XBL indie spotlight - I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1

I'm long overdue to write an article here, so here we go! While there's been many, MANY retail games that are well worth owning released this summer, it’s pretty obvious that with the economy the way it is and the sheer number of things going on in peoples lives that sometimes you just can’t afford to spend a full 60$ on something new. For those of you who are on a budget, there’s been plenty of great sales on Steam and some amazing PSN and Xbox Live Arcade games going from 10-15$. For people that aren’t able to spend that much either, this is exactly the type of game you’ve been looking for. Since Geometry Wars came out years ago, its formula has been reiterated and cloned many times, so it’s easy to think you’ve seen everything that can be done with twin stick shooters. Luckily, there’s some pretty amazing people out there that want to prove otherwise. Enter I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1: a game that I bought simply because of the laughable title, the fact that it only cost 80 Microsoft points (1$), and the incredibly minimalist box art which stood out in the Indie Games section. It sat on my hard drive for 2 days, unplayed but not forgotten, until I had some downtime two days later, so I finally decided to fire it up.



While its gameplay is still a reiteration of the tried-and-true twin stick shooter format, there’s a certain charm in its construction that has to be experienced once in everyone’s life. Since Portal came out, people have occasionally tried their hands at making a game with a comedic ending song (Portal - Still Alive, and You Have To Burn The Rope come to mind), but this game is almost built around this concept. While it’s fun to play on its own, the real humor of the game comes from the amazing song blaring in the background, which I don’t want to ruin here. The great thing about the music in the game is that just when it starts to get old, it switches into another version of the song and the map and graphics changes accordingly, along with introducing new enemies and weapons. I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 is one of those things that might have benefited from online play or an online leader board, but even without it, there’s tons of laughs to be had each time you play the game. It’s hard to say too much about it without kind of spoiling or possibly overhyping the experience, so do yourself a favor and download it with those 80 points you’ve had laying around on your account or at least give the demo a chance.

Demo Woes.

Perhaps one of the most definitive memories of the huge change to using CD's for video games, aside from the technical side of things, was that gamers everywhere were given the ability to play demonstrations. When the format had been around for a while, you would find yourself getting demos included with everything from magazines to cereal, and even as promotions for fast food companies. The entire idea behind things such as Playstation Underground or the demos for Sega Dreamcast were to generate hype for titles that you might not have heard of or perhaps just seeing images in magazines didn't do justice to the feel of the games themselves. Demos were constantly tweaked as years went by, changing as companies attempted to understand exactly what the consumer needed to see in order to make the jump from casual interest into being prepared to purchase, so the general expectation was that you would have around 10-15 minutes or a few levels, with the first few minutes or first level used primarily as a tutorial, explaining exactly what you were playing while showing off a few of the mechanics that made it different from the crowd by not being too challenging. Following the introduction, the next section typically let the player see how they could use those same mechanics in more difficult ways, such as an actual game to practice the trick stick that had been newly introduced in NBA Live 2k3 to getting a good grasp on the combat system of an RPG. It's always been incredibly vital that the new player that's trying to see if they're interested in a game to have some sort of brief tutorial or a slowly increasing difficulty meter without ever getting too hard just to start the hype machine in their minds and push the person towards purchasing the product.

So....WHY has this format of demo slowly been pushed out? Where we were once rewarded with a demo simply for buying a certain box of cereal or picking up a magazine, there's a lot of companies that refuse to have their demos available anywhere unless you do some sort of special preorder of a deluxe edition, which allows you to try out a game that you've pretty much already decided you're going to buy. Doesn't that completely eliminate the possibility of enticing anyone that was just casually interested? Even more frustrating than exclusive demos or releasing a beta for your game that pretty much functions as a demo in many peoples eyes after a certain point is releasing a demo without ANY sort of instruction as to what's happening. Just to lay all of my cards out right here, this entire article was fueled by my run through of the Madden 10 demo on Xbox Live. I haven't played a next gen Madden game (unless you count 07 on the Wii, which is significantly different), so this was my first time giving the franchise a fair shake since 2004. I've kept my eye and ears open by listening to what friends of mine that are into the franchise have told me they've added each year and how to perform the moves, but had it not been for that, I would have absolutely no clue how to control anything in this game, much less any clue of what makes it unique aside from looking pretty. To be fair, the demo is about 8 minutes long, which lets you at least get a feel for the basics of the game, but that's it. The demo doesn't even go so far as to tell a person that's never touched the franchise how to hike, pass, juke, the new defensive line moves, or any of that. Loading the demo up takes you to a 'Press Start' screen, which then shows you a menu that has the following options: Play Now, XBOX LIVE, Career Modes, Quick Modes, NFL Roster, My Madden, Exit Demo. Picking anything aside from Play Now just lets you see highlights of that feature of the game in a sentence or two, which is incredibly vague. Once you select your teams in Play Now, you're taken to the field annnnnnd that's it. From then on, you're just thrown in to the mix. One of the features that people either love or hate about these games is also missing from this demo too, which is the commentary. I don't... understand what the point of this demo is aside from letting people who were already fans of the series play this one a bit early, but it doesn't even inform you of what you should be looking for.

There's also the issue of vertical slice demos, which highlight specifically the best parts of a game, and I understand what it accomplishes, but if you're the developer/publisher and you identify a certain part of your title as being particularly well done or better than the rest, shouldn't you also know exactly what to go back and change with the rest of the content to make it a much more cohesive experience instead of trying to fool people with the one fun level from your game? The last thing that needs to be somehow figured out is what to demo and what not to demo. Some games just aren't going to hold up or seem all that appealing if you only get to play a small section, and while some studios seem to get this (Bethesda not releasing a Fallout/Oblivion demo), others tend to stumble and put one out which can have a negative effect on opening day sales (Burnout Paradise). If anyone else out there can think of any solid examples of well done demos, horribly botched ones, or has a different perspective, feel free to comment and get a bit of discussion going. Maybe I'm completely wrong in my assumption that demos are slowly starting to miss their original intentions, or maybe it's just the big companies that aren't utilizing them correctly and everyone else is doing a great job.