Look readers, I’ll be frank: and that’s why, today, I’m reviewing the most obscure 1990s first-person shooter I can find. Whoops, sorry; wrong Frank! Let’s try this again.

I keep going back and forth on whether I keep wanting to keep writing “Minus the Pudding.” On the one hand, the quality of my GameCola writing has been deteriorating lately as a factor of  my being more focused on other projects. On the other, I’m not exactly the only person covering XBLIG anymore; there are plenty of other sites doing it better, and more timely-ey. Sites like Indie Gamer Chick, which I hope to God never reviews Life in the Dorms, because they terrify me, and sites like VVGTV, which I hope to God does, because they contributed to our soundtrack and are therefore appropriately biased.

On the other hand (on the foot?), I also haven’t played any great (or even particularly good) XBLIG games in what feels like a year. Actually, it doesn’t just feel like it; it is, literally, a year, because I couldn’t come with any XBLIG games to nominate for GC’s 2011 year-end awards. And on the other hand (again, foot), Microsoft has seemingly given up completely on XBLIG; in the latest dashboard redesign, they relegated it even further away from anything relevant than they did the last time, to the point where—no joke—it takes 13 button pushes just to find them. In contrast, it takes just one button to, as of this writing, watch a trailer for the Paranormal trilogy. I don’t even know what that is.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s completely pointless for me to keep writing “Minus the Pudding”—just that, if 2012 goes by, and we don’t have another Excruciating Guitar Voyage to make it all worthwhile, I’m going back to writing erotic Pong fanfiction. Or worse. Shape up, XBLIG!

Sins of the Flesh

I’m starting to wonder if maybe it’s inappropriate to make jokes at Silver Dollar Games’s expense in literally every single thing I write for GameCola. Sure, they may propagate some of the worst of what XBLIG has to offer, and sure—this is only a rumor—they eat babies; but more and more it seems like they’re trying to branch out and make actual videogames. Or, at least as “videogame” as one can get on XBLIG.

Case in point: Sins of the Flesh.

You start off dead. A haunting little girl’s voice tells you that you need to do everything she says in order to live again. She says you can trust her. A cell phone rings. She tells you not to answer it. Do you? If you don’t, the screen starts fading to black; if you do; an older British man cuts in and blames you for everything bad that’s ever happened in your life. Both characters continue to vie for your attention throughout the game; all the while, your character moves automatically across the screen, while you try to shoot down all the enemies that are trying to drag you down to hell.

I’m a sucker for games that stimulate my ears; it’s the reason I found Bastion so interesting, even though everything else about it isn’t. It’s also the reason why I dug Sins of the Flesh. The gameplay’s simplistic to a fault; even during the eight-minute trial, my thumbs were sore from constantly pressing back and forth on each of the joysticks. Even if you hate the idea of this game, though, you should buy it; that way, maybe the world will never have to suffer another Cassie’s Animal Sounds.

ElfSquad7

Remember what I said earlier about not being timely? This is a game about wrapping presents for Santa. Oops.

An elf named Elfington. A rat named Cheesums. A Reindeer named Jellybean. What do they all have in common? They all have the best names ever. Also, they’re trying to save Christmas! There’s a present shortage, so they need to operate a present-making machine and—this is almost too wonderful to type—shoot the presents with their “present guns” in order to automatically wrap and then collect them. I just hope someone’s working on a Skyrim mod that includes this weapon as we speak.

The game’s like Smash Bros., with present-guns instead of any other attacks, and also you’re not trying to kill each other. You’re just trying to wrap presents. It’s actually pretty repetitive, too, just like Sins of the Flesh. Apparently it boasts four-player co-op, which should make it more chaotic and, inevitably, more fun. But it also means you’d have to ask three other people to play a game called ElfSquad7 with you.

Extreme Jogging

Little-known fact: I’m a runner (or at least, I pretend to be one every morning before work). I don’t talk about it much on GameCola, because this is a videogames website, so I assume, thanks to decades’ worth of stereotyping, that everyone reading it resembles something akin to Jabba the Hutt. So I’ll admit it—I checked this game out not because it looked inherently fun, but because it played to my own interests. (This is also the reason why Back to the Future: The Game is going to get Game of the Year this year: not because it’s the best game, but because it’s Back to the Future. Hey—it worked for Batman before.)

Although it claims to be a “running” game, actual running is the last thing you have to worry about in Extreme Jogging. A lot of the game is just moving from right to left and vice versa to avoid hitting things, though there’s also some strategy involved. For example, jumping. Also not jumping. Also, in the beginning level at least, there’s a soda power-up you can pick up to increase your stamina, which is not something I believe most running organizations would endorse. There’s also these neat Hole in the Wall-style segments where you need to control each of your arms with each the joysticks to fit through the brick wall rather than splat into it.

What really make the game, though, are the obstacles. In the first level, there’s a giant bounder chasing you; later levels have cows, hot air balloons, and goddamn sharks coming after you. It’s just dressing, but it makes what would otherwise be a pretty dull experience…slightly less dull, anyway.

Game Type

This is a game about how terrible the new dashboard is for XBLIG gamers. Here’s the joke: It’s very difficult to get to the XBLIG section on the dashboard, and also there’s a lot of advertisements. The first part of the game involves navigating through a fake dashboard with a series of fake advertisements (and some for actual XBLIG games—nice touch), until you can find the hidden “Game Type” menu that brings you to the second part.

The second part is a side-scrolling shooter with kittens and football players that are trying to kill you. It’s a lot of the weirdness for weirdness’ sake stuff; kind of like if the GHXYK2 guys put down the drugs and tried to make an actual videogame. The whole thing’s about as one-note joke as it sounds, but there’s some sense of vindication in knowing that someone went to all this trouble to make this point about the new dash.

And they’re probably right—even though they were intentionally trying to make it difficult to find the game within a game, I was still able to find it much more quickly than the actual XBLIG channel on the new dashboard.

…but that’s too depressing a note to end this article on, so here are some sloths taking a bath:

In an early episode of

It’s pudding time.

The Fall of Gods

From the Darkness shall rise the Light,

From the Light shall rise the Darkness.

It’s no “time flows like a river, and history repeats,” but it’ll do.

One of the easiest (and laziest) ways I’ve found to talk about indie games is to just say that something’s a crappier version of some other game you’ve already heard of. (To be fair, the developers themselves tend to do that, too—although they usually omit the word “crappy,” for some reason.) Lootfest, for example, is 3D Dot Game Heroes on a smaller scale; Chu’s Dynasty is just Super Smash Bros., except without any characters you’ve ever heard of. (These are of course both great selling points.) The Fall of Gods, then, is Secret of Mana, only with no co-op and an even worse translation.

The gist of the game is that—you might’ve been able to guess this from the name—the gods fell, and one man alone has the power to bring them back, or whatever. (I’m sure the rambly intro went into a little more detail than that, but when I started to see Fantasy Proper Nouns like “Eloh” and “Ergia,” my brain instinctively went into standby mode as a defense mechanism.) You need to hit things with your sword, collect all the magical artifacts, and then defeat the Great Evil. I wish I could go into more specifics than that, but the biggest problem with The Fall of Gods is how poorly written (or, more likely, poorly localized) the game is.

Here’s how to tell if your game needs a proofreader: If you don’t think you need one, you need one. (This goes for all forms of writing, actually; I adamantly believe that you shouldn’t even be allowed to tweet without someone looking it over first to make sure you didn’t screw it up.) I was so put off by the game’s apparent Babelfish translation that I couldn’t take in anything else about it. Which is too bad—the screenshots had me hoping and praying that The Fall of Gods would be the second coming of Secret of Mana; instead, it just disappoints as much as the actual Secret of Mana sequels. It feels like I licked a penny just to talk about it; blech.

Wizorb

Finally: the crossover we’ve all been waiting for!

…no, it’s not Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright. We all know that’s never coming out in the U.S.

…no, it’s not Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters; that already happened.

No, it’s the things fanfic dreams are made of! Dragon Warrior meets, of all things in the goddamn world, Pong, in this soon-to-be XBLIG classic.

The big innovations that Wizorb brings to the (tennis) table are 1) enemies wandering around the field; 2) spells you can cast to do things like break blocks, and break lots of blocks; and 3) little towns you can explore in-between levels, wherein villagers ask you for all your money. It also has—just look at the screenshot!—great style. So many indie games today try for that stylized “8-bit” look, but they’re only just calling it that. What they actually mean is, “I made this in MS Paint; that’s what old Nintendo games looked like, right?” They hide their lack of artistic talent under a guise of it being “retro.” Wizorb actually IS retro; the graphics ACTUALLY look like a (very high-quality) NES title, and the music and sound effects bring back happy memories of Mario 3 and Punch-Out.

I do think the name Wizorb makes it sound a little like a generic puzzle game, instead of an awesome RPG/puzzle hybrid—but, then again, I could say the same thing about Puzzle Quest, and that game did just fine without my criticism. This game makes Pong engaging in ways not seen since that horrifying masturbation minigame in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, and it shows that, with the right coat of paint, even the most dated of gameplay mechanics can be fun again. (Note: This trick does not apply to all forms of entertainment. I tried painting my cat once to make it more interesting, and after a very sad day I ended up having to buy a new cat.)

Also, while we’re talking about Pong fanfiction, here’s an excerpt from my latest romance novel: “The Passionate Paddles: Let’s Set a High Score Together!”

Blip.

The ball came toward me.

Blip.

The ball went back.

Blip.

The ball came toward me.

Blip.

The ball came back.

And then we made love for three days straight.

Hell’s House

YES. YES. YES. It’s been literally months since my last FMV adventure…which, if you recall, had the unexpected problem of having only about two minutes’ worth of actual FMV footage. You’d push some buttons, watch a scene, and then push the same buttons and watch the same exact scene. It was as fun as…normally, I’d say it was as fun as playing an FMV game, actually, but I guess that won’t work here.

Hell’s House is different. Sure, you end up watching the same footage over and over again, but that’s usually your own fault, not the game’s. It’s kind of like Dragon’s Lair—you watch a few moments of a goofy indie horror movie, and when certain Xbox buttons scroll across the top of your screen, you have to press them in order to keep watching. If you mess up, you start over. It’s thanks to mechanics like this that the phrase “KIDNAPPED?! My Daphne kidnapped again?!” has become an irrevocable part of my mindscape.

The big problem with Hell’s House is that you can’t really tell what the buttons you’re supposed to press actually are. They’re the same colors as the ones on your controller, but the letters are obscured by these weird skull symbols—so unless you have the buttons memorized, you have to keep glancing down at your controller to remember what the hell one “blue” is. Looking away from the screen like that kind of takes some of the fun out the game, considering that its entire purpose is to watch it.

Don’t get me wrong—Hell’s House is actually pretty cool, for what it is. A literal interactive movie. A more sincere and less David Cagey Heavy Rain, perhaps. Don’t expect Silent Hill or Resident Evil, and you won’t be disappointed.

DLC Quest

When you start off DLC Quest, you can only move your character to the right. There’s no jump button. There’s no animation, or music, or sound effects. You have a sword, but you can’t hit anything with it. Literally all you can do is more from left…to right. That’s IT.

…

Now, the developers could’ve just stopped right there, and they would’ve had a platformer that’s, if we’re being honest with ourselves, just as deep as most of the other platformers on XBLIG. But DLC Quest is no mere videogame; it’s a scathing commentary (or at least, a commentary) on the way today’s videogame publishers nickel-and-dime their own fanbase by cutting important content from games and then selling it later as “extra.” It’s a game specifically about buying downloadable content for itself.

…Not that you’ll actually be “buying” anything. All the so-called DLC packs are purchased through coins you pick up in-game. Want to move backwards? Purchase the Movement Pack, for five gold coins! Or, how would you like to pause your game? That’s another five gold coins, please! There’s also, of course, Horse Armor DLC, which costs a whopping 250 gold coins. (You get the subtle humor of that, right?)

I can’t remember the last time I had this much stupid fun with a game, without worrying if there were more productive ways I could be spending my time. It’s less than an hour long, and besides the gimmick, it’s a very basic platformer. But its cute jokes and clever critiques of the gaming industry still held my attention better than Skyrim, for godsake. DLC Quest may be a bit of a one-trick pony, but this horse of a different color never gets beaten dead, so don’t put it out to pasture just yet.

And now, another selection from “The Passionate Paddles: Let’s Set a High Score Together!”

Blip.

The ball came toward me.

Blip.

The ball went back.

Blip.

The ball came toward me.

Blip.

…But this time, the ball didn’t go back.

I didn’t let go. I couldn’t let go! Not this time. Not again.

As I held the ball tightly in my arms, I remembered her…her fine alabaster coloring, the sweet, sweet sharpness of her corners. She had four of them, just like me.

The pain of these memories was overwhelming…but the joy, even more so. It all came rushing back to me, like an unstoppable waterfall of pleasure through the cavernous hole that once held my yet-unbroken heart. A heart that beat only for her.

And then I noticed…something.

The ball I held so closely to my glistening chest…it bore a striking resemblence to my long-lost love. Or…at least it could, with a little imagination.

Why, yes. If I just squished it around in my hands (oh that felt good), and then flattened it out…the likeness was almost uncanny.

It only took me a couple of minutes.

Later that evening, as I turned the game off and settled into my warm bed with my pretend pixel maiden beside me, it was like she’d never really left me at all. And I didn’t even care who heard my passion that night.

At least I had something to live for now.

In an early episode of

I’m always looking for ways to pad out my column without having to play any more of these god-awful indie games, so I say it’s time for a…

Hey, remember that time I said I was making a videogame? Life in the Dorms? It’s still on. The script is basically done, the programming is basically done; the big things we’re working on now are graphics, music, sound effects, and having various members of the GameCola staff test it to make sure we didn’t do anything too stupid, like accidentally introduce stealth and/or combat into an adventure game. It’s practically a videogame already.

You want proof? Here’s a new trailer we just put together, staring yours truly as “guy wearing cardboard head.” Enjoy!

Phew! That is a videogame, isn’t it? Look for it on the Xbox Indie Games channel this fall! Or possibly winter! Or possibly next year! Hopefully not next year. In the meantime, here are some other games you can play, right now.

Cute Things Dying Violently

Despite this game’s title, you’re not really supposed to be killing all the cute things in Cute Things Dying Violently. You’re actually supposed to be saving them. The game even jokingly refers to itself in-game as Cute Things Living Full Lives. I feel ripped off.

It’s a point-and-tap affair where you have to highlight your cursor over these little blue blob things, and then click to fling them toward an exit door, without “accidentally” slicing them in half. After the first few stages the game starts adding more things for you to worry about, like switches you have to flip and fans whose direction you have to change. All the while the little dudes are mumbling cute things at you—I could’ve sworn I heard one say “I love you very much!”, right before I accidentally sent it pudgy-face-first into a buzz saw. Blood sprays EVERYWHERE when this happens, by the way, coating the stage and everything in it, while the severed, still bleeding halves of your friend go bouncing off-screen. It’s horrific.

Too be honest, it all got a little too complicated for me, but I also don’t like games where I can’t just press A to win. Moreover, I don’t think the Xbox’s thumbstick is really up to the amount of precision this game requires; you have to both aim the critter exactly where you want it to land, and pull back just enough to put the right amount of umph into it. There are options for adjusting the thumbstick’s sensitivity, but they only range from “normal” to “highest,” whereas I found myself needing something more along the lines of “painfully super slow.” The game also has a “profanity slider,” allowing you to change the level of cussing—from ”low sodium” to “MSG.” Unfortunately, I have no idea what those terms are supposed to mean within the context of the game. It’s like that time I was at a Tex-Mex restaurant with my parents when I was little, and the bathrooms were labeled “Damas” and “Caballeros,” and I had no idea which one I was allowed to pee in.

You know something? This just might be a landmark day in Pudding history—the first time EVER that I managed to find and play four awesome playable games, all at once. This calls for a celebration:

Thank you for reading. Please buy my game when it comes out.

Let’s do this, videogames.

(And you didn’t think my intros could get any shorter! Sorry; must be because I spend all my time blogging about yardsales now. Videogames just aren’t cool anymore.)

TIC: Part 1

You’ve seen people use the phrase “the screenshots don’t do this game justice,” right? It’s one of those awesome games-writer clichés that we like to use when we don’t have anything interesting to say. (Or, if you’re a writer for something like Game Informer, it’s just what you use, period. BOOM! Got you, Game Informer! …They’re not still around, right?) TIC is the game people wish they were playing when they said things like that, because now it just makes them look bad that they already used it on something like anything else.

You have to watch a video of this game in action before proceeding with this article. If you don’t, well then something something something BLOOD, something something DEATH, something DISMEMBERMENT, something something QUEST 64! You have been warned.

…

All right? Have we all watched it? Maybe you’ve still got some breath in your lungs, but—to use my own Pudding cliché—this thing could easily pass for an actual videogame.*

So, what are you? You’re this dinky little flying unicycle thing, who’s trying to thwart the megalomaniacs from EvilCorp from drilling up your homeland for sweet, sweet oil. (Videogames ARE promoting a liberal agenda! I knew it!) In the demo, the bulk of gameplay was centered around collecting silver acorns. Characters kept asking me for them, I guess because the plan is to just keep throwing them at Sarah Palin until she goes away. I’m down.

TIC appears to be a smart, beautiful, playful puzzle-platformer, but it really showcases the limits of the XBLIG platform re: demos. This game costs $3, or roughly WAY MORE than your typical Xbox indie game, and at a 10-minute time limit, the trial wasn’t enough to convince me that I’d want this game more than, say, a hoagie from Wawa. I’ll probably end up getting it anyway—just not when I’m hungry.

Millennium Man

This is a game about time travel, which, as you know, is a topic GameCola never talks about ever. It’s a platformer about a squishy-looking guy who’s been sentenced to “Eternal Prison.” Luckily one of the guards sympathizes with him—he’s left our guy a special treat in his cell. A device that allows him to travel through time!

And thus, gameplay. The item allows you to open a slider menu up on your screen, enabling you to select time periods ranging from 3,000 B.C. to 10,000 AD. As you move your cursor along the slider, the world around you changes to reflect the changing time periods. You have to find the one that suits your current needs to advance the game.

For example, the first puzzle involves a door with a solid wall in front of it. You travel to the future, to a time when the wall has long since crumbled, in order to go through the door. Granted, this means the puzzles aren’t generally much more complicated than “scroll around until you figure out what time period allows you to do something, and then go do it,” but there’s a certain Portal-esque aspect to the game, arranging time and space just the way you need it in order to escape the labyrinthine prison.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. Using lofty terms to describe this game helps me get through the next two that much more easily. You’ll see why very shortly.

GHXYK2 Classics Vol. 1

I hate doing things like this, because I always feel like I’m cheating you out of content, but I don’t have the vocabulary or the writing talent to accurately tell you what in God’s name playing this videogame is like. I have to resort to video footage. (Trust me, though—it’s worth it.) Watch carefully, and hold on to your eyeballs.

Recorded with my point-and-shoot** in front of my TV. I’m so sorry.

I want to say something snarky here, like “and now I’ve put as much effort into writing about this game as the developers put into making it,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s an intentional style, rather than the result of laziness or a lack of skills. It’s like those minimalist paintings that art history professors insist have some kind of deep meaning, even though the stupid painting is very clearly just one giant splotch of red. It might seem like they created it in five minutes, but I guess that’s part of the charm—that they so flawlessly executed a game that looks like it was made in five minutes, but actually has some substance to it, unlike games that were actually made in five minutes.

That’s not a very funny analysis, though, so go back and watch the clip again while I think of some good fart jokes, or whatever.

…

“Hey, what did the fart say to the other fart?” “Pppfffffffffffft, I’m a fart!” (Man, this stuff is hard. I have a new-found respect for the writers of World Wrestling Entertainment.)

Torque Quest

This, on the other hand, is just bad, and I don’t think it really wants to be.

Hey, now we’re back in comfortable territory for me! Point-and-click adventure games! Yaaaaay! And it’s even by a European developer, just like all modern-day adventure games. That means the writing doesn’t make sense because no one wants to hire a talented localizer (possibly because they spent the game’s entire budget on eighteen different songs whose lyrics consist only of the word “runaway” over and over and over a-goddamn-gain, not that I’m bitter).

For example, here’s a select quote from the intro cutscene. Two characters are rambling on about how they should kill their pet cat because it ate the USB pen with the prototype of the RPG they’re working on. (Just go with it. This is the part of the game that makes sense.) One guy asks if they should make a 1942 clone instead, and the other guy says:

“HE WON’T LIKE TO SWAP AN RPG WITH MORE THAN 40 DIFFERENT WAYS TO END A QUEST WITH A SHITTY SPACE INVADER SHOOTER.”

…Huh?

Here’s another one. When you click “examine” on a guy named Gary Jobson:

Most people who are considered to be friends by Torque [the main character] suffer come problems with alcohol and its abuse, Gary Jobson is one of them, which gives his ability to prevent a theft a “-2″ penalty, this means Torque wouldn’t have too much trouble stealing his wallet which contains his credit card.

AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH. One more, one more. When you examine an ATM:

“And to think that there are some consoles which have the same specs, a little more games and still they sell, it makes you think.”

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?! Also, when you click “use” on the ATM—this is intended to be a factual statement—he talks about how much he wants to have sex with it.

As a professional copyeditor—someone who spends eight hours a day editing corporate reports, and then comes home to edit articles for GameCola, or proofread text for indie videogames—this just looks like a cry to help for me. Call me, friend developer. You know I’m always there for you.

* For some reason, my original notes for this sentence read “why, it looks good enough to be a real videogame! puff puff on my pipe.” I really wish I knew why.

In an early episode of

After the last couple of games I had to play for “Minus the Pudding” (see the end of this article), I’m not sure I have it in me to write any more novel-length intro paragraphs. What you see is what you get. Come read about some games, or whatever. I don’t care anymore.

Math Cruncher

I hate math. I guess crunching is OK (arrrrr, it’s the crunch I love!), but only if there are absolutely no numbers involved. Literally the only reason I downloaded this game was because it reminded me of a freeware game called Number Munchers that I used to play in Ms. Caputo’s third-grade classroom; and it did not disappoint in that regard! Mostly because not only is this game a lot like Number Munchers, it actually is Number Munchers, just with a different name and worse graphics. This is of course to be expected in a service that allows games like Fortresscraft to thrive.

If you’re of a similar age group to me, then you might enjoy this game for the same reason that I did—stupid nostalgia crap—and you might also enjoy such fine XBLIG classics as “Where the F***is Carmen San Fernando?” and “The New Jersey Trail.” I just made those up, but who am I kidding—I would absolutely buy those games. Does anybody want to start working on The New Jersey Trail with me right now?

For those readers who weren’t in my third-grade class, here’s how the game works. It gives you an objective (for example: devour all multiples of 3), and you have to move along a grid, gobbling up anything that aligns with that objective. Also monsters show up sometimes. It’s actually a pretty terrible, Ubergridder-esque game. There were a few times when I was reasonably sure that I ate all the multiples, and it still wouldn’t let me finish. And by a few times, I mean every single goddamn time. My poor lil’ cruncher was just left there, alone, surrounded by monsters and numbers he couldn’t crunch, waiting to die, because dying was the only thing left he could do.

On the plus side, the game lets you input your initials into a high score list, and I dutifully put in “POO” like any third-grader worth his Trapper Keeper would.

Lootfest

It may seem weird for me to deride rip-offs in one paragraph and talk about how great they are in another, but don’t worry; that’s just because I’m a hypocrite. That’s why I name-dropped Monkey Island in a press release for Life in the Dorms after swearing I’d never support another game that did that. I’m a terrible person; is that a problem?

Anyway, rip-offs! This game looks and plays suspiciously like a low-rent 3D Dot Game Heroes,which kinda makes it a high-rent The Legend of Zelda. The NES version, I mean; this ain’t exactly Ocarina. Actually, I wish I could tell you what this game is about, but I have no idea. In the trial version, I met a grand total of one other person, who told me that I needed to buy a bow before I could do anything else. The entire game for me was just about finding the stupid bow, and unfortunately, I never lived long enough to do so. Before one of the many, many times I died, though, my grandpa popped up to pass along some age-old wisdom: “Don’t forget to eat pie!” That was a bit of a highlight for me.

And speaking of highlights: If I were to write a “The Ten Reasons” column about this game, reasons #1-9 would focus exclusively on all the different beard/beard color combinations you can come up with for your main character, and reason #10 would be his hilariously goofy smile:

And reason #11 is that his mouth appears
to be drawn on top of his beard.

Also, for a game called Lootfest, there sure didn’t seem to be much loot like, at all. Should’ve just called it Bowquest.

Tourist Trap

What’s this game about? Well, you’re trapped, and you’re a tourist. Where are you trapped? In a first-person adventure game! Ack, the horror! Also, you’re inside a place called “The Tower of Mystery,” the sort of awesome place I tend to go when I’m on road trips. Inside the museum you can find artifacts purporting to be, for example, the first-ever wheel, the head of a real-life jackalope (which fifty men supposedly died in their attempts to capture, and also it talks), relics from the first moon colony, and what is most likely the world’s largest phonograph, which the game uses to broadcast creepy royalty-free music whose vocals consist of a person laughing maniacally.

So, yeah: awesome setting. And the game does what I always want games set in museums to do—it actually lets me explore the museum. There’s also puzzle-solving, sure, but you can spend a whooole lot of time just examining everything in the museum and smiling at it before you’ve got nothing left to do but progress the plot.

Eventually you do have to move forward, at which point you discover that the game is just one big item-combination puzzle; you pretty much just use each of the items on one another until you win the game. It takes about an hour. Less, if you use the game’s built-in hint system. Still, a dollar for about an hour’s worth of entertainment isn’t exactly a bad deal. I paid $12.50/hour when I originally bought Left 4 Dead new.

Virtual Attraction – Part 1

Ah, of course. It just wouldn’t be a proper edition of “Minus the Pudding” without another chefoo by everyone’s favorite punching bag, Silver Dollar–HANG ON! This is by somebody else entirely! What is this?! It’s not enough that we’re ripping off shareware and Minecraft; now we’re stealing from one another?! What’s next—you’re gonna tell me that there’s 150,000 different I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 clones on XBLIG? Horse feathers.

There’s a disclaimer at the beginning of this game saying that it was designed for entertainment purposes only. “Although the information contained herein is based on sound scientific research, you are ultimately responsible for your own actions.” You mean playing Xbox games can’t REALLY make me the ultimate stud muffin?!

Virtual Attraction is, in all, actually worse than your typical Silver Dollar game. Like, way worse—it’s little more than a book in XBLIG form. And I don’t mean that in the sense that a visual novel can barely be considered a videogame; I mean, literally, there’s just text that you scroll through, telling you all the steps you need to take in order to woo a female companion. It’s an Ask.com article that they’re selling as a videogame. There’s also a quiz to test you on how well you read the material (I’m serious), and then for actual gameplay, you get to talk to a simulation of a woman, where you can practice what you’ve learned and…

Oh, sigh.

That’s it. I can’t do this anymore. I can NOT talk about these games anymore. Do you guys really want to know the secret of how to meet girls? It’s easy. Put your eyes up real close to your monitor. I’ll tell you.

GO OUTSIDE OF YOUR HOUSE AND TALK TO A GIRL.

That’s it! That’s literally ALL there is to it. Just get off your damned couch, go outside, and TALK TO A GIRL. Holy crap, it’s not rocket science! If the girl doesn’t seem interested in you, then you shouldn’t just give up and consult your Xbox about where you went wrong; you should GO TALK TO ANOTHER ONE. Good lord! Repeat until you’re married.

Look, let me be straight with you—I’m going to write an entire paragraph here without making any stupid jokes. As someone who is a) a nerd with no social skills, and b) actually married to a wonderful, beautiful woman, I’m telling you to just go for it. Nothing you could ever learn from one of these stupid games is going to help you more than the real-life experience of actually trying to ask someone out on a date. You can practice on virtual girls (euuuuuugh) and research wooing techniques all you want, but the bottom line is that if you’re compatible with someone, you aren’t going to have to trick them into dating you. They’ll just want to.

Blech. Is there another game I can talk about to get this stink outta my hair? Let’s see what else has come out lately…

How to Find True Love

…I give up. Play your own damned Xbox indie games.

In an early episode of

Before I get started with making fun of other people’s Xbox Live Indie Games, I have a big announcement to make:

I’M QUITTING GAMECOLA.

Hah! Boy, I bet that gave you a start. No, that’s not the announcement; I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention to the real announcement, which is:

ARE YOU SURE YOU AREN’T QUITTING GAMECOLA?

Hey, mysterious disgruntled voice from Jeff Day’s “Gamera Obscura,” get out of here! I’m trying to make an important announcement! Stop hijacking my capslock!

SORRY.

As I was saying–

YOU’RE MAKING YOUR OWN XBOX INDIE GAME!

You can’t just blurt it out like that; you’ve gotta build up to it! PLEASE LET ME DO IT.

…

OK, here it is:

I’m making my very own Xbox Live Indie Game.

I BEAT YOU TO IT.

Shut up.

Now, I’m sure you all have a lot of questions, like “seriously?” (answer: YES), or “what’s it about?” (answer: it’s a comedic adventure game about a newly-minted college freshman who has to deal with all the typical freshman things, like moving in, orientation, meeting your roommate, eating delicious ramen noodles, and hunting down serial killers and kidnappers), but I’ll be sure to answer them all in the parentheses of this sentence. I’ve been working on the game since April of last year, and by “working,” I really just mean writing—I’ve been designing the story and puzzles and writing the script, while game-development superstar Ted Hung (of Office DisOrders fame) has been doing all the actual work with programming and implementation, and art superstar Colin Greenhalgh (of GameCola fame) has been taking care of all the pretty.

No release date yet, but the game is on its way; trust me. By the end of the year, I may very well be an official XBLI developer! I hope that Silver Dollar Games gets a chance to turn the tables and properly make fun of me, for a change. To make sure you’re up-to-date with my game, I’d suggest checking out Moment Games’s website and/or liking their Facebook page, because that way I won’t have to constantly spam GameCola with updates about my game (even though I probably will, anyway). And other than that, just keep your eyeballs out; you’ll find out more soon enough.

And with that out of the way, let’s start–

WAIT, THAT’S IT? YOU’RE NOT EVEN GOING TO GIVE US A SCREENSHOT?

Well, I wasn’t planning on it, no. We don’t have a ton of art set in stone yet–

WELL I WON’T BELIEVE YOU UNTIL I SEE A SCREENSHOT.

OK, fine. TAKE THAT:

Yes, that is actual, literal gameplay, and that’s the best you’re gonna get from me. I guess I really just wanted to…keep you in the dark.

…That was a good one, right? You can really tell that I should be a paid videogame writer.

YEAH. THAT’S JUST WHAT I WAS THINKING.

Anyway, on with the Pudding!

Shoot or Date

People often walk up to me on the street—for the sake of this statement, let’s pretend that I’m sometimes outside and on a street—and say, “hey Paul, why do you keep writing about Silver Dollar Games if you think that time travel needs to be invented now just to ensure that they never existed?” Usually I respond by saying ”Well…as Marilyn Monroe once said, ‘it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.’ I’ve always been much more intersted in a unique crappy game than a generic space shooter or puzzler; I’m not going to waste my time on a game that offers me nothing more than the same experience as everything else. Can we stop pretending I’m on the street now? It’s making my palms sweat.”

Where was I going with this? Ah, yes: Silver Dollar’s latest “videogame”: Shoot or Date. The game in which you’re given a picture of a person, and you have to determine whether you’d rather date them, or shoot them. Why do so many of this company’s games involve shooting women? What does that say about them?

…I’m sorry to say that’s really all there is to this game. Picking out which pictures you like the best. Hooray! Well, there’s one other interaction you can have, too: at the beginning of the game, you get to press a button, and then the game randomly determines whether your character is interested in dating dudes, or ladies. Now, that got me thinking: Is this meant to be a political statement on whether one’s sexual orientation is something you’re born with, versus something you have a choice in deciding? Or is just a random game-design element that has nothing to do with anything? If you know, post!

(Wow, this must be the “Paul steals things from other GameCola writers” edition of “Minus the Pudding.” Captain Eric’s Psychic Thumb gives that a thumbs down.)

In all, Shoot or Date is one of the worst videogames I’ve ever played in my life, so you can see why I’d include it in a column called “The Best of Xbox Live Indie Games.”

Esoterica America

Esoterica America is a game where you walk around and interact with things. And there’s probably puzzles and stuff, too. I don’t know; I was having a lot of trouble figuring it out. The introduction went into all this high-level philosophical stuff, like “fate,” and “your father is dead and also in the land of the Gods,” and there was this big fetus on the center of the screen that was probably representative of…something, and I’m just not smart enough for any of it. It’s the kind of game where characters say things like “be aware of bus rides and odd men in shoe polish,” and you’re not sure if it’s supposed to be funny, or deep, or helpful or what.

Also, the main character moves really slowly. He doesn’t amble so much as he preambles. Hey, developers: I wouldn’t kick a run button out of bed for eating crackers, is all I’m saying.

However, I would like to give this game 6,000 official Pudding points for including a bonus game called—I poop you not—Buffalo Souljah & The Mystical Space Pipe, which you get to play when the main character interacts with the TV in his bedroom. (Though I’m taking most of those points back for the horribly dated South Park reference which immediately precedes it.) That minigame was fun, and it had explosions, and I got it, unlike the main game. I played three different 10-minute trials of Esoterica America to make sure I could see as much as possible, and all I got out of it was a sense of inferiority. Maybe you’ll fare better.

…I bet the game’s story has something to do with the Illuminati. Things like this usually do.

Inflamous

And on the other side of the seriousness spectrum, from high-level philosophy to “heh-heh, FIRE! FIRE!”, there’s Inflamous: a game in which you set yourself on fire, and run around trying to set other people on fire, too. I think this is more in line with my intellectual capabilities.

I mean, that’s really your goal; your primary objective in this game is to “set all the people on fire to win!” It’s like if ‘Splosion Man were a game about blowing up innocent people for no apparent reason. I mean, it’s like ‘Splosion Man. If you wait a while, you can even see their bodies turn to ash and crumple on the floor. Don’t get near any sprinklers or firemen, though, because they’ll just ruin your fun, the party-poopers!

Technically, this game is definitely way more enjoyable than the actual Infamous, whose name they’re parodying for some reason. (No, I’m not going to capitalize it like a tool; I’m sorry.) At least in this game, when I use my magical powers to torture everyone for my own pleasure, I’m not punished for it. God.

PLATFORMANCE: Temple Death

Oh glorious, glorious day! The sequel to an XBLI game I actually liked! In PLATFORMANCE: Revenge of the Capslock, you are the famed explorer Indiana Jones Lookalike, and you’re on a quest to rescue a 1940s movie starlet, who has been kidnapped by—I’m not making this part up—”a sect of evil sausages.” This game is WINNING, my friends! (Sorry, I learned how to make pop-culture references from Esoterica America.) As with its predecessor, it’s a side- and vertical-scroller where the entire game is one gigantic map, and you have to work past all these enemies and traps and crap that are inconveniently right in your way.

I liked this game a lot, and that’s only partially because it’s easy to write about, since I can just say “it’s like that awesome game that came out before,” and leave it at that. You’ve got infinite lives, plenty of checkpoints, yet its a hardcore platformer in which you’ll die a lot until you can figure out what you’re supposed to do. It makes me feel like I’m a real gamer, too, whereas most hardcore platformers are so difficult that they make me pee my pants and run away like I just had to talk to someone in real life.

I definitely stand by my assessment from before: bundle this up with a bunch of other levels and sell them as a package on XBL proper as a real game. MANY BUYS!

So, in conclusion–

HELLO AGAIN. SO THIS IS WHAT OTHER COLUMNS ARE LIKE, EH? THANKS FOR INVITING ME.

I didn’t invite you! You just jumped in when you noticed that I was using a comically capslocked font, like in Jeff Day’s column “Gamera Obscura“!

WHATEVER. HEY, WAIT A SEC…YOU NEVER TOLD US WHAT YOUR NEW GAME IS CALLED!

Oh yeah! Well, remember how I mentioned that it’s about serial killers and kidnappers? We really wanted the game’s title to reflect that, so we’re calling it…Life in the Dorms.

BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT LIFE IN COLLEGE IS LIKE? EVERYONE WANTS TO KILL YOU?

Now you’re getting it! Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to like us on Facebook.

In an early episode of

The Internets have been abuzz lately with posts about Xbox Live Indie Games, and for once I’m not making a self-deprecating yet hilarious joke: people other than me have actually have been talking about the service. I believe this means that my column has been a huge success, and I can now retire on my big fat pile of money.

Don’t believe me? You shouldn’t; nobody cares about Indie Games. But here’s a few actual headlines torn right from the meaty flesh of the blogosphere, just to prove us both wrong:

1. Achievements Top on Xbox Live Indie Devs Wish Lists

The debate rages on about whether XBLI games should be allowed to have official Xbox Achievements with a capital A. According to our recent “Versus Mode” column, there are two sides to this argument: Those who think that they should, and those who think that Achievements are just a visual reminder of how much of our lives we’ve wasted thus far on videogames, and who get depressed whenever they see their gamerscores go up. Man our writers are weird.

So which is the real answer? “Yes.” Yes is the real answer. Also duh. Also “I would give you so much more money if XBLI games had Achievements, Microsoft.” Next?

2. Xbox Live Indie Games Hit By Ratings Manipulation

This story was broken by Cthulhu Saves the World developer and friend of the ‘Cola Robert Boyd. Apparently someone—and we’re not naming names, but it’s totally the fans of that stupid lacrosse game—are creating loads and loads of fake Xbox accounts so they can en masse down-vote everything but the one game they like. Why would they do that? Because doing so ensures that their game climbs the XBLI ratings charts at the expense of other games and, thus, sells more copies.

If these accusations are true, it would actually explain a lot—particularly, Microsoft’s odd move of changing the official XBLI motto to “Indie Games: Where hard work truly is rewarded, so long as that work is spent on absolutely anything but making your game fun.”

3. FortressCraft Mines the Most Successful Xbox Live Indie Game Launch Ever

Not only did FortressCraft, the XBLI Minecraft rip-off, have the most successful Indie Game launch of all time, but it also became the number three game downloaded on ALL of Xbox Live for the week it was released. Some point to shenanigans—particularly in light of the already-prevalent ratings manipulation—but I say the reason for this game’s quick ascension is obvious: actually, it’s probably shenanigans. Not even I MAED was able to achieve that much success, and that game actually had a selling point.

And that’s the news! Now here’s the games.

Sword and Hammer

I did a little research on Sword and Hammer before downloading it, and I saw a lot of people referring to it as one of the worst things they’d ever experienced. This, of course, piqued my interest. It’s an FMV game with fantasy and swords—but on a budget that makes most other indie games look like they actually have a budget. The “so basically” is that you, the player, watch real-life footage of two LARPers hitting each other with fake swords, and at specific moments, you’re prompted to press a specific button. If you do it right, you get to keep playing, and if you don’t, you get to go do something fun, instead. It’s pretty much win-win.

So where did this game go wrong? (”Duh!”, you’re probably thinking.) The main problem is that, since I showed you the above trailer, you’ve now officially seen almost every scene in the game. That’s not to say the game’s only a minute and a half long; rather, it’s to say that the developers repeat the same six or so scenes over and over again; it’s like Source Code, only nothing ever changes, ever. If you see three enemies, it means that you’re going to fight the same enemy, in the same cutscene, three times. If you’re lucky, the monotony will get broken up by a Mario Party-style button-mashing sequence. Yep—that’s what “lucky” means now.

For one dollar, there’s still no way you could ever stop me from purchasing this game; unfortunately, it actually costs three. And there’s a lot of cooler things you could do with those three dollars. (Have you checked out the new Humble Indie Bundle yet?)

Bonded Realities

This one’s an RPG, along the same lines as Cthulhu Saves the World, though taking inspiration more from EarthBound than from Dragon Warrior. Also it’s like 15 minutes long; or at least it seemed that way to me. The game opens in a daycare (whose actual motto is “we love your kids so you don’t have to”), where our hero goes off to play in the sandbox with three of his friends. Yes, I said “daycare”—these characters are all about five years old. Why not? Most RPG heroes act that way anyway; at least these kids have an excuse.

But then…something goes horribly wrong.

The next thing you know, your character awakens in a forest, with blue hair and a sword. Also he’s all grown-up now, which means that he’s 17, because this is an RPG. From there, you fight your way through random turn-based combat until you can save your friends and, ultimately, save the world. (Probably, anyway; I didn’t get to the end. I got killed by an old man whose head was on upside down, and I’m going to suggest now that you don’t try to picture that, because I wouldn’t wish those nightmares on my worst enemies, or even the actors in Sword and Hammer.)

If you’re sick-and-tired of random encounters, this game has a fantastic way of dealing with them: Early in the game, you get an item that lets you turn off random encounters entirely! YES! This means that you won’t be punished for taking the time to explore corridors, and you won’t be stuck fighting a seemingly endless stream of slimes when all you want to do is SAVE YOUR GODDAMN GAME. (Actually, you wouldn’t be doing that anyway, because the game lets you save anywhere, but still). I thought Cthulhu was being friendly in turning off random encounters after you’d fought a set number of enemies, but I think I have a new bestie now.

Also, the writer/designer clearly had a lot of fun making this game, creating punderful enemies like the “hammered sickle,” or the “polar bear” who, in battle, can “use multi-variable calculus and derive your attack!” (I bet if I knew anything at all about math, that would be hilarious.) However, I’m not sure the same can be said for the artist. The game’s environments put me to sleep—and I mean that in the sense that they actually literally killed me. Here’s a free tip for all would-be developers: if your idea of art in any way involves mass use of the paintbucket tool, STOP DOING ART IMMEDIATELY. This has been a public service announcement from my eyes.

Bird Assassin

Better not tell my fiancée that I played this one! In Bird Assassin, you—get this—assassinate birds. Why? Actually, there is a reason, beyond just “the developer thought the name was funny.” According to the game’s opening cutscene, your father was shot to death by a maniacal bird. (Yes, I’m serious.) Per his ghost (still serious!), you need to kill every single bird ever, in order to exact your revenge, because that’s how revenge works.

It’s a side-scroller, and you move your little redneck dude from left to right, taking aim and taking out anything with a feather. The birds poop out coins whenever you shoot them, which you can then use to buy upgrades to your weapons after every level. Half the birds don’t actually appear to be attacking you, but that’s OK—as Inigo Montoya famously said in Princess Bride, “You sort of look like the man who killed my father. Prepare to die.”

The game’s not quite as exciting and action-packed as I expected—though exactly why I expected action-packed excitement from a game that I’m pretty sure is a Flash game in disguise remains to be seen. It’s over-the-top, but not quite over-the-top enough to reach the heights of a game like Castle Crashers, Bird Assassin’s apparent idol. Maybe it just needs to be two-player. …It’s not, right?

Iredia: Atram’s Secret

As this game starts, you receive a phone call. It’s your father. He’s at the hospital, and he has good news—your new baby sister is here! You’re excited because you’ve been dying to play the flute with her…but unfortunately, Dad also has some bad news for you.

DAD: “The doctors told us she won’t be able to play the flute.”
YOU: “Wow what medical geniuses. Obviously she won’t be able to play it until she’s a bit bigger. I’m going to play it for her.”
DAD: “No, Sara, there have been complications and your sister has been born with hearing problems.”
DAD: “Maybe she won’t be able to hear the flute.”

The game could clearly use a proofreader, but I can’t bring myself to make fun of it. Did you see that dialogue? This game is way too…I don’t know if “sweet” is the right word; but it feels like something a father hand-crafted for his daughter, who’s struggling to understand what’s wrong with her new baby sister. It’s a surprisingly deep and personal theme for any videogame, not just an XBLI one. How do you crack wise about that?

And how does the girl learn to cope? Well, after a cat steals her flute, she Narnias herself into a forest, where we have to catch the cat and get our flute back, all the while learning about how hearing works, mostly via fun facts that you can read on signs. The game basically breaks down the “educational” and “entertainment” parts into separate components like that, which might not be the best way to encourage learning; but maybe you shouldn’t play this as a learning game, anyway. Actually, maybe you shouldn’t play this game at all, unless the story resonates with you in some way. The main character jumps like she’s carrying a sack of potatoes on her back, and you spend most of the game learning about ears. That’s not exactly “fun” for most people; but this game, I’m guessing, wasn’t made for most people. It was made by a father specifically for his daughter, and the rest of us just get to experience that kind of love second-hand.

…Unless I did just completely make that up. It makes for a good story, though.

Some of you may be familiar with the Game Developers Conference—that’s where developers from all around the world gather to build new friendships, share ideas with one another, swap war stories, and, in general, work together hand-in-hand to realize the full potential of videogames as an art medium. Hah-hah! I’m kidding of course; it’s actually just another way for people to promote and sell videogames. It’s like E3, only with more pretension; or, it’s like PAX, only with a lot more pretension. It’s not without its highlights, though, and one of the highlights of this year’s conference was a panel on none other than Xbox Live Indie Games. (At least, I assume it was one of the highlights. GameCola, as typical, didn’t get an invite, probably because we do things like call it pretentious.)

A number of different factoids came out in this panel, such as “if you want your game to sell, you should make up a press release,” and “you should also make up a trailer,” but one of my favorite parts was when the developers started talking about things that Microsoft doesn’t allow on its indie games service. To put this into perspective, I’d like to first give you a list, based on my own experience through the Pudding, of things Microsoft DOES allow on its indie games service:

1. Sexism
2. Masturbation tools
3. Rip-offs
4. Silver Dollar Games
5. Babies exploding out of vaginas
6. The exploitation of women
7. Shooting fat people for sport
8. The glorification of creepy stalkers
9. Silver Dollar Games

Now, based on the panel, here’s an exhaustive list of things that Microsoft doesn’t allow in its indie games:

1. Nazis

I mean, I see their point. It’s cool to kill fat people, because they’re completely unsympathetic and everybody hates them; but once you start making games in which you kill Nazis, you’re going to piss somebody off. I get it. But what I don’t get—and what I think you’ve all been wondering, ever since you started reading this article—is…why the heck wasn’t I invited to participate in this panel?! I’m young! I’m handsome! I’m the winner of the 2010 award for “Connecticut’s Sexiest Beard!” I’ve played literally dozens of Xbox Live Indie Games, and I’ve been giving uninformed opinions on them for well over a year. Sure, I may not have published an actual indie game per se (…yet?), or participated in the indie game community in any meaningful way; but my review of Balloon Boy did earn me a free copy of the game from the developer, and where I’m from, that qualifies me as famous. What’s the deal, dog?

Anyway…where was I? Oh, right: videogames. Videogames! Where it’s OK to exploit, stalk, and kill people, as long as those people don’t actually deserve it. Let’s talk about a few, OK?

Vertigo

“Warning: Lighting yourself on fire may lead to severe burns and possibly death. It will probably not make you go any faster, either.”

You know you’re in for a treat when a game starts off with a warning like that. (Incidentally, it’s actually a pretty useful warning, too, since it’s a known fact that if you do something in a videogame, you automatically have to do it in real life, too. That’s just science.) Vertigo is an intense, pulse-pounding, groin-tingling game about running from left to right. It’s like Mirror’s Edge, if Mirror’s Edge were a side-scroller, and also fun. (Hate me if you want for that comment, Mirror’s Edge fans, but if the entire premise of your game is exhilarating crazy-person running, then maybe you should, I don’t know, let me actually run, instead of stopping me every six seconds to get shot at by people.)

You run, you jump, you slide under obstacles, and you wall-jump. (Fact: Everyone loves wall-jumps.) You also—and this is what sold me on the game—get to make combos. We learned last month that the quickest way to my heart is through combos (the second way, incidentally, is through asking me about my beard), and in this game, there are certain boost points you can run into, which add up to make you run faster and faster and faster! They also set you on fire, which I guess is why you run faster—YOU’RE ABOUT TO FRIGGIN’ DIE and you want to make the most of your life before you do.

In short, Vertigo takes the best part of the old-school Sonic games and makes an entire game out of it, which is great, because that’s like the opposite of what modern-day Sonic games do. This is an easy recommendation for anyone who wants to buy happiness for only a dollar.

GrappleBoy

Do you remember when fights used to break out at your house over who got to be the grappling hook guy in Trine? Of course you don’t. I’m the only person who actually played Trine. But if you had, you’d see GrappleBoy as a welcome respite from all the pain; after all, it’s a game wherein all the characters are the grappling hook guy. (Of course, there’s only the one character. And, in fact…it’s actually just a single-player game; so maybe it won’t be solving any of your problems. But let’s be honest—you don’t have any friends anyway.)

You play as a little blorpie thing who’s trying to get to the video store before it closes at midnight. (Man, remember video stores? I went into a Blockbuster the other day to see if they had any good deals on games, and it was like stepping inside a time capsule.) The video store is located on top of a mountain, and the way you’re getting there is, of course, via your tongue. That’s right—this game gives you a tongue button, and it’s not even one of those games that Matt Gardner likes to review. You’re also supposed to avoid touching the ground at all costs for some reason, though the game doesn’t seem to tell you why. My guess is that all the white tiles are hot lava.

Sure, your tongue doesn’t always go in the direction you’d expect it to, and sure, when I was studying journalism at the University of Maryland, I never thought I’d ever write a sentence like that; but the game’s fun, very much in a Super Meat Boy kinda way. Death is frequent, but your lives are infinite and the load times, thankfully, aren’t, so it doesn’t feel like a punishment. …That is, until you’ve been playing the same level for over 20 minutes because you keep getting hit by these stupid ceiling spikes, and your fiancée is starting to wonder just where you learned all these colorful swear words; but even then, there’s way worse things you could spend your dollar on than GrappleBoy. (Also: way better things, such as four months’ worth of daily advertising on GameCola.net!)

SSRGFM

Yes, from the makers of GRRRRRFLGNRN and FFFFFGGGUUUUUUUUUNNNURGLR comes the latest in a long line of incomprehensible grunting noises. I mean videogames. This one, I’m pretty sure, is actually targeted specifically to fans of the Pudding. It hates the same things we hate; it stands for the same things we stand for. It’s also a steaming pile of dog crap, but it’s supposed to be, so that makes it OK…right?

Eh. SSRGFM runs into the same problems that all parody videogames do—since you’re mimicking videogames that aren’t fun, you, yourself, are also inherently not fun. The game’s terrible terrible name stands for its three different game modes:

• Surround Sound
• Remote-Controlled Gopher Farting
• Masseuse

Surround Sound Mode lets you test your TV’s stereo system via piloting a farting gopher around a virtual living room, which I guess is supposed to be a parody of other XBLI apps, but to my knowledge, “parody” isn’t the same thing as “do exactly what the other guys are doing, but with gophers.” Masseuse Mode isn’t much better; like so, so many other XBLI games, it allows you to massage your penis with your vibrating Xbox 360 controller. As an added bonus, according to the story in this mode, you’re actually receiving your massage from a gigantic naked squirrel with big heaving breasts, because this just wasn’t creepy enough already.

But the heart of this game is Remote-Controlled Gopher Farting Mode. It takes the farting gopher from Surround Sound and…well…here’s the game’s official description: “Fart on other gophers until they explode from too much butt-hurt.”

You consume burritos to increase your fart meter, and you drink beer to reduce your butt-hurt. You can also I CAN’T BELIEVE I EVEN PLAYED THIS GAME WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME. It’s not funny. It’s not ironic. It’s not for us. It wants to be a game that’s making fun of all the other stupid games on XBLI, but all it ends up being is a stupid game itself. I can’t talk about this game anymore; here’s a gameplay trailer, so you don’t think I completely made it up:

On the plus side, SSRGFM has pretend Achievements that you unlock for doing things like visiting the menu and turning the game on. I’m pretty sure this is why XBLI games aren’t allowed to have real Achievements.

Cthulhu Saves the World

Cthulhu Saves the World is one of the games from the Indie Games Winter Uprising, but don’t hold that against it. It’s an RPG by the developer of Breath of Death VII and former “Versus Mode” participant Robert Boyd. It’s also probably one of the best Super Nintendo-style RPGs I’ve ever played, and I include actual Super Nintendo RPGs in that statement.

…of course, I have weird tastes. I’m not a fan of the dramatic; I’m not a fan of the overbearing. Right off the bat this eliminates nearly every Final Fantasy game ever made. What I do like, though, is comedy, and that’s exactly what Cthulhu Saves the World has. It’s actually funny; it’s actually cleverly written, and it’s not just some lame parody of other equally lame games. It also features the elder god Cthulhu in his best-ever appearance since he sat on my *NSYNC shelf wearing a suit and a pair of sunglasses:

In this game, Cthulhu has finally risen from the watery grave where he’s been for untold eons, only to have his powers immediately stripped by a mysterious wizard. The only way to regain his powers—as Cthulhu learns by eavesdropping on the game’s narrator—is to become a “true hero,” at which point he can get back to trying to take over and/or destroy the world.

Almost immediately you come across a helpless maiden beset by vicious monsters. You rescue her, of course (you’re CTHULHU, for his sake), at which point this little scene takes place:

GIRL: My hero!
CTHULHU: Hero indeed! Did you hear that? Do I count as a true hero yet?
NARRATOR: No.

The girl then joins your party (GIRL: “Does this mean we’re dating now?”), and you get to play through what is probably the most genuinely funny game on XBLI.

The battle system is standard turn-based combat, which I’m still not a big fan of, but at least it’s lightning-quick in this game, with no excruciatingly long attack animations (or really any animations at all) taking up valuable time that you could otherwise spend enjoying your life. It’s not quite as speedy as, say, Half-Minute Hero, but it’s actually bearable, for once. Also, the game lets you save anywhere. Also, while the game has random encounters, it turns them off after you’ve fought too many of them. I think I’m in love. The whole Winter Uprising could’ve been just this game, and it would’ve been a complete success.

Is it too late to add this to my list of the top five XBLI games from 2010? Moon Taxi seems much more like…like…like…I don’t know, Buffoon Taxi now. (That was a good one, right?) Cthulhu Saves the World definitely ranks up there with Pudding Hall of Famers like Office Disorders, Light’s End, War of Words and yes, even Excruciating Guitar Voyage. It’s so much better than getting a penis massage from a squirrel. Download it. Play it. Love it. If you don’t, we’re not friends anymore.

In an early episode of

Last month in Pudding, I ran my own personal list of the Top 5 Xbox Live Indie Games from 2010. This month, courtesy of Joystiq, we have: everyone else’s list. It’s based on sales figures—specifically, number of copies sold during the first week of a game’s launch—and the results, as expected, are completely demotivating. Personally, I’m so demotivated I won’t be able to finish this lame joke I think I already used bef

Take a look for yourself here:

Top 20 Xbox Live Indie Games of 2010 (based on full versions purchased during first week of release)

1. Baby Maker Extreme
2. Avatar Showdown
3. Avatar Paintball
4. Avatar Ninja!
5. Avatar Racedrome
6. Try Not To Fart
7. Nuclear Wasteland
8. Avatar Onslaught
9. Yet Another Zombie Defense
10. Zombie Estate
11. Breath of Death VII
12. MILITARY SNIPER-SIM 3.18
13. Get Rich or Die Gaming
14. Avatar Bumper Cars
15. Avatar Meet Up Live!
16. GET TO THA CHOPPA!!1
17. Shoot 1UP
18. Toy Stunt Bike
19. The Impossible Game
20. So Many Girls, So Little Time

So what can we learn from this list? Well, a number of things:

1. Gamers tend to care less about a videogame’s content, and more about what its name implies about its content. There’s no way, for example, that Baby Maker Extreme would be at the top of the list otherwise, because, spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with sex. (Incidentally, this is why Lizo and I have decided to rename our perpetually in-development adventure game, testgame as Christina Hendricks’s Nipples.)

2. The Pudding Bump is completely meaningless. Of the approximately 40  games I talked about in “Minus the Pudding” last year, only four made the list. And they’re all games I only included because I wanted to make fun of them.

3. The zombie fad, appropriately, will never die.

And, one final thing: Since nobody can be trusted to purchase games on their own anymore, I’m officially revoking everyone’s access to Microsoft Points until you can promise to stop buying games with the word “fart” in the title. (Yes, of course I can do that—I’m on the Internet. I’m also authorized to reset Gamerscores.) In the meantime, while everyone cools down, and maybe regrows a few braincells, check out these games you won’t be allowed to play anytime soon:

Game 35

Trust me on this: I think the name and the graphics are supposed to be boring; it’s all part of the theme that this thoughtful and introspective indie game is going for. …Maybe.

Actually, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with this game—whether Silver Dollar Games (because, yes, this is a Silver Dollar Games production!) intentionally made a ruminative game that both elicits and makes you think about real-life emotions…or whether they did so accidentally while trying to find the laziest way to fund yet more  boobfest girlsims, such as—and this is an actual game that they’re working on right now, and not just the worst thing I could think of off the top of my head—Fortune Cookies…in Bed.

So what is Game 35? Like many Xbox Live Indie Games, it’s an artsy fartsy minimalist platformer, though this time the emphasis is, thankfully, a little bit more on “artsy.” A word flashes on the screen at the beginning of each five-to-10-second-long level (kind of like in WarioWare)—something like “impulse” or “glory” or “impatience.” Then you have to move your little block dude through a level that tries to elicit that emotion in you. For example, in one level the narrator might say “fear,” and you have to get through that level while spikes fall from the ceiling and someone reminds you that we live in a world where Try Not to Fart is a top-selling game. Aaaaaahhhh! (See how effective it is?)

Mechanically, it’s a game about pushing your joystick from left to right; nearly ever puzzle in the trial can be solved just by doing that—without even looking at the screen. (A major theme of the game is “trust”: trust that, if you just keep moving, you definitely won’t fall into that deathpit you’re about to fall into.) You’re probably missing the point of the game if you’re doing that, though—whether that point is “think about what you’re feeling right now,” or whether it’s “I truly believe that Silver Dollar has no soul.”

Apple Jack

Going into this game, my only thought was, literally, “Oh my God look his head is an apple that’s so cool!” And it is—but this game is so much more than that. (I mean, it would almost necessarily have to be, wouldn’t it?)

First of all, Apple Jack dusts off a game mechanic whose return has been long-coming—picking up enemies, a la Super Mario Bros. 2, and then tossing them around the screen for fun until you accidentally progress the game. Secondly, and more importantly, it has the best multipliers ever. When you defeat one of the game’s enemies (which, BTW, consist of things like panda bears and washing machines), it completely explodes in a shower of coins. After that, you have about a 10-second window to kill another enemy, and if you manage to do so, the number of coins exploded doubles. And it just keeps doing that, every time you kill something! As I played the game, saving my pet dog, or the world, or even making any progress whatsoever in the game became completely immaterial; I had to create the biggest coinsplosion possible! (See the above screenshot for an example.)

Unfortunately, after a few levels, the game starts to incorporate other gameplay elements, too (for example: puzzles), which made me lose interest. But for a brief time, for me, it was glorious. I haven’t had this much fun with coins since I last spent some. Make that the entire game next time, guys.

Shooting Models

I bet you can guess who made this game.

Yes, fresh off of making an actual videogame in Game 35, Silver Dollar Games went right back to the breasts that brung them. Based on the literal title—Shooting Models—you might think that this is a Cabella’s-style game about trying to pick off models on the runway, but it’s not. Oh God, is it not. It’s so much worse than that.

In essence, Shooting Models is a photography game, kind of like Pokémon Snap, only you can’t interact with the Pokémon at all, and the Pokémon are all, in fact, pretty young girls. Yes. You work for a “gossip mag” taking “gossip photos” of models who are in town for some model convention or something. The actual mechanics of the game involve watching video footage and trying to take still pictures at the right moment to get the highest score. However, according to the game’s story, what you’re doing is this: hiding in bushes and hoping no one can see you, while you wait for pretty young girls to walk by, so you can take their picture without their consent and then sell the photos for profit.

…Yeah. That’s right. Welcome to Creepytown. Please don’t tell my fiancé I have a demo of this game on my harddrive.

Valet Parking Inc.

Well, we’ve finally done it. After videogames about lawyers, and air traffic controllers, and Dick Cheney, we’ve found the one topic that no one’s ever made a videogame about before. Parking. Well done, developers. All that’s left now in the bottom of the barrel is more barrel.

You’re some guy who’s trying to eek out a living in the high-stakes world of valet parking. You’re only making $4 an hour right now, but you’re hoping to, some day make, I don’t know, $6. A car pulls up, you hop in, and you park it. Later, the owner comes back, and you have to find their car and drive it back to them. Thankfully, just like in real life, everyone’s wearing a shirt that matches the color of their car—and they don’t seem to mind if you bring them them someone else’s car, so long as it’s the right color—so it’s easy to figure out which car to bring.

Like with XMAS Taxi before it, I by far had the most fun with Valet Parking Inc. when I flouted the game’s purpose and intentionally parked cars like a four year old—getting into the car and then immediately jamming my foot on the accelerator, making parking spots out of what others might more frequently refer to as “walls.” I never earned much in tips, and most of the cars might’ve been missing pieces when I was through with them…and I might not have ever worked my way up to that $6 per hour…but I was having fun, and that’s what counts. I’m sure that’s what my customers thought, too. I’m surprised none ever pulled a gun on me.

…Look. It’s a game about parking cars. You have to find your entertainment where you can.

In conclusion, of these four games, the only one that has a chance of making this year’s consumer-choice top 20 is Shooting Models. That’s where gaming culture is right now.

In an early episode of

I am videogames. I mean, not literally—at least, not as far as you know—but what I mean to say is…is…is…is…gosh darnit—writing is so hard!

…Of course, I’m not the first person to discover this. Good writing takes skill, motivation, and—this is where many bloggers struggle—something to actually write about. That’s why, since the dawn of time, we writers have been using idiotic and meaningless phrases like “since the dawn of time” to cover up for the fact that we have no idea what to write. Another well-worn strategy? Distractingly cute pictures of animals. BAM:

My pet rabbit. Actual name: “Phoenix Wright, Ace Bunny.”

But that’s not all. Another trick from the writer’s playbook is to make up a list. Of something. Anything. It doesn’t matter what. Lists allow us to take up a great deal of space, while still giving the (false) impression that we’ve done any work whatsoever. As an added bonus, in the Information Age, lists also serve another purpose: they allow Internet commenters to engage in their favorite activity (after cute pictures of animals), which is finding really stupid stuff to complain about.

Anyway, my point is this: everyone loves lists, and I need an intro. I’ve also played an enormous amount of XBLI games in the past year. So! Here! Without further ado (a Middle-English word that means “filler”), is:

The Top 5 Xbox Live Indie Games of 2010

5. Moon Taxi: It does for audiobooks what Guitar Hero did for rocking.

4. Epic Dungeon: If not for this game, the only thing “uprising” in the “Winter Uprising” would’ve been my vomit.

3. War of Words: Wordplay has never been so much fun! Or violent.

2. Office DisOrders: I now have a professional relationship with the guy who made this game. Also it’s hilarious.

1. Excruciating Guitar Voyage: Literally the greatest videogame ever made.

And that’s it for old videogames. Here’s some new ones.

Get Rich or Die Gaming

I think…I think Get Rich or Die Gaming is supposed to be an adventure game? But with a lot less wacky item-combining, and a whole lot more wacky penis jokes. You’re Wilson Cooper, a DotA obsesse who’s just been kicked out of his house by his father for playing too many derned videogames. (Harsh!) You’re left to fend for yourself on the streets, penniless. Of course, you turn to drug dealing. Of course. Within minutes you meet up with a guy whose name is—this is the kind of hilarity you can expect from this game—”Adickle Face,” and he’s here to teach you the ways of the “baller.”

For those unfamiliar with the term, the UrbanDictionary.com definition for baller is this: “It started off life meaning somebody who has made it big playing baseball. Now it means whoever uses the word and isn’t mocking it is a fucking idiot.” (Another, possibly more enlightening definition says that a baller is “to be not unlike M.C. Hammer,” as in “Are Those the ballers we saw yesterday? Yea, i think thats Josh Crooch and MC Hammer.” A third definition says that a baller is “an ignorant person who can’t order a sweatshirt.” I could read this site all day.)

From here, the game is apparently all about buying and selling drugs, but my character only got so far as buying and selling—this is true—a McDonald’s cheeseburger, which has surprisingly little pre-owned value. At varying points in the all-too-brief demo, I also was kicked out of a cyber cafe by a large man cosplaying as Pikachu, and I tried to purchase some goods from a veteran drug-dealer, but he wouldn’t sell to me, and he accused my nipples of being a disguised police badge.

I believe the major selling point of this game, as with a lot of adventure games, is supposed to be its world-class humor. Here’s a prime example of the kind of zinger you can look forward to in Get Rich or Die Gaming:

Character 1: What are you doing?
Character 2: I just collected the cash from my bakery, and now I am just enjoying a cigarette.
Character 1: Where is the cigarette you are enjoying?
Character 2: Nowhere.

Hah! Oh man, I’m tearing up. I’m literally tearing! I CAN’T STOP THE TEARS! WHY CAN’T I STOP THE TEARS?!

So…yeah. If you’re a fan of those Flash videos whose idea of comedy is South Park-sounding voices, intentionally poor artwork, and non-sequiturs, then say goodbye to your $1! But don’t play for too long, or else you might get stuck on the streets peddling used cheeseburgers, too.

Melon Madness

Soccer (defined on UrbanDictionary.com as “the sport of the sexy”) is terrible, and for some godawful reason this is like the fourth time I’m talking about it in this column. I don’t know why it keeps coming up. At least in this version of soccer, there’s no sweating, no grass-stains, and no getting “accidentally” hit in the chefoos by one of your stupid teammates.

In Melon Madness, your ultimate goal is to fling your entire body at the be-eyeballed watermelon until it accidentally lands in the opposing team’s net, which I believe is how the pros do it, too. About halfway through my first game, my team was winning, 6-1. Ask me how many of those goals I scored. Ask me. The answer is two. The computer scored the rest of my goals—and it was the computer for the other team. This is my kind of game!

I don’t think it’s actually possible to intentionally score goals in this game. (In fact, as I put the controller down to write that note, I scored two more goals.) The controls are super, super floaty (to quote the actual developer’s website, “Hey! What happened to physics?! He he!”), and it’s difficult to intentionally do anything, including move. That doesn’t mean the game’s not fun, though; it’s frantic, and hectic, and other synonyms for frantic, and I’m guessing the shenanigans only get wackier the more people you have playing. Though, I wouldn’t know, as my betrothed (UrbanDictionary.com definition: “to be betrayed by plant called cannabis”) still hasn’t forgiven me for making her play Ubergridder.

Watch the trailer for Melon Madness here. If it looks like fun to you, it is; if it doesn’t, then OH MY GOD, THERE’S SOMETHING HORRIBLY WRONG WITH YOUR EYE-BALLS!

Garden Gnome Carnage

I’ve always been a fan of garden gnomes—last summer, I almost made the two-hour drive out to Kerhonkson, NY solely to see the world’s second largest. However, I’ve never owned one myself, mostly because, as my fiancée puts it, “we don’t have a garden.” Still, there’s nothing to prevent me from playing videogames about them, and, thankfully, one exists. In Garden Gnome Carnage, you play as an actual garden gnome, whose home is under attack by an army of elves. I’m not really sure why; all I know is that it’s of the utmost importance that these elves do not enter our home. How do we keep them out? Well, it’s simple: we tell them that, according to one UrbanDictionary.com definition, the word elf “can be used humerously to describe the size of a man’s penis.”

No, wait! That’s not it! What we really do—and here, I’m being totally serious—is climb up to the top of our building, tie one end of a bungee cord to our chimney, wrap the other end around our ankles, and then jump. This eliminates our problem entirely, because it kills us.

Sorry, sorry! What actually happens next is that we start driving our house back and forth across the screen—did I mention that our house is motorized?—and bunjee-attack all the little elves until they go away. If they start to overpower us, we can also call in an airstrike, which instantly kills everything on the screen. You only have three of those to start with, but don’t worry—if you’re lucky, a fair maiden will pop her head out of a window and offer to bake you a new one.

Also, your building is made out of explosive bricks, which you can dislodge and hurl at your enemies. I love this game.

For the entirety of Garden Gnome Carnage, I never really figured out how to maneuver the gnome, or not accidentally blow up my pet cat with an explosive piece of my house; but it didn’t matter, because I got to use the phrase “maneuver the gnome” in this article. That in itself is worth however many pretend Microsoft dollars the developers want me to fork over, which is 80, which translates to only one real-world dollar, because Microsoft is stupid. What was I talking about again?

Super Janitoroid

I’d been looking forward to this game like a new Sonic game looks forward to sucking, and with good reason: it’s made by the same superheroes who developed Excruciating Guitar Voyage, which you’ve probably heard of before, if you read my intro paragraph. In fact, Super Janitoroid is actually a spin-off of EVG, starring the character of “the janitor.”

However. This game didn’t really grab me right away, or at all, like EVG did, and I’m pretty sure I know why: it’s a completely different kind of game. EVG is a point-and-click-style adventure game mashed with a platformer, whereas Super Janitoroid is more of a Metroidvania—which, if you’ve never heard the term before, is a clever portmanteau of the NES hit Castlevania and the XBLI game Super Janitoroid. There’s not much dialogue in this game, and there’s little, if any, wacky item-combining—in fact, in my brief time with the game, the entirety of gameplay seemed to be hitting stuff with my broom, and not having the correct key.

But that’s my problem. If you like this kind of game, you may very well like this game. After all, you get to fight a boss named “Pukey Snake” (pictured above), who vomits fireballs at you until you defeat him, at which point he gives you a box of fuses. And, as the great poet “anonymous” wrote on UrbanDictionary.com, the term “snake” can be defined, literally, as:

Well said, anonymous. Well sssssssssssaid.