A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Babylonian Twins (iPhone)
Jul 8th
I won’t rehash the story of this game’s turbulent development. (If you don’t know about it, you can read more at Wired.)
I will say, though, that I had no interest in the game until I saw it was free. (It still is, by the way.)
What you’ve got is a puzzle-platformer, where you have to switch characters to get past obstacles and collect the four golden palm trees needed to clear each level.
That swordsman is just about to kill me.
It’s actually very playable, with great controls and excellent level design. The only problem is that it uses a lives system that means you have to start a level from scratch once you’ve lost all your lives. I know, I know, that’s standard practice, but the levels are huge and far less interesting second time around. It really saps my will to carry on playing when I’ve got three of the palms and then lose my last life because a bat’s hit me in the face.
Might just be me, though, and it’s a still pretty marvellous that they’re giving the game away.
Robot Unicorn Attack (iPhone/Mac/PC)
Jul 8th
So, yeah, I tried Robot Unicorn Attack on my old G4 Powerbook the other day. (It’s over seven years old now, is only running OSX 10.2.9, but runs Opera perfectly well for general web use.) I survived for about three hours, by which time I’d reached about seven metres.
So, yeah, it runs, but it’s slow. Like, as slow as a zombie snail. With a broken leg. (Shush.)
My wife plays the game on her Samsung NC-10 netbook and it’s much faster, but still slower than it should be.
Robot Unicorn Attack running at the correct speed. Oh... wait...
To show her how it should run, I started up the iPhone version and promptly got my best score ever and continued playing when I went for a poo. It’s not easy to put down once you start playing, especially with the sound on. And I’m sure my wife enjoyed hearing the tinny sounds of Erasure coming from the bathroom as I wrestled with a truculent stool.
Zombie Defense (iPhone)
Jul 8th
Oh, for pity’s sake. So I’m trying to delete games form my iPhone because I’m nearly about of space. I deleted a few things, like Super Monkey Ball 2 and Re:Bounce, then came across Zombie Defense. I had a feeling it was the game with the zombies and the sandbags, but couldn’t really remember. It does have one of the most generic titles ever, after all.
So I started it up on the loo, just to check that I could delete it… and got completely sucked in. (To the game, not the toilet. Apologies for the mental image you now have.)
And, yes, it is the zombies and sandbags game. You’ve got four humans who don’t want to become brain-munching undead types, so you set the sandbags up so the zombies have to go the long way round to get to them, giving the humans more time to shoot their heads off.
Curse you, diagonals!
Simple enough, really, once you’ve remembered that zombies can get through defenses if there’s a diagonal gap between sandbags. My first couple of mazes were not a success, but I survived anyway, probably due to playing on the easy setting.
I lasted all three nights and now I’ve got a bit of a problem. Not only am I not sure that I want to delete the game, I’m now contemplating paying for the full twenty-night version. Bother.
Warpgate (iPhone)
Jul 7th
No, don’t get excited. I didn’t actually play this. I don’t have any great tales of space adventures and explosions to relate. I can’t even regale you with tales of ferrying religious pamphlets around the cosmos, which is all I seem to end up doing normally.
So why am I blogging? Well, I did the start the game up. An update came out for the game this morning that implemented Apple’s whizzy new anti-aliasing and I thought I’d check out the difference. So here are two screen shots, one taken before I downloaded the update and one afterwards.
Before.
After.
It’s like night and day! It’s practically a whole new game!
Ah, exclamation marks, the punctuation of the sarcastic internet tosser.
Maybe I should have zoomed in on my space ship a bit before taking the pictures. Still, the grid lines are less jagged. And… um…
NEXT: I actually play the game long enough to get in a fight, die and put the game down for another three months. Probably.
World Soccer Champs 2010 (iPhone)
Jul 7th
I really don’t think I’ve enjoyed a footie game this much in many a long year. It’s so good that I even made a custom team. I’m not sure if I’ve ever bothered doing that before – and if I have, it must have more than fifteen years ago.
So, I decided to make a team of country music stars. Waylon and Merle up front, Willie in goal, etc. It doesn’t take very long at all to set the kit and name the players, but why the game uses a slightly-unresponsive custom keyboard and not the iPhone’s built-in keyboard I don’t know.
Nice kit, huh?
The boys and girls of the team.
Here we are in action. I made the short name of the team CTY rather than CNT. I'm mature, me.
We’re not that great, according to the stats, but I’ve winning games against bad teams, which is good enough for me. I’ve just started an eight-team tournament, so we’ll see how that goes.
World Soccer Champs 2010 (iPhone)
Jul 6th
Buggeration.
Yeah, see I knew that would happen.
Still, only 1-0. Could have been worse.
I’m gonna go and listen to country music.
Omino (iPhone)
Jul 6th
And, yeah, talking of how I like games and can enjoy most of them… here comes Omino!
It’s a bit like Super Mario Bros, only missing inertia and a lot of animation. Feels like something made in a construction kit, though it’s probably not.
It’s not that good, really – but, but, but I didn’t hate it. I downloaded it – it’s free! – and played through the two included levels without feeling angry at using up some of my life on it. When the screen popped up at the end of the second level asking me to spend 59p on the rest of the game I declined, but I didn’t mind it asking.
A game a parent would proudly display on their fridge.
It has all the hallmarks of something one person put together at home in their spare time – and if I’d made this game I’d be very pleased with myself. Let’s hope the developer keeps going and makes better and better games. If you’re reading this, I may not have loved your game, but I salute you, madam or sir. Keep going, get better and well done. Oh – and that walk-on-water power-up was a nice surprise.
(Conversely, if the game was made in an office by a team who are hoping to make money for rent and food from the game… oops. Sorry guys.)
Doodle God (iPhone)
Jul 6th
It’s not often that I buy games I don’t like. This is mainly because I research games before spending my money, but it’s also because I just really like games. I can get enjoyment from flawed games if they have good ideas or polished games that don’t have any ideas of their own. And if I enjoy myself for half an hour and never play a game again, that counts as a good use of 59p in my book.
Doodle God, though, I can’t stand. I spent half an hour or more with it last night, trying to like it, but I just don’t get it. It’s selling well, it’s got good word of mouth, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.
Basically, you’ve got “elements”. You start with earth, air, fire and water and by combining two of these you make new elements and then you combine them to form even more elements until you’ve got plasma and swamps and ghosts and all sorts of things.
So you pick a category of elements, choose one of the them, then pick another category, choose another element and see if they combine to form a new one. That’s it.
Pick one from the left, one from the right, see if anything happens. Most of the time, it doesn't.
It all boils down to randomly clicking little boxes in the hope of generating more little boxes. Why people are finding this interesting, I do not know. It reminds me of being stuck in an adventure game and randomly clicking inventory items to see if you can make something out of them.
So it’s an entire game based on the boring, annoying bit of another genre.
A waste of 59p and a waste of time. It might be something you’ll enjoy, but it makes me angry just thinking about it – especially because I’ll no doubt start it up again sometime to try to see it the way other people are seeing it and end up pissed off that I’ve wasted precious minutes of my life when I could be doing something more fun like contracting malaria or peeling the skin off my cock or something.
And let’s not get started on the cycnical fucking way they’ve shoved “Doodle” into the name of the game to try and increase sales.
Okay, okay, deep breath. I’m beginning to turn green and my shirt feels tight (though, oddly, my shorts are fine), so I better stop typing now and think about kittens or something.
World Soccer Champs 2010 (iPhone)
Jul 6th
I appear to be paralysed.
Not, you know, physically. I can still type. I haven’t stood up for a while, so I guess my legs might have stopped working, but I can still feel them, so they’re probably okay.
No, I’m paralysed in top iPhone footie game World Soccer Champs.
(And not because of the low memory issues. Running the System Activity Monitor app before starting the game sorts all that out.)
It's a bit like chess. Only instead of playing chess, you're playing football.
I’m paralysed, you see, because I can’t quite bring myself to play the game. I got England through to the second round of World Cup. (Or the World Tournament or whatever they call it to avoid giving FIFA a million, billion dollar-pounds.) We’re going to face Germany in the second round.
And, I suspect, we’re going to lose. But if we win I’ll have got further than ever before. So I don’t want to play, because I’m going to blow my chance for glory.
I have no belief in myself. Hardly surprising, really, when we only won the group because of some lucky penalties against Algeria and the USA.
I need to work up the courage to play the game at some point, then dust myself off and start again if I lose. But it’s Germany, man. Germany. My arch nemesis. The Master to my Doctor. The Palpatine to my Mace Windu. The mega shark to my giant octopus. The meddling kids to my pissed-off, costumes-obsessed janitor. The Jason Voorhees to my sex-crazed, reefer-smoking twenty-something teen. The snakes to my plane.
You get the idea.
Still, at least I don’t have malaria.
Fruit Ninja (iPhone)
Jul 5th
Kill the fruit! Kill it all to death!
The final game I need to blog about today, Fruit Ninja has just reached the million sales mark. It’s very simple – slash the screen to slice fruit, avoid slicing bombs – but the presentation is exquisite and it’s a very satisfying high score game. For more than 59p it would feel like an indulgence, but at 59p it feels, if not necessary, then at least like money very well spent.
And, right, I do apologise for the lack of wit and insight today, but I’ve been rushing through these and, well, it’s not like this blog has much of either of those things even on its best days.
I starting to wonder if I wouldn’t just be better off writing about each game once and sticking a score on the end, but that’s not what this is all about. Hopefully, even if my writing is generally poor, seeing how often games get played and when is valuable… somehow.
And at least you can be sure of an honest opinion about the games, even if it’s an opinion that might change if I discover a broken level or read the instructions and find I’ve been missing something, or whatever.
