an actual game. And is actually quite fun for what it is. All you do is fly through a corridor with various, I guess they’re crystals in the way and all you’ve gotta do is maneuver your way through them around them while you keep going faster and faster. If you smack into one, you just slow down to a dead stop and have to get going again building up your speed. At the end of it, you get a completion screen showing your time. The left stick moves, Right trigger accelerates, Left trigger slows down and the Right bumper slows down. The number at the top is your distance, and the number at the bottom is the time you’re taking.

What you see in the screenshot are the graphics, the crystals change color and the sense of speed comes from the squares getting closer and closer. And the game gets pretty damn fast too without any frame rate problems (I should hope not given the simplistic nature of the graphics). The only sound effects you get is a “SCHMACK” when you slam into one of the crystals, and the sound of glass breaking or something when you slow down and the screen inverts it’s colors. You get some pretty cool background music, even though there appears to be only one track. The gameplay is one one of those simple to get/bitch to master kinda deals and controls without a hitch.

7.5 – The only complaint I’ve got is that it only saves your time for the session and not permanently, even though it asks which device you want to save stuff to when you first start the game. Other than that it’s just fine for what it is and not a bad way to kill a few minutes. I’ve played it 6 or 7 times so far and I may end up honestly buying it when I’ve got 80 points just to blow just so I won’t have to keep exiting and restarting it.

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Definitely a really cool idea. I’ve personally been waiting for this game to hit for a while. Well, ever since I saw the trailer a little while back. It looked cool as hell. A Streets of Rage style game with real actors? Hell yeah. But then I played it, and it only vaguely resembles any of those old beat ‘em up fighters that people like me know all too well.

The story is pretty thin. Street gangs have taken over Paris and the cops finally just say “Screw it.” and send in American gangs to fight the Paris gangs. That’s about it. It has two different story modes, one where you just take everybody out. And another where you befriend the bosses and they fight for you. But neither of them last very long, and once you get good at the game you’ll probably beat able to beat each one in no time whatsoever. There’s the typical Survival mode where you just fight wave after wave of enemies on one life bar (that get replenished a little bit after each wave). And an up to 4 player Versus match.

Thankfully, they give you little training videos on the main menu to kinda show you what to do, and to show off the combo system in the game where you can get some pretty insane stuff going.

The graphics are the first thing you’re going to really notice about this game, and while they are good … they’re not without their problems. The characters are large and highly detailed with lots of different animations going, and they all look great. The characters scale very good, and the backgrounds look awesome. But, the animation doesn’t flow. At all. You’ll especially notice this in the walking animation, but it haunts everything. The graphical effects are good for fireballs and whatnot.

But with all the enemies and bosses in the game, it’s the same 4 guys for ALL of them. Just different colors (which are horribly done) and sizes. Some of the bosses are as big as the entire screen, other enemies are only about as big as your shoe. But they all look exactly the same in the end. So there isn’t a whole lot of variety and it gets real old to be beating up the same boring looking guys. Yeah, you do the same thing in beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage, but the enemies are a hell of a lot more interesting.

You get different characters to fight with as you play through the game, and they do have different strengths and weaknesses. But the unlockable ones are just the same boring palette swaps you’re gonna see everywhere in the game. And it takes so damn long to unlock everything, I got bored and quit trying.

The music is actually really good with a decent variety in styles and tracks and they all sound great. The sound effects themselves are unfortunately not so lucky. Especially when the characters talk. They only have a few little quotes or grunts that you’ll hear a LOT. And it gets tiresome. A little more variety would’ve helped immensely. But the music is pretty damn good.

The gameplay, the game uses this weird multiple planes idea. Normally in a fighter like TMNT, The Punisher, Streets of Rage, Final Fight, etc you move independently all over the screen. In this game however, you dash in between the planes. Which is a huge irritation and really tends to get in the way. There are 3 basic attacks you can do, and a combo system. The attacks don’t really feel like they land though. You basically move through the entire game beating the crap out of everything in site, and this game can UNLOAD the enemies onto the screen without even a hiccup. And there are little bonus areas to break it up where it sticks you in a room full of enemies with, for example, infinite Fury. Which is a meter that builds up as you attack. It goes up to three levels, where you can unleash a super move of sorts. In one of the bonus areas, you get infinite Fury where you just unload on a room full of enemies that look the exact same. Other times, the game will move faster, or you’ll be moon jumping. But the enemies never actually attack back, they just stand around saying “Come on!” and “Get him!” over and over and over.

All in all, it tries to reinvent the wheel a little bit,a nd goes back to the days of the old beat ‘em up arcades while adding something modern. But the “miltiple planes” system is a terrible idea and more annoying than anything. Free movement is much much better. The game is entirely too short and kinda forces you to play it over and over just to unlock all the characters and difficulty levels. Having a 4 player Versus match is a cool idea, but the game isn’t good enough to back it up. And the fact that they don’t run … they walk with their broken walk animation entirely too slow, or you can hold down the R trigger and do a ridiculous looking slide.

One really high point for this game though (once you go through and unlock the stuff after numerous annoying playthroughs) is that you can configure the HELL out of the game outside of the default difficulty settings. You can adjust how many credits you have, enemy life which you can make almost as hard as you want. Enemy aggressiveness, enemy count, Fury, players speed, gravity and friendly fire. Unlocking them is annoying as all hell, but they do significantly change the game.

6.0 – The game is only priced at 240 points ($3), and for the price for all it’s faults it’s definitely worth it. I got some fun out of it, and I still play it from time to time, the multiple plane system of playing is irritating as hell, and the bosses are brain dead. But you get kinda used to it after a while. The ending for the mode of play where you befriend the gang bosses is pretty funny and actually made me chuckle.

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Okay, I’d like to state. For the record. I HATE most puzzle games. Tetris? Can’t stand it.Columns? …. It just depends on what kind of mood I’m in. Zuma? Sucks. Luxor? Sometimes I get into fits where I play that for weeks then I don’t touch it, but I do like it. Maybe because it’s kinda Breakout-ish in nature. I just don’t have the patience for them. Puzzle Pandemonium is one of those games I completely ignored for a while just because of that. I’m not a big fan of most puzzle games. Then one day there wasn’t anything else new worth trying, so I snagged it and tried the trial. And promptly got my ass kicked. That’s the reason I bought it. I got pissed off at it. And honestly, after getting used to it it’s one of the better puzzle games I’ve ever played. I honestly couln’t tell you if it’s a remake of any particular game or not though. I havea no idea due to my complete lack of knowledge of these kinds of games. And maybe that lack of knowledge is what makes this game good to me, maybe it’s a horrible knock off of a good game. I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care, because I like it.

Graphically, it’s pretty much what you’d expect of a puzzle game like this. Bright, colorful, the blocks look neat. That musical note background is pretty stupid though, but that’s alright because I’m so involved with playing it I barely even notice it. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even notice the CPU players. And you get a neat little fireworks explosion when you win or lose signifying that your game is over. I tend to see the losing one more often. :)

The sound, I mean, how much sound can a puzzle game have? The music sounds pretty good for the type of game, and if you don’t like it you can turn it down or just flat out turn it off. The sound effects are appropriate, though the optional voice taunts are pretty retarded. “All your combos are belong to us.” and stuff like that. Thankfully, they’re not on by default, and they may hit it off with some people. Because at first they’re kinda cute and funny, but after a while they just get irritating to me.

The gameplay however is the most important thing, and is the thing that I can’t really get too far into because I’m no good at puzzle games. So parts of this may be completely wrong. And feel free to leave a comment with any corrections. The game plays just fine. It’s basically just a match 3 puzzler, you have to get rid of the blocks before they fill your screen. When you get matches of more than 3, you send off various obstacles at your opponents. When you match some blocks next to … what I guess are the dirt blocks they start turning into the colored blocks one by one. You can send off brick walls at people, and even steel walls, as well as setting off combos that are pretty satisfying, even though I’ve only really ever done it on accident. :) It’s that battle aspect of it that really holds it for me, and makes the game even more fun.

It supports up to 4 players locally, but if you don’t have 3 other people to play the game with, it substitutes the missing players with computer players. You can either play just by yourself, 2, 3 or 4. So it’s kinda cool that you have the option.

Now for the bad. As cool and addictive as the game is, there is NO scores, NO win/lose records. Nothing. So no leaderboards whatsoever. And I didn’t really find that out until I’d played against the CPU 7 or 8 times and finally beat it. “Yeah! Got ya you son of a bitch!! I … I … dammit.” No way of proving that you did it. Of course if there WAS a win/loss record mine would be rather embarrassing, more so since I only play on the default difficulty level. :) If it had even local leaderboards of some kind, it would make coming back to it either more rewarding, or in my case more embarrassing. And while having up to 4 players locally is pretty damn cool, and helps the replayability of the game IMMENSELY. This game SCREAMS for online multiplayer and different modes of play.

7.5 (rounded down to a 7 for XBLARatings)– This game is great fun and addictive as hell. The score would be a lot higher if it had leaderboards of some kind, and online multiplayer. But don’t keep that from trying it out. At only 80 points, it’s a hell of a lot better than the other puzzle games of it’s type I’ve tried in the indie section, and well worth the purchase.

*UPDATE* A little tidbit from the developer regarding something I missed. "There is a win/loss record but it doesn’t really stand out. Every time you win a small musical note gets placed above left hand corner of your playing area."

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I downloaded this game at launch, and played a little at a time until I beat it. While this game doesn’t bring anything new (with the exception of a few things) that Super Metroid didn’t do better in 1994, it’s still a damned impressive Xbox Live Arcade title. Without giving away too much, you play as an individual named Jason who pretty much gets sucked into this terrorist plot to take out San Fransisco (hmm … nope. Not getting into that shit.). The game is in 3D, but is played from a side scrolling perspective that mostly works. But it uses the Unreal Engine which really helps bring everything to life, albeit in a lot of greys that the engine is known for.

For old Metroid fans like me, there’s nothing new in this game though … and playing it and going through the first half of it, it made me dig out my Super Nintendo and play Metroid again. And I’ll probably end up buying Castlevania : Symphony of the Night on Xbox Live Arcade as well eventually.

Graphically, the game is near perfect and probably the best looking downloadable title for any system. The Unreal Engine really shows it’s strengths with this one and, for the most part, makes the side scrolling perspective in a 3D environment work perfectly. There are some quirks with aiming at things in the background, and with aiming PERIOD … they aren’t glaring, but they do tend to get annoying. The attention to detail is top notch, except that during the cutscenes the characters have a really creepy video game look to them most of the time. But the detail of the various enemies that you have to deal with are something else entirely. The robots and death machines and whatnot almost look like they could pop out of the screen. The environments look outstanding, the animation is near perfect. And the closeups of when you decide to melee an enemy to take him out look great. Even though it tends to repeat the same ones over and over again, it never bothered me in the least. There is the occasional instances of the ragdoll physics getting hilariously bad though, something that plagues ALL the games that use them it seems. The enemies you take down never seem to actually fall realistically, hence the term “rag doll”. And seeing them under water is … weird. Oh, and the explsions of the boss enemies were particularly satisfying.

The only real complaint I have in the graphics department is that everything seems to be in that typical Unreal Engine grey. Even the outdoor areas that TRY to look lush and green don’t look it at all. Blue skies don’t look like blue skies, the entire game has a pretty muted color palette. What the hell is wrong with making green look green, and making clear blue skies blue?

The gameplay, as I’ve mentioned before is nothing new if you’re familiar with the 2D Metroid or Castlevania games. It’s tight, responsive, near perfect. Except for the cumbersome aiming. There are hidden powerups all over the place that you’ll unlock as you get new abilities, the swimming isn’t painful like it is with most games. And the level design is superb. While the complex isn’t all that big, it SEEMS huge because you get to all these new areas as you obtain various items throughout the game. And it helps with the fact that you’re unrealistically armed to the teeth with your normal weapon being that you can only carry one type of gun at a time with addons like a missile launcher, grenades, a foam gun that’ll either freeze an enemy in their tracks or expand certain places to the point they explode and a hook shot. And there are other things you’ll collect throughout the course of the game like an addon that makes you run REAL fast, another one that lets you do double and triple jumps with the aid of thrusters, a mask that lets you breathe indefinitely under water, and a helmet that’ll help you stay invincible against enemy fire.

And for people who are into that kind of thing, the game has a ton of replay value in the way of achievements and whatnot. Like completing the game with a certain percentage of the items, or completing the game in this or that amount of time on whatever difficulty. In game you’ll see a little popup in the lower corner that tells you how many headshots for example you have compared to someone else on your list. And if you’re like me and have someone on their list who lives and breathes these achievements, you’ll see some pretty high numbers in there. The proving grounds lets you try out the things that you’ll eventually get in the game, and are timed where you can compete against other people’s times. I’m not an achievement guy, though.

The sound is as good as everything else in the game, especially if you’ve got good speakers or a surround sound setup on your 360. The guns have a great sound to them which add to the overall powerful feeling of them. The explosions are as loud soundwise as they are graphically and add to the satisfaction, the music is … hardly noticeable at all to be honest and might as well not even be there. I honestly don’t remember ANY of it other than the subdued title screen music. While the story is kinda just shoved into the game, the voice acting in it is pretty damn good.

And the story … it’s a pretty short game, so there really isn’t much story to it. And it’s all pretty typical stuff. I didn’t really care about any of the characters and the story wasn’t all that impressive to me at all. While I’ve never read the book that this game is a prequel to, from what I understand you don’t need to. And it’s too bad, because a great story would’ve helped this game out even more.

8.0 – Is this the greatest game ever made? God no. Is it even the best game of this generation like I’ve heard some people say? Hell no, Biochock has it beat. Mostly because it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table in terms of gameplay, and quite honestly Super Metroid did it better back in the day. But it is the best downloadable title to be released on Xbox Live Arcade thus far, a great game on it’s own merits, and at only 15 bucks, it’s hard not to buy this. If this were stretched out into a full length game it could easily be a full priced release. On my first playthrough, I got through it in a little over 7 hours … and the game didn’t really get going for me until about hour 2 or 3, so it’s not that long at all.

I’m sure if I go through and play it again it’d drop, and I may play through it again. And now that I’ve finished it, I’m going to go see how I do in the Proving Grounds. But as of now, I got my 15 bucks out of it, and since I’m not much of an achievement guy I don’t care enough to go through and beat it with only a certain percentage of whatever items. But for people who are into it, that will add even more replayability to an already great game.

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There isn’t a whole lot to it, but it’s still pretty damn fun. Now, I have to confess, I haven’t ever really liked space shooters like this. I couldn’t even really get into Lucasart’s Tie Fighter games as exceptional as they are. But when a game doesn’t try to get too involved with it adding in buttloads of features that I’ll never use and using a million different button combinations or every key on the entire damn keyboard. This game brings me back to a time when the original vector graphics Star Wars arcade game was the thing to play. Now granted, while the basic ideas are the same, this game IS vastly different. But it brings back that feeling of just having fun to have it. You’re a fighter, and basically all you do in the game is fly around space destroying all the enemy ships. The good guys are in green, and the enemies are in red. Destroy the enemies. :) But there’s slightly more to it that you can do than just that. And that’s what makes the game interesting for me.

There’s a little bit of depth (as much depth as a game this arcade-like can have and still be fun in my opinion) to it. You get resources out of the downed enemy ships that can be used to upgrade your fighter gun fire rate, the total missile capacity, you can call in reinforcements that appear directly in your line of site and fly off to go and blow some stuff up. And you can upgrade the fighter capacity.

The game’s controls are very simply and intuitive. You strafe through space with the left stick, the right stick turns. Left and right trigger fire missiles and fire your main gun. And you use your bumpers to send off either your fleet or fighters to the the enemy shit you have selected on your screen. The only problem I have with it, which takes some getting used to, is that you click and hold the left stick to thrust. But it didn’t take long to get used to. The face buttons (A,B,X,Y) are only ever used when you get a ship upgrade of some kind.

Graphically, I have to say this game is damned impressive. The ships look great with a Babylon 5 type of look to them, and the explosions are cool. Fire envelopes the ships for a short time before they disintegrate into nothing with a little bit of wreckage. If I had to gripe about anything at all it would be that there isn’t much variety in the ships. You do see basically the same ships throughout the game (if it even technically ends), just increasing in number with each wave. That still doesn’t keep me from wanting to blow the son of a bitches out of the sky though. ;) And the frame rate doesn’t seem to dip at all, even when there are a ton and a half of enemies and your guys flying around with bullets and missiles tearing through the sky. Since the view is from a little bit behind your ship, the camera gets a little wonky from time to time with your ship obscuring your vision, but it’s rare and a quick flick of the analog sticks is all that’s required to fix it.

The sound is pretty good. The music has a real mellow sound to it that’s quite a bit off from the onscreen craziness that happens later on when the waves get bigger, it’s still pretty good and doesn’t get in the way of anything, though I do wish there was an option to turn it up and down, because it slightly drowns out the in game sound. You get voice chatter from your commander and squadmates, which does tend to repeat itself quite a bit. But it’s still pretty cool to hear and helps to give you that sense that you’re in a big battle. The weapon sounds are good, if a little too much in the background of everything. The explosions however aren’t that great. I expect little pops from the smaller enemy fighters, but it would’ve been so much better to have a HUGE explosion emit from the larger ships. But it’s only a small gripe.

The gameplay, like I said is simple and intuitive and doesn’t ever get confusing in any way. There’s no trying to figure out what buttons do what and the game controls very fluidly and has just the right speed to it. Hell, one of the things I hate about space shooting games is fixed here, if you get lost and can’t find anything to shoot at, click the right stick and you’re right back into it. Which helps since there doesn’t appear to be a radar. The squad AI isn’t that bad either, I find myself constantly in the position of chasing after an enemy fighter, only to see one of the bigger enemy ships, so I’ll flick my analog stick down to get it in my sights and send my fighters after it. Almost as soon as I do it I see this hail of bullets and missile head toward it and it’s health starts going down. Thankfully, you have infinite ammo in the game. Although the more damage you take you’ll lose the upgrades you got which means you can’t fire as many missles, or your main gun’s rate of fire is down to that of a pop gun. There really isn’t a health bar. Whether or not your ship stays in the sky relies on how much crew you have. Which, yeah. I mean, it’s a health bar in the end. But the way it’s done is that you kinda need a crew to handle a ship, so it helps add to the game to think that when you’re getting fired on that your crew gets hurt or killed in the process.

Sure, the game is pretty basic. You keep doing the same thing over and over until you get blown out of the sky to get a high score. It would’ve been nice to have online high scores. And it could have saved it’s wave based levels for a “quick play” option and offered a story mode with cut scenes telling a story in between the waves or every few waves or something, because this game seems like it could be SOOOO much more with the fantastically fun engine and gameplay it’s got. I really hope it goes further adding a story mode with different stuff to do (maybe protecting ships or something) and online play. Or at least an online leaderboard just so I can see how horrible I’m doing at the game. :)

And where the hell are MY huge pain in the ass to kill ships? >:)

7.5 (Rounded down to 7)– It’s only 80 points, it looks great, plays great. The sound itself is a little weak, but doesn’t keep the game from being a lot of fun. Go ahead and give the trial a try. If you like simple in concept arcade style games, go ahead and get it. Even if you don’t like space shooters like me, because I was pretty surprised on how much I like this game.

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A neat little game, even though there’s only one mode and nothing else. In some games, that works well, but not so much for this one. It plays a lot like Bitstream, only not anywhere near as good. You control a stream of color and you have to navigate your way through the races by maneuvering you stream through the level’s obstacles and beating your one opponent at the same time. There are various obstacles throughout the levels which aren’t THAT difficult to get past once you learn them, you have your typical speed up and slow down arrows, energy places that replenish any energy you may have either lost or used in boosting, slow down fields that slow your ship to a crawl as you pass through them. And that’s about it. If you hit anything else other than those things, you’ll lose energy, and eventually if you go through too many of them, you’ll lose the race.

Ignore the one screenshot that the game has because the actual game only vaguely looks like it. The screenshot implies that you race against 3 other streams when there’s only one, and makes the graphics look a bit differren than what they actually are. While the graphics aren’t exactly BAD by any means, they don’t match what’s in the screenshot. They’re quite a bit more basic than what’s shown. Though the levels are designed fairly well, it won’t take you very long to learn the best paths to take at all.

The sound effects themselves are pretty shitty, but the music is actually quite good and very much worth listening to. The gameplay is very simple, try not to hit the walls, get the energy boosts and the speedup arrows and use your boost sparingly. The speedup arrows speed your stream up for about a split second, while the slowdown arrows slow your ship down considerably. And the boost, while it does work well, sucks down your energy like nothing. Just try not to die and outrun the other stream to the finish line. If you do die or lose, just hit start and you restart the track.

5.0 – Not a bad game, but not great either. It only has single player support, no leaderboards of any kind whatsoever and one mode. It’s not a bad game for what it has though. For 80 points, if you’re into these kinds of games, it’s not a bad buy. I went ahead and bought it after playing the trial a few times, and I’ve made it up to the 6th level so far. I don’t know exactly how many there are, but being that you can’t save your progress, I don’t see there being that many levels. Go get Bitstream instead, it’s a bit more expensive at 400 points, but it’s a much MUCH better game.

Like I said in my earlier trial impression, this was the first attempt at a real first person shooter for the XBL Indie Games. And it’s actually not half bad once you get past the bad bits. You are Jonny Crush, and apparently the city has been overrun by aliens or aliens dumping off giant bugs. And I mean, these suckers are BIG. And there are LOTS of ‘em (the game claims up to 1,000 per level, and I don’t doubt it). You get various typical first person shooter weapons (and some not so typical) in your quest to eradicate every single bug. There’s bugspray that is actually quite useful early in the game, an M4 Combine assault rifle, the trusty shotgun that will take out several of the weaker enemies in one shot up close, an SMG for when you want to shoot really fast … but it’s pretty weak. Then there’s a sniper rifle that has 2 levels of zoom to it. I’ve never liked sniper rifles in games personally, but for something like this is a little different story. The trusty rocket launcher which is probably the most impressive weapon in the game. A minigun which is my personal favorite, high speed, high power, hell yeah. Then a weapon called Hammerhead that I haven’t unlocked yet. But from the picture it looks like it could be some form of jackhammer.

The graphics are decent, but not without their problems. The levels … if they ARE different in layout you can’t tell because they all look the same. A barren wasteland of a city with no cars, no street lights, no stairs leading up to the building or anything and humongous blocky buildings. The textures are blurry but serviceable, it looks a little bit like a Nintendo 64 game in that regard. The enemies are huge and fairly well detailed, but the animation is next to nothing. When they crawl off a building for example, there’s no animation showing them going from the building to the ground. They just appear there. And sometimes you’ll find enemies beside buildings that you just can’t shoot for some reason. When they attack you, it doesn’t really look or feel like an attack, in fact the only way you know you’re BEING attacked is that your blood will splatter on the screen for a second. And when you kill an enemy up close, their blood splatters on the screen. When you die, there’s no animation or something of you falling over and getting ravaged by the bugs, it just basically says “You used a life” and that’s it. On the same note, there are a HELL of a lot of enemies on screen with the frame rate, for the most part, staying pretty solid.

There are a fair number of different enemy types ranging from cockroaches and ants to bees and dragonflies (which are hard to aim at because they move pretty quick). And there’s also giant worms that come up out of the ground and slam themselves on you. But the toughest enemy in the game has to be … I”m thinking it’s a beetle. They can take numerous point blank rocket blasts, the only way I’ve found to reliably kill them is a few sniper rifle shots directly to their damn faces. And the enemies in the Final Encounter level are significantly different than anything else in the game in regards to appearance and seem to come from everywhere, including the sky. And somehow, I managed to glitch the game out and get BEHIND the caution tape wall that surrounds the levels, with the enemies attempting to follow. So I had all but 3 or 4 of the enemies right there in front of me, which was a pretty impressive sight I must say. One rocket blast and all but the flying enemies and those damn beetle things just fell over. :)

The guns look alright, but again, kind of Nintendo 64ish in appearance. Though the explosion from the rocket launcher is pretty damn coo with a huge fireball and smoke that completely obscures your vision for a short time. And the smoke trail that follows the rockets is pretty cool tool. Seeing the enemies fly apart in little pieces from a blast like that, bug pieces flying all over the place. Aaaah, very satisfying. :)

The sound is pretty decent with the typical gun sounds (and the pathetic little whisp from the bug spray). The sound of a ton of bugs dying as a result of the minigun or M4 Combine is pretty cool, they have a significant alien sound to them, even though there isn’t much variety in that regard. The music is … fitting. Not good, not bad. It doesn’t make me want to rip my ears out or anything. There’s an option to turn down the music, the sound effects and the voices. But Jonny talking to a woman on the radio … is few and far between. Given the type of game it is it would’ve been kinda neat to hear the cheesy Duke Nukem-esque one liners from time to time. :)

But the real star of the show sound-wise is the rocket launcher. When you fire that thing off and it hits something you KNOW it. It’s the HUGE echoing explosion that just makes me wanna use it over and over and is very satisying hearing that explosion and a ton of bugs just blowing apart into a million pieces.

The gameplay is pretty standard for a first person shooter. You use the left and right analog sticks to control Jonny, the right trigger to shoot. The left trigger to do a quick 180. The shoulder buttons let you pick out different guns, and also serves as a quicker way to pause the game than reaching over for the start button. When you have the sniper rifle eqipped you click the right stick to zoom in, again to zoom in further, and again to return to your normal view. The A button jumps (which you actually get a reward in the game for actually jumping on a set number of enemies.) . And the rest of the face buttons are reserved for various powersup that you find throughout the stages. There are the typical pickups like health and ammo. But there are also shield pickups that makes you invulnerable for a short time by hitting X. There’s a “green cow” pickup that when launched with the B button will quickly move you across the screen and hopefully away from getting swarmed. And there’s a “Tick-Tock” powerup. You collect this thing, hit Y and it stops time for everything but you. But when you kill one of the enemies in this stopped time, they make the SOUND that they’re dying, but they remain frozen. When the powerup wears off, THEN they die. Which I don’t know if this is good or bad because it results in some pretty neat looking stuff when the time runs out. :)

But, Jonny seems to run like he’s running underwater. The look speed is okay, but he just moves WAY too damn slow. I don’t know if the developers thought people would want the slow paced gameplay of something like Call of Duty without the sprint, or Halo … but poor Jonny doesn’t move as far as he should (to me anyway) for a game this arcadey. And the movement is sensitive as hell, if that left analog stick isn’t PERFECTLY center when you’re moving forward you’ll start strafing, which is kinda bad when you’re running from about 50 bugs that are chasing you down the street and you strafe into a wall.

And early in the game you’re going to be doing a hell of a lot of backpedaling. And later in the game you’re just going to be trying to survive long enough to get into a position where you CAN backpedal. :) So it kinda evens out.

One real big problem I’ve had, I’ve nevere actually PASSED level 14. I run for a little while away from everything, then the game stops dead and says “Extermination Complete”. What the hell is that all about?

Oh, and for you achievement people needing something to help you feel better about yourselves, while these indie games don’t have official achievements, there are various awards given for doing certain things.

6.5 (rounded up to 7 for XBLARatings just because I can't do .5 increments here hehe) – Is it a perfect game? God no, but is it fun to kill thousands of giant mutant bugs? Hell yeah. Even with it’s problems and sub-par graphics it’s a hell of a lot of fun and a great way to kill about 10 or 15 minutes at a time. And the game recently dropped to 240 MS Points ($3), and it’s well worth it, even if you’re pretty much doing ONE thing the ENTIRE 16 levels. :)

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Alright, I can KINDA get the massage applications … at least they DO something, even if it’s nothing I personally really care about … but fucking LOLCats? Seriously? You’re on a computer right now right? Or a phone? Or a Wii for fuck’s sake. Then save yourself a dollar and go to LOLCats.com or icanhascheezburger.com and look at them there. OR just find a torrent with a shitton of them, download that, copy them to a pen drive (or burn them to a CD), put them on your Xbox and set it for slideshow.

This boasts “over 150 LOLCat pictures” …. and that’s IT. You press the left trigger or right trigger to cycle through images that aren’t even full screen … and you press Back to exit. Now … on a side note, if it actually had THOUSANDS of images instead of the pathetic amount it has …. MAYBE.

What the fuck, man. Like I said, if it had THOUSANDS of these pictures, THEN I could see MAYBE where it would be worth at least existing. Or maybe if it was on the iPhone instead of a full out console like the 360.

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Much improved over it’s predecessor, though still has some of the same problems. Like I said in the review for the original Retro One (right here, read it first), this game has it’s problems. There STILL isn’t a high score list of any kind. But they did add more levels (bumping the total up to 21 levels), new enemy ships that are pretty different from what you were blowing away last time, and while it does still have the explosive charges that you can pick up from fallen enemies, it also has nukes that you can pick up and fire off at will (assuming you have them in stock) by pressing the B button. Which is a HUGE help later in the game when things start going insane.

The palette swap pictures of a galaxy are gone from this one, but what replaces it is kind of a mixed bag because it’s just a blank field of stars with different colors of gas. But it does give more of an impression of actually going somewhere. Other than the new ships and slightly different backgrounds, the graphics are identical. Of the new ships the ones that stand out in my mind are metallic bug looking things that pop in from the top of the screen and giant bombs. There are more, but the frantic pace of the game assures that you won’t see them on screen that long. :)

The music is a remixed, much better sounding version of what’s in the first game, although it’s still repetitive because it’s the only track in the entire game. The sound effects sound a little better, especially your ship’s shots that you will hear a LOT. I don’t know whether to say the shots drowning out the background music is a bad thing or not, but it WILL be a bad thing if it still does this when or if they release part 3, assuming it actually has different music for each stage. But hearing the music for this game a couple of times it’s not bad. For for 21 levels … yeah.

5.5 (rounded up to 6 for here) – This is MUCH better than the previous one, adding in more levels and 2 player support. But it’s still missing a high scores table which ultimately kills the replay value of it. And it still doesn’t have bosses. Humongous screen filling bullethell bosses would be a very welcome addition and would break up just blowing the countless enemy ships up.

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Yes, I bought this, but let me tell you WHY I bought it. I have a dog named Henry. Now this dog is about as stupid as a dog can get. There isn’t a bus short enough for this dog. And when I downloaded the trial out of pure boredom and fired it up, he noticed it. He then proceeded to curl up by the TV thinking it was real.

Yeah, I know. Stupid reason. But hey, whatever. :) It really doesn’t do much, I mean … it’s a fireplace. You can change the grates, the mantel and the backgrounds to various types to customize it.

For what it’s meant to do, it does it well. I guess if you have a big plasma, LCD or LED TV or somethin’ in a country style room, this would work. It looks like a fireplace, it sounds like a fireplace which actually sounds kinda strange in my surround sound setup because I’m hearing the slight roar of fire with pops and crackles come from everywhere. Thank God I don’t do drugs, or this would really mess with me. Seems like something I could fall asleep to. Then people who hit see me online on my 360 would see “Dhalamar’s playing an Indie Game! Fireplace.” for hours on end. lol

8.0 – Purely based on the fact that it does what it’s meant to do well, the customization options and the fact that it really screws with my dog’s head. Though it’d be kinda neat to have a fire poker on screen or something to move the logs around and whatnot. Maybe add wood to it or something. I dunno, I’ve never had an actual fireplace. I only know what I’ve seen on TV.

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This is probably the shortest one I’ll ever do. :) I like Pong games. I liked them when I was a kid on the Atari 2600 (and even a real Pong machine that I still have around here someplace, although it hasn’t worked in years), and I like it now. There really isn’t much to say about this. It’s Pong, it supports 2 players and custom soundtrack support (thankfully because the ingame music is terrible). Can’t really say much about the graphics, I mean … take a look at the screen shot. It plays a great game of Pong, there is nothing limited in the trial, so there isn’t even a reason to buy the game. It has sound … a little “bing” when the ball hits something. The paddles act the way they should, they don’t move too fast or too slow. It’s just a little time waster, but it’s nothing compared to A Game of Tennis in the end.

The only thing this game has over that is the fact that it might as well be free (it’s 80 points, but like I said. There’s nothing limited in the trial) and the paddles handle SLIGHTLY better. Go ahead and grab this if you want, but A Game of Tennis is a much better bet if you’re into these games. This does a great job with the old Pong game, and I can’t say anything bad about it other than the music. If nothing else, if you and a buddy are drunk, download this and fire it up. :) It’ll keep ya busy for the 8 minutes or whatever the trial lasts. Oh, and the screenshot says it’s version 1.0, the actual download is version 1.1, though I have no idea what the author did with it.

*UPDATE* The developer commented on my review of it on Wasted Seconds with this little tidbit regarding the behind the scenes of the game. :)

"Version 1.1 added a few bug fixes and features, the most notable of which is the volume control option – some testers thought the default music volume was too loud.

The “bing” noises (there are two, one for each paddle) are actually me “popping” my finger out of my mouth. We’re high tech at GeeQ ;)"

Since I have no choice but to give it a numerical rating here, I'm going to give it a 5.5 (rounded up to 6 for here) just because I like Pong, it's pretty much free and when I fire it up I have me some fun inside that trial period. It's plain, simple Pong done right. No more, no less.

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I love Mario Kart for the SNES, and F-Zero and all those other Mode-7 racers. There’s just a certain charm about them, and this game manages to mostly capture that feeling. Is it the best racing game out there? Hell no. But it doesn’t have to be. If you played Mario Kart or F-Zero on the Super Nintendo, you’ll know exactly what to expect here. No real sense of speed, just kart racing. Since when were karts all that fast anyway. It’s got a fair amount of different characters to choose from like a ninja, a pirate, granny, a robot … 8 total with 16 tracks. Local and online leaderboards for your best times, and 4 player split screen local play where you can race either Versus, Battle or Time Trial. Battle Mode has 4 arenas of it’s own that are more than big enough for a 4 player game. And some of the tracks get bloody HARD … like the last track in the game. You had better love those bumpers that cause your kart to drift, because you’re gonna need them. Remember Star Road in Mario Kart? Yeah, now you know what I’m talking about.

Graphically the game looks great for the era it’s chasing after. The racers themselves are detailed quite nicely with the exception of a few problems that I’ll get to later, as well as the tracks that each have their own unique look (the lava track is my personal favorite). And there are various powerups you can get by running into crates, one that places mines behind, or makes a hole in the ground. Then there’s one that makes you jump. Then you’ve got the two “turtle shells” (except in here they’re just little colored discs). One that just goes straight and bounces off the walls, and another that homes in on people. As well as a boost, which you’ll see a lot of if you’re in last place, because that’s all you’ll get to try to help you keep up. The last track in the game though, even with it’s transparent roads looks a little empty otherwise. Although it is infuriatingly difficult. :)

The sound … well the music has kind of a kooky kart style beat to it that works fine for me. It kinda reminds me of Burger King game called Pocketbike Racer if you’ve ever played that. But the sound effects themselves are few and far between. You have the sound of the kart engines, screeching tires when people spin out that doesn’t sound all that great. And the little “thock” of karts slamming into each other. Good music, but really weak in the sound effects department.

The gameplay however, is great. The Grand Prix mode is what I typically play, and I use the Time Trials to practice tracks. The Grand Prix mode basically works like a tournament. You get so many points for winning a series of races. There are 4 different cups, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. And you just go through and attempt to come in first. You can either race against 7 other CPU opponents, or 3 other people can join in on it in the race for first place. The Battle Mode’s 4 stages are pretty evenly balanced out and can be tons of fun. Time Trial is something I’ll probably never really be good at, because I really suck at the game, and my Gamertag is slowly disappearing from the list. :)

Now with what I was talking about with the graphics earlier, it’s immediately apparent as soon as the game starts. The racers themselves never change expression. Ever. Which isn’t really a big deal considering that’s about the only time you ever really see their faces, but it would’ve been a nice addition. And it would’ve went well if the game just had more sound effects. You don’t get the little “zoom” when you pass someone up, you don’t hear the characters bitching when they get hit by something. Or when they pass someone, hit someone with something or win. Winning animations would have been great. Even speech balloons would’ve been nice.

And there are some major balancing issues with the karts. For example, if you pick the ninja at the very first race … you more than likely will not even place because damn near everyone is so much faster. It doesn’t matter that he has better control and acceleration, if you get out in front you’ll lose it pretty quick. And when you smack into a wall it results in a DEAD stop and it’s a bitch getting off of that wall. And if you go off into the dirt or shallow water, pretty much the same thing, you slow down to a complete crawl until you get out of it, which will completely obliterate any chance you had of winning no matter WHAT character you chose.

And it would’ve been nice to have different control setups, because my natural reaction to make the kart go into a drift to make it around these tight corners is to pull the right TRIGGER and not the right BUMPER. But it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I don’t really understand the logic in it considering the triggers aren’t even used in the game.

It’s not perfect by any means, and it has it’s problems and annoyances. But it’s still a hell of a fun, especially if you’ve got some buddies over who are for an old school style racer that just wants to be fun. Kart balancing issues aside and the irritation of of the walls and dirt aside, this is a great game. I don’t know if it’s worth the 400 points, you can be the judge of that, which will be a little difficult, because in the 8 minute trial … it takes 3 times that long to really get a feel for the game.

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Okay, this is kind of a weird one. The game itself, no it’s not that great, at least for today’s standards. But the game’s entire presentation is just like how it’s described : “Retro One is a classic style side scrolling 2D space action game.” It’s a horizontal shooter, and you move around the screen shooting the bad guys that are coming in front in front of you, behind you, under you, just everywhere. It has a few powerups that change the bullet patterns to about 4 different types which come in very useful at the later levels. An explosive charge that sends out bullets all over the screen that just cut through enemies like a hot knife through butter. A couple of orbs that give you extra points … which is basically pointless. A shield that, well, take a guess that does. 2 different ones that increase or decrease your ship’s rate of fire. And a little hint here, you definitely don’t wanna speed it up, you wanna slow it down because then you can have a WALL of bullets that will slam into anything that comes from the right side of the screen. :) And a few other ones, like slowing the enemies down, extra lives, etc etc. All of these are dropped at random from enemies that are destroyed. And you run through 15 levels of this.

The graphics are pretty basic. The only real animation in the entire game is from the ship’s thrusters, they flicker. That’s about it. The backgrounds are always the same, except different color palettes for each level. And a fog that comes in from time to time. They’re not terrible, but not very good either. They’re …. functional. There’s the word I want. :)

The sound is pretty much what you’d expect from an arcade shooter from the 80’s or early 90’s. The ship’s shots have this high pitched “pew pew pew” type sound to them, there’s the sound of the ships exploding, and the music. The music is kinda half in half. Not great, not terrible. The only sound that is Earth shatteringly horrible in the entire game though is the sound that emits when you collect an extra life. Why oh WHY did they choose THAT. Oh God.

The control and gameplay, at least for me, is heavily dependant on what kind of controller you’re using. I found this game to be the hardest to play with the stock XBox controller. But then I plugged in my arcade stick and I was whipping around the screen with awesome precision. And turning on the turbo, while technically cheating is a lot of fun just to be able to shoot a billion shots a second. ;) But then you can’t do your charge up special move where you hold down A for a couple of seconds, release and it fires off a range of bullets from your ship. This is where the game is good, sort of. The ENGINE for the game itself is pretty good, and has a lot of potential. The game ITSELF just isn’t very good and doesn’t start getting interesting until about level 13 (near the end of the game) when things start really getting insane.

The game has different difficulty levels ranging from Easy to “Rock Hard” where you’re given one life, and near as I can tell no powerups are dropped by the enemies, but I didn’t last long enough to really find out. Made it to about level 2 before I accidentally ran into an enemy ship. :)

And for some unknown reason, there are quite a few things … really BASIC things … that aren’t in this game. It’s only one player, and there is NO high scores list. Offline or otherwise. Yet, the game has blue orbs that you collect that are worth 5,000 and 10,000 points. Short of taking a picture of the screen and putting it on Flickr or Photobucket or something, there is no way of saving your high score. The sound drowns out the music completely, that HORRIBLE sound that emits when you pick up an extra life. The game is entirely too short. And no bosses. A game like this NEEDS bosses.And if you want to find out what the different powerups do, you’re on your own because there’s nothing explaining them.

The game’s engine is great and really shows a lot of potential. And it’s pretty fun for how long it lasts, especially if you’ve got an arcade stick and turbo. :) But it’s missing way too many features that will turn off most players, and it gets annoying staring at the same background over and over. It’s only 80 points, but I’d say skip it. Retro One : Part 2 fixes a lot of what’s wrong with this game, and overall is a much better game.

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This is actually the kind of game that appeals to me. Simple gameplay, and a simple concept that keeps me coming back to blow up more stuff to raise my high score more and more. The gameplay is exactly that, simple. You hop into a tank that is pretty slow and boring at first and you beat the level by either shooting down the enemy tanks or collecting these green orbs that are scattered throughout the level. But then powerups come into play that make your tank move faster (and they get movin’ pretty good), make your bullets move faster and add ammo where you can get more than one shot at a time on the screen. And every so many levels a much needed extra life. It’s got all the options that every indie game on the Xbox 360 should have such as local and global leaderboards, system link support, local multiplayer support AND Xbox Live multiplayer support. And this is one of those games that I seem to completely suck at and continue to play just like I did at the arcades back in the day. And I’ve even managed to add a sound effect to the game because every time I accidentally ram another tank a “DAMMIT!” erupts from me as I watch it go. :)

The graphics are nice, albeit pretty simple. The tanks look great close up, even though you won’t see them that often close up. The stages are put together well, and change in regards to layout as you progress through the levels. But they do change drastically in appearance as well, which is a welcome thing, because honestly. How boring would it be to see the same damn level over and over. One stage you’re playing through pyramids, another giant rocks or whatever the hell they are. Then you get a high tech look with simple, clean lines, and God knows what else because I suck and have only made it to level 9 (which if you play by actually staying AWAY from the enemies instead of chasing after them like I do you’ll probably get further :) ). I have no complaints here,

There are different camera angle options, there’s the default view which shows the playing field at an angle, and can be changed by moving the right analog stick either up or down. You can adjust it to the point where it’s either a useless looking straight across the playfield view to looking down directly on top of it (which is what I personally like to use when I’m using the regular controller). But the camera angles you can select in the options menu are honestly pretty useless. There’s a close-up view that just follows you tank around everywhere close up. And one that constantly circles around your tank which makes the game damn near impossible to play just because you never know which direction you’re actually going.


There’s an option to turn a minimap on, which places this map in the lower left hand corner of the screen that, on the default view gets in the what of whatever’s down there. But it’s not an issue since the minimap is detailed enough you could literally play the whole game from it. You can also toggle the “Destro-cam Replay” mode to either all the time, never, on your last life or at random. What this is, when you die the game stops dead, zooms into your tank where you can see a closeup of it exploding. Kinda useless, but neat at the same time. I have it set for random. :)

Unfortunately, during multiplayer, if you or your friend gets shot down, the entire game stops and stays stopped until whoever gets it starts moving again, which really slows down the pace. Not a big gripe of course because it doesn’t detract from the fun, but still. I’d rather see in multiplayer the bullet slam into you or your friend’s tank and then respawn immediately where where the owning occurred without the stop because there is a few valuable seconds of invulnerability after you respawn. And thankfully, there isn’t any friendly fire and you can’t ram your friend’s tank (though it’d be nice to have an option to turn that on because it’d really change the gameplay in co-op if you had to worry about shooting your buddy).

Oh, and the explosions. Which to me, are the most important part graphically because if the explosions suck then why would you give a shit about blowing stuff up. ;) The explosions look like they should with the tanks blowing up in this huge smoke filled fireball with debris flying all over the field, though while the smoldering remains of the tanks stay on the playfield, the debris doesn’t. :)

The game sounds great, the shots sound pretty good … even though they don’t sound nearly powerful enough to take out a tank in one shot. When the shots hit a wall, it has a great low thud to it. The explosions sound as good as they look. And you have funny little audio queues when you pick up a poewrup (like the sound of a race car flying by when you pick up the powerup that speeds up your tank). But the music is terrible. Too basic, too repetitive and just boring. Mercifully you can turn it down, and the game does support custom soundtracks, though I’ve never used that particular option in ANY game just because I have an old 20GB 360 and my hard drive is pretty well filled up with a ton of XBLA and XBLIG games. And there isn’t near enough room for music. :P But that’s neither here nor there. Great sound effects, but terrible, repetitive music that can thankfully be turned all the way down.

One thing I can say that really helps this game along awesomely is that it controls GREAT with the stock Xbox 360 controller. Usually trying to use that analog stick to control a game like this is frustrating as all hell. But in this, it’s great. Though I don’t use the stock controller that often anymore for certain games, I personally use the SF4 Fight Stick because it brings me back to the old days of playing stuff like this in the arcades. :) You can also use the SF4 Fight Pad to control it if you want to, or any other 3rd party controller. That’s just the one I happen to have. But the control is tight, responsive and doesn’t go all weird on you when you try to do tricky moves to get out of the way of a bullet that’s flying toward you.

8.0 – Other than the terrible music and the dead stop when someone dies in multiplayer, there’s nothing I can really complain about with this. It’s fun, addictive, has 2 player support both locally AND over Xbox Live, and the System Link option is just a weird icing on the cake. :P I’ve played this continuously over the last week or so, and I’ve found that even that I REALLY suck at this I keep coming back for more. The 400 point price tag may seem a bit pricey, but who doesn’t wanna blow the shit outta tanks. :P It could use some other gameplay modes, like Deathmatch or Capture the Flag, and 4 player support, but it’s still fun as hell the way it is.

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This game is digital heroin.That’s the only real way I can describe it. It’s a tiny download, a little under 13 meg I think. And probably a large part of that size is the music itself. It’s a very simple dual stick shooter made by the same guys who brought us the XBLA game Dishwasher : Dead Samurai, that’s literally all you need to control the game are the two analog sticks. When you first start the game, you are greeted with this outright HIDEOUS looking title screen, telling each player (up to 4 locally, no Xbox Live play unfortunately) to hit the A button. You can check out the top scores with the Y button … of which I don’t happen to remember any scores that came with the game for you to beat. And you can hit the B button to exit. No background music, that’s about it. The title of the game flashes. You hit the A button, it brings up where you’d like to save your scores. Then it asks if you’re ready. Now if I were the type to judge a game by the title screen alone, my hopes would be shot. But I’m not like that fortunately.

When you start, you appear in the middle of a fairly boring looking field of dirt. A few zombies pop up out of the ground and you shoot them with your default pea shooter. But that’s not the first thing you really NOTICE. You hear this music going … which is surprisingly a large part of the game. And you hear the lyrics “Welcome. To my game!” with a light rock tone to it, and when it gets to the lyrics “You’d better shoot them, or you’ll die. Cos I made a game with zombies in it! Oh yeah.” And THAT’S when the game really starts. You are then BOMBARDED by easy to kill zombies. And as the game progresses you get bombarded by even more enemies such as generic looking snakes going along their typical 4 areas of movement, weird looking little flashing faces, geometric shapes, glowing asteroids that blow apart, little green blobs that multiply as they’re shot, tougher zombies, and God knows what else. And this is the one and single mode in the entire game. I haven’t played it with other people (Yet. That comes this weekend.) but I can only imagine it’s the same thing.

Graphically, it’s the stages themselves that are the best part of the game. Your character and the various enemies, while they don’t look all that great … it’s all a part of the game because the developer seems to be poking fun at all these horrible Xbox Live Indie Games that seem to show up every week. Snake games, card games, zombie games etc etc. The stages however morph and change along with the music, changing the ground layer, adding neon lights like you’re in the middle of a mosh pit at a concert, plugging the developer’s logo, changing colors. It really is amazing the way this overly simple dual stick shooter manages to present itself and REALLY adds a lot to the game. And these simply drawn enemies die in just amazing way, either in a little shower of blood, or just outright exploding (seeing those damned snakes just explode in a cloud of ASCII is great). And the explosions that result of the constant bombardment of the rocket launcher are cool as all hell.

You get various weapons and powerups that show up both at random and from fallen enemies. You start off with your worthless pea shooter. But then you start seeing these icons appear on the screen. There are machine guns, rocket launchers, lasers, a 3 way plasma rifle type of deal … which happens to be my favorite. A flame thrower, which works GREAT when you’re surrounded shotgun, and a little bullseye looking thing that creates a destructive shield around your character for a short time that kills anything it touches. There are also extra lives and lightning bolts that make you move faster, which helps a LOT because without it your character isn’t a whole lot faster than the zombies themselves. And the control itself is totally flawless.

The sound adds just as much to the game as the gameplay itself. Especially the music, which is outstanding and hilarious. I wish I had it to put on my iPod, it’s just that good. But the only other sounds you really get are the sound of the guns, which have a great feel to them. Especially the rocket launcher, if you have a good sound system on your TV you’re going to FEEL it when that son of a bitch slams into a group of enemies. Or the flamethrower that doesn’t have much range but will quickly take out anything it touches. And all the other weapons sound GREAT as well. But the music and the way the stage and enemies interact with it is the real star of the show here.

Now for the bad, which this game in all it’s addictiveness and fun has. When you die, especially later in the game, it’s both neat and frustrating as hell. When the zombies kill you (or anything else for that matter) they just walk off like you weren’t even there. But the game doesn’t respawn you where you left off, it respawns you in some random area that is close to where you’re at. And usually, it respawns you in the middle of a horde of zombies and other enemies with that useless pea shooter you start off with. Which will more than likely cause you to die because you can’t clear out enough enemies to get to a different weapon. You have a few seconds of invulnerability during that time, but it doesn’t seem to help much. It’s only a slight nag, but it’s worth mentioning.

And there’s only the one game mode, which is the exact same every time you play. While this isn’t really a problem given how much fun the game is, a little randomization would’ve helped a lot, maybe a different game mode or something that just randomizes everything about the game. And the final thing … no Xbox Live support for ANYTHING. No online multiplayer and no global high scores, which, as I understand it isn’t supported by XNA anyway. But there have been developers of other games do it using P2P.

9.0 – Despite those small nags, this game is all about the experience, because without the music, the humor, the over the top weaponry and ridiculous enemies it would just be another bullshit dual stick shooter. The presentation is among the best of any Indie Game and most Xbox Live Arcade games you’ll see, and is just a TON of fun to play. This game is among the best games ever released on the Xbox Live Indie games, and at only 80 points there is no reason not to own this game. And I can’t wait to get 4 players in on this sucker after some beers. Don’t even download the trial if you’ve made it this far, just unlock the game right off the bat. You definitely won’t be sorry.

Here’s hoping for a sequel with even more crazy shit to do, I’d pick it up in a heartbeat.

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Alright, let’s get one thing straight. This game is drop. Dead. Gorgeous in every presentation it makes. It’s probably among the highest in graphical quality you’ll see of any Xbox Live Indie Game as of this writing. And those who are familiar with and love Rez will definitely recognize many aspects of this game. This is a racing game that requires almost pixel perfect precision in a lot of areas. So much so I’m utterly terrible at it, and yet I keep going back and trying over. And over. And over. And over.

There are few very unique and satisfying modes here, first off there’s a Tournament race. It’s just like any other tournament, where depending on how you place (out of 8) depends on your overall score in the tournament. So that means you can possibly place last somewhere in there so long as you redeem yourself later on. And there are a lot of different areas to race in, although none of the one’s I’ve played last more than about a minute or so. There is a single race, which lets you just jump in and try a race right away from any of the tracks that you’ve unlocked. Which is a great way to practice up on an area where you’re stuck at without having to go through the entire tournament just to get there. There’s a Freestyle mode, which lets you manipulate the different streams to make music, which is really pretty damn cool. You can effortlessly change the note type from Beat to Riff for each individual stream, use the left and right bumpers to change what color you’re using, turn the hi-hats on and off and change the background. It’s just a shame you can’t save the “masterpiece” you’ve put together. But for reasons I don’t really understand, when you go to restart from the pause menu, it tells you that restarting costs you 1 tournament point.

Then there is Swarm mode, which I don’t think I’ll EVER get the hang of. In swarm mode, you control TWO different streams using the left and right analog sticks. And can go up to EIGHT players … 4 people conttrolling two streams at a time. This is something I’ve definitely gotta try this weekend. Now … I can type two different things on two different computers without skipping a beat. I can carry on 4 different conversations about God knows what WHILE playing Magic : The Gathering, but I CAN NOT do this Swarm mode worth ANYTHING. :P And I keep coming back to it because it’s just really friggin’ cool.

The graphics, as I said in the opening paragraph are GORGEOUS and you’ll be hard pressed to find better in the Indie Games right now. Everything uses a glowing neon vector graphics look to it, with the exception of a VERY rare frame rate hit it moves along smooth as silk, and is just a pleasure to look at. And, your streams, for how simple they are really look elegant as they twist their way around the screen. It almost looks like a ballet. The sound is even more impressive than the graphics, because soundwise, everything reacts to everything. It’s hard to describe, you’ve just gotta experience it for yourself. And this has some GREAT music to go along with it that NEVER gets old. Those of us who play Rez a lot will recognize a lot of the sound effects, and they fit this game perfectly. Mainly the few voices that are in the game, and some of the sound effects. And the game goes into a demo mode after a while of not doing anything at the start menu and just plays itself. Something that you really don’t see that much anymore.

The control is sublimely perfect, when you start getting used to it you’ll be slipstreaming off of opponents, getting within mere pixels of walls and using those strategies to blow your opponents away, because the way the game works is that going in a straight line makes you go faster, moving in any way slows you down a bit. Now, there are turbo pads of sorts that shoot you across the screen in a temporary speed boost, but being almost pixel perfect in your accuracy means you don’t NEED to use them depending on you who you’re playing.

Now for the bad. Even the best games have it, and with this one it’s quite a nuisance. That elegant streamlined effect the game gives? Where they’re PERFECTLY spaced? The engine forces that, and in tight corridors it’ll actually realign you into a wall slowing you down to almost a complete halt. Which is extremely difficult to avoid in some parts and has cost me more races than I care to admit to. Now, when you’re out in front this obviously isn’t an issue, but if you’re like me and it takes you a bit longer to get used to the tracks, it gets REALLY irritating. And the tournament mode has NEVER actually saved my progress. I’ve made it to the third batch of races in tournament mode, but when I quit the game and come back the only tournament that’s unlocked is the very first one and I have to go ALL THE WAY THROUGH that first tournament and WIN it just to get the second one. Play through the second one to get the third one. But it still has the stars filled in for what I’m assuming is what place i fit into (if I placed in the top 3 at all). I don’t get it. And a small thing is that when the game goes into demo mode, when you exit out of it and hit Start, you’ve gotta select a place to save your game. Every time. The first issue with the engine realigning you to make everything appear streamlined and perfect isn’t really a game killer. Because when you learn the tracks, you’ll dominate. But the second issue with it not saving what tournaments I’ve unlocked is a pretty big issue.

Despite those pretty large issues, which I hope I’m just screwing up somewhere or missing some sort of game mechanic, but it doesn’t seem like it, this is a GREAT game and offers a hell of a challenge if you’re a perfectionist. Some people will be put off by the 400 point ($5) price tag, but I look at it this way. If I saw this on a store shelf for 5 bucks with the right type of game description on the back of the box and those screenshots, I’d snag it in a heartbeat and hope that tournament issue gets resolved. And if I’m missing something or screwing up somewhere with that tournament issue, I’ll most definitely amend this review to reflect it, and add an entire point and a half to my overall score.

UPDATE The developer commented on this review on Wasted Seconds with this, which is friggin' great:

"The tournament issue is something we’re aware of, (and seems to be an XNA serialisation bug!) We’ve worked around it, and the patch should already be in peer review, and up in a few days!"

Of course, my cable connection is down, so I can't get on Xbox Live (I refuse to do it with my DSL connection) so I have no way of knowing at the moment whether this update has been applied. *sniff*

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This game definitely isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but it’s got the features it needs to make it worth playing With two player support via Xbox Live, System Link and locally with online global scoreboards, this is packed. There are two modes of play. Retro and Advanced. The WAY their played is no different from each other. A ball is served, and you bounce it back at your opponent, and if he or she doesn’t do the same you score a point. Simple stuff. But the more often the ball bounces, the faster it goes. That’s when it starts getting tough. When you select a mode, you set how many points are needed to score in order to win. But there’s a difference in that between the two modes. In retro mode, however many points you set is how many points you need to win. I’m thinking that you can set the points from 1 to 999, but 5 to 20 would be enough for me. In Advanced mode however, the score limit you set is the limit your opponent has to set on YOU. You can potentially score infinitely. Which is honestly the best mode of the two.

Unfortunately, in any of the multiplayer options the Retro mode is the only one you can play, which is a little bit of a disappointment given the interesting scoring of Advanced. Although you can play by yourself in Local multiplayer, which I have a feeling is something that I’m going to do a lot of just because I think it’s fun.

Graphically, I mean … it’s Pong. Black and white with scores and a countdown when it serves the ball. The big thing here is the collision detection which is actually as good as it’s supposed to be. Sound is the same deal. It sounds like a plastic ball hitting things, and that’s about all you’ve got. But there is custom soundtrack support if you wanna rock out to Pink Floyd or somethin’ while you play the game. I don’t have any MP3’s on my system, so that’s out for me. :) Something that’s only in the full version of the game that’s really neat are two screensavers, you click the left trigger and it removes the menu and just shows that cool animation that’s behind it. And you click the right stick and it goes into a demo mode where the computer plays itself.

The gameplay is perfect to me because it’s so simple. It’s what makes games like these work. It works for Pong, it works for Pac-Man and Frogger and all those other old school games. You move a paddle up and down and smack a ball back at your opponent. That’s it. But the challenge gets to where the paddle only moves at a certain top speed, which is in my opinion a little slow, but not having the old trackball or Atari 2600 Paddle controller manages to complicate things in controlling it. But this does a good job with the paddles, the thing may not move that fast, but it won’t be too long where you can pretty much predict where the ball is going to go and be there long before it gets there. I’m STARTING to get the hang of it.

Now the bad … which I’ve pretty much already stated. The only multiplayer option is the Retro mode. I would’ve loved to see the Advanced mode in multiplayer to be honest. And more than two modes of play. I honestly don’t know how that would work, but maybe something as simple as being able to shove the paddle forward to make the ball go faster. And 200 points for the game is a bit much in my opinion, but this is also going off Microsoft’s old pricing structure.

You really have to be in a certain mood to play Pong. I, for one, am in that mood constantly because I like very simple games that you can go in, play for a few minutes and leave. Not being able to play the Advanced mode in multiplayer is a bit of a disappointment. But the fact it’s got online multiplayer PERIOD is awesome and I wish there were people to play it with. And global scoreboards help out a lot too, because I see that top score of 21 on there and I look at my puny 7 that I got earlier and think “Alright, dammit. I’m going to get this.” At 200 points right now, it’s a hard sell. But, like I said, this is with Microsoft’s old pricing structure for the Indie Games. If it drops down to 80 points, add one full point to my overall review score and call this a must buy for someone looking for something to kill time with every now and then with something that’s really simple and easy to play and get into. And if you do buy this game, get ahold of me so we can play some games over Xbox Live. :)

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Okay, I’ll be perfectly honest here, when I saw this, I automatically dismissed it … I mean … Cyborg Mice Arena? What on Earth? But then I played it … and while it does have some flaws, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. The game is played at an isometric level (like you’re looking down at it at an angle), uses the two sticks for moving around and aiming. The left and right triggers to fire one of two weapons (or both). The right bumber does a melee attack where your mouse whips his tail around. And the A button fires off a powerful EMP that will destroy anything that’s unlucky enough to be in it’s wake. You fight against drones get more powerful and grow exponentially in numbers to get money to upgrade your mouse. It’s a pretty simple concept, and it really reminds me a lot of Gauntlet in the way it plays. Drone generators pop out at random throughout the level, and start producing drones until they’re destroyed. Ammo and health come from the fallen enemies, which you will DEFINITELY need. After a while of playing it goes from about 10 enemies or so to 90 and beyond. I don’t know how far the waves go, but DAMN. Read on. :)

When you first start the game, your mouse doesn’t have any implants. Has a pea shooter pistol and a shotgun which he dual wields. The game then runs you through a tutorial showing you the different aspects of the game and to show you the controls and what to do with which enemies and whatnot. When you finish that you get $5,000 to use to unlock weapons and/or abilities for your mouse. THIS is where it gets interesting, because the first time I started playing it I got to about Wave 8 … after I added some upgrades to my mouse I managed to make it to wave 89 I believe it was before I finally got completely overrun, and that took a good 45 minutes of nonstop play. Then I had enough money to unlock EVERYTHING for my mouse, including all the atages and game modes. Now, granted, that doesn’t seem like a long time. But I only played it on Easy and got that far. I tried to move up to Medium and Hard, and it gets HARD.

And there is a fair amount of stuff to unlock in this game. There are different stances for your mouse, the first one is the standing stance. And you can own up to two of each type of weapon (one for each hand, or combining them if you want). Your pea shooter pistol, a rapid firing SMG, shotgun, mini plasma that’s pretty slow to fire, but the shot explodes and destroys everything in a small radius around it after a bit. And, my personal favorite, the impressive looking flamethrower that comes in REALLY handy later in the game when you’re getting overrun by enemies. The next stance is prone, where your mouse is on all fours, and the weapons get strapped to his back. There’s the machine gun, plasma and heavy flame for this. And playing the game prone is a whole other way to play as well, though I like standing better personally. And of course the cybernetic implants for your arms, legs and tail to make your mouse shoot faster, move faster and be able to smack enemies even harder with his melee attack. The equipment part lets you buy things for your mouse such as slowly regenerating health, a beacon for multiplayer that lets you place a beacon on yourself to make yourself the target if one of your buddies you’re playing with is about to die or is just getting completely overrun. An option to double your starting and quick-buy ammo and, my favorite, something to make that destructive EMP even bigger.

You can unlock two more game modes for the game on top of the excellent Wave mode where you try to survive wave after wave of enemies. There’s an endless mode where they just keep coming and coming and a Versus Team Battle mode with unlimited ammo, but the scores aren’t recorded. I unfortunately have yet to play this multiplayer, I am going to the next time I make it over to a friend’s house. I can only see this game getting more and more insane with 3 other people. Although, unfortunately, it doesn’t have Xbox Live support. It’s all just local.

The major thing where this game is lacking is the amount of maps. At first you only have access to one. But once you get enough money you can unlock 4 more. And while they each have their own unique look and layout, they just don’t feel all that different to me. Now it does help that you can do things like turn random obstacles on or off and play with other people, but it’s just not quite enough to it. It needs a whole lot more stages in this writer’s opinion.

Now graphically, even though the animations are a little stiff and the frame rate tends to take a slight hit when there’s a LOT going on onscreen, they are quite good and serve the game perfectly in it’s extremely hectic style of playing. The mouse looks great, the enemies are small in overall types but each have their own distinctive look and behavior that adversely effects how you go about playing it. And the weapon effects for guns like the plasma and flamethrower are pretty impressive. The rest of the bullets are basically colored circles that fly through the air, but hey. It works. One minor detail against it is that when an enemy or drone generator is destroyed they just simply disappear. No little explosions or anything. But given the fact that when you get to really playing it there’s a LOT of stuff dying a LOT, and I have a feeling having seperate explosions would bring the frame rate to it’s knees. And on the darker colored maps, it’s a bit hard to see those little tiny cats which is kind of a bitch because they’re the most dangerous enemy in the game. :)

The sound is pretty standard stuff, the weapons sound pretty good but they don’t have much of a feeling to them. The enemies each have their own unique style sounds, so you know in all the craziness what’s going on. But the music is top notch. The game even comes with a completely seperate Music Player to play the music for the maps you’ve unlocked, and ALL of it is simply outstanding techno/dance style music. I just wish the Music Player supported random play or something like that, because this is really good stuff. This can be found in the Gallery part of the main menu. Also in there is a 13 page hand drawn book called Cyborg Mice Origin. It even has subtitles for the book that can be toggled on and off because the text on the pages are honestly a little hard to read (maybe that’s because I’m still in the stone age with a 480p TV, I don’t know :) ) and is just great fun to read because it takes everything DEAD serious. And for you people who need to be told you’ve done a good job, the game has rewards it gives you for doing certain things. So far I’ve gotten all of them but 4, 2 of which being secret ones.

I’m going to play the multiplayer part of this the first chance I get, but being that I’m not much of a multiplayer guy (I much prefer it over Xbox Live) I’m kinda reviewing this from a single player perspective. Despite the lack of maps and the few little flaws here and there, there is a hell of a lot of fun to be had here and it’s well worth every cent. The trial just doesn’t do it justice because it doesn’t show how fast and completely insane this game gets. Right now it’s 200 points, which comes out to $2.50, and is definitely worth it. Go after your score, and being able to blow stuff away with 3 other people is great icing on the cake, and will do very well for those Friday and Saturday nights of drinking large amounts of alcohol. :) If nothing else if you like techno music and hate playing good games, buy it for that. the music rules.

UPDATE - I finally got around to playing the multiplayer, and it's even more insane than the single play just from the other people going around alone. :) And the screen zooms in and out depending on where the other players are at. So, yeah. Rockin'

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Anyone who has played Geometry Wars before will find nothing different here in the basic gameplay,. except that it’s better than Geometry Wars in a lot of respects. One can’t help but compare games like this to GeoWars because people seem to think that game is the best one of it’s type, so I’m kinda going to do that.

When you first start the game, you’re treated to kind of an alternative rock sounding song, that sounds kinda weird in this game, but works. You play Global Challenge where you try for your spot among the best players in the world. Yes, that’s right. It’s got Global high scores, which, you do need an Xbox Live Gold account to use, but it’s there! Now, granted, I sincerely doubt I’ll ever get any higher than I am since the top player has 1.5 billion points or something. There are also a bunch of Versus mini games which definitely look interesting, but alas I won’t have anyone to try them with until this weekend. And there’s local co-op. Going to try that as well. So think of this review as coming from someone who doesn’t play a lot of games locally due to lack of people to play it WITH. :)

The main mode, Global Challenge is what I’ve been playing, and it’s great. It’s a score chasing game like Geometry Wars that’s actually fun instead of frustrating. You get various weapon powerups, super weapons like being able to make a black hole or covering the screen in lighting. Or just simply pushing enemies away. It’s not frustrating in the least, even when you die over and over like me, it’s just FUN. Something Geometry Wars sorely misses with me.

Graphically, everything is done extremely well, and is overall just impressive. The variation in the enemies is staggering, the whole level just seems to come alive, hence the name of the game. The gun upgrades are useful and look great. The sound is the same way, the shots sound just right without being irritating since you’ll be hearing them a lot, the music is really good and almost worth buying the game by itself. Almost. The control is perfect using the dual sticks to, well, obviously move around and shoot and the triggers and bumpers at the top to unleash your various special attacks. I’m definitely going to try the Survival Mode and the Party Games this weekend, because if they’re half as much fun as the regular game, it’s going to rock.

8.0 – I really can’t say anything bad about this game. It has global high scores and enough modes to keep you and friends going for quite a while. And not to mention it’s just FUN. When this first came out, it was 800 points … and that would’ve been a hard sell to me just because I’m not overly fond of dual stick shooters. But right now it’s 240 points (about $3) so it’s worth taking a chance on it, and I’m glad I did.

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Now call me weird, but I like snake games. Back in the day I would play the old QBasic game Nibbles for what seemed like forever. Later on in 2001 when I got a cell phone, it was one of those black and white screen Nokias, and I would play the snake to kill time while my wife at the time was in doing whatever at the doctor’s office or something.Then I find this game with this description :

In Garrett the Slug you control a lovable slug named Garrett. Garrett loves to roam around his patch of grass eating colored pellets, and avoiding rocks. But the forces of metabolism are out to stop him, for the more Garrett eats, the more colored trail he leaves behind. For unknown reasons Garrett’s own slime is toxic to him, so make sure to avoid touching that as well!

Ok, sounds like a snake game to me and I downloaded it. What I fired it up and you hear a voice describing what the game is, kind of. And then the voice says to hit left on the controller. No menus, no nothing. It just throws you into the game. There isn’t even a pause menu, you have to hit the guide button to exit out of the game. So I hit left on the directional pad. Nothing. So I moved the analog stick, and Garrett starts moving along one tile at a time eating “food stuffs” to horrible music. And I guess you do that until you die. Oh, and his slime trail grows a little bit every time you eat something, and changes color depending on what color “food stuffs” you eat. That is LITERALLY all there is to this game.

Treat this game as a freebie to stay away from. There’s no possible way the person who coded this ever thought he would get money out of it. It seems like more of a thing he just threw up there for the hell of it, and if he could’ve made it a free game I’m hoping he would have. If you do download this, you’ll get your few minutes of play out of it and probably never touch it again.

And I gave it a two just because his slime trail changes colors. :)

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The first time I played a game like this was on the Sega Dreamcast. The game was called Sega Swirl, and I’m WANTING to say that it was on the Dreamcast Web Browser Disc, but I can’t say for sure. And I was hooked instantly. For a guy who hates puzzle games, I sure to play a hell of a lot of them.This game isn’t any different from that old Dreamcast game in basic play, although not as graphically pretty or anything. The gameplay is simple, like all puzzle games. You select a group of 2 or more of the bubbles, hit the A button and they disappear. The hard part is getting your high score up there where it’s actually worth sharing. The bigger the group, the bigger the overall score. One of those easy as sin to learn that anyone can have fun playing it, but difficult to really master kinda deals. Maybe that’s why I hate puzzle games most of the time … hmm …. and no. Don’t bring up Tetris to me. I got my fill of that game when I was younger playing Super Tetris on the PC and, obviously, on the Game Boy. That’s when I learned to somehow HATE that game. I even used to have nightmares of Tetris blocks falling at the speed of light and trying to get out from under them. They were even pixelated. It was weird, and I’d rather not relive that game. Anyway, enough of my tangent about Tetris, let’s get on to Dr. Popper, because this game is actually worth talking about.

Graphically, the game is perfectly serviceable. You have your score at the bottom and various little options and the field of bubbles at the top. The bubbles look like they’re having a seizure when you select them, which really makes the groups stand out thankfully. When you pop a REALLY large group of bubbles, they explode in this pretty impressive looking … well … explosion. You have different themes to choose from, basically just making the default bubbles into different things. Multicolored dice and jewels and whatnot, but they have no effect on the gameplay whatsoever. Just whatever floats your boat. I tend to stick with the default bubbles because the dice just look weird and ugly to me being multicolored. Maybe if they spun or something when they were highlighted. And the jewels, while they look cool, I just prefer the default theme. But it’s really cool that you can pick different stuff in the first place.

The sound is standard fare if you’ve ever heard sounds in a bubble game. The bubbles pop, they slurp for some reason when you get more of them. And the explosion sound is a very satisfying long lasting echoing explosion. The music however gets a tad repetitive after the first couple of times it plays because it doesn’t flow. It just stops and starts over again. The first couple of times you hear it it’s alright. But after a while of playing I found myself going into the options and turning it down almost all the way so that it was still there, just not so there if that makes any sense.

It has 5 different modes of play. There’s the traditional game where you get a set screen of bubbles and you pop as many as you can. Ideally all of them. If you create a blank spot at the bottom of a column, all the colums to the left of that move over to the right. And that’s more than likely where gamers who don’t know this kind of game will start with. There’s Continuous, which is what the name implies. It just keeps adding columns infinitely. Then there’s Shifter and Megashifter. Shifter, every time you pop bubbles, it moves all the rest to the left of what you popped to the right, grouping them all as much as it can to the right of the screen. Which really screws me up because I’m not that good at anticipating it when I wanna make combos. :) And Megashifter does the same thing, only after so much of the screen is cleared it sends over a whole bunch more random bubbles you have to deal with. Then there’s the mode I play the most. It makes the field of bubbles a hell of a lot bigger, so you have even more of them to deal with, and it seems to add in the Megashifter mode. Which is a hell of a lot of fun.

Now I can’t really say anything bad about this game, but there are some things that would prolong the life of it by a lot and make it even better. Multiplayer of ANY kind, whether it be local or over Xbox Live (preferably Xbox Live in my opinion) would’ve been awesome. But the game is only 1 player. And on the high scores list, you’re competing against set high scores that come with the game, yourself, and whoever else happens to play it on your system. While that’s just fine, it’d been better to have an online updated high scores list just to have some sort of goal besides beating out your own high score. And better/more music, or custom soundtrack support would have been a welcome addition, because the same song looping over and over tends to get a little repetitive and annoying.

7.0 – If the game had any kind of multiplayer support, better music and a better high scores list, it would’ve easily gotten an 8 or 8.5, because this game is great. Addictive as hell, every time I play it time seems to just fly by. Don’t let my gripes about what I think should have been in it keep you from buying this. Especially since it’s only 80 points. There’s no reason not to pick this up, and if you have kids they’ll more than likely love it.

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