A Gaming Diary
Archive for October, 2009
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Oct 9th
So, Nintendo announced that they’d be sending us Nintendogs to live in our Animal Crossing houses and I got very excited for a couple of seconds, as my head filled with images of little puppies running around my feet and leaping up at me when I got home.
Then I realised that they’d just be furniture items, but assumed that when activated with the A button would have short sounds and animations, like a lot of Animal Crossing furniture. Maybe the labrador would roll over on his belly, maybe the chihuahua would start yapping at you, that sort of thing.
Yesterday I got my first Nintendog and it was disappointing, even with my lowered expectations. There aren’t any animations, it’s just a static, basic piece of furniture that does nothing. This may be a technical limitation with the way new items get added to the game over the Internet, but it’s still a bit of a downer.
It does look cute, though, and I shall keep a small collection of dogs in my basement.
Minigore (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Minigore got updated yesterday. It was sold as an episodic game, but bad luck and bugs have conspired to make it seem like an age between the release of the game and the first update. It’s finally here, though, so let’s have celebration.
Or not, as it happens.
There are a couple of big bugs in this update, for starters. If you flip the screen orientation in the options, the game will freeze and will need to be reinstalled. If you choose not to use OpenFeint the first time the game asks, then you’ll never be able to use it.
I didn’t get hit by either bug and I liked what I saw when I first started the game. There are now little icons round the edge of the screen showing where the enemies are, which makes them easier to track down during the slow early stages of the game and provides a useful indication of danger later on.
This is a good change. The update also includes the latest version of OpenFeint, which is far better than earlier versions. I, as you’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog, have had my problems with the OpenFeint system, but Minigore seems to use it well and actually uploads your scores when you go online if you were offline when you got them. Good work, Minigore developers, may other developers follow your lead.
The bad news is, though, that this update has pretty much broken the game for me. The problem with Minigore is that it starts far too slowly. In a fast arcade shooter like this, you shouldn’t have to spend the first few minutes of the game hunting down enemies. You should be the hunted. The new system for showing off-screen enemies helps with this, but it’s still a pretty boring game for the first few minutes. I don’t much like it.
Of course, this can all be solved by switching to Expert mode, which ramps up the difficulty much more quickly and turns the game from a slog into an enjoyable shooter. Except it doesn’t any more. Now, you need to earn 2,000 points in Normal mode to unlock Expert. Which means I’ve had to play eight games of boring Minigore so far to try and unlock good Minigore. My best score is 1,868, so I haven’t managed it yet. It’s getting very old, very quickly. I’m having to play a game I don’t like to try and unlock a game I do – and which I could play quite happily until the update hit.
There’s no option to play the old version. The game I liked has just been taken away from me and replaced with a game I don’t.
The other major change is for the worse, too. In the old version you had two lives, in the new version you’ve got three. No, no, no. Minigore works best as a fast, frantic short-lived blast. Extending the length of a game isn’t making it better in this case, it’s making it worse. I don’t want games to last ten minutes, I want to be struggling to last two.
I’ll probably keep plugging away at boring old Normal mode to unlock Expert mode, just because I want to get back the game I liked so much. Even then, though, the extra life may well extend the game past the exciting stage and into slog territory. I’ll just have to see.
Minigore has had a coveted place on the first page of my iPhone games since it was released, but I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to last.
Squareball (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Squareball got an update!
Look at the menu:
You can now change the skill level from Pro to Amateur. (Amateur is much slower, Pro is the same old speed.)
I, of course, am having none of it and am still attempting to complete level nine at the same old difficulty. I’m getting better, but I’m not there yet.
If more people enjoy the game now there’s an easy difficulty level, that’s a good thing, but I reckon the game’s utterly fantastic as it is.
Canabalt (iPhone)
Oct 8th
After not playing the game at all yesterday, as far as I can recall, I found myself completely out of practice today.
I was missing jumps, running into obstacles and generally just fumbling around like a gorilla trying to put together an IKEA wardrobe. Without instructions. And with a couple of screws missing, but he won’t realise that until near the end. If he ever gets there. Which he won’t. He’s just a gorilla. Mighty, fearsome, possibly in control of the global black market in bananas, but really not suited to putting together furniture.
Still, it didn’t take long until I was doing reasonably well again. You know you’re there when you only realise you need to jump over an obstacle after your character is already half-way over it.
I didn’t end up with a new high score, but I did reasonably well.
Tap Tap Revenge 3 (iPhone)
Oct 8th
What an absolute mess this game is.
Let me tell you my story.
I started the game for the first time and created an account. As part of that, I had to create an avatar, except the game wouldn’t load any of the pictures, except one, which I ended up choosing just to get past this step.
Then into a tutorial. Like most rhythm games, circles scroll down the screen towards the bottom. When they reach the bottom you tap the correct circle and all is well. That works, though the fact that your finger obscures the thing you’re hitting means it can be tough to see if you’ve hit it correctly.
Then the game introduces arrows, which also scroll down the screen, and which require a shake in the direction that the arrow points when they reach the bottom. These didn’t work for me. I got every up arrow perfectly, even when I wasn’t trying, but the left and right shakes never registered. The developers seemed to realise that there was a problem with these arrows, because you can turn them off in the options screen, which I have done.
After the tutorial I chose one of the three – three! – included songs, which turned out to be a guitar-based abomination that had my wife issuing death threats and making me promise never to play the game within her earshot ever again. Still, the game itself was quite fun.
I got some coins for doing well and I could use those coins to buy new clothes for my avatar. This is all done online and the servers were still struggling, so I spent a lot of time staring at screens like this and waiting.
Eventually I ended up looking like this.
I’m not sure that I’ll be bothering with much avatar customisation.
I decided it was time to download some tracks. I didn’t want to pay for songs, so I looked at the list of free tracks. It’s a long list, but I’d only heard of three artists, I think, and I only like one of those. For some variety, though, I decided to download the pack of free songs for the easy level of the game. You can’t seem to download them in the background, so I had to wait for ages and ages and ages and ages before they were loaded.
One of the free tracks was by Freeland, an artist I genuinely, actually like. So I sat down on the toilet and started his song. I’d never heard this particular track before, but it was excellent and I tapped away and instantly forgave the game everything.
So, yes, this game is a colossal pain the neck, but when it works, it’s lovely. I’m not just not sure I’ll bother fighting through the sea of crap to get to the good stuff very often.
Maybe they’ll update the game and upgrade their servers so it all works faster. Maybe they’ll start releasing some free songs by artists I’ve actually heard of. Or maybe it’ll stay slow, broken and expensive.
Rock Band was announced for the iPhone this morning. Tap Tap Revenge better watch out, because I’m longing to defect.
Dr. Awesome Plus+ (iPhone)
Oct 8th
I thought this would be like Trauma Center, but with your finger, rather than a stylus or Wiimote, standing in for scalpels, tweezers and the like.
It’s not.
It’s a tilt-controlled Qix clone with medical theming.
Luckily, it also happens to be great fun. The controls work well and it’s polished and the difficulty is based on your level, which can go down as well as up, so it’ll never get too hard.
The best part, though, is that it uses people from your contact list as patients.
I felt pretty awful when I killed my sister last night.
The only really eyebrow-raising part of the game is that it seems to only give you twenty-four real hours to save a patient, so you’ve got to play every day or they’ll die. Seems a bit harsh.
This version is free and is supported by some pretty ignorable ads, by the way. I’ll take a small ad at the bottom of the menu screen for a free game, but I don’t like how long it takes to download your data from the net every time you start the game.
Mr. HAND – The Hand Who Loved Me (iPhone)
Oct 8th
Not another vertically-scrolling Bond-themed, hand ‘em up! Haven’t we had enough of them already?
What?
Oh.
Well, this game was free last night, so I grabbed it.
You fly up the level, tilting left and right, trying to hit hands that you can beat and and avoid hands that will beat you.
It’s good fun, it works, but I didn’t feel that it had that special something that keeps you coming back to simple games like this. I’ll play it some more, though, and see if my opinion changes – these are very much first impressions.
Anyway, if it’s still free, go get it. Presentation-wise, you’ve never quite seen anything like it.
Edge Lite (iPhone)
Oct 8th
The full version’s back on the App Store, but costs £2.99, so I thought I’d play through the Lite before making a decision.
Oddly, I couldn’t control it. Bits that were easy last time I played were near impossible this time round. I’m not sure what’s changed, but it was a very frustrating experience and I didn’t even bother finishing the levels in the Lite version.
Won’t be buying the full version quite yet, then.
Brütal Legend Demo (PS3)
Oct 8th
Now this is more like it!
A properly, actually, excellent game with swearing and metal and heads flying and genuinely funny comedy cut scenes and a car that’s on fire and a beautiful cartoon lady and killing people with guitars and it just plain rocks. Hard.
Of course, it’ll probably have some terrible levels and awful boss fights, judging by Psychonauts, which was a great game ruined by too many difficulty spikes, but I loved this demo. Loved it.
And I want more. Lots more.
