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The trailer for Breath of Death VII: The Beginning is now live! Here’s the link:
Really busy trying to get Breath of Death VII ready, but in the meantime, here are a few quick review.
Shoot 1UP (80 MS) - Fantastic vertical shmup with the gimmick being that you control a squad of ships instead of just one. By the Weapon of Choice developer.
Soulcaster (240 MS) – Like Gauntlet except instead of directly attacking your enemies, you summon a warrior, mage, or archer. Like an Action/RPG crossed with Tower Defense. Well worth the money.
Missing Reel (240 MS) – Pretty but shallow arena shooter. AI allies bugged out the first boss preventing me from being able to finish it. I was sufficiently bored to not want to restart.
Cyborg Mice Arena (240 MS) – Competent but uninspired arena shooter. Lots of upgrades to buy, but there are better arena shooters on the service (like Echoes+) that you could be spending your money on instead.
We just finished picking out all the music we want to use with Breath of Death VII and programming it in to make sure it sounds good in-game. Now, we’re just waiting to hear back from the musicians for permission. I hope everyone agrees to let us use their music – we’ve got an excellent set of songs right now that fit the game very well and I’d hate to have to change any of them out.
With a name like Yet Another Zombie Defense, I was expecting something subversive like I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES!!!1, but no, you get exactly what the title promises. Yet Another Zombie Defense is yet another zombie defense game.
That doesn’t mean that it’s bad though. You shoot zombies, collect money, and then spend money between rounds to purchases walls, buy weapons and ammo, and buy turrets (which you can then outfit with any of the weapons you’ve purchased). It’s a winning formula and there’s some fun to be had. The graphics are decent, the music is nice, there are leaderboards to compete on, and the whole thing is wonderfully cheap at 80 MS points.
On the other hand, Yet Another Zombie Defense doesn’t excel. The enemies lack variety, the AI is really stupid (even for zombies) and will actually go out of their way to attack walls instead of you, the weapons lack oomph, and there’s no multiplayer. So it’s a decent game, but not a great one. It’s the very definition of its name.
If you want a good, relatively cheap zombie shooter game, I highly recommend Zombie Shooter 2 for the PC – it looks nice, there are a ton of weapons (many of which are awesome), there are some minor RPG elements, and a few different modes to play. Great, mostly mindless fun. Alternatively, Zombie Apocalypse on XBLA is rather entertaining, especially with a couple of friends. Both of these games are only $10 full price and you may be able to find them on sale for less. Yet Another Zombie Defense may be cheaper, but I’d recommend the higher priced alternatives – they’re worth the extra money if shooting zombies is your thing.
Work on Breath of Death VII is going well. Most of the game’s graphics are finished as well as a good chunk of the game engine. We’re hoping to have a beta version of the game done within a couple of weeks at which point we’ll have many more screenshots to show off.
Sorry about the lack of reviews lately. Between working hard on BoD7 (trying to get it finished in time for the Dream-Build-Play contest at the beginning of March) and some problems with my computer (going to get a new one soon), it’s been difficult to get on. Hopefully, this will change shortly.
I wanted to take a moment to talk about BoD7’s pricing. It was a hard decision, but in the end, we decided to go with the lowest price point and place it in the 80 MS points ($1) bracket. Now, some could argue that with a game in a popular genre that is poorly represented on the service, we might be able to make more money with a higher price point, but in the end, my analysis of sales data from other games seems to indicate that the average consumer views XBLIGs as a place to pick up $1 game diversions. Sure, there are a few exceptions (like the music creation software, ezMuze), but for the most part, good games get ignored unless they’re $1. So the pricing decision is part altruism (let’s give everyone a great game for a really low price) and part self-interest (the increased sales should more than make up for the lowered amount of profit per game sold).
And to go with that, I’d just like to comment on the thought that the race to the bottom with pricing is a bad thing. I hear developers talk about how they can’ t afford to price their games at lower prices and then watch them crash and burn as their game fails in the marketplace, largely due to their price. It’s not that you can’t afford to price your games at a lower price, it’s that you can’t afford not to. Take Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe for the PSP. Fantastic tower defense game with tons of content that you could easily spend week after week trying to master and finish. $20 price tag. It’s failing big time on the PSN and I’m sure the price tag is the primary reason – people see the high price tag and are scared away, even though if they actually bought the game, they’d probably find it to be well worth the money.
With all of the many options available to gamers (both free and otherwise), your average gamer is going to be looking for ways to justify against buying your game. Your job is to remove his excuses. Picking a low price point is a great method to that end.