Xbox Live Indie Games Round-Up – 27/10/09

//Pumpkin Chop
By MatthewM [link]
Here’s another example of someone developing some software that no one in their right mind would want and then slapping it onto the indie marketplace, just in case any gamers are foolhardy enough to part with their cash for it. Pumpkin Chop gives you a 3D pumpkin, and allows you to can carve whatever you want into its orange flesh. At the risk of sounding like a three-year-old with an inquisitive mind, I have to ask again: why?

While it has been coded with a degree of enough competence that we should be encouraging MatthewM to keep honing his skills, we should also be pointing out that some things are best left on the drawing board. Rather like PDC World Championship Darts on the Wii, you’re never going to make a videogame that can compete with the real deal. Because, like playing a game of darts in the pub compared to standing in front of your telly and trying to not throw your Wiimote at the screen, carving a face into an actual pumpkin is five times easier than this and hundreds of times more satisfying. It would have been easier to give users a pen tool that they could use to draw faces with and then a cutting tool that they could use to remove the unwanted pumpkin flesh. Instead, you’re meant to mark each point of each line you want to carve along until you’ve come full circle – which means it takes an age to carve just one pumpkin.

The bonus of being able to save your carved pumpkin faces for future reference doesn’t make it any more worthwhile, and once the childish pleasure of carving speed dobbers into a pumpkin has worn off, you’re left wondering how fast you can erase the memory of Pumpkin Chop from your mind.

It handles like an inept Photoshop rip-off that’s riddled with shortcomings and takes at least ten minutes of fiddling about before you’ve sussed out how you can actually carve a scary mouth rather than an unidentified hole in a large vegetable. But time and again, that same old question rears its head. Why?

//HuntersLunch
By DK Alpla [link]
If it wasn’t for the fact that the past two weeks has seen a glut of dire indie games, HuntersLunch wouldn’t merit much of a mention. But in comparison with the majority of recent releases, it is head and shoulders above the competition.

It harks back to the days of the SNES and early Gameboys – just looking at it makes about as much sense as trying to play hieroglyphic script Top Trumps. Is that grey blob meant to be mountains? And what on earth are those yellowish smears meant to be? To make matters worse, the instructions are all written in Japanese, so it takes some educated guesswork to crack the conundrum of exactly what you’re meant to do, but funnily enough, it turns out that HuntersLunch is a box-pushing puzzle game.

Presumably, you’re a hunter trying to get through the harsh terrain, avoiding the angry spitting chipmunks (?) and murderous London buses (?!), to reach your lunch box, which you’ve stupidly left in an inaccessible spot behind a huge mountain range. Hunters, eh? They’re not well known for their intelligence.

It’s all about pushing barrels here, laying bridges there, blowing up mountains everywhere, and is the kind of game you can find practically anywhere on the net for no money at all. That said, there’s still enough of a challenge within each level for HuntersLunch to be a diverting game, and lovers of old school Nintendo cartridges might find themselves hunting down a decent SNES emulator online after a few minutes of play, but another indie game that looks and feels retro? Oh, how I wish for more of the winsome, college campus charm of Run Away!…

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