A Gaming Diary
Archive for January, 2010
Sword & Poker (iPhone)
Jan 18th
Grinding levels twenty and twenty-one to get enough cash to purchase a trident that caught my eye in the shop. Once I’ve bought that, I’ll try to progress a bit further – it’s getting tough now.
Pokemon: Journey To The Sky (iPhone)
Jan 15th
Yes, it’s a highly dodgy Doodle Jump rip-off starring everyone’s favourite electric mouse, Pickahu.
It got taken down within hours of appearing on the App Store, but I grabbed it as a curiousity.
(And not because I love Pikachu. I’m a 36-year-old married man with a steady job and a Volvo. Of course I don’t have a favourite Pokemon. And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be one as obvious as Pikachu. Oh no. I’d go for something much cooler.)
Anyway, I turned airplane mode on while I played, just in case it tried to do something dodgy – I trust Apple’s review process this much: none. It’s a fairly dull Doodle Jump clone that takes too long to get hard, but it seems to work okay and doesn’t have the annoying shooting elements of Doodle Jump, so I guess it wins there.
Would have been nice if the developer had made some attempt to actually, you know, animate Pikachu as he leapt around, but there you go. At least there’s a local high score table.
RIDGE RACER ACCELERATED (iPhone)
Jan 15th
For balls-out, dry-mouthed, seat-of-your-pants excitement I don’t think anything else on the iPhone comes close. The sheer sensation of speed using the Class 5 cars is unmatched and the twitchy, fluid, almost organic handling is like the nightmarish, drooling flipside of the clinical, digital precision of Ridge Racer on the PSP. Brilliant.
Sword & Poker (iPhone)
Jan 15th
Down on the twentieth floor and things are getting tricky, mainly because I always feel the need to pick up all the treasures on a floor before I leave. If I just took the quickest path to the boss I’d probably do fine. Well, maybe – I’ve not actually seen the boss yet, he might be a tough one.
I’m easing off a bit on this game now. I’m still playing it a lot, but it’s not consuming me any more. I’m finding it much easier just to play a battle or two and then put it down for a while. I think this is probably a good thing.
Vector Runner (iPhone)
Jan 15th
Forty-fourth best score of the day, bitches!
Yeah, okay, so that’s not very impressive, but it was by far my best run so far.
Serious Sam HD Demo (360)
Jan 15th
Serious Sam is an excellent game. I’ve not played it in years – I’ve been keeping this blog since late 2005 and it’s never been mentioned before – but I still remember all the different enemies. The levels I don’t remember so well, but who can forget the screams of the suicide bombers as they rush towards you?
Playing through this demo was a pure nostalgic rush, basically. It’s my type of shooter. Instead of long cutscenes you get optional text pages to read and while there may be the odd switch to pull, generally you’re just running around large rooms shooting things until they explode. This is a very good thing.
When I get some spare money I’m going to buy some points and I’m going to buy Trials HD and Serious Sam. Yes I am.
Bayonetta (360)
Jan 15th
Bayonetta is so amazingly brilliant that I just want to explode with joy. Okay, the cut scenes go on too long, but I’ll be skipping those after my first time through the game – and, yes, I fully intend to play through Bayonetta multiple times. I probably won’t, because I’ll probably get stuck on a boss two-thirds of the way through the game, take a break and then never go back, but right now I’m in love.
(Let’s not mention the part where I got stuck last night because I’d forgotten a technique the game had told me about a few days ago. The problem with playing for half an hour here and there is that it’s easy to forget the tutorial stuff that happened days ago.)
My only real problem is that I’ve only got stone medals so far. Okay, so I’ve only completed two chapters, but both of those have given me the lowest ranking. It’s quite upsetting, as it feels like I’ve been doing rather well.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Jan 14th
I’m probably giving a false impression of my skills from my screenshot selection.
The Horrible Vikings (iPhone)
Jan 14th
I’m not quite sure what to make of this, to be honest. It’s a catapult game, where you have to send your viking flying through the air to reach a target, bouncing off ninjas and hunks of meat and stuff on the way.
It’s all quite confusing, to be honest. There’s an awful lot of talking – the conversation below appeared after five or so consecutive shots and disappeared just before I smashed my iPhone – but not a huge amount of real guidance and I’ve been very, very gradually trying to worm my way inside the game while feeling like I don’t quite get it.
I think one problem is that you have infinite lives. There’s not a certain number of shots required to win a level, you just keep going until you do. The “best score” recorded for each level shows the number of shots, so I guess the idea is to do each level as efficiently as possible, but that way probably won’t get you much money, which is used to buy upgrades from the shop.
I guess I should just fire off vikings to try and get lots of money, buy everything in the shop, then go back and try and improve my scores for each level, but that just seems like grinding.
I really don’t get it. In itself I like it rather a lot, tilting my iPhone to try and hit things to bounce off and time my butt slam to hit the level target, but the whole surrounding structure seems unfocused. I guess I’d just like a more linear mode, without the map, with upgrades given to me when they’re needed and a target number of launches for each level. And maybe some points or something. And medals. Or maybe I don’t need any of that, maybe I just need to feel like I’m actually working towards a solution for each level, rather than doing the same thing over and over until I get lucky. I’m really not sure.
Vector Runner (iPhone)
Jan 14th
It’s just the iPhone version of this Flash game. You move left and right and try to pick up good stuff and avoid hitting bad stuff. Very simple, good fun, looks a lot better than that screen shot suggests, the touch controls work perfectly well and there are online leaderboards. Good stuff.
