Just Cause 2 Demo (360)
Mar 10th
I’m still playing this when I’ve got an odd half hour spare.
It’s still absolutely wonderful.
Every time I think I might be getting a little tired of it, I fire it up again and find myself running and flying around with a huge grin on my face.
Last night I had an excellent time in helicopters and now I’ve worked out how to use my parachute and grapple to fly across flat ground I’ve been enjoying just floating along.
If you haven’t yet, get a helicopter with rockets and blow stuff up. Oh, and grab a mounted gun and walk around with it. Huge amounts of carnage await you.
Utterly, absolutely fantastic. Shame the full game comes out when I’m in the US for three weeks. I’m tempted to buy the PS3 version while I’m over there, just so I can play it on my brother-in-laws PS3 while I’m on holiday.
That would be silly, though. Much better plan to order a copy to be waiting for me when I get home, to help with the post-holiday blues.
Bit Pilot (iPhone)
Mar 10th
Bit Pilot is another avoid-em-up. It’s not as good as Tilt To Live, but it has two advantages.
1) It’s half the price. (Though 59p versus £1.19 isn’t a huge difference.)
2) It uses touch controls, so you can play it in bed.
Least exciting screenshot I've ever taken? Sorry.
And very interesting thumb controls they are. You use your thumb to move around, but if you use two thumbs in the same direction you can move faster. Seems odd at first – and the pixel art thumb in the tutorial video is inexplicably terrifying – but works really, really well.
It’s a shame it came out at the same time as Tilt To Live, because it’s likely to be overshadowed, but it’s a lovely, lovely little game and deserves better.
Tilt To Live (iPhone)
Mar 10th
Insanely addictive avoid-em-up, featuring lovely graphics, great controls and power ups to help you kill the all red dots that are bent on your destruction.
It’s very, very hard to put down once you’ve started playing and is completely worthy of all the acclaim it’s getting from people who have played it.
Avoid the red dots, use power ups to destroy them.
The only problem is that you need to be sat up to play. You’re meant to be able to play lying down, but I can’t get my ship/arrow/thing to move left and right when doing that, even if I calibrate it with a custom setting. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the iPhone accelerometer or whether it’s something that can be fixed in an update, but it’s a little annoying.
When sat up at the right angle, though, this is one of those perfectly-polished small iPhone gems.
Street Fighter IV (iPhone)
Mar 10th
Breathe easy. Street Fighter IV works as well as we could have hoped for.
I can’t pull off fireballs all the time, but I can’t in any version I’ve ever tried. (Hurricane kicks, however, come out a lot more easily, though still without any regularity. Again, like all versions I’ve tried. I think my thumb just likes going backwards.)
You’ve got a big virtual joystick that works well. You can see directions light up as you move it, so you can see exactly what you’re doing if you look down there.
There are four main buttons – punch, kick, special move and focus, which do the obvious. What type of punch and kick you perform seems to be dependent on how you’re holding the joystick, according to people who have investigated more thoroughly than me. Pressing forward and punch will do a heavy punch (when out of throw range) and pressing down and back and punch will do a light crouching punch, or something like that.
Take that, stupid Guile! Ha!
To do an ultra you can hit your little ultra bar when it’s lit up.
In a way, then, you’ve still got the tactical game, with some of the timing/moving skills removed.
There are a couple of options to make things easier. There’s Auto Block, which is on by deault, and a Special Move Assist, which is off. It apparently makes it easier to pull of specials, but I’ve not investigated it yet.
There’s not a lot in the way of the modes. You’ve got the main tournament mode, where you battle the other seven fighters. (Eight are included, I suspect more will come via DLC before too long – possibly when SSFIV comes out on the big consoles.) That means there’s no Seth, thank god, and you fight M. Bison last. Or I did, anyway, when I played. After winning you get shown a SSFIV trailer, which is a bit cheeky, but cool.
I’ve been through once on Normal I lost a few rounds, but no matches.
Apart from tournament, you’ve got sparring, training and dojo. Not looked at those yet.
There’s also multiplayer, which I have a feeling is Bluetooth only. Don’t think there’s any online play.
You can save match replays, but you can’t do anything clever like save them as iPhone movies or upload them to YouTube. Missed opportunity there.
Most importantly, it runs very smoothly and feels great. I really, really like it, arcade-stick-owning hardcore players will probably hate it and I suspect most other people will be probably be in the middle, leaning towards the happier end of the spectrum.
Silent Hunter (iPhone)
Mar 9th
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this arcade-style sub-’em-up.
You’re in a submarine during World War 2. And you’re on the side of the Nazis, which is a bit uncomfortable. You travel around on a map of the North Sea, until you hit some ships, then you get a 3D view of the sea and have to kill all the enemy ships and planes.
It's quite atmospheric at times, I'll give it that.
You’ve got torpedos, big guns for firing at ships and anti-aircraft guns for shooting down planes. It’s all very easy to use (though the anti-air guns could use an option to invert the y-axis), but there’s not a lot of tension or danger. I’ve died once because a ship hit me, but other than that I don’t seem to have been in any danger, even when the icon in the top left of the screen showed I’d been spotted.
It’s not bad, really, but it’s all a bit lifeless. I’m still playing it now and again, hoping that it might click, but I can’t honestly recommend it based on the first hour or so of play.
Final Fantasy (iPhone)
Mar 9th
Played a lot of this over the weekend. I got in my boat and found a new village, defeated an evil elf, returned someone’s crystal eye, gave some powder to a dwarf so he could blow things up, that sort of thing.
I'm on a boat...
After having an easy time for the first five hours or so, I’ve now found a cave that’s said to house an evil vampire. I went in and left as soon as I could – not easy, with an encounter rate that went through the roof – because I was being pummeled. I think I need to level up a bit before trying again. Time for grinding, hooray!
Just Cause 2 Demo (360)
Mar 5th
A huge funsplosion of a demo, it lasts a little over half an hour and I managed to find time to play it four times last night. It’s that good.
It gives a you a huge sandbox to play around in – though it’s a tiny area of the full game’s map – and all sorts of fun tools with which to cause as much destruction as possible. Everything seems designed to give you tools for entertainment, from the guns to the vehicles to the parachutes to the amazing grappling hook, which is to Just Cause as jumping is to Crackdown.
It’s that good.
This has gone from nowhere to “must buy” status and is the best example of what a demo should be in years.
Half-Minute Hero (PSP)
Mar 5th
So far, no surprises. The demo of the game gives a very good idea of what the main game mode is like and I’m yet to try any of the other gameplay types. It’s a very good little game, with the no load times from UMD and the Start button skips all dialogue, making replaying levels much less painful.
I’ve played six levels now, but have done most of those multiple times, trying for better times, to open up different paths and to get some obscure ratings. For example, there might be a “Lonely” rating for a level, which you’ll get if win the level without recruiting a certain character on the map. The names give hints for how to gain the rating, but some look very difficult – can I really complete a map without any food? Do healing herbs count?
Very nice indeed, though whether it’ll keep me occupied to the end of the game remains to be seen.
Power Pros (iPhone)
Mar 4th
Started a season yesterday as the Panthers. I’ve changed the difficulty to Normal and set fielding to Semi-Auto, so I need to throw to bases, which makes for a much better game. At this level I’m always in danger of losing, but know that I can win.
It’s definitely an arcade representation of the sport, but it feels right, though it’s very reliant on home runs for scoring. The vast majority of runs the AI and I score are from homers, with very few scored by getting people round the bases a little at a time.
Still, it’s really good stuff, now, even I don’t know what half the stuff on the menu screens mean.
A little help here, Konami?
I guess the faces show happiness/moral and affect performance and the colours under the player names seem to show the positions they can play. I think. Shame there’s not more help for that side of things.
Go Panthers!
When playing ball, though, it’s absolutely great and I think it’s my favourite baseball game on the iPhone. I find that the best way to judge a baseball game is by how enjoyable the pitching is compared to the batting. In many games, pitching seems to be a chore to get through before you can bat again, but Power Pros has an excellent, quick pitching interface that means I rather enjoy that side of things.
I’m even manually selecting my pitchers and making substitutions during a game, which shows I must be getting into it.
Dungeon Solitaire (iPhone)
Mar 4th
Lots of this last night. I’ve only managed to improve my best score by one hundred points, from 28,000 to 28,100, but that’s not really why I’m playing, anyway. It’s just a lovely, lovely solitaire game.
I just need to turn over one more hero card and I've won.
The dragons are very hard to deal with if they come out early, but there are ways to see them off. I especially like using the potion that makes cards very powerful, but which kills them after their next fight. I get monsters to drink it a lot more often than I give it to one of my heros.