Tiny Review: Calamity Annie

Auntie Pixelante’s Calamity Annie has been available since August, but it wasn’t until version 3, released yesterday, that I was able to play the freeware quick-draw game— my computer can rarely be cajoled into running anything that is not a web browser or error dialogue. The wait was totally worth it!

This is pretty much the perfect game to actually get some playtime from me — it’s brief enough that I feel like I can just play for a few minutes, which then turns into an hour or so. This is something I’d love to be playing on my DS, although that’s true of any game I like.

Three things about the game that are yee-haw:

Consistently great pixel art, including swanky handmade fonts.
The story progresses across multiple playthroughs of the game — even if you lose.
The “hombres” you face are hilarious. All Auntie had available to characterize them were names and sprites, and she totally gave them all personality. My favorite new bad-guy cowboy name, though it’s hard to choose, is “Never Done Jack”.

Three things that are, I don’t know, some kind of bad cowboy thing:

I can’t share this with Alisha or Eric, because they have Macs.
The difficulty seems a bit random. It feels like I can lose a life before I can even react in one round, and lazily disarm the next hombre.
I’m never going to see all the story, because I’m alternately terrible with the mouse and distracted by my cat walking across my computer.

Score: 2 (the number of hours sooner I could have finished work last night had I not installed this)

tags / calamity annie / auntie pixelante / freeware / jc

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