Hysteria Project Review

       Hysteria Project truly is a mini. There is about ½ hour of content, and that is it. The game costs $3, so that ½ hour would have to be really, really great to justify buying it. Unfortunately, despite some cool ideas, there's not enough there.

       The game is pretty basic. You see a short video segment (and I mean real video with actors) and then you must make a decision about what the character you are controlling will do. You have two choices. If you choose the wrong one, you die. If you choose the right one, you may need to follow some onscreen prompts to press buttons as they flash on the screen. If you press the wrong button or don't press the buttons fast enough, you die. Dying sets you back to the last checkpoint.

       You wake up in a room and have to try to escape and then make your way through the woods while being pursued by a relentless axe-wielding figure. That's the gist of the story. There are a few interesting wrinkles to it. There are about 3 pretty interesting developments that happen while you are playing.

       The video quality is really bad. I imagine it looks a little better on the smaller screen of the PSP, but I was playing on my PS3, and it was pretty grainy. However, in a horror game like this, that's not the worst thing. It looks a bit like a found-footage movie, which isn't a bad look. Although if it was a few shades sharper and in HD, it would still look like found footage and be a little more palatable.

The presentation does have some good qualities to it. It is shot from a first-person perspective, and it pulls that off very well. You often see “your” arms touching branches while going through the woods and the perspective looks great when you are performing tasks. There is also a neat effect where you blink from time to time that works really well. On the other had, the action is frequently broken up by checkpoints, which save your game on a seperate screen, and the decision screens, which take you to a separate screen away from the images of the video. Both of these elements break up the flow and should have been super-imposed on the screen while the video was still rolling. It's strange that they aren't since the quick-time events are super-imposed on the moving video, so the developers obviously know how to do it. Then again, if the video rolled straight through without the screens popping up to break up the action, the game would only be 20 minutes long...
       I also think the game would be better with some gore, since it supposed to be a horror game and you die a lot. Not every horror game needs gore, but this guy pops out and chops you with an axe from time to time and the screen just turns red and you die. Some low-budget gore would be really cool and appropriate, methinks.

       The music is pretty good. It's quite dark and dread-inspiring.

       This game was obviously made by a few people in the woods on a very small budget. In order to be a better game, it would need more content, more mechanics, better video quality, and a presentation tune-up. A few of its narrative ideas are interesting. The “epilogue” of sorts that you can access after the game ends is dumb and threatens to ruin the mood of the game. A few days after playing it, I realized I barely remembered it existed, which is a bad sign. I wanted to like the game a lot, but it's a Bad Game, Tier 1.

Sneezies Review (PSMinis)

            When I watched a video of Sneezies, I thought it looked really interesting; extremely simple and cute, yet with a cool chain reaction mechanic. Although I typically go for much crunchier gameplay, I wanted to give it a try. It's my belief that very simple games with good graphical design can be a lot of fun despite the hate they sometimes get. Unfortunately Sneezies is much less of a game than I thought it would be.

            In the game, a bunch of Sneezies (cute, colorful, round creatures) float around in bubbles on the screen. They are constantly in motion. You move a cursor around and can drop one blast of sneezing powder by pressing X. Any Sneezies the blast touches will sneeze, which pops their bubble and lets out another blast of sneezing powder, hopefully causing a chain reaction. They then parachute to safety. Some levels feature just a few Sneezies and some feature close to 100. Unfortunately there isn't too much strategy to Sneezies. You can try to optimize your drops, but it all seems to work out pretty randomly. I try to drop between two Sneezies as they are moving apart so that the chain reaction spreads throughout the screen. I tried a few other strategies too. But it seems that you get a pretty similar result if you just press X randomly. Your goal is to get a certain number of Sneezies to pop their bubbles and fall off the screen. Usually you need to get almost all of them.

            Watching the Sneezies sneeze and cause big chain reactions is amusing, but the game wears out its welcome with its length. A full game of Classic mode is close to 50 levels and seems to take forever. The game might have had some potential for high score chasing with friends if you could play it in five minutes, but it's hard to imagine ever playing it again after sitting through over an hour of sneezing.

            There are four game modes. Classic has you go through progressively harder and bigger levels. Easy mode is like Classic mode but you get a second drop of sneezing powder if you don't beat the level on your first. Score Ex mode gives you an increasing amount of points for each Sneezy you get in a level, as opposed to Classic mode, which gives you 1 point per Sneezy. Challenge mode is slightly different than the other modes. In it, you get 5 drops of sneezing powder and try to reach a goal number of Sneezies. After each drop, more Sneezies are added to the screen. If you drop 75% or more in a single drop, you earn another drop. Unfortunately this mode is really easy, and you can meet most of the goals by mashing the X button. After completing Classic mode, I quit Challenge mode after about ten levels as I was really bored. I was starting to miss drops on purpose to hurry things along when I met the goal, and I did that thing where you start to fall asleep and almost drop what you're holding; in this case, the controller.

            The animation and sound of the Sneezies themselves is quite good, and it's cool to see a huge chain reaction go off, or to watch a hundred sets of blinking eyes watching you, waiting for the powder to drop. The sneezing sounds are pretty amusing, which is good since you will hear them a lot. Unfortunately the backgrounds are pretty bad looking. The music is passable; a gentle guitar and some other subtle stuff. After awhile it's annoying though.

            Sneezies would be cool as a mini-game or a mechanic within another game, or if there were more interaction to it. As it stands, an animal could literally be trained to press X and could beat the game and beat your high score. A game like that could still be silly fun, especially if you had a high-score rivalry, but no one is going to play this game for an hour to try and beat your high score. I'm sad to say it's a bad game, tier 1. 

Piyotama Review (PSP)

     I'm dreading writing this review. I might have to put this game in the bad category, which would be upsetting, the first game I've done that with. We'll see. Keep in mind that this review is for the PSP version of the game. The PS3 version may have more features that would affect the score.

     Piyotama is a puzzle game. I was even in the mood for a puzzle game when I played it. Even so, after about 7 rounds of play, I'm done with it. The first was confusing. The 2^nd through 5^th round were entertaining. The last two were boring.

     I like some puzzle games a lot too. I love Lumines. I had a bitter high score rivalry with my brother in the original. I ultimately lost, but I'm convinced I could beat his high score if I wanted to put in the effort. I had a brief flirtation with Hexic HD that I enjoyed. And I played a huge amount of the truly remarkable Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, one of my favorite PSP games ever.

     So let me describe Piyotama to you briefly. It's set up kinda like Tetris. There are a bunch of eggs all in stacks. More drop in from the top from time to time. You control a cursor that highlights a row of eggs. You can press left or right to move out three eggs from the left-most or right-most section of the rows. Those three eggs stay with your cursor, so you can move them to other rows by pressing up and down and then left or right to put them back in while taking three others out from the other side. Matching up four or more in a row of the same color highlights them, meaning they will hatch. Hatching occurs at set points, or you can speed it up by pressing R or L, although this gives you less points. You can also switch around the order of the three eggs that are outside of the rows with your cursor by pressing cross or circle. One cool feature is that once an egg is highlighted to be hatched, it stays highlighted, even if you move it out of its group of four. This means you can go and grab every egg of one color and plug them all into the same spot on top of three other eggs in turn, and they will all hatch even though they end up all over the board. There are special rare eggs that hatch all eggs of the same color, eggs that lock rows so you can't move them, and eggs that are worth extra points. Also, I should point out that the columns are diagonal only, eggs are staggered, not directly on top of each other. There is a mode that gives you 300 seconds of play, and a mode that stops when the eggs reach the top of the screen like Tetris.

     Does that make sense? I hope so. If this was a better game I would try to explain it a little more clearly. I didn't like it because it's really random. You will get tons of matches accidentally as you move eggs around. I thought that might be cool at first, but it turns out it's not. It makes you feel like you don't know what you're doing; kind of the opposite of what I want to feel while playing a puzzle game. Or any game, really; it makes the game feel like it is playing itself without your input. There also just isn't any depth or hook that I could find. It's a bit different, but also basic. While I like the mechanic of keeping eggs highlighted so that they will hatch even if you move them out of their grouping, nothing else was doing anything for me.

     The art style is decent; cutesy chickens, I guess you could say. There are a few skins you can download for free that change the background and dress up the mama chicken. They are beach and holiday themes. It's cool how when the eggs hatch, cute little chickens fly out and hang around on the side of the screen.

     The music is about half cute, half grating.

     I've seen positive reviews of this game praising its price. I guess it costs like $2. Totally irrelevant since it isn't fun after a few sessions. Games should only get praised for being cheap if they are good. I got this for free; what good does that do me if I'm not going to play it anymore?

     I don't regret the few play sessions I had with Piyotama, I'm just not going to play it anymore. I need to show that it is quite a few steps worse than some of the games I've put in the mediocre tier. I'm going to give it a Bad Game, Tier 1 rating. I feel mean, but it wouldn't be fair to sugar coat my honest opinion. I'm sure people worked hard on this, and I respect that. It just wasn't very fun to me.