charlie murder

Ska Studio’s excellent RPG brawler Charlie Murder recently received a title update. The patch notes for the 400 KB download were posted on the game studios’ blog:

• I’m …
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There are two new free Xbox 360 games available to Gold Xbox Live members right now. Charlie Murder & Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. The Games with Gold …
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The one-year anniversary of the Games with Gold program brings with it the standard two titles each for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, as well as a bonus game for Xbox 360.

The first title for Xbox 360 is Dark Souls. This is an action-RPG for those who enjoy a grueling, teeth-grinding challenge, perhaps even to a masochistic level. The difficulty is legendary, and not for the faint of heart; however, for the grand total of no money, it might be worth it for those on the fence to give Dark Souls a chance and forever be trapped in the mindset of “just one more try.” The game will be free June 1-15.

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The Games with Gold program will celebrate its first anniversary this June.  To celebrate, Microsoft is expanding the program to include the Xbox One. Additionally, Xbox Live Gold members …
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Ska Studios revealed the state of the next Charlie Murder patch via a quick little Facebook post on its page. The studio says that all of the “easy” fixes are complete …
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Microsoft has announced that over 200 developers are working on titles for the Xbox One via its ID@Xbox initiative and has released the names of 65 of these developers that are joining the 32 developers they already announced back in December.

Some of the highlights in the list include The Behemoth, developers of the extremely popular Castle Crashers and BattleBlock Theater; Playdead, the developers of eerie XBLA title LIMBO; Ska Studios, the team behind the beautifully violent games Charlie Murder and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile; Warhorse Studios, the developers behind the highly successful Kickstarter Kingdom Come: Deliverance; and Zoë Mode, the developers of Powerstar Golf.

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The sales stats are in for the majority of the month of August (July 29 – August 25) on the XBLA marketplace and they certainly make for interesting reading. …
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Ska Studios’ Michelle Juett Silva and James Silva spoke recently (via PlayXBLA) about the upcoming title update for the popular Summer of Arcade game, Charlie Murder. The update primarily serves to …
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There’s a scene in Ska Studios’ Charlie Murder in which the members of the titular punk rock group do what rock stars do best. No, they don’t rock out, though the game does dedicates several scenes to just that. During the scene in question, the band does the rock star thing and tears apart a hotel room. The rambunctious five behave the way we’ve all come to expect rock stars to behave: irresponsibly. Furniture is destroyed, a mattress gets kicked, hell is raised.

So what, right? That’s all standard rock star fare, and it fits right into a game that celebrates nearly every aspect of the (undead) punk rocker lifestyle. That little mattress-kicking bit, though, well, that seems to have upset at least a few game critics. It’s not so much that the mattress is being kicked that caused the issue, but it’s the individual doing the kicking and the role she plays in the game on the whole that caused some reviewers to be put-off by the character.

The character is Kelly “Skelekitten” Skitten, and she spends most of the hotel scene meagerly kicking at a mattress while the rest of the band — which itself raises from hell in the game’s opening scene — raises hell. Eventually, a male member of the band walks over and does the job of destroying the mattress that Skitten apparently could not accomplish on her own. I noticed it while playing through Charlie Murder for review, but I thought it merely a harmless joke about a woman who looks to weigh all of 90 pounds not being capable of destroying a mattress by kicking it. Another critic felt differently.

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Charlie Murder was developed by Ska Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios. It was released August 14, 2013 for 800 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Charlie murders. Charlie — in concert with the other members of the band of his namesake — brutally, bloodily murders undead and demonic foes by the score. Oh, he also skateboards, puts on concerts, drops acid, flies on a broomstick and does a whole bunch of other crazy crap. Mostly, though, Charlie murders. He makes a point of stomping on downed adversaries’ defenseless faces, sending their eyeballs and somehow-still-intact brains flying out of the noggins that contained them only a second earlier. He shoots, he slashes, he bludgeons, he punches — he murders. Such wanton destruction might prompt another round of those discussions as to whether or not those damn video games the kids play really have gotten too violent, whether or not they really are rotting gamers’ brains (at least they have the good courtesy to leave them in their respective noggins). It might do that, but it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t do that because the death and dismemberment is all so outrageous, so ridiculous, so…hilarious, that no one should take any of it seriously.

Absurdity is never in short supply in Charlie Murder. The two-person team of James Silva and Michelle Juett-Silva have distributed it with liberally enough here that Charlie Murder crashes right through genre convention, and, for the most part, keeps on rockin’. Silva once commented to XBLAFans that he had no need for a design document. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time how serious he was about that statement, but it’s obvious now that there was at least some truth to his words. It’s impossible to believe that anyone at Microsoft told the Silvas what they could and could not do when designing their game. In fact, it’s hard to believe that they themselves were even capable of as much. Yes, the tried-and-true brawler staples are all here, but so are myriad off-the-wall ideas that somehow come together in a way that (usually) works. Charlie Murder isn’t the first brawler to load up on crazy — but it is one of the best.

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