XBLI Developers are Crackheads

If you have either played an XBLI game or developed for XBLI then you're most likely nodding your head right now.

I've got three short reviews, if you're interested.





MOON CHEESE

Very pretty.
But I wish that the aesthetics of this game (the art, the music, the sound effects) could just be pulled right out and transferred to a better title.
Moon Cheese is something that would've grabbed my attention in an arcade, but after dropping a quarter and losing all my lives I'd never bother touching it again.

See how the rocket keeps blowing up in the video? Any idea why?
Yeah. I have no fucking clue, either.
Or at least I didn't until I pulled up the How to Play window a second time and identified that the yellow helicopter dudes are bonuses while the red ones kill you... Or at least they should, except sometimes you can blow them up.

This is the kind of game that frustrates me the most. Where the effort and talent is obvious, but there's just one big, monumental fuck-up that ruins everything.














BLOW ME UP

The flat blue background doesn't exactly blow my mind, but this game is actually pretty good.

It also has a blow-up doll that's disturbingly well animated.

I'm not too crazy about how the meter burns out a huge chunk of itself even if your explosion is super-tiny. And if you don't charge up for a few seconds you barely cover any distance at all, so while small explosions sometimes feel like a good idea, you never want to do them.
And your blast radius takes at least three seconds before it can ignite virtually anything, so you have to be careful about that, too, which is annoying.
















SWASHBUCKEL UR SEATBELTS

I don't fucking know.
If the dev was trying for the weirdest game on XBLI, then I guess he won.

The craziest thing was, after I beat the first level, the game simply told me that I had reached the end of the demo and then it shut itself off. We're talking a genuine trap door dropping me right back onto the dashboard.

No XBLI game does this, ever, for any reason. At the very least you have to make sure you don't hit the A button (and sometimes the B, X and Y buttons as well) or the game will automatically send you to the buy my shit window and try to trick you into paying money for something you don't want.
That's what should happen at the very least.


This game doesn't give a fuck. It just doesn't give a fuck.