Last Wednesday I posted part one of a blog where I explored a few of the random games I’d discovered on the Xbox LIVE Indie service, and this week I bring you a summary of the last four of those games. Prepare yourself for we are about to enter a world of scarily sub-standard games.
THE ZOMBIE SHOTGUN MASSACRE 2
Well, I guess it does what it says on the tin.
So right off of the bat the title didn’t make it sound like it was going to be the most original game, and while I was hoping for the game to surprise me with what it could do, it really didn’t. The game is a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up where you take on the role of a very scantily clad woman, using a shotgun to defeat oncoming zombies. There’s really not much more to the game than that, the gun doesn’t even need reloading. There were about three or four types of zombie which kept spawning as I moved through the level, the music was mind-numbingly repetitive, and combat consisted of me pressing a single button over and over to fire the shotgun, the only weapon I had throughout the demo.
There were occasionally health kits for me to pick up, as well as ‘idol cards’, items that made portraits of scantily clad anime girls appear in the top-right corner of the screen, which I needed to grind out fifty of to progress through the demo. Besides fighting through the zombie hordes and collecting cards, the other objective in the trial was finding two pieces of a ticket to enter what appeared to be a strip club. Now, I’m not the kind of person to usually get up in arms about sexuality in a video game, but it felt as though THE ZOMBIE SHOTGUN MASSACRE 2 didn’t have a lot going on and was trying to sell itself on largely on the prospect of girls not wearing very much to make up for that.
Overall boring combat, annoying music, bad UI, and a lack of much else in the game made THE ZOMBIE SHOTGUN MASSACRE 2 very off-putting.
Head Shot 2
The premise of Head Shot 2 is fairly simple; in each level you are presented with a 2D screen where there are a crowd of people, some moving left and some moving right. You press A when you’re ready and the game then gives you a picture of your target. You must find your target in the crowd, move your crosshair over them and fire without missing the shot or hitting any innocent civilians. Simplicity is definitely something that can help indie developers focus their projects but I felt like Head Shot 2 was just too simple. Moving a marker over a target and pressing A got repetitive quickly and made the game feel like it was lacking substance.
Targets also seemed to vary greatly in the amount of time they’d spent hiding between other between other characters in the crowd and the game was not helped out by its pitched-down announcer. He talked at all times on the main menu, talked when I was given my target, and talked when I’d take my shots. The announcer got old fast and was neither cool nor funny. Based on my experience, I can’t say I can recommend Head Shot 2.
Avatar Snowball Fight
Oh Avatar Snowball Fight dev team, if only you'd spent more time on the trial.
If there’s one good thing I can say about Avatar Snowball Fight it’s that it did what a lot of other indie games haven’t and impressed me as soon as I booted it up. Not only had they created a full 3D environment for their game, which actually looked reasonably good, but as could be seen from the main menu the game had a multiplayer mode. I couldn’t actually play the multiplayer mode, it being a trial version, but it’s not often you see XBLI games with 3D, avatar support and multiplayer. Unfortunately as soon as I jumped into the single player ‘practice mode’ it all went drastically downhill.
In the practice mode I could move my avatar around the 3D world and he’d animate jerkily from place to place, and I could use a single button to throw a snowball in the direction I was pointing, or at least vaguely in the direction. The snowball shots seemed deliberately designed to often land a little off of where the crosshair was pointing and sometimes outside of the crosshair at all. My targets were snowmen that would occasionally pop up from the ground; they remained stationary, they could not fire at me, I could walk straight through them if I wished, and they were by no means in short supply. The snowmen offered almost no opportunity to really test the shooting mechanic. There were power-ups scattered across the game world, however moving over them only made a message appear telling me they could only be unlocked in the full version. Most buttons on the controller that weren’t ‘fire’ also seemed to open up a menu for me to buy the full game, and Avatar Snowball Fight even took other opportunities to remind me I could get the full version from the Marketplace, as though if I wasn’t reminded every five seconds I might just forget that money can be exchanged for goods and services.
I feel like there may be a way better game waiting for me in the full version of Avatar Snowball Fight but the trial version is certainly horrendous, and they do themselves a disservice by not using a world which obviously took some effort to build to really hook the player.
EZ Muze: Hamst3r Edition
Seriously, try this thing out.
So, I tried to save the best until last. Yes, this one isn’t technically a game, it’s a piece of music-creation software, but this download was good enough to make an exception for. I know this might sound like bias coming from someone who is a fan of Giant Bomb’s Hamst3r, and considering that I had to sit through the last three train wrecks before uncovering this gem, but this is definitely the best thing I’ve seen on Xbox LIVE Indie so far.
In terms of design EZ Muze: Hamst3r edition is a pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a music creation program on the PC. You are given a number of audio channels; two for drums, two for lead, one for vocals etc. and you can select music loops from a wide library of samples, all created by Hamst3r, and drop them into any of the spaces on the track. Unfortunately the Xbox 360 controller seems to be by far the biggest limitation to what you can do in EZ Muze. While it seems like the developer did their best with making navigation through the program as smooth as possible, the 360 controller makes things feel a little clunky. In fact it makes me wish there was a PC release of this game for download.
Controller issues aside I liked everything I saw in this game, the music samples are excellent, the program gives you a lot of freedom, the interface looks very sleek, and the song the trial comes pre-loaded with gives a great idea of what you can do with the program. This is an indie release so much better than the other games I’ve seen on a service and one I’d definitely recommend.
Duder, It’s Over
So, for now that’s my look back at the games I’ve found on Xbox LIVE Indie Games; some of them promising, and some not so promising, but I encourage anyone who wants to take the step into amateur development. Thank you for reading. Good luck, have Batman.
-Gamer_152
