Over the years, Big Fish has improved upon this hidden object theme incorporating other puzzles into the mix, along with complete and sometimes surprisingly compelling story lines.

Over the last couple weeks I’d heard some buzz surrounding one of Big Fish’s newer games, The Search for Amelia Earhart. Because I’ve been captivated by Earhart and the mystery of her disappearance since childhood, this game was my first free download when we picked up the new iPad.

While the graphics aren’t necessarily designed for the retina display, the HD version looks fantastic on the new iPad. The music, while brief and repetitive, is only moderately derivative of every uplifting theme you’ve ever heard. That said, I did find it wholly identifiable which is something I enjoy when revisit a game. (I’m calling out the Big Fish Rhinna Ford line of games here and their clearly ripped off X-Files theme. Not fair!)

The Search for Amelia Earhart combines a bit of hidden object with a few other types of puzzles along with a full multimedia experience to create a wholly realized, if abbreviated, biography of this enigmatic historical figure.

I’m typically hyper-critical of attempts to blend history or science into games. Confuse astrology with astronomy and you’ve lost me for good. However, The Search for Amelia Earhart holds it’s own. Like all Big Fish games I’ve encountered, it is designed for young adults, but there is enough substance that it needn’t fall into the total fluff category. I can easily imagine it being a great game to play along with your kids.

As a player you’re taken on a journey through Amelia Earhart’s life. When you progress through each hidden object quest, puzzle and challenge, you’re presented with interesting and little-known facts about Amelia. And as you complete each part of the game, you’re treated to first direct quotes, and ultimately video footage of Amelia herself. The quotes, footage and music are designed to inspire.

Each segment of the game further advances one of the theories surrounding Amelia’s final flight. While none of the theories presented by the game are entirely outlandish, you might find yourself a bit skeptical. It’s up to you to do the research after you finish the game. This shouldn’t be difficult because, coincidentally, the search for Ms. Earhart is all over the news right now based on some newly discovered evidence. It will be interesting to see if the game is updated in the future to incorporate this new information.

Aside from the game being relatively short, my real disappointment was the timing involved when prompted to upgrade from the free version to the paid version. I didn’t know this then and without giving anything away, I was fully halfway through the game at this point. That alone isn’t a big deal, but I will reveal that there are no new puzzle types to encounter when you pull the trigger on the paid version. Yes, there is more game to play. Yes, some of the puzzles become a wee bit more difficult. And yes, there are more theories, more Amelia videos and a tiny denouement.

If you’re a huge dork like I am for strong female historical figures shrouded in mystery, and like your hidden object games beefed up with puzzles and, of course, the online equivalent of flying lessons, you can’t go wrong downloading the free version of The Search for Amelia Earhart for your iPad. You’ve got plenty of game to play before you have to decide whether or not to spend $4.99 on the complete version. Frankly, I’m not convinced I’d do it again. I’d probably play through the free part, spend the money on a latte and google search the hell out of Earhart to satisfy any remaining curiosity.

Final note: The latest iPad HD version of the game is not the same as the PC/Mac version of the game. If you’re researching the game and read any of those reviews, there are no clairvoyants or detectives or intrusive voice overs in the iPad version.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The Indie Mine: Kris, here at The Indie Mine we became acquainted with your work around the time you were porting Hypership Out of Control! to iOS, but by then you were already a veteran of a few released games on the 360.  Going back even further, how did you get into indie development in the first place?

With my first games, I learned not to let my expectations run wild. There are lots of people making games and only a handful that strike it rich with their first couple titles. I expected too much and I was disappointed.

The Indie Mine: You’re arguably best known for your game Hypership Out of Control! and the Hypership series in general. Where did the inspiration for that game come from?

Kris Steele: I had a game on my graphing calculator in high school where you were a triangle (I think it was supposed to be a car) and you kept going faster and faster as the road you were on curved and progressively got more narrow. It was a very quick, shallow game but I liked the idea. I brought that game to space, added lots of power-ups and collectibles, and a pinch of humor. It worked out pretty well.

Retro space shooter Hypership Out of Control! in all its old-school glory

The Indie Mine: Oddly enough I know the exact game you’re talking about.  Moving on, you’ve become a well-known figure in the XBLIG development scene, but you’ve also received notoriety for your involvement in the Uprising events that indie developers have undertaken to promote XBLIG.  How did you come to be involved and what have you taken away from those events?

Kris Steele: There was an open call to XBLIG developers to submit their titles for the Winter Uprising, which I entered my game Hypership Out of Control! into. I wasn’t really involved in the heavy lifting of that promotion, I just supplied a title and did my best to let me fans know about it. There was occasional talk of another promotion for some months after that but no one really stepped up and made it happen so I decided to take a lead fearing it otherwise may never come to pass. I partnered with Dave Voyles of ArmlessOctopus.com and we collected feedback from other developers, organized voting and promotion dates, and recruited a few others to help out with the website, trailers, and music. It was really a community event.

The Indie Mine: You were recently quoted in a GamaSutra article regarding your dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s dashboard changes and the effect it’s had on XBLIG sales.  You’ve also been outspoken in other venues as well claiming that XBLIG isn’t really the way to go for indie developers to be successful.  Do you still feel this way?  Do you think there’s anything Microsoft or anyone else can do to help the service thrive?

Kris Steele: I still feel the same unfortunately. The tools for making XBLIG are really great and in that regard it’s a fantastic place to learn. But outside some pretty specific genres / game types, sales just aren’t there for most developers. I believe this to be mostly a visibility and a filtering problem. XBLIG has been moved around and push back too much on the Xbox Dashboard. Casual gamers don’t happen across it as often as they used to. Within the channel, there is a high volume of games released but no good way to tell the good from the bad. Apple has done well on the AppStore with their New and Noteworthy list, which includes quality new titles. XBLIG would benefit a lot from a setup like this rather than a straight list of new releasing being the most visible area of the channel. I believe if gamers found more high quality content, they’d come back more often.

The Indie Mine: So I take it this means you intend to steer clear of the platform going forward?  I know you’ve already ported Hypership to iOS.

Kris Steele: For my larger games, the stuff that takes 6 months or a year or more, for sure. It’s too much risk and not enough return to justify those efforts. If there is something I can do in the course of a few weeks that makes sense for the market, I wouldn’t rule it out.

The Indie Mine: What’s up next for you?  Will you be doing more ports, or do you plan to start new games and franchises on other platforms?  Do you already have some ideas in mind?

Kris Steele: Mainly I’m working on a PC port of Volchaos, a lite version of Hypership iOS, and World of Chalk, which we’ve switched from XBLIG to a PC release. When I get some of the ports done, I’d like to do a brand new iOS title next. I’ve also worked some on my next big game, which will be similar to the SNES Legend of Zelda title. But that’s still a long ways off though. 

Volchaos will be making its way from XBLIG to PC soon

The Indie Mine: What’s your end goal as an indie developer?  Do you plan to continue flying relatively solo?  Do you want to someday have a studio?  Or do you want to break into the mainstream at some point?

Kris Steele: I like to have full creative control over what I’m working on which kinda rules out working for someone else. Perhaps some day that does means having some employees if things go really well, but I’m getting by fine so far with contract work for the aspects of game development I can’t do well myself (art and music mostly).

The Indie Mine: Looking back, is there any particular game or moment you’re really proud of or that you especially look back fondly on?

Kris Steele: Hypership iOS was recently nominated for a Pocket Gamer Award for Best Action / Arcade Game (http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/pgawards2012.asp). Considering how many thousands of mobile games are released yearly and what kind of competition we had for this award, this was huge. We didn’t win, but it was really an honor to be nominated alongside other games like Super Mario 3D Land, GTA3, and eventual winner Jetpack Joyride.

The Indie Mine: Before you go, is there any wisdom you’d like to expound either to fellow indie developers or gamers out there?

Kris Steele: Go out and make something. You’ll learn infinitely more by doing than by sitting on the sidelines. Read a game programming book, read some tutorials. There are lots of free or cheap ways to get into game programing. If you’re passionate about making games, you’ve got no excuses not to start making them right now.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Fun Infused Games, the developers who’ve recently brought us games like Volchaos and Hypership Out of Control for XBLIG and other platforms, have announced the release of their latest title Hypership Still Out of Control.  The space shooter is an updated version of their previous Hypership title with redone artwork, modified enemy waves, additional music, and more changes.  It’s available right now in the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace for only 80 Microsoft Points.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

VolChaos is the latest in a string of difficult games I’ve been playing lately including the recently-reviewed Growing Pains.  This particular platformer is the brainchild of Kris Steele, lead developer of Fun Infused Games.  I also recently reviewed one of his other titles, Hypership Out of Control, and if you read the review you can understand why I was excited to try this latest game.

VolChaos is a platformer consisting of a few dozen levels, each with the same task – reach the flag at the end of each stage.  To do so you must hop from one precarious platform to another with the occasional spring box placed to bounce you up into the air.  Working against you is the ever-present threat of lava, slowly(or quickly) rising up and erasing your ability to backtrack or slow down.   The game also mixes in a variety of enemies to either kill you or to otherwise interfere with your attempts to get where you’re going as fast as possible.  However, it’s actually the stagnant spikes that will often prove to be your greatest nemesis.  While it’s easy to feel a great sense of satisfaction when figuring out the trick to getting through an area without getting impaled, there are also times where you’ll find yourself cursing the developers for trying to be so diabolical.   On a few occasions I thought the spike placement was cheap because you can’t always see where you’re going to land when you’re springing or falling despite the inclusion of a tiny mini-map on the screen. For the most part, however, I felt like the difficulty was just right for seasoned gamers.

While your main goal is simply to survive, each stage also has a secondary task to try to collect all of the gems.  Many of the gems will already be on your path, but often they’ll be just out of your reach or placed in a direction opposite your goal.  This forces you to make the tough choice between staying alive and going for the glory.  It’s completely feasible to beat the game without collecting any gems, but if you can manage to collect them all on a particular level, you’ll unlock an expert version of that level.  These expert levels black out the background, speed up the lava, and throw more enemies at you in an attempt to force you to be near-perfect in your timing and execution.  I actually found the expert levels more fun, even though you lose the vibrant graphics.

The controls in the game certainly elicit mixed opinions.  I can appreciate how certain jumps in the game require you to build up a little momentum and how sometimes it’s necessary to take a little off your jumps in order to hit the next platform without bumping your head.  There is a definite learning curve to figuring out all the little nuances to your character’s jumping mechanic.  It’s not so much that it’s problematic, it’s just that it doesn’t always feel like you’re getting a consistent response with repeated actions even though you are.  According to his blog, Steele is looking at the horizontal movement in the game to determine if it needs tweaking.

As with many games in the platformer genre, there’s not a lot of depth to the story in VolChaos, but at least an effort was made.  The premise is funny for its mix of cliched adventurer story and its absolute absurdity.  Your character is a down-on-his-luck adventurer who has resorted to volcano-diving for gems in order to settle his bills and get what he wants out of life.  As well done as the story setup is, the various still-image intro screens that precede each level are just confusing.  I’m not sure if the developers are trying to be completely random or if there are some inside jokes I’m not privy to.  There are a few chuckle-worthy phrases amongst the entries, but for the most part these one-liners seem out of place or at least out of context.

Perhaps the best quality of VolChaos is that it evokes such a feeling of relief and accomplishment when you just eke out getting to the flag before the lava overtakes you.  The game does such a great job of building that tension that some of the imperfections can be overlooked.  Steele already has plans in the works to examine some of the issues mentioned here if not outright fix them.  If you’re looking for a challenging platformer with some quirky humor, then I’d recommend giving it a try.

Note: This game was reviewed using version 1.0 of VolChaos on XBLIG.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Like many old-school space shooters, the objective here is to stay alive as long as possible by manuevering around obstacles and destroying incoming enemies.  The hook with Hypership is that the longer you’re alive the more speed you build up.  Gradually those solid walls you were able to easily avoid will become that much harder to miss.  Enemies and destructible walls that you had plenty of time to blast to smithereens are now objects that it might be easier to avoid rather than destroying to score the points.  One of the most addictive components of the game is the exhiliration that comes with successfully making it to that next wave when you’re zooming along at maximum speed.  Should you make it through all ten waves, you’ll restart at the beginning but with your top speed bumped up to make it that much more difficult.

If there’s any one element of the game that deserves close scrutiny it’s definitely the controls.  Since it’s an iOS game you’ll be using the touch screen to move your ship around.  Both the iPhone and iPad have their unique advantages and disadvantages over the other.  While the iPad will give you a more spaced-out view of the game than the iPhone, it also means that you’ll be having to cover more real estate when moving the ship around.  This can be a challenge for a game where movement is frenetic and reaction times paramount.  However it’s not detrimental to the game and is only worth mentioning because its one of the few potentially negative critiques.  One of the nice design choices is that you don’t actually have to have your finger on the ship to move it.  You can touch anywhere on the screen and the ship will react to your swipes.  One of the problems with touch screen games is that your fingers or hands can obscure your view, but this inclusion by and large negates that issue.  There’s a bit of a learning curve here in figuring out what works best for you.

Adding to the replayability of the game are a few additional modes that change up some of the mechanics or rules.  While most are a variation on the speed settings, my favorite was actually the Coin Down mode.  Instead of having a set number of lives, you start with a set number of coins.  As time passes, the coin meter counts down.  Hitting zero will result in the game ending so it’s up to you to pick up coins as you’re flying to keep the counter up.  The real twist here is that in order to keep pace with the meter you’ll need to keep your speed up, whereas in Normal mode you’ll survive a lot longer by slowing down.  Die or slow down in Coin Down and you won’t be able to pick up coins fast enough to survive.

One of the biggest draws to arcade machines was competing for the right to have your initials up at the top of the score leaderboard for everyone to see.  Thanks to the inclusion of Game Center, Hypership hasn’t lost any of that old-school appeal.  With it, you can have your scores automatically posted to the global leaderboard.  Each of the game modes has its own standings, and these can be further broken down by current day, weekly, or all-time listings.  I find that few things fuel a competitive fire better than seeing someone else’s score ranked higher, and I believe that will keep players coming back to this game for awhile.  The game has an achievements system for accomplishing various feats.  The achievements are also tracked through Game Center.

Hypership Out Of Control is one of those games that you just instantly get.  It’s a game that is simple and universally understood in its nature to appeal to a wide audience, but with some advanced techniques to stimulate the seasoned gamer.  It also hearkens back to an earlier age in gaming so for some it’ll have a certain nostalgic factor.  Any way you look at it though, you’d be hard pressed to find a reason not to get the game.  Although this review was for the iOS version, the game is also available on Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows Phone 7.  Your biggest question shouldn’t be whether to buy it, but what platform to buy it on.  The XBLIG version includes local multiplayer, but you can’t take that version with you on the go.  The game’s only a dollar though so maybe you don’t have to choose at all.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.