A Gaming Diary
Archive for August, 2010
Dead Runner (iPhone)
Aug 26th
Remember Deathchase on the Spectrum? Well, this is like that, only without any shooting.
You’re in a forest and there are nasty ghosts (or something) behind you, so you have to run away, tilting your iPhone to avoid trees.
Run through the forest, run!
Now, in real life you’d get slower and slower as you ran, until you fell over and were set upon by angry ghosts. In the game, though, you get faster and faster, as you might expect. There are two modes – a simple distance mode and a points-based one with glowing orbs to collect.
It’s all very simple, but it looks very nice indeed, the controls work perfectly well and it’s another brilliant little game to add to the iPhone’s near-infinite list of such titles. Perfect bite-sized gaming.
Minecraft (Mac)
Aug 25th
Done a fair amount of work on my castle lately.
There’s a new section below the Secret Shrine.
There are new towers over the throne room.
The graveyard walls are now covered in moss.
It's not as awesomely impressive as other buildings on the server, but it's mine.
I’ve even got a couple of waterfalls. (And, yes, there is a secret passage linking them.)
Mostly, though, I’ve been exploring a massive cave system I discovered under the hills near my castle where I’d been mining. I found a couple of (non-working) monster generators and some empty chests. (Apparently you get stuff if you destroy the chests, but I didn’t know that at the time and have never been able to find them again.) I did, however, get enough gold to top my throne and enough diamonds to make a wall of jukeboxes in my guard house.
NHL 2K11 (iPhone)
Aug 25th
It’s a hockey game. The ice kind of hockey.
Now, I know nothing about hockey, but I’ve been enjoying this. It’s fast, fluid and responsive. I can’t tell you how well it represents the sport, but it’s a good videogame.
I don't think I've won one of these puck drops, or whatever they're actually called.
I’ll probably delete it today.
Why?
Well, because it doesn’t save mid-game. It supports app switching in OS4, but if the app gets closed in the background while you’re doing other things, then you lose any game in progress. There’s also no autosave in season mode that I can see – you have to remember to save after every game. Which would be annoying enough if it worked, but the first time I tried the app crashed and I lost everything.
If it saved properly in the middle of a game I’d probably love it, but as it is I don’t think it’s worth the effort, unfortunately.
Minecraft (PC/Mac)
Aug 23rd
I added a glass-domed tower to my castle at the weekend. Shame I forgot to take a screenshot of it, really. To make up for it, here’s a picture of a duck in my graveyard.
Quack.
This lunchtime I spent a very therapeutic forty-five minutes or so constructing a wine cellar.
Wine racks.
Okay, so the new fences don’t make very good wine racks, but I can’t think of anything better right now.
Monorace (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
Like Gravity Runner, but without jumping – a single touch sends you from floor to ceiling or vice versa.
Time moves faster as you approach the right-hand side of the screen. This is important.
It may not look great in screenshots, but it’s actually pretty brilliant. There are a ton of pre-defined levels where you need to be as fast as possible, rather than just get to the end, and an endless mode.
All three side-scrollers I’ve blogged about today are great, but this is the one I spent most time with over the weekend – and by quite a long way.
Monster Dash (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
Canabalt, Robot Unicorn Attack, Run… and now… Monster Dash!
You can pick up better weapons. The Machine Gun Jetpack is pretty amazing.
You run from left to right, avoiding spikes and pits and shooting enemies.
Simple controls, well-balanced, no obvious rough edges, great little game. Seems to be selling very well on the App Store and deservedly so.
Solipskier (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
My wife had a miscarriage last week, which was absolutely devastating, hence the lack of posts. You can read all about it HERE if you want more information, but I have no idea why you’d want to.
Anyway, on with the games!
I wasn’t in the mood or mentally up to anything deep over the weekend, but four quick, thrillsome games helped get me through. First up, Solipskier.
Arrows show where gates will be.
You draw the level with your finger to guide your little skier through gates and get him to jump. It’s insanely fast and great fun. The music’s bloody awful, but I play my iPhone games with the sound off ninety-nine percent of the time, so I don’t mind.
You can play the Flash version online HERE, but using the mouse is nowhere near as easy as using your finger on the screen. The iPhone version’s much more enjoyable.
Minecraft (Mac)
Aug 20th
Sorry for the lack of updates, but it’s a difficult time right now – my wife and I got some very bad news earlier this week.
While I’ve been offline, though, someone built a road outside my castle, so now I’m linked in to the rest of the server.
Follow, follow, follow, follow....
That’s very nice.
I’m hoping normal blogging service should resume next week.
Minecraft (Mac)
Aug 17th
The evolution of my castle on the multiplayer server I talked about yesterday.
As it was yesterday, not much more than a tower.
I built on the back.
Then I built a courtyard garden on the front.
Here you can see the courtyard on the front.
Time to sign my work.
Building a big entrance way and hall on the front of the castle.
I didn't like the way it looked, so I built a guardhouse by the main entrance.
A view from another angle after some more tidying up.
The view from above.
It’s not as impressive as a lot of the other things that have been built on the server, but I like it.
Minecraft (Mac/Web/PC)
Aug 16th
Yes, I used all three clients over the weekend. I played it on my desktop PC at home (a winter wonderland I forgot to take a screenshot of) and using the Mac and browser clients in the office. (I had to come in on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend, briefly.)
But, today, I’m not going to show off my single-player achievements, instead I’m going to show you some of the stuff that’s been built on the BeeX server.
What you see when you log in.
And this is what you see when you turn round. The tunnel links a lot of the stuff people have built.
A statue I made (which then was added to be an unknown user).
My great beardy tower. You can jump from the top, which is as high as the came lets you build, into a pit that goes down to the bottom of the world. It kills you, but it's fun.
Strange, oddly beautiful towers.
Roads, walls, towers and more.
Castles are popular - and very impressive.
Dimrill's castle is simply amazing.
It's even got a library.
Graffiti, Minecraft style.
And that’s just a tiny fraction of the amazing things people have built on the server.
What’s nice is how well everyone’s been playing together. I don’t think there’s ever been any intentional vandalism, people have found open, unused areas of the world and made their homes there.
