Avatar Farm Online

The horse is watching.
He's always watching.
Always.

Avatar Farm Online was recently released on November 16^th 2012 and made by Milkstone Studios. They originally created Avatar Farm, which has been their most successful game to date. Avatar Farm is much like the social Facebook game Farmville and its ilk, but the original version had no online components. The newly released Avatar Farm Online fixes this problem, and now you can visit other people’s farm and help them out with it, if they allow visitors to do so. How are the online components, and how does Avatar Farm Online compare to other farm sims?

Johnny Carnage

Yeah! What am I implying by pointing my finger at my head?
Am I so crazy I might just shoot myself?
Or do I just have my gun in the wrong hand?

Johnny Carnage is a game developed by Milkstone Studios and released on October 6^th 2012. The description from the game states you’ll be rescuing girls from evil skeletons from Mars, and call the game a platformer/shooter. Milkstone Studios has a pretty good track record, with several of their previous games also being very good. Does Johnny Carnage live up to their high quality precedent Milkstone has set for itself in the XBLIG?

Sushi Castle

Oh man, it's Final Fantasy VII all over again.

Sushi Castle is another rogue-like game created by MilkstoneStudios and released on July 7^th 2012. Milkstone Studios currently list twenty different games on their website that they have released for the Xbox Indie Game Arcade, many of which are really good. On their website they claim that Sushi Castle is heavily inspired by the PC game Binding of Isaac. How does Sushi Castle compare to it, and other games in the rogue-like genre?

Oh, gooey brain monsters that leave behind a trail of filth that
causes damage. How original.

The graphics of the game are colorful and crisp. One of the things that I really appreciate is being able to play this without having to worry about turning the graphics down so the game doesn’t run slow, something that is a common problem with Binding of Isaac. Another thing I really like is the interface on the right side of the screen that shows your stats. This keeps you from having to pause the game or bring up a menu to find out what your stats are at. I feel like the character design is a little uninspired though. I found myself sometimes fighting multiple version of the same looking enemy with simple color palette swaps. I understand that the game is supposed to be about Ninjas, but there’s lots of Japanese mythology that could’ve been drawn upon to create a bigger variety of enemies. I guess sometimes you can have too many ninjas.

Ninja zombies! Or mystic zombies! Or homeless people!

The game play is exactly like Binding of Isaac. You run around in a randomly generated Zelda-esque dungeon collecting items that boost your stats or change your weapons. One of the differences in this is that while in Binding of Isaac you can only shoot up, down, left, and right, in Sushi Castle you can shoot in the diagonal directions as well. This actually makes the game somewhat easier, especially when faced with enemies who can only fire in the original four directions. The game also controls exceptionally well, and really makes me wish that Binding of Isaac offered this option too.

Oh look! A fat ninja! Those ninja stars should bounce right off him.
That's how fat works, right?

The game has a lot of items that you can find, but not near the massive amount to be discovered in the Binding of Isaac. Another problem I find with the game is a lot of items, enemies, and bosses seem to be ripped straight for Binding of Isaac. I understand Sushi Castle is inspired by Binding of Isaac, but it almost seems like they recreated the things they found in Binding of Isaac and didn’t put much work into making these things their own. As you progress through the game this becomes less of a problem, as the enemies in the later levels of the dungeon actually are quite different than what you find in Binding of Isaac. However, this is a game you replay over and over and over again, so you spend far more time in the first few levels than you do in the last. Once again, it makes the first chunk of the game feel uninspired, and I just wish more effort would’ve been put into trying to differentiate themselves from Binding of Isaac instead of just trying to be clear where they drew their inspiration from. When you get to a boss for the first time and it has the same exact attack pattern as a boss in Binding of Isaac, as a player I was left with a feeling of “Been there, done that.”

THE PROBLEM: The bosses period. THE SOLUTION: Your giant tampon.

Binding of Isaac is one of my favorite games, and the due to past experiences with publishing a game on the console market, Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl have been hesitant to release it on that platform. They have only recently begun to discus that avenue, and my only worry is that Sushi Castle with seem like an inferior game once that is released. If Milkstone Studios makes another one, I really hope they put more effort into making the game as different as possible from Binding of Isaac. They game could also use a slew of more items, enemies, and bosses, along with lots of secrets for players to find and explore. The large amount of things to do and find in the game is one of the things that make it so fun, as each play through should be vastly different from the last.

Otherwise, if you don’t have a computer I HIGHLY recommend this game. If you can play it without being able to look through the lenses of Binding of Isaac, you will have a LOT of fun with this game, because it is very good. And it’s only 80 MSP. You’re going to get a lot of entertainment out of that dollar, and Milkstone Studios has a great track record for their games, so we need to support them so they can continue to put out great games.