Indie | XBL Indie Games Round-Up – 28/07/09

//Choc-a-riffic
Projector Games [link]
A cute, Peggle-style opening greets you with the ingredients to make chocolate, a rather fitting away to kick-start this sickly-sweet puzzle-platformer. It also masks the lengthy loading times and technical issues that hinder the game, where stages take up to six seconds to load, and causes the game to slow to a crawl when a friend comes online. Bugger off xxWeapon14xx, I’m trying to push eggs here.

On top of that, the platforming is a little on the rough side. It’s a level-by-level 2D puzzle platformer of pushing chocolate eggs towards the goal, with blocks to push and enemies to avoid. The bunny has an interesting tilt to the control scheme, where the right stick can move his hands around to punch the floor or grapple a corner ledge, but it ends up being a pointless addition that just gets you stuck on things. It also highlights the poorly designed levels that misguide the physics-heavy objects, where things topple at the slightest touch and become lost forever, or cause bottle necks in one-way passages.

We admittedly didn’t play far enough to see later levels (the trial version didn’t let us) but the technical issues and haphazard level design was evidence enough that this is a rough release. If it dropped the pointless arm control idea and straightened out the object sensitivity, as well as the obnoxious loading times, this could be more of an enjoyable platformer.

//Physics Sandbox
xMONOx [link]
Despite its poor timing – coming out a week after the game creation suite Kudo – this has more to do with LittleBigPlanet than its Marketplace brethren. Here you can draw polygons, triangles and polygons on a two-dimensional plane, attach them to springs and pistons, and watch the shapes fly all over the shop. Geometric bliss.

Although it lacks a tutorial, it’s easy to learn through doing, where a side bar chooses your tool, then draw and connect stuff together to make a madcap masterpiece. Like LittleBigPlanet, every object has various settings such as friction, bounciness and transparency that react to the objects around it. When you are done, you press the play button and watch your priced Rube Goldburg attempt unfurl. (And if like mine, completely self destruct. Well, it looked right anyway.)

While everything is a pinch to make, you’ll have to do it each and every time you load it up – the lack of a save function here is criminal, as is an online sharing tool (although blame this on the Indie Games service). Furthermore, complicated designs with lots of on-screen objects and hinges to piece them together cause the game to slowdown to an insufferable crawl: give the ‘Contraption’ example to see what we mean.

It’s also worth checking out for the most delightful title screen ever – a car smashing into the title text that careers off differently every time. Although fairly simple, it’s easy-peasy to get to work, and the results are instantly gratifying. Worth a look.

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