A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Warpgate (iPhone)
Jun 23rd
This was GREAT and BRILLIANT and then I never played it again.
I love my space ship when it's not blowing up.
So time to dump it from my iPhone?
Well, no, because I tried it again and got sucked in. Took a while to relearn the interface, but I got there without having to restart. Still died horribly whenever combat happened, but I decided to try and stay out of fights and spread my religion quietly and without bother. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that, though. I need to try and convert people in enemy space now.
It’s a worry.
SimCity (iPhone)
Jun 23rd
Oh! A surprise! I was ready to delete SimCity from my phone, but decided I should give it a chance first.
A thriving metropolis... possibly.
I loaded up Tutorial City, which I’d carried on playing after it had taught me all it knew, and built a fire station. And a house for me. And Big Ben. And then I worried about how to balance the budget. And then I noticed loops of road and rail weren’t actually connected up properly and I wondered how to fix that. And then I saw demand for Industrial was very high and wondered where to put more of that, because I didn’t want to ruin my residential land prices.
So, yeah, SimCity is staying on my phone for now. I’ll probably not play it again for months, but it’s a good game and it’s nice to know it’s there.
Space Miner (iPhone)
Jun 23rd
I came to an understanding with Space Miner last night.
I agreed that it wasn’t a bad game at all, it agreed that it just wasn’t for me.
Hunting the last asteroid on a level is just plain horrid.
It’s not you, Space Miner, it’s me. I like you, I do, but your dialogue and controls get right on my big, wobbly man tits.
I’ll delete you from my phone, you’ll go on giving fun to the thousands of people who love you.
Bye.
Fast & Furious Adrenaline (iPhone)
Jun 23rd
So, right, last night was a “Play Big Games” night. And by “big” I don’t mean AAA or best-selling, but big in terms of the number of megabytes. Running out of space on my iPhone, you see.
Anyway, first to be tested was Fast & Furious Adrenaline, in which you race cars down streets and try to get to the finish line before other cars. Sometimes you do a time trial where you have to beat time itself, rather than other cars, but not in a Doctor Who kind of way.
I was so busy taking a picture I missed those blue arrows.
Other times you do drag racing, which relies on you timing your gear changes and then using your boost. These are great fun, because they are different.
The main racing, you see, isn’t that interesting. Oh, it’s a long way from broken. Okay, when you crash it all goes a bit funny trying to turn you round the right way again, but the tilt controls work very nicely, the tracks even have shortcuts and it’s all quite nice (when the framerate isn’t plummeting to depths even BP couldn’t reach). It’s just not very exciting and, along with the performance issues, led to me deleting the game from phone. Not without regrets, but too few to mention.
Yeah... no.
Felt like a slightly harsh decision, but I’ve got plenty of driving games. And it’s not like I’m deleting the game from iTunes, I can always put it back on if I feel inclined.
But I won’t.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Jun 22nd
KA-BOOM!
Ha ha! More levels! Hooray!
Took me forty minutes or so to complete them all, but it’s going to take a lot longer to get all three stars for all the levels.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Jun 22nd
I'm losing.
Out of my last ten completed games, I think I won two. For some reason I’m doing really, really badly lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired, whether I’m having a run of bad luck or if everyone else has improved while I’ve stayed steady, but it’s really quite annoying.
Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter (iPhone)
Jun 21st
How lucky am I?
Well, I can spend my lunchtime hunting dinosaurs.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I reckon that makes me pretty damn lucky.
A charging dinosaur. One bolt. One shot. And I'm not dead. Phew.
It’s not even like I have to move. And even if I die – which I do – then I don’t really die, I just glare at the screen and hit a button to try again.
When you sit down and think about it, life is pretty sweet.
Come on, just for a few seconds, sit down, think of all the amazing things you can do. You can hunt dinosaurs, explore alien worlds, shoot outlaws in the American West, drive fast cars at insane speeds and even take part in strange activities that don’t have any equivalent in the physical world. Strange glowing blocks and lines, moving, pulsing, changing under your control.
The power of it all! The worlds we visit! The sheer fucking strangeness of the things we experience every single day!
It’s a wonder we’re not all insane.
FIFA World Cup (iPhone)
Jun 21st
What was that match on Friday night? Who were England? Not a team, just eleven men who looked like they’d never met before. Except, no, not eleven men – nine men, whatever the hell Rooney is and the unquiet ghost of Emile Heskey.
And a bird on a goal making a mockery of the whole thing.
At least I had FIFA here so I could play the match myself and get a better result.
Aaaaaah, much better.
In my version we won comfortably and Rooney scored with a gorgeous chip over the keeper that, had it been, you know, real, would have gone down as one of the best goals of the tournament.
Sigh.
Hellkid (iPhone)
Jun 21st
Run, Hellkid, run! And fix your server!
Surprise!
Well, I was.
Surprised.
I spent more time playing Hellkid than any other game over the weekend.
Maybe.
Or it was tied with Geometry Wars and Pix’n Love Rush.
DO I LOOK LIKE A STOPWATCH?
JESUS.
I would have played it a lot more, too, but the servers were down last night and it wouldn’t save my scores, so I played different things instead. Still games, though. I didn’t take up the vuvuzela or anything. (If I had, my wife would have killed me and I’d be writing this blog from the grave with skellington fingers and a scary, clacking face-jaw.)
Pix’n Love Rush (iPhone)
Jun 21st
Yes, it looks so nice it makes me want to jump up and down and point at it with much glee.
This really is lovely. Two things spoiling it a little, though.
1) The “needing 1,000,000 points to get on OpenFeint” thing. Still don’t like that.
2) Some of the levels seem to be pretty much impossible to do perfectly. (Or maybe actually impossible.) On the one hand, this adds a nice level of quick decision making to the game, on the other hand it’s a bit, well, shit.
Minor points, though, very minor. Absolutely great game otherwise.
