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The Way Too Indie Review of CarneyVale Showtime
by Charlie Reneke
CarneyVale Showtime
240 Microsoft Points ($3 US)
12/22/08 Gambit
CarneyVale Showtime by Gambit is a ragdoll physics game (which seems to be a genre in and of itself these days) in which you hurl an acrobat through a vertically stacked, maze-like circus tent. The object is to reach the top of the screen and throw him through a fiery hoop. In order to do this, you must use grabbing-arms stationed every few feet to catch him and swing him to the next arm. You're on a timer to get through the ring, but scattered all over the course are balloons which add back seconds that have passed by. Along the way, you acquire new abilities that change the way you navigate the screen.
As with any ragdoll game, the first question is "how good are the physics?" The answer is pretty good. Slinky, the main character, flips limply as you toss him from grabber to grabber. It took me a few rounds before I figured out that I could actually steer Slinky in the air when I released him from a hook. I think this ability slightly cripples the game design, because after this I breezed through the next dozen levels with no problem at all. There's no manual option to select which hook is the one that extends to grab him, as the game automatically uses whichever hook is closest to him. More than once I used the wrong grabber because of this, but it's hardly a broken system, and after a small learning curve I quit making that mistake entirely.
Every time I thought the game had settled into a rut, a new type of obstacle to clear showed up, or a new ability, or both. As a result, the game doesn't ever get boring. If there's a fatal flaw in the design, it's that all of Slinky's new abilities are assigned to the B button. Thusly, sometimes when I wanted to Wall Jump, I ended up rocketing myself into the wall, unable to perform said jump. This becomes a problem during the later stages of the game that require continuous use of your special abilities and ups the difficulty level to the point of being infuriating.
CarneyVale Showtime is the first XBLIG that I mistook for a normal game on the marketplace. This is a professional production at work here. The graphics are sharp and without glitch. The music is obnoxiously catchy, although the announcer declaring that I'm a "Balloon Basher" every five seconds got irritating. Overall, the production values are so sharp and professionally done that this game feels like it should be booted out of the Indie crowd and forced to hang with the big boys.
And that extends to the gameplay too. CarneyVale Showtime is addictive and truly fun to play. This is the type of deceptively simple design that would have been a smash hit in arcades in 1980 and touched off a new genre fad. The game is loaded with potential in replay as every level is scored on a star-system. You get one star for just completing the level, one for doing so in the allotted time, one for popping every balloon, one for finding a hidden star in the level, and one for not taking any damage on the course. At first I was all too anxious to five-star every level, but towards the end the level design was so maddening that I gave up any hope of doing so and was content to merely finish the level.
If that's not enough for you, the developers threw in a level designer. I never really fool around with that kind of stuff in any game so I skipped experimenting with it here, but I still got a solid ten hours of enjoyment out of CarneyVale Showtime. In fact, while having friends over I fired this game up and demonstrated it to them, and they all wanted a piece of it. There's no multiplayer modes here, so everyone took turns watching everyone else. It's the closest I've come to an old-school arcade experience since I was a little kid. People just had to watch this game be played, the same way people would gather around the guys who were that good at Defender or Pole Position. Laughs were had, high fives were exchanged, and cheers went up. It makes me wonder if arcades would still be around if the type of creativity found here had kept going in the 90s, before every coin-op became a fighting game, shooting game, or driving game.
Rating: ****1/2 My issues with the B button were the only reason this didn't get a coveted five-star rating. The last few levels have some very tricky design issues that would be hard enough to clear on their own without the game mistaking my intention to jet upwards with jetting to the left. This happened far too often. Mapping all the special abilities to the same button undoubtedly was done to keep the game simple, but it ruined the experience somewhat for me in the later levels. That said, the control scheme is flawed, not broken, and the overall fun factor for CarneyVale still ranks among the top of the Indie pile, even if it doesn't belong there.
Thanks to Chris for editing.
by Charlie Reneke
CarneyVale Showtime
240 Microsoft Points ($3 US)
12/22/08 Gambit
CarneyVale Showtime by Gambit is a ragdoll physics game (which seems to be a genre in and of itself these days) in which you hurl an acrobat through a vertically stacked, maze-like circus tent. The object is to reach the top of the screen and throw him through a fiery hoop. In order to do this, you must use grabbing-arms stationed every few feet to catch him and swing him to the next arm. You're on a timer to get through the ring, but scattered all over the course are balloons which add back seconds that have passed by. Along the way, you acquire new abilities that change the way you navigate the screen.
As with any ragdoll game, the first question is "how good are the physics?" The answer is pretty good. Slinky, the main character, flips limply as you toss him from grabber to grabber. It took me a few rounds before I figured out that I could actually steer Slinky in the air when I released him from a hook. I think this ability slightly cripples the game design, because after this I breezed through the next dozen levels with no problem at all. There's no manual option to select which hook is the one that extends to grab him, as the game automatically uses whichever hook is closest to him. More than once I used the wrong grabber because of this, but it's hardly a broken system, and after a small learning curve I quit making that mistake entirely.
Every time I thought the game had settled into a rut, a new type of obstacle to clear showed up, or a new ability, or both. As a result, the game doesn't ever get boring. If there's a fatal flaw in the design, it's that all of Slinky's new abilities are assigned to the B button. Thusly, sometimes when I wanted to Wall Jump, I ended up rocketing myself into the wall, unable to perform said jump. This becomes a problem during the later stages of the game that require continuous use of your special abilities and ups the difficulty level to the point of being infuriating.
CarneyVale Showtime is the first XBLIG that I mistook for a normal game on the marketplace. This is a professional production at work here. The graphics are sharp and without glitch. The music is obnoxiously catchy, although the announcer declaring that I'm a "Balloon Basher" every five seconds got irritating. Overall, the production values are so sharp and professionally done that this game feels like it should be booted out of the Indie crowd and forced to hang with the big boys.
And that extends to the gameplay too. CarneyVale Showtime is addictive and truly fun to play. This is the type of deceptively simple design that would have been a smash hit in arcades in 1980 and touched off a new genre fad. The game is loaded with potential in replay as every level is scored on a star-system. You get one star for just completing the level, one for doing so in the allotted time, one for popping every balloon, one for finding a hidden star in the level, and one for not taking any damage on the course. At first I was all too anxious to five-star every level, but towards the end the level design was so maddening that I gave up any hope of doing so and was content to merely finish the level.
If that's not enough for you, the developers threw in a level designer. I never really fool around with that kind of stuff in any game so I skipped experimenting with it here, but I still got a solid ten hours of enjoyment out of CarneyVale Showtime. In fact, while having friends over I fired this game up and demonstrated it to them, and they all wanted a piece of it. There's no multiplayer modes here, so everyone took turns watching everyone else. It's the closest I've come to an old-school arcade experience since I was a little kid. People just had to watch this game be played, the same way people would gather around the guys who were that good at Defender or Pole Position. Laughs were had, high fives were exchanged, and cheers went up. It makes me wonder if arcades would still be around if the type of creativity found here had kept going in the 90s, before every coin-op became a fighting game, shooting game, or driving game.
Rating: ****1/2 My issues with the B button were the only reason this didn't get a coveted five-star rating. The last few levels have some very tricky design issues that would be hard enough to clear on their own without the game mistaking my intention to jet upwards with jetting to the left. This happened far too often. Mapping all the special abilities to the same button undoubtedly was done to keep the game simple, but it ruined the experience somewhat for me in the later levels. That said, the control scheme is flawed, not broken, and the overall fun factor for CarneyVale still ranks among the top of the Indie pile, even if it doesn't belong there.
Thanks to Chris for editing.
