A Gaming Diary
Archive for September, 2009
Against The Fire! (iPhone)
Sep 21st
Despite some stiff competition from some excellent games, Against The Fire! walks away with the award for Most-Played Game of the weekend.
It’s another twin stick shooter from the Alive 4-ever team, but I think I prefer it.
Instead of arenas, you have increasingly complex levels, with rooms and corridors and dead ends.
Instead of zombies, you fight cute little fireballs.
Every mission is an escort mission. You have to find one or more citizens trapped in a burning building and lead them to safety. Job done, you move on to the next level. There aren’t any experience points or upgrades or anything like that, which means no grinding of existing levels just to survive. (Though can always go back and play old levels for a better score, should you wish.)
Not that it’s an easy game. It starts off that way, but I’m about half-way through now and am having to try levels multiple times, working out the best routes and desperately trying to protect the citizens on the walk back to the safety zone.
It’s colourful, great fun and the controls have never once been an issue. It won’t last forever – as I said, I’m nearing the half-way point already – but it’s definitely not a short game and it costs a mere 59p.
Run (iPhone)
Sep 21st
Ha!
I hadn’t played this wonderful game since since I got my new iPhone because I was mad at having lost my high score.
I’m over that now, though, so started it back up. I was rubbish at first, but soon got a score of nearly five hundred, pretty much doubling my previous best score on my old phone.
Excellent.
Sorry that the screen shot is from the very beginning of the game, but once you start playing there’s no time to stop and take pictures.
Unify (iPhone)
Sep 21st
Played a lot of this over the weekend. Thoroughly enjoyable stuff, though I’ve still not finished Normal mode, nor even come close.
Inevitably, though, I’ve been having problems with OpenFeint. Yeah, that’s a shocker, I know. It logs me in when I start the game, but then often fails to record high scores and achievements. It’s a real pain, but at least Unify actually has proper local scoreboards, so OpenFeint is just an extra on top of the rest, not a necessity.
iBlast Moki (iPhone)
Sep 21st
I love that this keeps changing.
I found myself in a strange underwater world, where light things float up and heavy things sink down, leading to some very interesting puzzles.
After that, I found myself back on dry land, but now, as well as bombs, I have balloons I can use to make things float.
My general way of playing this now is to do a level, get scared by the next one and quit the game. Then, a few minutes later I’ll start it up again and be put back exactly where I left off. No menus, nothing – straight into the game. I’ll realise the level wasn’t as hard as it looked, though it’ll probably take a far bit of experimentation, then I’ll see the next level, quit out and the cycle begins anew.
It’s fabulous.
4×4 Jam (iPhone)
Sep 21st
This is great in small bursts.
A race here, a race there, just start it up, have three minutes of fun, then put it down for a while.
Played like that it’s actually pretty brilliant and I still love the extreme bounciness of it.
I am so glad I bought this game. It was good before the update, now it’s just great.
Townrs Defender Lite (iPhone)
Sep 21st
I wish I had liked this more than I did.
To start with, it doesn’t quite fit into any established genres, which is refreshing. It’s a bit like a tower defense game, a bit like an action game, not quite either.
Creeps come in from entrances and try to get to your castle gate. There are towers in their way. However, you don’t sit back and place towers, you control a single hero, rushing about the level, killing enemies before they can destroy your towers and, eventually, your castle. You get experience points and can level up your skills and it seems like the sort of thing I would like.
So why didn’t I? Well, I found it slightly awkward to trigger attacks and the cool down on of them means a mis-timed or mis-placed attack can cause you real problems. I felt like the difficulty came from the control system and not the game itself, which is never a good thing.
There’s probably an injustice here. Even a few weeks ago, I might have played more, really trying to get to grips with it properly and maybe even doing so. Right now, though, after twenty minutes or so of struggle I just gave up and deleted the game. I’ve got so many things to play that if a game still feels awkward after a few minutes I’m not going to go back. It’s harsh, but that’s the way things are on the App Store right now.
Still, it’s an interesting little game and you can try it for free, so it might be worth a download to see if you get on with it better than I did.
Str8ts (iPhone)
Sep 21st
My save file is long dead, but I’d nearly finished the first set of Jack (i.e. Easy) puzzles, so decided to step up to Queen difficulty.
I’ve not been overwhelmed, but it is taking me rather a long time to complete each puzzle. The last one I finished took me almost half an hour. Whether that’s simply due to the difficulty level of the puzzle or because I’m out of practice, I’m not sure.
I do know that it’s good to be playing again, though. Str8ts is excellent.
Pixelogic Lite (iPhone)
Sep 21st
I was wondering how Picross could work on an iPhone screen, with it not being big enough to hit small squares. Pixelogic has come up with an excellent auto-zoom solution, which means that errant taps hardly ever happen. But they do, and that’s a problem.
You see, Pixelogic is one of those Picross games that let you know you made a mistake as soon as it happens, which I hate. There’s nothing worse than a badly-placed tap resulting in a red cross on the board when you’ve been trying to solve the puzzle without help.
It’s annoying enough to stop me buying the full game – or even finishing the first 15×15 puzzle I tried. If there’s a way to turn it off and play the puzzle “neat”, I couldn’t see it.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Sep 21st
Did okay over the weekend, really.
There’s some person called MagicalDrop who appears to be in a different class to everyone else I play, though. I think it’s just that he never seems to leave me open open doubles and triples.
