A Gaming Diary
Archive for August, 2010
Say What You See: Music Fest (iPhone)
Aug 16th
The dastardly final clue. (Ignore the balls.)
Finished, with the help of my wife and – for that final clue – my friends. A complete obsession for the twenty-four hours it took to complete.
Gravity Runner (iPhone)
Aug 16th
Oh what a feeling...
Nicely-styled, one-button platformer, the twist being that tapping in mid-air inverts the gravity, letting you run on the ceiling. It’s got a ton of levels and an endless mode and would be very good indeed if the controls always responded properly. As it is, too often it’s decided I want to invert gravity when I want to jump, killing me dead.
A shame, but it’s still the game I played most over the weekend, despite that smallish issue. The developers are looking into it, too, so hopefully it’ll be as good as it deserves to be before long.
Say What You See: Music Fest (iPhone)
Aug 13th
Danger! Red alert! Danger!
::runs around the room making siren noises with arms flailing::
This is one of those games that gets into my brain and won’t let go. It’s a puzzle, where the picture contains clues to band names. So if there were a bunch of wolves putting together a newspaper the answer would be The Wolfgang Press. (It’s a good thing I’m not designing these puzzles, really.)
Some clues are much easier than others. The guys in t-shirts there took me a while.
Anyway, it’s incredibly hard to let go of the thing because you know the answers are there, right in front of your face. (Assuming I’ve heard of all the groups and artists in the puzzle, of course. This is by no means certain. I’m getting on in years and don’t have much time for the stuff on the radio these days.)
My brain just doesn’t want to let it lie. I even had an one answer come to me in a dream last night and had to grab my iPhone at five in the morning to type it in before I forgot it.
The Incident (iPhone)
Aug 13th
Up to level four now and it’s got properly good after the easy opening chapters. Level three was a very welcome step up from level two, but level four seems just right to me at the moment. Hugely enjoyable – just a shame it took so long for me to get there.
That reminds me, I have Carcassonne turns to play.
Of course, difficulty curves are tricksy things. I’ve seen people online complaining that the first two levels are fun, but that it gets too frustrating after that. Poor developers can’t win.
Minecraft (Mac/Web)
Aug 12th
After spending some time exploring massive caverns beneath the earth, I decided to build a stairway as high as it could go.
Building the staircase was stressful.
I fell off several times making it, but always found my stone and steps.
The view from the top.
Once it was as high as it would go, I made a platform with a couple of holes in it and poured lava down one and water down the other. I was hoping for some obsidian when they met at the bottom, but it was not to be.
The falls.
Still, it’s fairly successful, I think.
Enviro-Bear 2010 (iPhone)
Aug 12th
Fuck off, badger!
Gave this a go, to see if I could see it as a game, rather than an amusing joke app. I really tried – I ate a couple of fish and, I think, found a cave, but then I left the cave, I think, and I got buried under snow. Silly, yes. Amusing, yes. Annoying, yes. Brilliant, possibly. Great game, no.
So Long, Oregon! (iPhone)
Aug 12th
From the makers of Enviro-Bear comes a game that’s almost as silly, but far more playable. (I know some people will defend Enviro-Bear to the death as a game, but I’ve never managed to get past that control system. That said, it’s one of the very first iPhone games I ever bought and it’s never left my phone.)
So Long, Oregon! is a mixture of, um, The Oregon Trail and Trials HD. Sort of.
Indians can be helpful, but not in this case.
You’re in a wagon and you have to reach El Dorado by jumping over hills, hunting animals and getting into all kinds of disease-based scrapes. It’s randomly generated and, I think, sometimes impossible, but games are short enough that having to restart isn’t a problem. (The charm helps, too.)
I spend a stupidly long time playing this last night. I even got to El Dorado and back once, making me one of only fifteen players to set a score on the leaderboard. (I was the worst of those fifteen, but at least I got there!)
There are even extra challenge modes that change things round a little – I’m especially fond of the race mode.
Minecraft (Mac/Web)
Aug 11th
I just lost everything.
I was building a big tower to make a lava-fall and I fell off the top and died.
Ran back, but couldn’t find my stuff anywhere, except a couple of bits of stone. That’s a bucket, full set of iron armor, diamond pickaxe, etc. all lost forever.
I had just enough iron in storage to make another bucket, so I managed to complete the lava fall, but now I’ve got to go looking for more sources of metals and diamonds to replace all my stuff.
At least I had a good stock of stone and iron pickaxes and some food.
It glows!
It’s a nice lava-fall, but I don’t think it was worth it.
Minecraft (Mac/Web)
Aug 11th
I decided to make a giant stone face, full of sadness, then use water to mimic tears streaming down its face.
A very good idea.
But things didn’t work out as I’d hoped.
The Crying Man.
I still think it’s a good idea, but that version isn’t very good at all.
Must try harder.
The Incident (iPhone)
Aug 11th
I’d have thought that the best thing to do when random objects were falling from the sky would be to remain indoors, but no, in this game you have to move left and right and jump so that you stay on top of an ever-growing pile of rubbish.
The flags there are a checkpoint.
The controls (tilt to move, tap to jump) work well, it looks lovely, but it’s really, really fucking dull for the first hour or so. I just played and played, my stock of lives growing, until I finally reached a point where I was losing more lives than I was gaining. It was worth the effort, because it’s a decent little game, but it’s not a good start.
