Xbox Indie Games Review - Immunogen

The game is pretty different from anything I've seen on Xbox Live Indie Games and that could be a good or bad thing. You're given a cursor that you use to drop colored pills onto viruses to kill them. Using a cursor on a console game isn't a bad thing if the game isn't based on speed. Once you reach higher levels or play on a higher difficulty you have to be really quick and accurate while selecting and dropping the pills and that's the only downfall of the game. At the beginning of each round you're shown the set of viruses (colored) and which colored pill you must use to kill that specific virus. For example. Green kills pink, blue kills red, and so forth. This game really keeps you thinking because EVERY round it changes making you learn everything over again. On top of that they'll eventually add more and more matches you must remember (it starts at 4 but can increase up to 12 I believe!?).

It also has a set of awards so you have some replayability in order to get them all. One of them is to reach level 46 in any difficulty and while I played the game I only got up to level 7...

They've talked about porting it to smartphones of some sort and I think that'll be an awesome market for this game because it's a drag and drop game which works a lot better on a PC/touch phone then for a console with thumbsticks. Getting to level 46 and remembering 12 matches of colors is going to take a photographic memory or some serious memory skills.


Rating - 7.5/10.

Xbox Indie Games Review - Lumi

Lumi review (as written on xblaratings.com)

First off I have to express that this game is beautiful! There's all kinds of parallax going on (sometimes gets in the way of your character) and particle effects and even a couple cutscenes (intro and ending).

Lumi also won the DreamBuildPlay 2010 challenge so you can guess that it's a pretty well polished game.

While this game was going through review there was a lot of talk about the difficulty of the game being too harsh. The thing about this game that makes it difficult is based on the main mechanic of the game, magnetism. You have 2 buttons, left/right trigger, that either attract or repel you from certain obstacles. Use the blue to attract to blue points, or use red near a blue point to repel away from it. This is a very cool mechanic but it falls short because of its unforgiveness. If you don't physically touch the point you're trying to attract to then you'll miss it. You have to be pixel perfect with your jumps and there's some points in the game where you have to be successful in 6+ jumps in a row or else you'll fail (or have to retry). When you have to be near perfect in each of these jumps it can get pretty frustrating especially after having to retry 20+ times which happened on a few levels for me. I think I'm a pretty patient guy but I had to walk away from this game a couple times because I was getting way too frustrated.

I do recommend it to anyone who likes a challenge and the top notch art just adds to the experience. The Impossible Game is a difficult game and that's doing quite well so I think this one should also do well.

I'd give Lumi an 8.5/10 solely based on the difficulty level. Don't get me wrong I'm all for games that test my skill but I think it was a frustrating difficulty based on its unforgiveness rather than just a difficult game.

Xbox 360 HDMI vs Component

Is it worth it to upgrade? I've always used the component cables that came with my 360. I'm sure you get a little quality boost but is it enough to warrant an upgrade? I don't have any experience with HDMI so is there anyone out there with experience/opinions on HDMI vs component? I'd love to hear from people currently using HDMI or even better if you went from HDMI to component so you can sell me on the idea! :)

EDIT: I got pointed to this link on twitter by @theBigDaddio: http://bit.ly/dfhMSA. Basically if you're a movie fanatic and/or you have an HD DVD player you should upgrade. Some shadows are more defined with HDMI but you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference. The component cables can only scale video to 480p so there's another movie fan stat.

Current Xbox 360 HDMI vs component verdict: Go with HDMI if you're a movie fanatic and want to get resolutions higher than 480p.

Space Swine, VS2010 and more tutorials!

It's been a while since the last post but I've been pretty busy with a wedding this past weekend and we put Space Swine through its first peer review session. A few people commented on some things that we're now changing and there was a loss of control issue so we would've had to pull the game for that reason anyways. On a positive note they seemed to enjoy the humor in the game so that's always good.

I also installed Visual Studio 2010 because I've had it on a disc for a while now but haven't felt the need to install it. I'm still using Windows XP on this laptop so I can't use the Windows Phone 7 dev tools until I upgrade to Vista or 7. The XNA 4.0 beta just came out as well but it doesn't support Xbox 360 development yet so that's another bust. I mainly installed it so I could play around with the new interface and play around with some new stuff like Silverlight until I either move my desktop, which has Windows 7, or upgrade my laptop.

Since we've had some downtime and there's not much to do while Space Swine is readying for release I've wrote a handful of tutorials to share with the world. You can find a list of them on the XNA Tutorials tab at the top of this blog or at our website. They're nothing special but hopefully they help the newer people with some basic things that they'd want to do in their game.