(With only a couple of months left until you can no longer purchase Indie games on 360, I decided now would be a good time to remind people that there is some good stuff hidden away among all the crap! So here's a few posts merged together from Blog Of Stuff recommending some spooky selections!)
There are literally thousands of games available on Microsoft's Xbox 360 that a lot of people will never have played or even considered. Some gamers looking at the Indie Game section on the dashboard will see games you can buy for 69p/$1 and automatically dismiss them as being pointless rubbish that's not worthy of their attention. Other's will look at the fact that some of the most popular games just involve minimum gameplay and badly-animated, big-boobed, scantily-clad girls and again think that the Indie section of Xbox is to be avoided. And there is a lot of pointless, sexist and just plain rubbish stuff floating around on there....
But there's also a lot of great games! Some of which are a damned sight more entertaining & innovative than a lot of the full price releases on the console....some that are totally unoriginal and steal stuff from other places, but are still a massive load of fun! But it's finding these games that are worth playing that can be tricky! So I've decided to give a mention on the list to 10 horror-themed titles that I've considered good enough to buy, and once Halloween is over I might let you know about some other games that are worth a lot more than the few pennies the creators are asking for them!
Bloody Death
Remember when FMV was the future of gaming? Almost every game that came out at one point in the nineties had some sort of live-action element in it! And then it just sort of fizzled out and went back to pixels & polygons....Well, thankfully a group of Italian (I think?) game developers decided that we needed anew Night-Trap style game and provided us with this little gem!
It's obvious right from the start that English is not the first language of the stars of this game...a slaughter takes place at "Quite River" which was surely meant to be "Quiet River"? Maybe not, maybe it is quite the river! Anyway, the rather blood-soaked tutorial introduces you to the Quick Time Event controls you'll be using for the entire game. Yes, it's just a case of bashing buttons as they appear on screen while you watch a really bad horror movie, but what a great bad-horror movie!
Our heroine escapes the slaughter, and we join her 3 years later as a couple of friends join her and her boyfriend for a night of booze and Xbox! Unfortunately, in true schlock-style, the killer from Quite River has tracked her down and phones to let the group know he intends to murder them all! You have to try and keep them alive by using the aforementioned QTEs...
The acting is terrible, the script hilarious and sometimes you'll successfully manage to hit the correct combination of buttons only for the character to be horrifically murdered anyway, but it all makes for a hugely entertaining 20 minutes or so play, and the fact that they've even attempted to resurrect FMV games is to be applauded, as is the fact you can pick it up for £1.99! If you love cheesy, so-bad-they're-good horror movies this'll be right up your street, and as a fan of such fare I highly recommend you download it immediately!
Hell's House
Look! It's the star of Bloody Death Francesca Mamo in a sort-of sequel! This one has our star wandering around a Haunted House, and again you have to QTE your way through the game as you try to stop her dying horribly! This one doesn't have a lot of talking...in fact I can't actually remember if there's any talking at all, so it's not quite as funny! It does mean that the acting doesn't seem quite so bad too though, so we may see Francesca in a Dario Argento movie yet!
Anyway, it's another fun little interactive movie and again worthy of the £1.99 it asks for the pleasure of sitting through it!
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Dead Pixels
This one is a great retro-style side-scrolling shooter that has you trying to make it to freedom across a town filled with zombies! It's got a brilliant Grindhouse-inspired intro, and groovy music throughout! You can stop at shops to sell items you pick up along the way and purchase health packs, ammo & guns, and there are several types of zombies to try them out on! The zombies will drop extra cash too, but try not to die as you pick it up before it disappears!
Dead Pixels is packed with references to zombie movies & games, and there's some free DLC that adds a survival mode, and another set of levels that changes gameplay a bit to keep you on your toes! Both of these extra DLC modes come with their own great intros and it makes for quite a large package of stuff to play through! It's awesome and could quite easily have been an Arcade release....And yet it's yours for 69p/$1!
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Midnight Bite
Draku's parents have flown off on vacation, but they forgot to stock up the fridge before going, and so it's up to us to guide the little vampire through a stealth action game so he can snack on the villagers, quench his first and emerge unharmed when his parents return!
You'll have to evade the guards, who have Metal Gear Solid style lines-of-sight, and hide in the occasional box to avoid being seen. If you keep your eye on the guards, you'll get to know their patterns, and you can slip past to the villagers! Once you get to a villager you can feast on their blood, and when you've got them all you'll move on the next screen via a magic mirror exit. Soon, extra dangers are added to the mix, like cats that'll wail if they see you and garlic that'll slow progress even more!
It's a fun little puzzler with a cute style that'll appeal to any little monsters that happen to be lurking in your own crypts, as well as anyone who generally loves sneaking around as a bloodsucker!
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I Maed A Gam3 W1th Zombies 1nit!!!1
This game is as much a music video as it is a Robotron-style twin-stick shooter! You battle to survive hordes of zombies, picking up various power-ups and trying to last to the end of the creator's 15-minute or so song about the very game you're taking part in! It's a game with zombies in it, for goodness sake! What more do you need to know!? Go spend your dollar!
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Saturn 9
Sent to a suddenly silent spaceship to find out what happened to the crew, you discover that things have gotten a little out of hand and some sort of creatures are running riot! This might not sound like the most original set-up for a game, but Saturn 9 was a pleasant surprise when I discovered it!
Taking influence from games such as Fear, Dead Space & Eternal Darkness, this first-person survival horror has hallucinations making you question just what is really happening, and what's in the protagonist's head. These occur when your character is running out of oxygen, which you'll need to keep topping up. Locked doors provide some password hunting and puzzle solving, and you'll need your wits about you to work some of these out.
The atmosphere of the game was really surprising to find in an Indie title, with the constant breathing coming from your character as they move around the incredibly dark levels in their spacesuit and the diary logs left by the crew creating a truly spooky environment..
Again, it's worthy of reaching a larger audience than the one XBLIG has, and like a few other games here it looks like you'll soon be able to get it on Steam too! It's well worth a look, especially for under a quid!
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Three Dead Zed
This is a great side-scrolling platform adventure, where you play the role of a zombie spliced together from 3 different types...the Classic, the Sprinter & the Brute! Switching between the three types will get you through the puzzle filled levels, as you dodge various blades and saws and other hazards...
The Classic can climb ladders & push buttons...the Sprinter moves quickly & can bounce up between walls that don't have ladders and the Brute is the muscle of the three and can break walls & platforms & pick up heavy items and move them to make platforms..
A strange voice that has directed you to freedom from the lab you were created in, tasks you with removing tin-foil hats from cats also trapped in the lab..but who is behind the voice? And what are his motives? It'll be a load of fun finding out, and despite a few tricky moments and pixel-perfect jumps etc., this should keep you interested long enough to reach the end!
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Vital Force
Basically a budget Project Zero / Fatal Frame, Vital Force sees you play an eight-year old girl who wakes up in a subway station, with no memory of how she got there and only her phone to help her find her way out again...it also quickly becomes apparent that the station is populated by spooky Japanese-style ghosts, so she'll need to use her phones camera & torch functions to try and combat those too!
Health packs & batteries are scattered around that'll keep you and your phone topped up, as you spend around an hour battling beasties & trying to escape, and for 69p you should be pleased with the scares on offer here! Well worth a purchase!
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Twin Blades
The presentation of Twin Blades is a little higher than you'd expect from most Indie titles, and the price reflected this..being a few pounds instead of the usual 69p-£1.99..but it's actually pretty pointless me telling you this, as apparently it's no longer available for purchase! If you haven't already downloaded it, you'll no longer be able to play it, as it has disappeared for some reason from Xbox, Windows phones & iOS!
It's a side-scrolling hack'n'slash affair, that quickly becomes repetitive but is charming enough in its design to keep you playing a bit longer than you probably should. You play as a nun trying to stem the flow of zombies invading your homelands, and buy weapons such as ice-guns & flamethrowers to aid you along. These can be upgraded by picking up the coins that the progressively tough zombies drop, and cashing them in via a priest back at the start of the world map...
The ever-increasing difficulty and zombie types and a neat little challenge mode keep me going back to this, and although it's far from perfect it's a real shame that it's no longer available to buy. Hopefully it'll resurface someday, or even better...get a much improved sequel, although as the studio responsible seems to have to disappeared too, this seems unlikely....
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The ever-increasing difficulty and zombie types and a neat little challenge mode keep me going back to this, and although it's far from perfect it's a real shame that it's no longer available to buy. Hopefully it'll resurface someday, or even better...get a much improved sequel, although as the studio responsible seems to have to disappeared too, this seems unlikely....
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Zombie Death Quota
Another game I've played way more than I would have thought, Zombie Death Quota takes Minecraft's looks, spruces them up a bit, and adds a shoot-em-up style gameplay..which has you scrambling to collect boxes whilst blasting or avoiding the oncoming hordes! You need to survive long enough to be rescued by a helicopter at the end of each level...
Whenever you use a flamethrower, you get a nice blast of Heavy Metal which makes you feel like a total badass, and there are lots of other weapons which you get as you move through the levels, which helps keep things a little less repetitive..
It's a simple idea, but done wonderfully! None of it is very original, but somehow it all adds up to make a highly addictive little game! And it even adds special objectives once you've completed a level, so you have an excuse to replay them! Another game worthy of your cash then, as is.....
ZDQuota II - Ghost Dogs
...The sequel! Which is pretty much exactly the same, but this time you can bring a friend! Oh, and there's the freaky, jumpy undead ghost hounds to deal with now too, which adds a little extra spice to the pot..
And this time, it's dubstep instead of rock that blasts your eardrums when you fry things with the flamethrower! So you see, it's a totally different game! Well, different enough to spend another 69p anyway! ;-)
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Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
Another simple premise with snazzy presentation for this last indie recommendation! In this, you play the Duke, who seems to have misplaced his princess! It was (probably) those bloody Monsters! So the Duke sets off to reclaim his love, and terrify the monsters (probably) responsible for her disappearance!
Gameplay involves trying to touch as many platforms as possible, and then bouncing off the monster three times before it reaches the top of the level. For every platform the Duke touches, a combo-counter increases..but if he touches the same platform twice, the counter resets and the bonus is lost!
Trying to improve your combo & therefore score is the hook for this game, but the charm of the graphics, the wonderful music and the humour of the story will also have you coming back time after time to try and beat your previous scores! Go buy it immediately!
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Medieval Zombies
This game plonks you way back in days of yore, facing hundreds of the undead as you search crates and hunt for better equipment to destroy them with, whilst also trying to keep your fellow AI zombie fighters alive. As you can see, the graphics are somewhat rubbish, but this gives the game a certain appeal...
Unfortunately, it also gets very, very repetitive after the first 10 minutes or so. Somehow, despite it's obvious crapness, I still really like Medieval Zombies, but i can't really recommend it or you'd think I'd gone completely mental!
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After Dusk
Ah! This is a bit better! In After Dusk, you, as captain of a starship, answer a distress call from a Space Station to find out what went wrong and maybe claim some salvage. Once you get there though, you find things have gone a bit bitey-bitey, brainy-chompy Dead-Space-style, and the space station crash lands onto a nearby planet! Skulking around the dark, you fire up generators to keep the light-fearing nasties at bay and try to get back to your ship and get away from all this death!
It's quite a groovy little game, with some nice light effects (your bullet lights up a trail as it shoots off towards the nasties), some decent platformy-puzzlements and a suitably unsettling soundtrack. Well worth a go if you're looking for a good creep around in the dark....
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Dead Kings
I really like this one! Apparently a sequel to game called Bloody Checkers (which focused a lot more on playing checkers, obviously), this one has you creeping about a castle at night looking for loot and battling dead kings and queens by examining their paintings and then taking on their challenges, which come in the form of a few mini-games like Breakout, Asteroids or, indeed, checkers...
You'll also struggle to keep your candle alight to see where you're going and access the paintings, as various ghostly happenings occur to scare you pantless and put out your flame! This game oozes atmosphere, and was quite a surprising find for me on XBLIG...It reminds me of Dark Souls, the old TV series Knightmare and a random crappy-but-good covergame you'd get on the front of an old Spectrum mag! Definitely give this one a go for a unique blend of freakiness this Halloween! Oh, and you can bring a friend for a co-op playthrough too! So yay!
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Press X To Not Die
Another one of these Live-Action-Video style games now, that everybody thought was the future of gaming back in the early nineties. This one actually tries to be funny, unlike the ones I reviewed earlier in the post, and it sometimes succeeds.
As you've probably guessed from the title, the game consists almost entirely of QTEs and you have to bash the buttons at the right time or you'll fail whatever task you happen to be doing. If QTEs are a personal bugbear of yours, you'd better steer well clear....
Plot-wise it seems pretty similar to Sean Of The Dead, with you trying to get to your girlfriend and escape the random outbreak of whatever virus is causing people to go a bit doolally and violent! Like I said, there's a few laughs to be had, and it's just about the right length for you to not get bored of just pressing random buttons. So yeah, again worth a go if you're after something a bit different....
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Demon House
Lastly today, we look at the rather okay Demon House, where you wander around a spooky mansion in FPS mode, trying to put a stop to an evil scientist plans for world domination using an army of undead creatures and robots!
It's fairly standard budget FPS stuff, but has a nice spooky atmosphere with lots of Haunted House style creepiness, and decent enough AI that it's pretty enjoyable to roam around. You'll also need to find keys hidden in secret areas to open doors so there's a fair bit of exploration too! It's pretty decent for the price you'll pay, so I recommend you give it a go.
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So there you go...for under £20 a whole load of stuff to keep you busy for hours....but with only a short time left before some of them disappear perhaps for good!
Remember that a lot of these games are available on other platforms such as mobiles, PCs and PSP..and also that if you're still not sure about spending cash on them, Xbox allows you to download a trial for every single one, so you can sample them before you part with your pennies!
Remember that a lot of these games are available on other platforms such as mobiles, PCs and PSP..and also that if you're still not sure about spending cash on them, Xbox allows you to download a trial for every single one, so you can sample them before you part with your pennies!
