Recettear is a fantasy game about money. You’re a cute anime girl, your father has wracked up a huge debt, and it’s up to you to pay it off. Through a mixture of salesmanship and adventuring, get as much money as you can ASAP or your home will get repossessed and you’ll be forced to live in a cardboard box.

Recettear is basically two games in one. The first game is a store sim. Buy low, sell high, and rake in those high profits. By successfully guessing how much customers are willing to pay, you can gain XP which will raise your Merchant LV. As your Merchant LV goes up, you’ll get wealthier customers and unlock new gameplay features like item crafting and store customization.

The second game that makes up Recettear is an Action/RPG. Your main character is a little girl who can’t fight for herself, but she’s perfectly willing to hire adventurers to go collect treasure from dangerous dungeons for her. At first, you only have access to a simple swordsman, but by meeting certain conditions, you can gain the ability to hire more advanced adventurers like a thief who can create doppelgangers and a mage with deadly attack magic.

The dungeon designs are random and not particularly interesting, but the combat is fun and random events help to keep things interesting. At set floors, you’ll run into bosses who are generally well designed with varied attack styles.

Both the store sim sections and the Action/RPG dungeon exploration are pretty fun, but combine the two into one game, with each mode helping you out in the other and you end up with a game that’s a blast. This is definitely a case of the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

For an indie game, Recettear looks and sounds quite nice with graphics and music similar to those you would expect from one of the smaller professional Japanese RPG companies like Gust or NIS. The game can be difficult at first, with tight deadlines to pay back your debt and powerful monsters to fight, but if you fail to meet a deadline, the game actually becomes noticeably easier since the game starts over but you retain your LVs and items. Thankfully, the game includes a button to skip cutscenes so replaying the same sections is much more enjoyable than you would expect.

Recettear does not support widescreen displays, which is a slight mark against it. On the plus side, it supported my gamepad with no problems and it never froze or crashed on me.

Recettear will probably take most people around 10 hours to complete the main storyline, however there’s plenty of post-game content to discover after that so you’re definitely getting your money’s worth.

All in all, Recettear was a very pleasant surprise. Fun gameplay combined with an enjoyable script result in a highly addicting game. Carpe Fulgur – the new localization company behind the English version of the game – has already earned themselves a fan with this, their first release. Very highly recommended.

Recettear comes out on September 10, 2010 for the PC and can be purchased digitally on Steam, Impulse, and Gamersgate for $20.

After you’ve created your character, you enroll at a big magic academy and then we’re fully in life sim territory. You’re given a calendar of events and the ability to choose up to 3 activities for each day. You have a ton of activities to choose from (with more being added as you progress) and at first, it’s a little overwhelming, but I quickly got into the groove and settled into a routine of attending classes, studying, improving skills, and trying to improve my relationship with other students. There are adventures you can embark on, areas to explore, and tons of random events (which play out in a Choose Your Own Adventure fashion where your stats and skills determine the success rate of the various choices).

The presentation is functional – lots of text, with some still images – with calm classical music.  Everything’s text and menu-based so twitch gamers beware, but for fans of calmer turn-based fare, there’s a lot to like here. The full version is a little pricy for an indie game at $25, but there’s a lot of content here, and the game feels like it’ll have a ton of replay value so the game should keep you busy for quite some time if it’s up your alley.

Ophidian Wars: Opac’s Journey is available on XBox Live Indie Games for 80 MS points.

Aphelion looks great. It’s by far the most professional looking RPG on XBLIG and wouldn’t look out of place on XBox Live Arcade. It’s not perfect, and the indie nature of the game peeks through here and there (like in the running animations which feel out of place), but overall, the visuals are one of the game’s strongest points.

The music is solid. Everything ranges from decent to good, with one or two great song. No complaints here.

Story is a mixed bag. The banter between the 4 playable characters is entertaining enough and their personalities are about as fleshed out as you would expect with a 5 hour game. On the other hand, the plot is fairly cliche. Yes, the big bad guy of the game is a mysterious silver-haired swordsman. No, Aphelion isn’t going for parody. Even worse, though, is that since this is an episodic game, there’s no real resolution. The game ends with a climactic battle, but it felt like I had just finished disk 1 of a 4 disk game. Nothing is answered and I didn’t feel like I understood the overarching plot any better after beating the game than I did halfway through the game. Plus, since this is an indie game, who knows if the future episodes will ever get finished?

Gameplay has serious balance issues. There’s a Break bar that fills up as you deal damage or are hurt and after it’s full, you can unleash a crazy powerful attack that can target multiple enemies, deals massive damage, and doesn’t even cost a turn. It’s as broken as it sounds, especially when you consider how quickly you can fill up the bar later on in the game after you’ve gotten several multi-hit techniques. Sadly, the unbalanced gameplay doesn’t stop there. Restoration items are dirt cheap so I was never in danger of running out of EP (the game’s form of MP) so I just unleashed my strongest attacks & spells all of the time. Because of this, random battles would frequently be won before the enemy even got a chance to move. Similarly, I rarely used healing magic in battle since I could just use one of my many powerful Full Party heal items.

The game uses a fun LV-Up system similar to Mass Effect, but here too, the game is unbalanced – each character has 3 skills that they can upgrade to gain new abilities, 3 skills that give party benefits, and several additional skills that just give stat bonuses. The problem is that the stat bonus skills give such small bonuses like +2% per level. Admittedly, these add up over time, but it’s just not very fun to waste a LV-Up on something that has no real discernable effect on your character.

There are a couple annoyances that detract from the game. Random encounters are frequent. Font sizes are rather small, to the point where I leaned forward slightly to make it easier to read. I’m playing on a high quality 32″ HDTV so I can only imagine how difficult it would be to play on a small low quality SDTV. These problems don’t render the game unplayable, but they do make the game a little less fun.

The game took me a little over 5 hours to beat. After beating the game, you unlock a New Game+ mode that lets you restart the game at new, harder difficulty levels while keeping your LVs and equipment from your previous playthrough(s). Between that and a few optional harder bosses near the end of the game, Aphelion could keep you playing for quite a while if you’re so inclined.

Despite Aphelion’s flaws, I had some fun with it. Not enough for me to want to replay the game (although I’m mildly tempted to try skipping straight to the highest difficulty level in New Game+ to see if it offers a challenge), but I had fun getting new equipment (the game has a ton of equipment for a 5 hour game) and utterly decimating everything that stood against me. There were a couple of parts where your party splits up for a short period of time which were kind of cool and a nice change of pace. On the other hand, I can’t help but be disapointed by Aphelion. It’s obvious that many people spent a lot of time making this game so it’s disappointing that the gameplay and story aren’t up to the same high level of quality that the graphics exhibits.

Aphelion: Episode One – Graves of Earth was released on July 7th, 2010. It can be purchased for 240 MS points ($3 USD).

EDIT: This review was done based on a peer review version of the game which had horrible load times. I just tried out the version that you can purchase on the marketplace and I was shocked to discover that the load times are drastically better and are actually rather short, all around. I’m really surprised that there was such a huge difference between the ccg file version that people were playtesting & peer reviewing and the version on the marketplace. I’m sure my overall impression of the game would have been slightly more positive if I had played the version with the short load times.

Radiangames Crossfire Somewhat Longer Review: Picture Space Invaders. Now add modern graphics, the ability to teleport back and forth between the bottom and the top of the screen, a good variety of enemies that compliment each other nicely, various power-ups (most important of which is a power gauge that lets you drastically increase the power of your shots for a short period of time), co-op play, 50 main levels, and 2 unlockable modes (super fast mode & a gauntlet of extra hard levels). The game looks fantastic, it’s a blast to play, and the gameplay has more depth than you might think at first glance. Well worth the 240 MS points.

Radiangames Crossfire is one of the best arcade shooters I’ve ever played.

In short, buy it as soon as possible.

First up is a great bullet hell shmup called Vampire Rage.

Next up is a highly polished geography game called Around the World

Both games are only 80 MS points and are well worth checking out if you’re interested in difficult vertical shmups or geography-based quiz games respectively.

Two games, 80 MS points each.

First up, Chaos Node. This reminds me a lot of the arcade game, Bust a Move. Like Bust a Move, in Chaos Node, you have a bunch of colored balls & shapes, and you shoot colored balls at them. Hit the same colors and you’ll destroy them and get points. Where it differs from that classic game is that in Chaos Node, true to its name, there’s a whole lot more chaos. Your gun is in the middle of the screen and whenever you hit a wrong colored ball, it bounces away which in turn will hit other balls and before long everything on screen is bouncing all over the place.

After playing Chaos Node for 10-20 minutes I started to warm to it, but even so I’m not sure that I’d recommend it. The game felt TOO chaotic – like whether or not I suceeded was based as much on luck as skill. But hey, even though I didn’t love it, it wasn’t innately bad so give the trial a go and see if its particular brand of gameplay is for you.

Second, we have Urban Space Squirrels, developed by a group of student at the University of Utah. As an alumni of BYU (the arch-rival of the University of Utah), it hurts me to say it, but Urban Space Squirrels is actually pretty good. It has a nice visual style, a decent sense of humor, and the gameplay (which generally involves throwing bombs and then using them to propel yourself through levels) is enjoyable as well. Well worth the low price they’re asking for it.

All of the games they picked are excellent choices and I’ve talked about a few myself on this website. I’d also like to add one more that came out right after the article – Gerbil Physics 2. Gerbil Physics 1 was an excellent puzzle game with a nice sense of humor and the sequel is the same thing but better and with a few new tricks up its sleeves. It’s only 80 MS points. Buy it, love it.

And I really must say, this past week or so has been an awesome time for XBox Live Indie Games. Gerbil Physics 2, JoyJoy, Zombie Estate, Retrofit: Overload, and Mamotte Knight are all very high quality games that each deserve a spot in the top 20 best rated. Even some of the second string games this last week were pretty good – I got sent a review copy of Ranger and though it’s not much more than a glorified flash game (shoot arrows at the incoming hordes, using several power-ups to give yourself an edge), at least it’s a fun glorified flash game.

Gameplay is like Gauntlet crossed with a simple tower defense game. As either a Knight, Ninja, Amazon, or Mage, you run around killing monsters, bolstering defenses, and otherwise protecting your princess. If the princess dies, it’s game over so her safety is the #1 priority. Between levels, you can use points gained to level up in 4 different abilities which vary from character to character. For example, the Amazon can increase her speed, gain a life draining ability, increase her attack power and combo potential, or improve her boomerang special attack with the ability to have multiple boomerangs out at one time and improved range.

Monsters start out simple, but as the levels progress, they get more advanced from ghosts that teleport around the stage to giant dragons & monster dumping airships. But don’t worry – an easy difficulty level, unlimited continues, and the potential to bring some friends along help keep the game manageable for the inexperienced. And if you want a challenge, the higher difficulty levels definitely provide just that.

The whole game is presented with an excellent 8-bit visual and audio presentation (albeit with drastically more happening on screen at once than any actual 8-bit game). The game is fun in one player and the different character classes provide a good amount of variety to the gameplay, however where the game really shines is in the multiplayer. Grab some friends, crank up the difficulty level, and prepare yourself for a multiplayer gaming experience rarely matched.

Really, the only major omission to the game is the lack of online multiplayer. Online multiplayer would have elevated Mamotte Knight from an excellent game to an “EVERYONE MUST BUY THIS NOW!!!!!” game. However, even without online multiplayer, Mamotte Knight is one of the finest XBox Live Indie Games out there. A great single player game and a fantastic multiplayer game, all for only 240 MS points. Well worth a purchase.

Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur – The backstory is amusing (about a dinosaur who gets fed up with leetspeak), but I’m not so sure about the actual game. You select letters on your dinosaur’s back, shoot them at buildings, connect them to form words, and then breathe fire to cause the words to explode, hopefully taking down a building or two in the process. Occasionally a plane will fly overhead with a power-up to be gained if you can complete an almost finished word. There are also periodic bonus levels where you just have to shoot planes down without having to worry about words. All in all, the game is mildly entertaining, but I’d rather play Word Soup.

Missile Escape – Fly around in a jet and dodge missiles. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Strategy seems to consist mostly of getting the missiles together in a group and then flying around in circles while you wait for the time to run out with the occasional course correcting to take into account errant missiles. It’s not a bad game, but it feels like it’s missing something – like playing a game of Pac-Man where all the pellets have been removed and you just have to run away for a minute.