A Gaming Diary
Archive for March, 2010
Dungeon Solitaire (iPhone)
Mar 1st
A wholehearted, unqualified recommendation here. Dungeon Solitaire is a brilliant game that works on the toilet, in bed, on the sofa, at your desk and sitting outside the TK Maxx changing rooms while your wife tries on swimsuits.
Spend two minutes going through the tutorial and this screen will make sense.
It may look like a collectible card battling game, but it’s very much not. The clue’s in the title. It’s a solitaire game. It’s got its own deck and its own rules, but it’s all about turning over cards and trying to win. There’s more scope for tactics than traditional solitaire games and it’s got a very robust set of rules that sound immensely complicated on paper, but which are made very clear by a quick tutorial.
You can add to the game by buying cards to add to your deck as DLC, but there’s no need to do so. The main deck is good enough to stand up to repeated play.
The interface may lack polish, but the game itself is fantastic.
There are also OpenFeint leaderboards and a good list of achievements and overall this is a very, very good solitaire game. It being a card game, there will of course be times where you can’t win, but that’s common to all these games and no reason to steer clear. I really do urge you to take a chance and spend £1.19 on this game, because I honestly don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Astro Ranch (iPhone)
Mar 1st
A small, Harvest Moon style farming game, that’s unfortunately been released in an appallingly unfinished state.
There are crashes aplenty, a terrible lack of feedback when player actions fail and the social networking part of the game simply doesn’t work right now.
An example. I started the game, went through the tutorial, then spent all my money on seeds. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to dig the ground so I could plant the seeds, but it wouldn’t work. I used my shovel, my character walked over to the square I’d chosen, then did nothing. There was absolutely no explanation of why it wouldn’t work, but I eventually found out online that you need to pay to dig squares and I had no money. A little pop up explaining the problem would have saved me an awful lot frustration – and when a game loses that amount of goodwill so early, it’s hard to get back. (It does tell you that it costs money to dig land in some text help you can find in your house, but it was in the Crops sections, which I didn’t check, rather than the Basics section, which is where it tells you how to use your tools.)
Give him cannonballs. Hope game doesn't crash.
Another example. There’s a chap who wants you to find three cannonballs. I wandered around the tiny game world, found the balls, then took them to him. I gave the balls to him… and the game crashed. I went back in (the game had saved the previous day, so I didn’t have to repeat too much), then tried again. This time when I gave him the balls, the guy told me to go find the balls, then immediately thanked me for bringing the balls to him.
There are other niggles, such as path-finding bugs that send your character in the opposite direction to where you want to go. The controls need work too, as sometimes you need to be annoyingly precise about exactly where you position your character and I really don’t like having to tap the screen to move. It’s all right when moving down the screen, but when going up the screen my finger gets in the way. I don’t like having to shake my iPhone to shake trees, either.
All a bit flakey and unfinished, in other words. Luckily I’ve not yet hit any bugs that stop my game from loading, as others have reported online.
There's decent farming underneath it all.
Once it’s all fixed, there’s going to be a good game here, but I don’t think it’ll ever rival Harvest Moon. I’m not a fan of the sci-fi setting, as having made-up names for vegetables and animals makes everything less intuitive, and the game world is surprisingly small, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the game design.
After a few updates this might be worth getting, but until its been fixed and tweaked it’s impossible to recommend.
Giana Sisters (iPhone)
Mar 1st
Giana Sisters began life as a Super Mario Bros clone. Nintendo didn’t like it very much and it was, I believe, removed from sale.
It’s now back on the iPhone. Despite not being an exact clone any more, it doesn’t do much to hide its main influence. There are enemies to stomp, blocks to hit with your head and a power up that lets you shoot fireballs.
If you get all the red gems in a world you can access a bonus level.
It’s all very playable and nice-looking and is more than merely decent, while not rivaling Nintendo in terms of level design or feel. It works well enough, though I wish the left and right controls were a little higher up the screen, but the lack of inertia means the character movement feels more workmanlike than inspired.
If you’re expecting a dodgy Mario rip-off, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you’re expecting something to rival Mario, you’ll be disappointed. It’s a very good game, but I can’t love it.
Final Fantasy (iPhone)
Mar 1st
Didn’t play as much of this as I’d intended over the weekend, but I managed to do some wandering and found another town.
Yarr!
The people there were scared of some horrible pirates who were hanging around, so I went and beat them up. (Violence, of course, solves everything.) The pirate captain was so impressed that he vowed to change his ways and gave me his pirate ship, which was nice of him.
I’ll be sailing the seven seas when I next play, then, unless I just wander around outside town fighting for a while to level up.
Orbital (iPhone)
Mar 1st
I don't know why I keep using new screenshots, you wouldn't notice if I used an old one.
One of my friends beat my Gravity high score, so I had to try and reclaim by top spot on my friends leaderboard. Unfortunately I failed, so he’s still there, taunting me. I’ll get him one day, though. One day…
Half-Minute Hero Demo (PSP)
Mar 1st
It looks like an old 16-bit RPG, but the twist is that the world is going to end in thirty seconds.
You run around as the clock counts down, getting into random fights and trying to level up enough to beat the boss before the clock hits zero. Sometimes you can get the Time Goddess to set time back, but that costs more and money each time you use it, so time and money management are absolutely key.
The first level in the demo is easy enough, but the second level took me a good long time to beat, trying to figure out the best order to do things and how to get enough cash to give me the time I needed.
It’s very good indeed, feeling absolutely fresh despite its looks, and I’d have downloaded the full version from the PSN Store over the weekend if it hadn’t cost £7 more than a UMD copy from Amazon – which, of course, I can trade in once I’ve completed the game.
Hopefully it’ll arrive this week – I’m dying to get stuck in.
