People complain that this blog costs them money. Apparently, I’m so persuasive that after reading about games on here they have to rush out and buy them. Well, okay, sorry about that. Let’s try and save you some cash now, shall we?

Spy Bot Chronicles, then. It was released yesterday and jumped on by members of the Touch Arcade forums and lavished with praise. It’s on a 59p introductory offer, but the price is expected to rise a fair bit before long.

Praise plus special offer equaled purchase.

So, what it is? It’s a 2D platformer that, apart from the odd nice bit of physics, is completely unremarkable. It’s, you know, fine, but that’s about it. The controls don’t work for me, either. Now, if you’ve been reading this, you’ll know that it took me about a week of iPhone ownership to go from “Virtual pads will never work! Burn them!” to “Actually, sometimes virtual pads work fine.”


Spy Bot Chronicles should be fine. It’s only got three buttons – left, right, jump – and they’re quite large. So how comes I keep missing them? How comes I run right when I want to go left and manage to hit the jump button, but then miss it half a second later when I want to double jump? I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I die more from missing the controls than anything else.

So you should obviously save your 59p and not buy this then.

Right?

Right?

Well, there’s two things stopping me from coming right out and telling you not to buy this game.

The first is that the buttons are so large, that I can’t help but feel that it must be my fault that I’m missing them. (Though I suspect that having them right up against the edge of the screen isn’t helping.)

The second reason is that, well, all the other iPhone games I’ve blogged about this morning are ones I played yesterday lunchtime. Apart from a few turns of Words With Friends, this is the only iPhone game I played all yesterday evening. I kept getting annoyed with it, planning new ways of cursing it… then going back to check it really was awful and playing another level. I’m well into the second world of four now.

So, yeah, there’s that. I’m very conflicted. I hate it. I loathe it. It frustrates me and makes me want to smash things… but I keep going back.

I’ll leave the final decision up to you, I think.