Obsessive Collecting Disorder is a punishment platformer. The elite few who have deduced my taste in games will be aware that I don’t like punishment platformers. I wanted to kick Super Meat Boy in the face, and SMB was far superior to the majority of sadistic perfectionist ordeals. Exceptions to the face-kicking sentiment are rare. N+ on XBLA is one of the few I actually have fun with, mainly thanks to its emphasis on working out how to cleverly snag as many coins as possible rather than just trying to drag your mortally perforated carcass across a psychotically painful room. Obsessive Collecting Disorder has the good grace to align itself with the N+ way of doing things and thereby spare me the necessity of gnawing off my own head in frustration, though it still costs me a finger from time to time.

When I can get the taste of my own devoured extremities out of my mouth, I quite enjoy Disorder (though the inability to abbreviate it to OCD without confusing it with another game is a thorn in my side). The visuals teeter on that uneasy watershed boundary between charmingly minimalist and offputtingly spare, but for the most part they work for me. Again, they remind me of the white/black/yellow simplicity of N+. In a game where the slightest error can result in an unpleasantly soggy-sounding death, it’s important to have visual clarity and avoid cluttering the levels with misleading background objects or befuddling textures.

Your little obsessive collector is ridiculously agile, which is frankly a necessity to feel comfortable tackling any punisher, but is surprisingly often excluded from games that would benefit from it. Gruelling platform slog Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES insists on having a main character who can barely muster the agility to jump over a sausage roll.

It never feels quite right in Disorder, though. Huge jumps in platformers frequently feel floaty, but there’s no float here. The obsessive collector leaps a mile into the air with the grace of a lunar gymnast, then drops like a sack of depressed potatoes. The upshot is that for a while it’s difficult to time your manoeuvres because the pace and motion of the jumping feels so unintuitive. In the early levels I suffered abrupt deaths less often from poor play than I did from uncomfortable control. Even so, I mostly felt the obstacles in Obsessive Collecting Disorder, while challenging, were seldom unfair. They were always surmountable as long as I could work out the sequence or the timing, and then execute it without making a mess of the whole thing.

I have to add one qualifier at this point: I wussed out. I played on the easiest difficulty setting, which adheres to the punisher convention of offering infinite lives. The standard difficulty setting is a different beast entirely. It gives only a limited supply of lives before you have to start over from scratch. In a game that sometimes saw me suffer a couple of dozen deaths even on its early levels, finite lives are only for the most insanely skilled – and I reiterate, this is the standard setting, the normal difficulty. Obsessive Collecting Order’s default state is an extreme sport and way too much for this mere human reviewer to fight through.

Ultimately, how much you enjoy Obsessive Collecting Disorder will come down to what you want from a game. If you’re one of those people who inexplicably relished the convoluted savagery of Super Meat Boy, large tracts of Disorder might be too simple for you. If you resolutely dislike punishers, this is unlikely to be a revelation that converts you. The game’s real strength, though, is that it’s two games in one. For the relative novice, it’s a challenging platformer that at least has the decency to run you gradually through manageable levels before the truly vicious parts kick in. At the same time, the punisher pro might find the standard, limited lives mode provides a new sort of intense challenge.

Obsessive Collecting Disorder isn’t for everyone, but it’s a generally well made dual punisher with slightly awkward movement controls that certainly mar the experience but never manage to ruin it. Moderate punisher fans might not get enough from either extreme, but as an entry point for newcomers or a new type of gauntlet for veterans, it has plenty to offer.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

 A copy of Obsessive Collecting Disorder was provided for review by the developer.

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

Super Ninja Warrior Extreme is one of those platform games. You know, those. ‘Punishment platformers’ – the ones that like to bully you, give you seemingly insurmountable obstacles and then sneer at your inadequacy. I hate those games.

I don’t hate Super Ninja Warrior Extreme.

For most of its 30 levels, SNWE is reasonable. You control a basket-hatted swordsman who is out for revenge on unspecified persons for an undisclosed crime. This is much plot as we get, or need. The details don’t really matter – either to us or, I suspect, to the ninja himself. You make some wall jumps, dodge some buzzsaws and cut down some henchmen. The game definitely takes its cue from Super Meat Boy, and although it never reaches corresponding heights of teeth-grinding frustration, the format is certainly familiar.

This ninja’s mission doesn’t just lift Team Meat’s ideas wholesale. The influence is strong, but SNWE does its own thing, and manages to avoid feeling like a mere wannabe. Each level is one room full of traps and obstacles, with a boss swordsman at the end who must be reached and cut down like the mangy cur he is. Unlike Super Meat Boy and its budget knock-offs, there are enemy warriors scattered strategically around the levels, and the ability to attack them by pressing X makes more difference than you might think to the feel of the game. In some levels, working out which enemies to eliminate and when can be crucial to getting through. SNWE is no Tenchu, but it’s a nice touch.

I’m not so keen on the boss enemies, though. They’re not real bosses, just the same slightly tougher enemy at the end of each room. They serve only to throw in the occasional irritating last-second death, which feels a bit cheap when you’ve finally got through a labyrinth of traps after a few dozen attempts. Still, the bosses aren’t actually a problem, just superfluous.

Fortunately for someone like me with a low tolerance for sadistic torment, Super Ninja Warrior Extreme doesn’t feel like it’s difficult just for the sake of being difficult – a flaw common to ‘punishment platformers’ (or ‘painformers’ if you prefer). There are a couple of points where it starts to stray into this territory, but they’re brief and not worth getting hung up on. The difficulty is a little erratic, though. Even after the two or three simple tutorial levels, some levels can be finished on the first attempt while others require patient practice and a lot of luck, and this challenge doesn’t grow in a neat progression. By my reckoning the game took me 75 minutes to finish. I spent 15 minutes making countless attempts at (I think) level 24, and just shy of half an hour sobbing my way through (definitely) level 27 – yet levels 28, 29 and 30 only took a couple of tries each.

This, too, isn’t a major complaint. There are worse crimes against game development than uneven difficulty. Again, for the most part the difficulty is pitched at a level that’s more challenging than average but not frustrating. It helps, too, that the retro ninja aesthetic is quite well done. The music is nothing to write home about, but the visuals are decent, the player sprite is distinctive, and the pre-level messages of encouragement have a (presumably) intentionally hammy tone that reminds me of Mute Crimson.

It’s a good thing that the game is so short, as I wouldn’t recommend leaving it mid-play. The reason is very simple: in place of any sort of save system, Super Ninja Warrior Extreme takes the super extreme approach and uses a password. Mercifully it’s only four digits rather than the sprawling multi-case alphanumeric odysseys found in too many NES games, but it’s still a needless inconvenience. I assume a password system was chosen to remain in keeping with the retro aesthetic, but it’s just annoying. When I got frustrated with one level and went to reheat some pasta, I had to pause to get the password, then go and find a piece of paper and a pen. It’s not a huge ordeal, but inflicting this on the player in the name of authentic 8-bit console styling is a step too far. Don’t sacrifice playability for image, kids.

These complaints are all pretty minor, though. If the game was a protracted 200-level trudge like Super Meat Boy, all the password-scribbling would begin to grate. As it is, the whole thing can be finished in one sitting, and it’s unlikely to take more than two or three unless you’re new to platforming mechanics. In some games, brevity is a curse; here it’s a blessing. The frustration never mounts too high, the password system doesn’t intrude too much, and the whole thing is over before it starts to feel repetitive. For 80 Microsoft points, I have no hesitation in recommending Super Ninja Warrior Extreme, even to those with an allergy to punishment platformers. In this case, the super extreme fun outweighs the pain.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

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