A Gaming Diary
Archive for May, 2010
Trials HD (360)
May 10th
Polished off the Easy and Medium levels at the weekend. I think I got a Silver medal on one level, but it was all Bronze medals apart from that. It’s getting tricky now – I wonder how I’ll cope with the Hard levels?
(Of course, if I hadn’t spent several minutes trying to get a strike on a level that included a set of out-of-the-way bowling pins I’d have probably tried out one or two of the Hard levels by now.)
Black (360)
May 10th
You remember Black, right? An Xbox first-person shooter with satisfying gunplay – both stealth and all-out-guns-blazing-near-genocide – and brilliantly designed levels and huge explosions and graphics so beautiful that they still look half-decent today.
It should, by rights, have been an absolute classic, but lengthy, incredibly, astoundingly dull, unskippable cut scenes and a save system that meant that there was no point playing the game unless you had a couple of hours to spare conspired against all the good things it did.
I played through the first two levels again on Sunday (with my iPhone in hand for the cut scenes) and nearly wept at the missed opportunity. It’s so, so close to being one of the very best FPS games that’s ever been made, but what I can only assume is some sort of bloody-minded “we’re going to make you appreciate our art whether you like it or not” attitude brings the whole thing crashing down.
The fact that I still put it on now and again, half a decade or so since it’s release, shows the quality. The fact that I’ve only ever seen the first few levels illustrates the problems.
Cavern (iPhone)
May 7th
Another roguelike, this one built specifically for the iPhone. I’ve not played it much, but it seems like it could be very decent if I can get the hang of the movement controls. At the moment I’m all over the shop. The principle seems decent – tap the square you want to move to – but somehow I keep mucking it up and running around like a loon. (There’s also a small d-pad in the bottom of the screen, but I’m having even less luck with that. Sometimes it moves me, most of the time it seems to do nothing. Perhaps I should check for instructions, eh?)
An epic battle, possibly.
It also seems awfully easy to die, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Nothing wrong with a good bit of permadeath.
If you’ve not played any sort of roguelike before then the magnificent Sword of Fargoal is probably the easiest starting point, but this looks like it might be another worthwhile example of the genre. I’ll hopefully have better impressions after the weekend, if iNetHack doesn’t eat all my roguelike gaming time.
iNetHack (iPhone)
May 7th
Bravo! Three cheers for the developer!
I tried iNetHack out a long, long time ago and found it a little too fiddly, as I remember. The latest version, though, is much improved, with a far better interface and lovely graphics that combine familiar letters and simbols with nicely-drawn graphics.
Get out of the way, dog.
It’s still NetHack – and as such probably incomprehensible to newcomers, though help is available – but it’s a great implementation and the developer has to be applauded for improving the game so much from the initial release.
The biggest test for me when I come back from a long time away from NetHack is how easily I can find a way to rename my pet. I had to look through a fair few menus in this version, but I found it fairly quickly and now have a lovely little dog called Ralph. He keeps wandering off, but he does like eating goblin corpses, bless him.
Ninjatown: Trees of Doom! (iPhone)
May 7th
It’s one of those “climb as high as you can” games, but doesn’t use tilt controls. Instead, you’ve got two trees up the side of the screen. Touching the side you’re on makes you climb up, touching the other side makes you jump across the gap to the other side.
Red guy kills you, purple stuff kills you, red toadstool thing bounces you.
Your goal, as normal for these things, is to avoid obstacles and collect power ups as you ascend. It makes the most of its ever-so-slightly novel control scheme and is slower paced than many games, often giving you a good amount of time to decide how to proceed. (Though as you get higher the more sections that require quick reflexes there are, with slippery wood, moving demons and nasty chaps with blow pipes and spears.)
It feels a bit fiddly at first, but once you become comfortable with the controls it does start to get its claws in. I certainly found myself playing it more than I expected after my first few goes left me feeling a little cold towards it.
The main problem is that it’s the sort of game you start up for lots of short sessions, but has a load of annoying, unskippable splash screens when it starts up. It’s quick and easy to restart once you’re in the game, but if they could shorten the initial boot time it would be lovely.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 7th
I'm great!
So, I’ve now three-starred the latest batch of levels. Can I have some more, please?
MLB World Series 2010 (iPhone)
May 6th
Decent baseball game. Bit light on features, but includes real teams and players. (What I think I might really like is the officially licensed MLB Power Pros game, but that’s only out on the US App Store. Grrr.) Good pitching and batting controls, which are what really matters, but it’s sometimes hard to tell what just happened and why you’re suddenly two runs down.
It doesn't look great, but I quite like the basic mechanics.
I only played a single Exhibition game last night, as the Astros against the Phillies. I started reasonably well, but ended up losing 16-5. Ouch. Still, doesn’t seem that far removed from reality.
The real MLB NL standings, yesterday.
The Astros really aren’t doing very well at all this season.
Sword & Poker (iPhone)
May 6th
Hooray! I beat the final boss! I win!
Not the final boss. That might be a bit spoilerful.
Except, actually, that just opened lots more levels. It’s the game that keeps on giving!
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 6th
I like this screen.
So, after playing Crush The Castle for a bit I had a hankering for some Angry Birds. I had four levels left to complete with the full three star ranking, now I’m down to three.
Crush The Castle (iPhone)
May 6th
Played a fair few levels of Crush the Castle last night. It’s the iPhone version of a web game and basically set the template for the likes of Angry Birds. (That’s at least as far as I’m aware.) I shall explain in pictures.
There's a castle, of sorts.
There's a trebuchet. You click once to start, then again to launch your projectiles.
You (hopefully) hit the castle and it wobbles a bit, then (hopefully) falls over.
There’s a few things that make it worse than Angry Birds. Obviously, it lacks the charm of that game. Also, the trebuchet is on its own screen, so you can’t actually see the castle when you fire. The various projectiles you can use aren’t nearly as interesting or as skillful as the birds in Angry Birds. Finally, there’s not such a satisfying sense of destruction. Parts of the castle fall rather than break – and it takes a lot of effort to make them do that. You don’t feel nearly as powerful in Crush The Castle as Angry Birds.
Still, it’s not a bad game by any means and was free when I downloaded it yesterday, so I’m not going to complain too much.
