Leave Home – a truly fantastic sidescrolling shooter where the level changes depending on how well you’re doing – just had a price drop to 80 MS points recently. It was well worth the higher price point before so now you have no excuse.
Black Chicken Studios sent me a review copy of their new PC life-sim RPG, Academagia a little while ago and I’ve been playing it off and on. It’s basically a Harry Potter life simulator minus the license. And you know what? It’s pretty fun.
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.
I just realized that I haven’t said anything about Ophidian Wars: Opac’s Journey which is a shame since it’s a quality game. It’s basically Metroid without enemies and with the ability to purchase upgrades ala an RPG. It’s a little rough around the corners, but even so, good Metroidvania-style games are hard to come by and this is a good Metroidvania. If Small Cave Games has done this well with their debut title, I can only imagine how awesome their next game will be (which from what I’ve gathered is more of an Action/RPG).
Ophidian Wars: Opac’s Journey is available on XBox Live Indie Games for 80 MS points.
I didn’t have high sales expectations for PlayDead’s first XBLA title, Limbo. Between the higher price tag ($15), black and white graphics, and short running time (most reviews have pegged it at around 3-6 hours), it had “artsy sales flop” written all over it. And yet, 8 days after release, the game has over 200,000 different entries on its leaderboard. If say, 75% of those entries purchased the game (with the other 25% being alternate gamertags) and Microsoft took a third of the revenue, the developers of Limbo are looking at around $1.5 million dollars. Now admittedly, Limbo had a bigger development team than most indie games and it’s been in development for a while, but even still, $1.5 million would be fantastic lifetime revenue for most indie titles, to say nothing about a mere 8 days of sales.
The question then becomes why? Why has this game sold so extraordinarily well? I haven’t actually played the full version (they were out of review codes when I asked and our money’s too tight for me to purchase new games these days, although I hope royalties from Cthulhu will rectify that) so I can’t analyze the entire game, but just from the demo and the Internet, I’ve come up with a few possible explanations.
1 – Summer of XBox Live promotion. Any game that’s featured in Microsoft’s yearly Summer of Arcade promotion gets a huge boost in visibility. Yet this alone can not explain Limbo’s huge success – for comparison, last year’s Splosion Man (another high quality Summer of Arcade game) had 70,000 leaderboard entries after a week – a solid showing, but nowhere near as good as Limbo (and Limbo is $5 more expensive!).
2 – Media Coverage. Coverage by the media is huge for boosting sales, as my own experience has born out (Breath of Death’s sales usually spike whenever a website covers it). Limbo currently has 48 reviews on Gamerankings with an average of over 90%. Both the coverage and the high scores certainly can’t hurt.
3 – Accessibility. Limbo’s controls are very simple – move, jump, and interact. Although I’m sure the puzzles get more difficult as the game goes on, at least in the demo, there was nothing particularly mindbending (pull an object, push an object, jump). Certainly this isn’t Braid with its numerous complicated time manipulation mechanics.
Not only are the controls simple, but the game wastes no time in letting the player play it. No lengthy cutscenes, no big tutorial, just press Start and begin playing.
4 – Cliffhanger demo. The demo for Limbo isn’t long – it took me about 10-12 minutes amd that’s with getting a couple of hidden achievements - but it ends with a bang and that counts for a lot. I daresay a lot of people who were on the edge ended up buying it just to see what happens next.
5 – Ignored niche. Horror games have become a scarce commodity of late. Resident Evil has abandoned its horror focus in favor of action, Alone in the Dark & Silent Hill haven’t had a great game in years (although Shattered Memories was a step in the right direction), Fatal Frame is Japanese only these days, and we haven’t seen anything new from the Siren team (my personal favorite horror series). Sure, we’ve gotten a couple of new series like Dead Space & Alan Wake, but for the most part, I daresay there is more demand for horror games than there is supply.
Limbo fills in this much desired void in the current gaming market, but not only that, it has some noticeable advantages over the limited competition. One, it’s rated T so children and teenagers who are in search of scares but have parents that frown upon M rated games can purchase it (as well as adults who chose not to play M games for whatever reasons). Two, it’s a 2D platformer so players who lack the skill or inclination to play 3D shooters (i.e. the standard format of horror games these days) can play it with ease.
Any other reasons I’m missing?
A new version of Breath of Death VII was just released to the marketplace today. This version is just to fix a few small bugs that we discovered recently; no new features have been added (maybe next time).
Sorry about the lack of updates recently – I’ve been busy moving to a new place so game development and reviewing has taken a backseat. We finished moving today, however, so expect more reviews and more news about Cthulhu Saves the World soon.
RPGamer.com just posted an interview of yours truly talking about Cthulhu Saves the World. Click here to go read it.
I love RPGs, but sadly, there isn’t a whole lot to choose from in this genre on XBox Live Indie Games, especially when you consider that the service is almost two years old. There’s our game, Breath of Death VII. There’s Light’s End which is decent and sort of an RPG (although despite its RPG-esque visuals, it really has more in common with the old graphic adventure games that Lucasarts & Sierra used to make). There’s Dungeon Adventure which is supposed to be a decent rogue-like (but all things considered, I’d rather just play Nethack for free). Then you have Star Cross, ZenHak, and Legend of the Rune Lords, all of which have major issues. And that was pretty much it for the RPG genre on XBLIG, up until yesterday when Aphelion: Episode One – Graves of Earth came out.
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 Short Review: Buy it as soon as possible.
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.
Progress report, we’re up to 123 monsters for Cthulhu Saves the World and we’re not done yet. For comparison, Breath of Death VII had 100 monsters, about a third of which were palette swaps. Cthulhu Saves the World does include some monsters that are variants of other monsters, but the percentage is smaller, and in most cases, they aren’t just palette swaps, but have other variations as well. Not only are there going to be noticeably more monsters in Cthulhu Saves the World, but I really think Bill outdid himself with the quality as well.
To whet your appetite, here is a sampler of some of the monsters we have done yet.
Click on the image to see them at full size.