DISFIGUR-EIGHT-ED
More videogame imbecility for you to laugh (or suffer if you're about to play it).
This time is Figure of Eight by Xitilon.
Nothing, I mean NOTHING could prepare you for something as stupid as this game.
Oh, fuck. When it comes to Xitilon shmups, you know what to expect: Zero efforts, zero tolerance for error, weird ideas and cheap trophies at expense of wasting your precious money. The premise of this "game" (if we can call this thing like that) is to rack up a high score throughout multipliers that increase the default value of your enemies. But here's the catch: YOU DON'T HAVE CONTROL OF THE SHIP, so the "autopilot" moves it in an horizontal "8" as if you're on a fixed running track. The only way to "Control" it is by holding the fire button to slow your ship or most exactly, the bunch of squares that are supposed to be your ship. Yeah, the graphics are horrendous at the point of making Atari 2600 look like God of War. Well, shit. I've talked about the game's graphics too soon, so, back to the gameplay. Yeah, you can slow your ship by holding the button, but doing it so will also "focus" your auto-firing spread shot into a more frontal stream. Yeah, you have an auto-firing weapon pretty much like the vulcan in the Genesis port of After Burner II so you can concentrate on slowing down the ship in specific moments in order to obtain the bonus items that might get in your way because getting the bonus items is just "luck abuse" where you have to get a series of pure luck stunts in order to obtain the items.
Lesson for developers:
There's a thin line between being creative and being a dickhead.
Being a Xitilon game, it means one thing: Being cruel with the player as much as possible. As if the bad idea of forcing your ship to a perpetual "8" path, if you take 1 single hit, its game over, and for a game that requires you to obtain 2400 points which can be obtained by picking SEVERAL multipliers. So, boy, if you've picked this game for trophies, then get ready for a lot of frustration from this game.
I know challenge is important for any videogame, but 99% of the times, losing in this game won't feel like if it was your fault, but because of absolute cheapness and imbecile programming, and really, this game will be annoying to the point of making you feel like if someone is trying to test your patience because due to the rules of the game, you can only move in one single direction, and the zero-tolerance for error just makes you get more and more angrier at the point of wishing the worst to the developer.
Hate the weird effects? Xitilon gave us options to turn'em off.
Well, at least Xitilon gave us the option to toggle the screen effects on or off.
Unlike some of his previous works were stuck in crappy filters and distorted "Old TV" like screen effects, but at least he understood that shit wasn't necessary.
...Aaaaand, the player's wrath exploded.
Good evening once more. Wow, that was rather...final, wasn't it? Figure of Eight is what we can call "Troll'em Up", a "Game" that claims to be playable, but its simply infuriating due to its "brilliant" concepts. If you want to know how is a shmup made by an 8-year old kid who confuses "challenge and fun-factor done with intelligence" with "harsh and mindless difficulty after sipping Monster Energy", then this is the game for you. That's all I'm going to say because if I keep talking about it I'll definitely lose my mind.
1 R-9 out of 10. It just brokes the imbecility level on any reviewer scale you could find:
On to the next review... Hope things get better.