Maybe it’s because I grew up in a bit of a rough town, but there’s something quite endearing about a game that wants you to kick old dears in the head. Or maybe it’s because I’m slightly wrong in the head, I dunno.
So, Angry Barry then. You’ve probably heard of it by now. You’ve probably sat down and watched the trailer. Some of you may even have taken the risk and downloaded the demo. For those who haven’t, well, do so. Please.
Given I seem to spend more time than is probably healthy with my head in my hands bemoaning the lack of decent titles on the XBLCG, or rather the lack of decent highly polished entertaining titles (and trust me folks, I’m all for lack of polish if the game is good enough), then Angry Barry is the remedy if ever I came across one.
Alright, alright, it’s not without its flaws. There’s definitely been a couple of moments where I cursed the game design to high heaven and all the way back again, but I’m not going to be the person to run up and give this game a kicking for a few mistakes because it’s so joyous in its silliness that it’d be like kicking a puppy.
Yeah, that’s my morals for you. Kicking a puppy=bad. Kicking an old dear=fair game. Make of that what you will, readers.
Angry Barry is a political mick take all done in an almost Shinobi-esque style. If you’ve ever played a platform cum beat-em-up before now, then you’ll know the drill. If you haven’t, well, it’s pretty simple stuff. Move to the right. Beat things up. Do combo things and special move larks. Defeat end of level boss. End level, rinse and repeat.
The game starts off with a rotoscoped backside wobbling itself away from view. Well, it’s an obvious joke that gets pulled but if ever you want to lay down your stall, might as well make it memorable. After that, you’re into the realms of the world of silly political references and beating up grannies, agents and hot air balloons. What?
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a fair few references that are going to get lost in translation to the multinational less obsessed with American politics folks like myself (hey, we’ve got a cracking expenses scandal going on over here right now, that’s enough to keep me in politics for years without worrying about what our American cousins are up to) but it’s a testament to the borderline insanity of the game that it doesn’t really matter. You don’t really need to know the slightest thing about American politics to enjoy walking around kicking people in the face.
Look, it’s got a special move called The Hope Punch. I’ll tell you this for nowt, folks – it knocks the Hammer Of Dawn (Winner 2 years in a row of most disappointing special weapon in a game) into a cocked hat. It’s worth a gander for that alone.
As I said earlier, it’s not a flawless game. There’s times when you find yourself swamped by stupid amounts of enemies on screen that it falls into some sort of trial by boredom than fun, but y’know, once I’d learnt to ignore that particular piece of silly and just take the game for the daft overkill it is, I’d settled into a happy enough groove on it to not be to bothered.
Did I mention the art too? It’s kinda lovely.
So yeah, I’d probably give Angry Barry a recommended tag for going balls out alone. The fact that it gave me a little grin for a while gives me a couple more reasons. Throw in the lovely presentation and it’s a definite recommended.
It’s not perfect, but damn, it’s taking the CG to a place it should be going. The sort of game that couldn’t ever see the light of day from a commercial entity. The theme alone would be enough to crush the concept at birth y’know?
I can’t help but want to applaud that.
Oh yeah, here’s the trailer again. Just because.
Angry Barry from Aaron McCray on Vimeo.
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After eight minutes of fighting two hundred of the same two enemy types over and over and over again and watching really bad smoke effects and other shitty things I deleted it. Recommendation? LOL! Maybe I’m biased because I know the developer was pissed that the first CG didn’t sell at all and then decided to stop developing their real title “An Awesome Game Where You Shoot Stuff …” (DBP entry) and instead created a cheap game to pay his bills. It’s a shame, because AAG was really nice. And one of the most viewed trailers on Youtube for community games. Angry Barry is just utter garbage.
The presentation was nice & I laughed a few times in the demo, but the gameplay just didn’t do it for me. Walk to the right while the game spams endless copies of the same enemy just isn’t that much fun. Given that you could get The Dishwasher for only twice the price & get a much longer & vastly more polished & enjoyable game, I don’t really see the point of buying this particular game unless you really like the humor.
Pandapadawan,
Not quite true. Ad Pets was never really meant to sell and I didn’t care about sales with that. We decided to make a game in two weeks just to test out the service and get our menu programming, etc. down, so we essentially remade the C64 game, Floyd of the Jungle with a few updates. We knew people wouldn’t like it that much and didn’t really care, it was made just for fun.
What is true is that with the GOOD CG titles not selling, at all, we knew we couldn’t spare the dev time to make AAG at the moment because it would be 6 more months of work for no money. So, we started making games with less dev time, which meant we started focusing on different genres with less dev time. I had Bad Dudes stuck in my head, so we made a game that was just like Bad Dudes/Rolling Thunder/Shinobi etc., because we knew it wouldn’t take too much time, and knowing that the genre itself is repetitive, we tried to add a few things to mix it up (tank fight, helicopter fight, thrown items, combo system) and pay a lot of attention to the humor in the game to make it fun VISUALLY, even when it was being repetitive.
So yeah, we know it gets repetitive for some, and for others, the humor touches override it. We mainly tried to make people laugh with this one; it’s not really a ‘cheap cash in,’ just an attempt at a different genre with less dev time. We’re working on a game that plays like Zelda now, maybe you’ll like that more. And then AAG since we figured out ways to finish it faster.
Or maybe I’ll dop everything and get into the blooming massage market
I hated Angry Barry also. It just was tedious.
yeah I agree, I only played for about 2 minutes and 10 seconds. I do like the concept of beating up on political figures though. I’m currently developing Presidential Punchout for community games channel, teaser gameplay available here:
http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/98037/PresidentialPunchout/iframe.html
Spammer.
I have to give this game some credit because we haven’t seen much of the beat-em up genre on XBCG. Clean and crisp visuals, decent animation, pretty good controls, collisions behave the way you expect them to, and semi-interesting concept…I didn’t find anything horribly wrong with the game.
Yes, it does get crowded at times, but I feel the special moves compensate for that, and gives you a way out.
There’s also a certain level of polish here that you don’t see in many XBCG games.
Though I personally don’t think it measures up to the sky high standard that the other XNPlay Recommended Downloads hit. Things like powerups and a bit more variation in baddies would have sent it over the top, for me anyways.
I do wonder though, how much attention the game would have gotten without using characters that mimic political figures. I think I may have liked it a bit more if it were unique storyline and characters that spoofed alien invasion movies…though I think they did use what they had very well (loved the Dean coming in screaming, as well as the Hope Punch with the American Flag in the background). Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m from Canada…
But hey if anyone needs a super-villian use Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he’s pure evil.
Well, fudge.
I’ve been looking forward to this one. I’ve downloaded it a couple different times now, just in case there was a DL error.
All I get is a Code 4. The Community Games screen comes up for a couple seconds, then Code 4.
*sigh*
Hit that Report Abuse button!
Asking from genuine ignorance: Does that really count as abuse? I thought that was more for stuff like “This game ripped off my intellectual property!” or “Hey, this game has naked men performing explicit sexual acts in it!” or “Umm, this game contains a virus that turns players into zombies and encourages them to begin the apocalypse… braaaaaaaains…”, not crashes.
Never-you-mind. I found a relevant forum posting on it, from an MS employee no less, which answers all:
http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/32278/184698.aspx#184698
(Spoiler: It turns out they do want reporting abuse used for crashing.)
9572AD, some people are getting that, and there’s no way anyone can figure out what it is; it has something to do with something on Microsoft’s end, as it’s nothing that showed up from testing, playtest, or review, and only shows up on certain 360s. We asked Microsoft about it and didn’t get a response yet; we’re more mad about it than you are, as it’s affecting sales/the consumer automatically blames it on us, even though there’s nothing we can do about it.
Jim Perry, it’s not abuse. It’s something on MS’s end.
Abuse in this case covers the game crashing. Even if it’s a problem on MS’s end the game should still be pulled until it’s resolved. Having a user buy a game they can’t play is not good.
Read the post linked above.
The issue turned out to be with “non-standard” graphics mode settings.
I had my X360 set to 1280×1024, which doesn’t seem non-standard to me, as it’s what I’ve been using on my PCs for near a decade, but anyhow, it will kill Angry Barry and a couple other XBLIGs, as well.
So, it’s just down to finding the right resolution that will allow it to run.
At first I thought the game was sort of tedious, but I started getting into a rhythm with the hope punch.. then it all made felt right and I was really making progress through the game. Good job!