The Tube Adventure

Sometimes you need something silly to play, whether you are unwinding at work, ignoring a loved one, or just plain bored out of your mind and the The Tube Adventure is the silliest of them all. I'm not going to write a review for this one as it's quite short but it is well worth many a play through. It's best not to try and make sense of it, just sit back and enjoy the madness. It's available for free anywhere Flash is.

My best score yet

Desktop Dungeons

Desktop Dungeons began it's life as a Game Maker game that is still available for download as a sort of demo of the game. It has changed a lot since then, including changing to a Unity based engine. As I too am making a game based in Game Maker, I was interested to play the original to see how much can be done with Game Maker and I was pretty impressed but for the purposes of this review let's look at the full version.

The original isn't as pretty as the full release.

There is a story of forging a new kingdom to ward off the monsters of the world or something but it is all rather silly. The main crux of the game is defeating dungeons and then using that gold to upgrade your kingdom. This will unlock new classes, races, items, etc for you to use in the dungeons. But don't think these upgrades will make the game any easier, quite often an upgrade will also let loose a new dangerous type of monster that will require new tactics to defeat. You really need to be focused when playing Desktop Dungeons as it is quite a challenging game. Dungeons will often take multiple tries to complete and the game explains that dying is learning. Often you just need to learn the pattern of the dungeon but as they quite often randomise key features you can't always rely on your memory. The random nature of the dungeons also means sometimes you get off to a horrible start and other times you find the items and enemies you need straight away. This can be immensely frustrating at times.

Look at those graphix

It's an odd style of gameplay where you just bash into your generally unmoving foes until they die. Then as you explore through the fog of war you regain health and mana. However, there are various additions that mix this all up. Magic plays a big role in this and can give you an edge in combat. So to do shrines. Worshipping at a shrine will grant you powerful benefits but the gods get angered by certain actions like drinking potions, or using magic, so you have to be careful. To switch up from just straight dungeon crawling all the time the game also offers puzzles. Puzzles have a specific way they are to be completed and are meant to teach you about the game. The thing that really tricked me with them is that you don't have to "win" them like you would a dungeon. In a dungeon to win you typically have to beat the strongest monster there but in a puzzle you just need to perform the actions in the correct order. I was trying so hard to be able to beat this one monster and when I figured out all I needed to do is hit it once, well, I was a bit shocked. I really think this could have been explained as it would have made it a lot easier. Oh well you die you learn.

 

I don't normally go for immensely challenging games as some others do but I got a lot of enjoyment out of Desktop Dungeons. There are some annoying issues and the game isn't going to win an award for it's graphical achievements but it has a lot of charm and character. It has a good balance of patient, tactical play and loot grabbing silliness to keep you coming back for more. Plus it's pretty cheap and on Steam, which means it will go on sale eventually, I say at the very least put it in your wishlist 8/10.

Band Stars [iOS]

Band Stars is a free to play, band simulation game. I was pretty excited to pick this up as the combination of being a rockstar plus Kairosoft style gameplay really appeals to me. If only it was as easy as playing this game to start a successful music career.

The game is divided into five different sections, firstly you have recording. Recording is the bread and butter of your group and is what you'll be doing most of the time. First you'll pick the label, the style and the lyrics of a song as well as one of your band members to write it. Then you select who should play what instrument on the track and if anyone will do a solo. Finally you choose someone to mix it. All of these different sections correlate to one of the five different skills, lyrics, creativity, melody, rhythm and polish. I am always confused by polish as they write it with a capital first letter. Who has the best Polish? It asks, umm... Next we have training. Training will improve your band members in one or multiple of the five skills as mentioned before. The higher their stats in these levels the better your song will do on the charts.

Hiring band members is the third section. You'll start the game with just four musos but you can have up to six working on a song at once, plus you can store others away in the VIP section. This allows you to collect the whole lot and complete all of their challenges which I'll get to shortly. Next comes upgrading. You can upgrade the look as well as the performance of all the instruments in your studio. You can also upgrade your furniture which allows your musicians to rest faster. Plus you can upgrade the strengths of your solos and because this is a free to play game you can also buy your various currencies here. Lastly we come to challenges which act as the quests of the game. You have various tasks to complete some of which come from the specific band members you have and some are just bonus challenges. Each musician has three challenges to complete which will provide you with various goodies for completing.

At first I was really sucked into this game. It slowly introduced new concepts and it felt like there was depth to this and it was slowly being fleshed out. But after a few hours I felt a little lost. There was still plenty to do but why am I doing it? Because it's free to play you'll have to play the waiting game with this one and you only seem to get rewarded with more waiting. The solo mini-game is boring you just occasionally tap to spend inspirado and there aren't really any other mini-games to play. Sure there are more challenges to complete but they are all essentially the same. Train someone in rhythm, train someone in polish etc., this game needs a little something more. I think this is what I don't understand about the way the free to play model is being implemented at the moment. You can pay to not wait but waiting is what the game is about.

The music is enjoyable if a bit generic at times but they do have to cover a lot of styles so that is understandable. Plus the presentation is great, it's colourful and cheerful. I still think it's worth a play because you will get some enjoyment out of it at first and perhaps some of you will feel hooked but in the longterm, you aren't going to even think about this game again 7/10.

Snail Dentist

So snails do have teeth, in fact they can have thousands of them. Luckily in this game you only have to deal with eight individual teeth. As far as I can tell this game is made by just one guy and it is based off a game that was released in October called Pumpkin Dentist. In fact I believe it is the same game just with a snail instead.

So right in front of you is a snail's head and it will open and shut it's mouth allowing you to clean its teeth. To clean its teeth you just need to touch on them until they turn white but if you try to clean its teeth whilst it's mouth is shut you will hurt it. Hurt it too many times and you fail the level. Also there is a timer and a little gremlin that want to ruin your day too. You do have some power-ups to combat all this. A toothbrush which cleans some teeth a bit, freeze will let you keep the damn snails mouth open for a while, and the finger? Well the finger just undoes all the times you hurt the poor snail.

There are just a bunch of odd things about the game. You are constantly bombarded by a message asking you to review or report a problem with the game. Eventually I thought why not leave a review so I hit the button and the whole thing crashed. The in app purchases aren't explained at all and it seems immensely dodgy to me, it just says 100. Is it going to charge you one hundred dollars? I am too scared to find out.

The only problem with this game is that it's boring, which is a fairly big problem for a video game. All you do is tap on the snails teeth every level. It isn't like Plants Vs. Zombies which throws in some new mini-games from time-to-time to keep you going. Still it is better than Ashes Cricket 2013 2.5/10.

Ashes Cricket 2013 [Windows]

Ashes Cricket 2013 is in contention for one of the worst games of all time. The game was released on Steam on the 22nd of November and then pulled on the 26th, for being too buggy and straight up terrible. Now it has been reported that the game has been cancelled by publisher 505 Games, though it seems to me that it is still unclear if the whole project is cancelled, or if they will send the developer Trickstar, back to the drawing board. Trickstar are an Australian developer based in Melbourne, so it is particularly sad to see them drop the ball on this one. Anyway, what is this game actually it like?

The graphics are just atrocious, the models look like something from years ago. The crowd just stand around with their hands in their pockets. The animations are shocking, sometimes a player will throw the ball backwards which looks pretty hilarious but I'm sure was not what was intended. At least they managed to get all the sponsorship signs on the stands, I guess. The music is alright but the commentary makes no sense most of the time. They will tell me how the batsmen was terrible to miss that ball, even though it's called a wide, plus it gets quite repetitive.

Where the hell are his eyes?

The controls are terrible and there is no explanation of them nor is there any customization. If you are going to play with a keyboard you need to go here to learn the keys. Yes in order to learn the keys to play the game you have to go to a third party website. I can't even imagine what they are thinking. If you play with a controller be prepared to use the keyboard and then the controller in no specific order and for no logical reason. Like all cricket games you need to learn the right timing and placement of your shots and bowls but honestly I have no inspiration to want to learn it in this game. Without a tutorial to get you started you are left alone to figure it out and with an option to see the controls in the game you have to alt-tab out to your browser. What a frustrating mess.

Even if the game does re-release without a single bug it's still going to be just a simple cricket game. You get to play 20-twenty matches, ODIs or tests, which is fine but there is no career mode or anything off the beaten track. Don Bradman Cricket 14, which had a little preview in Melbourne on the 7th of November, is going to have a full career mode where you can work your way up through the ranks and it looks like they are actually going to take the time to put out a finished game. I give this abortion of a game 2/10.