Posts tagged doodle jump

“THIS OUR MOST AMAZING UPDATE EVER!”

That’s what the release notes said.

So I downloaded the update to see what was so amazing.

In the jungle...

You can play the game with an optional rainforest theme, which looks nice, but covers up important parts of the screen.

Um…

Okay…

Er…

Sorry, I don’t get it. These novelty themes for Doodle Jump are interesting for a game or so, but aren’t anywhere near as good as the original theme when it comes to actually playing them. If they had separate leaderboards there might be some sort of point to them, but without that, I really don’t see why they exist. I could just get some shiny star-shaped stickers and put them on my iPhone screen and call it Galaxy mode, it wouldn’t amount to the same thing.

Doodle Jump’s one of the very best games on the iPhone, though it took me a long time to realise that. These other themes do nothing but add novelty and annoyance. As soon as the novelty wears off, which doesn’t take long, all your left with is the annoyance.

Still, nice rain effect in that forest theme, I’ll give them that.

So, that whole “not liking Doodle Jump” thing seems to be over, huh? Commercial breaks, toilet breaks and, er, probably some other breaks I’m forgetting – they’re all Doodle Jump time.

I still don’t like the bits where you have to touch the screen much, but I’m getting better at them and they don’t spoil the experience as I used to think they did.

There's no time to take screens when I'm actually playing.

I always get a bit grumpy when I change my mind about a game, because I don’t like to have been a Mister Wrongface, but on the plus side, it shows the benefits of a gaming diary like this over traditional review sites. People may like numbers and “definitive” verdicts, but games aren’t really like that – especially score attack games without a beginning, middle and end.

On the other hand, there’s not a lot to say about some games, so when I keep playing them I start to struggle for something to say. Which leads to nonsense about cats and getting all meta about the point of this blog.

I didn’t think I liked Doodle Jump, but I played it for hours over the weekend. Hours.

I'm going to die. I know it.

It started with a tweet. One of my friends posted their high score, so I responded with my high(er) score. They then beat that score and we went back and forth for a while until I got a 32K monster score that’s going to take some beating.

(Not that 32K is huge in the general scheme of things, but it’s a lot bigger than the scores we’d been getting before.)

I still don’t like tapping the screen to shoot, but you can mostly get away without doing that and playing for a long time has helped me realise how well-designed the random level generation actually is. It must take some skill to gradually make things harder without ever making it impossible.

I’m a convert.

I enjoyed the mini-version in Pocket God so much that I spent 59p on the real version.

It’s very good and feels better than the Pocket God version. Not much to it – and I think even having to tap to shoot monsters gets in the way of the core tilt-to-land-on-clouds game a bit – but it is, as absolutely everybody says, incredibly difficult to stop playing once you start.

High scores are integrated very well, too. You get little markers on the screen when you pass your own best scores and also those of other people. How it decides which scores to show, I don’t know. It might be people close to your skill, it might be people who have recently played, it might just be random.

It’s really just one of those games you have to have on your iPhone. I feel somewhat remiss for not having purchased it earlier.