Tasty morsel’s of time consumption

I am starting to love Xbox Indie Games more and more. I am also starting to loathe Xbox Live Arcade even more after recent revelations from a developer that pitching games to XBLA have now become stupidly hard to get approval as Microsoft is simply bolstering it’s weekly queue full of games by the big developers. The fact is, Microsoft is a massive cash hungry machine and whichever way you look at it, sometimes they make monetary decisions without looking at the best interests of gaming itself. The Indie Games section was very much undervalued by allot of gamers whom are signed up to Microsoft’s service and even we were criticised by some stupid air head that we don’t offer enough support for the platform because we gave a bad rating to Hoyles Texas Hold Em. The problem was that the author of the comments obviously didn’t look further this his very own nose to see the other reviews that we had on display.

Colourful and reminds me of my school scrapbook.

Today’s latest Indie review, comes from Spyn Doctor Games an independent one man operation headed up by Johannes Hubert. Spyn Doctor games for those unfamiliar have also made the games Kuchibi, Golden Tangram and also single handed responsible for Tony Blair’s coming to power as the UK prime minister in 1997. Okay, so the last part isn’t true but if Alistair Campbell had a games studio, he’d call it Spyn Doctor. Now, the game has you navigating bugs from your doodles into a pot of honey, for some unbeknown reason this then brings the bugs back into the real world and hey presto, you have a unbelievable and rather random half baked story to the game. Don’t worry though, this game is 80 Microsoft points, so you’re not going to care about that element.

What you will care about is whether this game is much fun, provides much of a challenge and whether you will get bang for your buck. Fortunately the game does fulfil in the majority of those area’s but that really depends on what sort of a gamer you are. To best compare this game it does remind me a little of Lemmings but without all the tools. You’ll have to draw bridges, lines and dotted ladders for the bugs to make their way to the honey pot and this is all done by a pen that you control with your Xbox controller. You will find that you will run out of ink when you draw after the tutorial missions, so you’ll need to delete some of your existing drawings to create new paths for sectioned bugs. Sounds like a good interactive challenge? Yes, in many ways it is, whether I would say that you’d actually have fun doing it, is questionable. Be warned with this title, you will have to sink in some serious time to even complete a level, it took me nearly 20-25 minutes to complete a single level. Perhaps I am cack handed, but I’m usually great with physics puzzles and general logic, this then requires a level of patience that simply will not be cut out for everyone. One of my biggest bug bears with the game is the randomisation of the bugs themselves. They’ll often follow a set path and just as it looks like your going to complete a level, one of the bugs decides to move in a different direction. This can become insanely frustrating at times, especially if the bugs fall to the bottom of the level map.

Presentation is definately one of the games strong points.

Graphically the game is really pretty, the doodles are nice to look at and Spyn Doctor add in some high score leaderboard’s that seem to be populated by people with Quantum Physics degree’s. I like how you can zoom into the level for more detail to make drawing more easier and I also like the fact that they have even considered the ability to speed up the bugs travel (much like in Lemmings) and also the ability to increase the drawing speed of your pen to help you complete the level quicker. There are enough levels in this title to give you an extensive lifespan and like one of the featured review blurbs says on the Spyn Doctor website, this is the type of game you’ll want to play in between other games. It’s not something you could sit through and complete in one sitting, not unless you have Buddhist like qualities. The audio in the game is adequate too, nothing special, nothing really worth talking about.

In essence then, Doodles Are Bugged packs a hefty value punch for the money your forking out 80 Microsoft points, which is the equivalent price of buying a share in ALDI. Cheap, very cheap. If you are technically challenged like I am you’ll be able to get over the initial frustration by taking a look on the Spyn Doctor forums or there featured videos for solutions on how to complete levels. This will help you out, as once you get the basic principles in place it becomes a more enjoyable game to play. Do we recommend this title? Absolutely. Doodles Are Bugged is one of the very few games that can wipe hours from your day, without you even realising it. Addictive (once you get around the logic)