A Gaming Diary
Archive for May, 2010
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 20th
New levels, new background.
Fifteen new levels! Hooray! Good levels, too, though three-starring them hasn’t been much of a problem so far. I’ve only got three or four left to do and only started yesterday lunchtime.
Denki Blocks Lite (iPhone)
May 20th
Slide the blocks around - they merge when the touch. It's simple once you try it.
Nice little puzzle game, though I’m not sure I’ll buy it as I think the Master challenges will give me nightmares.
(Apologies for brevity of my posts today, by the way, I’ve had a long, long day already and it’s barely even lunchtime. Had to get up two hours early to drive for an hour for a hospital appointment, then drive back, then get into work, etc.)
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 20th
I said yesterday that this was great fun. I wasn’t lying. Not an awful lot more to say about it, though.
Bikers are bloody annoying, but not as bad as the police.
Anyway, here’s the music video it was based on. It’s not NSFW or the sensitive. My wife thinks it’s awesome, I find it slightly troubling.
And I’m surprised that the current version of the game got past Apple – I don’t hold out much hope for future episodes.
Last Gladiators Pinball (iPhone)
May 20th
Conversion of a fondly-remembered Saturn pinball game, I believe. It’s hard to find on the App Store, due to having a Japanese description and title, so here’s a link. It’s currently free, down from £2.99, but the extra tables cost £2.99 each. Still, free pinball, eh?
It's nice to be able to see the whole table at once.
It’s good, too. It feels just right and there’s a lot do. I’m no pinball expert, so forgive me if I don’t go into details. My only problem at the moment – and this may well be me being stupid – is that I can’t see any record of my high score(s) anywhere, rendering the whole thing a bit pointless.
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 19th
A bit of a departure for Mobigame, Trucker’s Delight is a bizarre, faintly troubling and fantastically entertaining mix of Chase HQ and MotherHEAT. (Look, when an Xbox indie game becomes a reference, it must be good – go download MotorHEAT right now.)
The more you hit the sports car, the more points you get.
So, right, you’re a trucker and you espy a lovely young lady in a sports car. So you decide, as you do, to chase her down the road and ram into her car as much as possible… which somehow earns you money. You tilt to steer your truck down the undulating landscape and use bizarre power ups, trying to ram the sports car, disable pesky bikers and police cars and get to the next checkpoint before your time runs out.
The Mr. Slurp power-up has you use your tongue to lick the clothes off young ladies.
The pixel art style of the game is absolutely lovely, it runs at a fair old clip and it’s very, very moreish.
There are some very, very minor niggles – it can be hard to see ahead of you going uphill, power-ups always come in the same order, very occasionally there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid a collision – but I don’t hesitate to recommend it at the current price of £1.79. And if you find the boobs distasteful then, well, I’m sure Apple will demand their removal sooner or later.
FIFA World Cup (iPhone)
May 19th
This is actually a decent little football game. The arrows showing where your passes will go are a very nice touch, the buttons being labelled with actual words are good, the analogue stick appearing where you put your thumb help the controls… it just feels like someone sat down and actually thought about the game and didn’t just shove a World Cup skin on a standard football game template.
The replay viewer has more features than you might expect in a mobile game.
There are issues, of course. Player switching can be painful and there’s a distinct lack of teams compared to FIFA 10, obviously enough. I’m not even sure how well it would stand up to huge amounts of play. But for me, wanting just to play a quick game of footie now and again, this is just about right.
Of course, there’s X2 Football 2010 out now, which everyone’s raving about. I’ve not tried that (yet) and it might be a better game than FIFA, but unless I’m missing some horrendous bugs or exploits (perfectly possible given my limited time with the game) I can’t see anyone feeling too ripped off if they buy this.
Perfect Balance: Harmony (iPhone)
May 19th
It's a crazy plan...
I’m getting through this at a fair old lick, up to level sixty-something at the moment. It’s a bit of a tricky one, but I’m sure I’ll suddenly be all “AHA!” about it soon enough. And if not, well, you can skip up to three levels on your way through the game. Nice little touch, that.
Skate 2 (360)
May 17th
Absolutely brilliant. I’m so glad I finally gave Skate a chance. I went for the second game as it was far cheaper to download it directly to the 360 than to buy a disc copy of the third game. I spent hours with this over the weekend, even when I didn’t mean to. I’m pretty rubbish at it, but the satisfaction gained from nailing a line after ninety minutes of trying can’t be beaten. Here’s a couple of things I did that don’t look impressive, but which made me very happy.
I’ve really got to thank my brother-in-law. If I hadn’t watched him playing Skate I’d never have bothered checking it out again after my pretty disastrous time with the demo of the first game. So Curt, thanks very much!
Pinch (iPhone)
May 17th
Another lovely puzzle game on a platform full of them. You’ve got coloured circles – norbs, the game calls them – and you have to split them and combine them into different sizes and colours to get them to the exit.
The controls are a bit finicking at first, but you soon get used to them. The only real trouble after the first few levels comes when trying to split orbs near one-way and limited-use gates – sometimes a stray finger will push the norb into a no-win situation and you’ll have to start over. Not a major problem when the levels are so short, but annoying.
It may not look like much graphically, but it's always very clear what's going on, which is the important part.
The levels, though small, are all well-designed – the only real problem is that there aren’t enough of them. It doesn’t help that the game’s so incredibly addictive. It’s one of those games where you can’t let go until you’ve finished a level… and then when you get past it and see the next one you have to give it a quick go, just to try it out… which meant that the game flew by. It wasn’t long until I’d polished off all the forty-eight levels and was left wanting more. Luckily, the developers say that more are coming. They bloody well better.
Still, for 59p, it’s difficult to really complain.
(Oh, and in the current version there’s a bug with the OpenFeint achievements, but don’t let that put you off. Those achievements will become meaningless once Apple’s own system is released later this year, anyway.)
Perfect Balance: Harmony (iPhone)
May 17th
Lovely little puzzle game. It’s been long enough since I played the Flash version that it feels new. Was free when I downloaded, which makes it a huge bargain.
This is not a winning solution.
If you’ve not played it, you simply have to put the shapes into the level without them falling off. Easy to understand, good controls, lots of content.
