A Gaming Diary
Archive for September, 2009
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Sep 3rd
Sometimes games go very, very wrong.
And sometimes you make a move that’s so good you break the little score bubble over your word.
Swings and roundabouts.
Samurai: Way of the Warrior (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
Today’s choice for lunchtime game was Samurai: Way of the Warrior. I didn’t manage to progress in the story, so I decided to try and sharpen my skills in Dojo mode, where you’re in a small arena facing wave after wave of enemies. It’s a good place to be.
And, as it should, it keeps a record of your high score.
There’s few things as cathartic as slicing off some heads while you digest a bacon sandwich.
Samurai: Way of the Warrior (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
There are two types of nice suprise on the App Store. The first is when a game you know you want suddenly appears on the store without fanfare, like Mr Driller. The second is when a developer you’ve never heard of, who hasn’t hyped their game, quietly releases an excellent game.
Saumrai: Way of the Warrior, is one of those.
It’s an incredibly stylish, lovingly polished hack and slash game, perfectly suited to the iPhone hardware.
You’ve got gorgeous comic book cut scenes told in slightly broken English.
You’ve got a top-down view of the world, where you tap to move around and swipe to perform slashes and combos, which slice enemies up into pieces in an incredibly satisfying manner. It starts off easy, letting you get used to the game, but soon ramps up the challenge. I didn’t die in levels one and two, but level three is proving to be a challenge, in a good way, with enemies that can do you a great deal of harm if you’re not careful.
It took me a couple of levels to get used to the timing of combos, but my skills developed in the time I needed them to. So far, it’s all been very well judged and has been a great surprise. The £1.79 price tag seems very fair, maybe even a bit of a bargain.
Very, very impressive, especially for a game which was apparently put together in the developers’ spare time.
Mr. Driller (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
Mr Driller!
On the iPhone!
For a mere 59p!
That should be all you need to know.
If you want more information, well, it’s not packed with modes, but it’s got quite a few. It doesn’t have any characters in it apart from Susumu, at least not unlocked at the start.
The controls are where some people are having trouble, but I find the virtual pad works fine. Sometimes I drill in the wrong direction, but I’d say it probably works better than the 360 controller for me, though there’s not much in it. I’ve done the 500m challenge with only one life lost, to give you an idea.
Anyway, I love Mr Driller, so I love this.
Run (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
Ah, here’s a fun little game.
It’s a scrolling obstacle course, where you have to time swipes and taps to avoid death. It’s one of those simple little games that seems comfortable with a 59p price point.
It’s good fun, though I haven’t worked out how to get past sharks yet. A jump and attack, possibly. I should read the instructions again.
Anyway, I reckon most people will enjoy it, though some freaks reckon it starts off way too easy and is thus a bit boring. I don’t have that problem. It’s a little tricky to find on the App Store, having such a generic name, but if you’re having trouble finding it just search for Arthur Ham, the name of the bloke who released it.
Oh, yes, and it’s got zombies in it. Is that a part of the Apple requirements for the App Store now?
Deer Hunter 3D Free (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
Someone on rllmuk mentioned that this was better than Hunting Unlimited, so I downloaded the demo. It may not have as many features and levels as Hunting Unlimited – it’s a bit hard to tell from the demo – but it looks a lot nicer and I think I prefer the shooting.
Not so sure about the bonus round where you grab extra points for killing squirrels that run across the screen, though.
Anyway, the trophy room in this game goes one better than Hunting Unlimited and shows you a 3D model of the animal you killed with the trajectory of your bullet going through it. The line is white on the way in, red on the way out. Subtle.
If the full version of the game was 59p I’d snap it up, but I’m not sure whether to bother for £1.79, what with everything else I’ve got on the go.
Hunting Unlimited 2010 (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
The short version of a long debate is that, I don’t have a moral problem with other people hunting, but I’ve never felt the desire to do it myself in real life or in a game. Conversely, I do have a moral problem with people running around cities slaughtering innocent people, but I’m quite happy to do that in game.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that I should try a hunting game, so when I saw Hunting Unlimited 2010 would let me hunt in Idaho and had a launch price of 59p, I took the plunge.
The first thing that struck me was that the drag-to-aim control method was backwards. I was trying to drag the sights, not the screen, or vice versa, and kept dragging the wrong way. I soon adapted, though. Just took a bit of adjustment.
The second thing that struck me was that this is one ugly game. Rubbish sprites and terrible animation.
Anyway, I started shooting at things with my rifle and soon had a gold trophy for killing a deer with a heart shot.
And then I got one for killing a deer with a lung shot.
That made me feel very strange – and not in a good way. Slaughtering people I can do without a thought, but getting bonus points for sending a bullet through an animal’s lungs? I felt – and there’s no other word that quite captures it – icky.
I put the game down for a while. And when I came back I was over all that. I got my crossbow licence and went to Texas (you can hunt in all fifty states, with trophies kept separately for all of them) to try and shoot some boar. Tricky little blighters, especially with the crossbow. I got a few, but none of my kills were good enough for a gold trophy.
I’ll probably keep trying. I’m honestly not sure how good the game is, but when I was lying in bed last night, it was this game that kept me from turning the light out and going to sleep. Not because I was stricken with guilt, but just because I couldn’t put my crossbow down.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Sep 2nd
Sometimes… just sometimes…
…a game completely gets away from you. In this case, all hope was lost when QUIZ was played, but I wasn’t doing very well before that. Having to change letters, all that.
Orbital (iPhone)
Sep 1st
And here we have the reason I didn’t play enough of my other games this weekend. (Along with Harlan Coben, I spent a lot of time reading the latest Myron Bolitar book. It was great and all, but the big reveal was a bit silly.)
Orbital is an utterly fantastic game. Simple rules, mercilessly fair, quick to play, hard to put down. It’s pretty much genius.
Explaining the rules would make it sound more complicated than it is, so I won’t bother. Just know that this is the first game since Mr.AhH! that I consider an absolutely essential buy, even at the vast sum of £1.79.
Dead Panic (iPhone)
Sep 1st
Now, this is very interesting. It’s not a shooter, though it does have shooter elements. It’s not a tower defense game, though it has elements of that genre, too.
It definitely is, though, yet another zombie game.
Basically, you have army men in the middle of the screen, or thereabouts. On some levels you can position them, on others their positions are preset. Zombies stagger on to the screen and you turn your men to face them, so they can shoot them.
It’s different, it’s frantic, it’s tense, it really feels like a zombie siege… and I’m not sure it’s as good as I want it to be.
I’ve got a couple of problems with the game. The first is that it’s very, very hard. I’m currently stuck on the third level, where my two men don’t seem to have any hope of defeating the incoming hordes. I’ve tried positioning them in all sorts of places, but with no luck.
I’m wondering if I should have three men and that losing a chap on the previous level means I only have two for this level, but I can’t seem to finish level two with everyone alive. It’s a problem.
The other problem is that in the heat of the moment I repeatedly move the wrong character. This has led to many, many deaths. I suspect this is my fault, but when the vision cone of one character overlaps another character I’m having trouble selecting the man I want. I need to play more to see if this is a fault with me or the game but, as I said, I think it’s me.
I may even have to turn the difficulty down to Easy, but I only noticed that option during my last session with the game and haven’t tried it yet.
