Like movies, most of the games you get to hear about are funded by major studios with massive production teams and huge budgets, but there has been a recent increase in the number of independent games studios making a go of it. One of the best recent examples of a great indie game is Number None's Braid, which is easily one of the best games of the last 12 months.
But what about the games that, well, just aren't very good? When they come from a mainstream studio, they're just an overpriced, high-budget flop, doomed to linger in the Computer Exchange bargain bin for the next decade (EA's Lord of the Rings: Conquest comes to mind).
It's a bit different when you're dealing with an indie game, though. While your average major-label PC release will go on sale for around £30, most independent games cost under £15. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more willing to blow £9 on a ropey (yet strangely fun) game than £20.
Which leads me directly to Paradox's Stalin vs Martians, a Command and Conquer style real-time strategy game that pits the forces of Second World War Russia against an alien invasion. Even the title sounds like a B-movie. The game itself is genuinely weird, with tanks and infantry units pitted against giant eyeballs, strange fungi, hordes of little green (and pink, and blue) men and Pixar-esq one-eyed, big-headed, fire-spitting things. Oh, and later in the game you can field a skyscraper sized Stalin. Basically, it's a bit mental.
Unfortunately, all this bizarre, vodka-fuelled ingenuity is let down by an inordinately steep difficulty curve that is almost entirely down to the unresponsive control system. You can't zoom in much and the graphics are little fuzzy around the edges, too, but I'd have forgiven that if the controls were better. This is a real shame because the basic premise is pure genius (unless, of course, you think it's in rather poor taste to engage in light-hearted japes involving genocidal dictators…). If you want to give it a go anyway, it's certainly cheap enough, at £7 from GamersGate. It's quite possibly worth it for the music alone.
However, the absysmal control system, for me, puts Stalin Vs. Martians out of the running as a true Bad B–game Classic. I prefer it when a game's flaws don't render it largely unplayable. What I'm really looking for here is something that has half-decent gameplay, but with a ludicrous plot and awful acting. Remember the voice acting in the first Resident Evil? That bad. Right. Any suggestions?
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Incidentally, gaming has already had its own version of Plan 9 From Outer Space – developed by Gremlin Interactive in Ireland and released in 1992 for the Amiga, Atari ST and PC, it's not so much a game of the film as a game featuring the film. A bit of a turkey itself, it received mixed reviews, with its best score coming from our late sister magazine Zero, which gave it 89%, mostly on the strength of its campy charm, in-jokes and the free copy of the movie that came in the box.
It was a point-and-click adventure with largely static graphics that pitted you against Bela Lugosi's double to find stolen reels of Ed Wood's "masterpiece". In a revolutionary move for its time and genre, it even included clips of the film in the game. In short, it's a something that only a fan of the film could really love and almost, but not quite, a B-Game in its own right.
Thank you for your article
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