I believe that I have stated several times here that I could only be less pleased with the holiday game release schedule if it somehow murdered my family. The silver lining to this bleak and smoky cloud is that it gives me an opportunity to try out some of the indie titles that looked interesting to me when they were released, but were passed up in favor of bigger games. And since holiday sales are starting to bare their teeth, conditions have never been more perfect. So let's get our hands dirty with our first title:
Shank is a side scrolling 1 to 2 player beat em up, reminiscent of the arcade games of old. Well, actually that's untrue. If this game had appeared in any of MY childhood arcades, a swarm of angry and undersexed suburban housewives would have demolished the place in minutes. The narrative is a very stylized Kill Bill affair, where you play as the titular Shank, hunting down everyone who killed his wife and murdering them in the bloodiest way possible. The graphics are all the in the cartoony style above, but that doesn't mean this is a soft game. I have yet to find many other titles that will let me pounce on a guy, repeatedly stab him in the chest (an act I have deemed "hatefucking"), then shove my shotgun into his mouth and send him to his maker, sans one skull. The enemies come in the standard beat-em-up varieties of "slightly varied normal dudes", "less varied bigger dudes", and "obnoxious animal" (in this case dogs), but what the game lacks in enemy set variety it makes up for with a "cool factor" of 11. Your attacks vary between standard (light), melee weapon (heavy), gun, and grenades, in addition to having fun pounce or throw attacks to add variety. The emphasis is on racking up big combos by varying between all these attacks, and for the most part it feels like a very Devil May Cry-ish system that flows with the aforementioned title's ease. You will never feel like more of a badass than when you string together your first 150 hit combo.
Or strangle someone's head off. THIS IS SOMETHING YOU DO.
Unfortunately, the game stumbles a little bit in terms of replay value. "Normal" difficulty is a relatively simple affair, and the game gets pretty challenging by the end without getting outright infuriating, but "Hard" is so hair-rendingly difficult that I don't even see the point a little bit. Enemies are made a little tougher, and in-level checkpoints disappear, so a single death means you go all the way back to the start. There is also co-op, but at present it is local only, and since you must (MUST) play this game on a gamepad (or ideally an arcade stick), I have yet to try it on account of only owning one. Maybe this will be fixed in a later patch. As it stands, this is a very fun, competent, and stylish beat-em-up that, in spite of leaving you a little high and dry when you're done, is a really worthwhile play if this genre is still something you're in to. But if beat-em-ups in fact AREN'T you're bag, how about...
I think that the developers of this game (newcomers Dejobaan Games) titled it this way so that it would come up first in any searches listed by title. And with a title like AAAAAA!, your attention gets commanded pretty easily. Rather than tie you down with anything like narrative or background, the premise of AAAAAA! is thus: you begin a level, you jump off a building and fly past obstacles until you see a landing platform, pull your chute, and hopefully don't break your legs. Getting near objects gives you "kiss" points and staying near them gives you "hug" points. There are also fans on hidden platforms to give a thumbs up to or flip off (depending on if they're YOUR fans) as well as buildings that can be graffitied for bonuses. At the end of it all, you get "teeth" based on your score and you unlock new stages or bonus videos with said "teeth". Look, I don't claim to understand the probably peyote-induced madness of the creators of this game, but I do know that it appealed to the obsessive primal gamer instinct in me of "set a score, then meticulously figure out ways to beat that score, so that you then have a higher score to beat." That's about all there is to this game, so again, the $10 price tag seems a bit high for what you get, but this game is full of all kinds of bizarre Tim and Eric style charm that I feel is very deserving of commendation. The "Anti-meditation" bonus video (which insinuates that you might have bugs crawling on you) and "Grandma's cookie recipe" that involves the ashes of your dead son are just a couple of the weird little clips you can unlock. They serve no purpose other than to be funny as hell, but is that a bad thing?
All in all, there isn't much more to the game than "fall, don't hit stuff, collect various bonuses, unlock harder levels". But there is a certain proficiency to the way that Dejobaan made so many levels with surprisingly varied tricks for getting those coveted five star rankings. The game feels part extreme sports, part puzzler, as some levels have kind of inscrutable means of getting the high score.
Inscrutable is a good way to describe MANY aspects
of this game.
As a gamer, I can heartily recommend both of these titles as good, maybe even great games (particularly Shank, the acquisition of which wreaked hell with my finals). My opinion as a consumer, however, is marred by their respective prices ($15 for Shank, $10 for AAAAAA!), and that is probably why these games are never actually going to get the attention they should. But as I mentioned last week, Steam sales are a pretty prevalent part of the season, so if you have a few holiday bucks to burn, and conditions are right over at the Steam store, then you should really give these games a go, at least while we wait for the major developers to stop playing with their dicks.
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