XBLIG Review - meds
This one actually took me a bit to get into because I didn't know quite what to make of it. Hell, I've played a little more of it and I STILL don't quite know what to make of it. It's both terrible and oddly good. So I'll let the developer's description do it :
Meds is a terrifying reimaging of classic oldschool breakout...on drugs. The goal is simple: break all the bricks on screen to clear a level and advance. However, a new ingredient to the old mix is our 'Withdrawal Bar'! As it depletes, the player experiences extreme hallucinations..anything from the screen shaking to seeing astronauts and unicorns! All the while, these effects are randomly generated, so no 2 levels will ever be the same! The game features 50 unique levels, local multiplayer, and 10 different pill powerups!
That description sums up this game perfectly, because that's exactly what you get. When you first start the game, you get a rather boring looking Breakout style game with the same blocky graphics you would have expect 30 years ago with a few effects thrown in here and there. But as you start playing further and further, you start realizing there's random shit showing up on the screen. Everything from badly drawn background cities with equally horrible looking monsters to pizzas to little explosions and random color changes. Along with some very cheap deaths as a result of either the ball, the paddle, or BOTH going invisible.
The powerups aren't anything we haven't seen before ... lasers and multi ball and whatnot. When the bag at the side of the screen goes completely empty you get a few seconds where you actually control the ball and then it goes too fast to keep up with because the paddle moves at the pace of a special olympic hurdler. And a lot of the times you will lose a ball right at the beginning of the level because it shoots off in some random direction and the paddle is too slow to get over to it in time unless you react fast enough. The sound is very basic beeps and boops most of the time, and the music ... while fitting to the game is rather subdued.
So the core gameplay is utterly atrocious. The ball physics are at about the level of an LCD game (this I know because I play the Breakout LCD game from time to time) ... but the biggest draw is just all the weird shit that goes on in the game. And that's the ONE reason to play it. And THAT's the reason this game is worth snagging up for a mere 80 points. Because on top of that insultingly bad Breakout game is just ... I don't know how to describe it. All that weird stuff that happens just flows together well. There IS multiplayer ... but it's local only so I honestly haven't tried it. I'm not the "sit down on the couch and play a game" kinda guy. If a game doesn't have a good single player portion, then it's not worth playing.
I'm not going to give this a score just because I really don't know what to make of it. It's 50 levels ... though I haven't gotten through them all yet to be perfectly honest. All the cheap deaths and bad gameplay make it a REALLY long game to play. But damn does all that random, oddball shit that happens really suck you in. Definitely worth snagging just to see some of this stuff.
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