A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Words With Friends (iPhone)
May 24th
Barely touched my trusty iPhone gameswise over the weekend. Saturday was spent in London, taking my wife on a magical mystery tour for her birthday. Went to the Natural History Museum, the V&A and then finished off the day at the Legally Blonde musical. (Hugely enjoyable stuff – and not just before my Doctor, Peter Davison, is in it.) Then Sunday was spent with Red Dead Redemption.
I did, however, manage to find time to keep up with my games of Words With Friends. It would be more accurate to have taken a screen shot of a solid but unspectacular move, but I just wanted to show off a bit.
Slay (iPhone)
May 21st
Fantastic as always, but I’d love it if the game gave me a warning if I was about to create a unit that would take me above my maintenance limit.
Of course, the real problem with Slay is that once you start playing it’s difficult to stop. Those of you who’ve played it will know what I mean. And if you haven’t, it’s probably about time you started.
Last Gladiators Pinball (iPhone)
May 21st
Okay, thanks to a helpful poster on the Touch Arcade forums (yes, people like that do exist amongst the twelve year olds still impressed by polygons) I’ve found out how to view high scores. You just leave the game on the initial menu screen for a while and they pop up. Not ideal, by any means, but at least they’re there.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 20th
Fifteen new levels! Hooray! Good levels, too, though three-starring them hasn’t been much of a problem so far. I’ve only got three or four left to do and only started yesterday lunchtime.
Denki Blocks Lite (iPhone)
May 20th
Nice little puzzle game, though I’m not sure I’ll buy it as I think the Master challenges will give me nightmares.
(Apologies for brevity of my posts today, by the way, I’ve had a long, long day already and it’s barely even lunchtime. Had to get up two hours early to drive for an hour for a hospital appointment, then drive back, then get into work, etc.)
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 20th
I said yesterday that this was great fun. I wasn’t lying. Not an awful lot more to say about it, though.
Anyway, here’s the music video it was based on. It’s not NSFW or the sensitive. My wife thinks it’s awesome, I find it slightly troubling.
And I’m surprised that the current version of the game got past Apple – I don’t hold out much hope for future episodes.
Last Gladiators Pinball (iPhone)
May 20th
Conversion of a fondly-remembered Saturn pinball game, I believe. It’s hard to find on the App Store, due to having a Japanese description and title, so here’s a link. It’s currently free, down from £2.99, but the extra tables cost £2.99 each. Still, free pinball, eh?
It’s good, too. It feels just right and there’s a lot do. I’m no pinball expert, so forgive me if I don’t go into details. My only problem at the moment – and this may well be me being stupid – is that I can’t see any record of my high score(s) anywhere, rendering the whole thing a bit pointless.
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 19th
A bit of a departure for Mobigame, Trucker’s Delight is a bizarre, faintly troubling and fantastically entertaining mix of Chase HQ and MotherHEAT. (Look, when an Xbox indie game becomes a reference, it must be good – go download MotorHEAT right now.)
So, right, you’re a trucker and you espy a lovely young lady in a sports car. So you decide, as you do, to chase her down the road and ram into her car as much as possible… which somehow earns you money. You tilt to steer your truck down the undulating landscape and use bizarre power ups, trying to ram the sports car, disable pesky bikers and police cars and get to the next checkpoint before your time runs out.
The pixel art style of the game is absolutely lovely, it runs at a fair old clip and it’s very, very moreish.
There are some very, very minor niggles – it can be hard to see ahead of you going uphill, power-ups always come in the same order, very occasionally there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid a collision – but I don’t hesitate to recommend it at the current price of £1.79. And if you find the boobs distasteful then, well, I’m sure Apple will demand their removal sooner or later.
FIFA World Cup (iPhone)
May 19th
This is actually a decent little football game. The arrows showing where your passes will go are a very nice touch, the buttons being labelled with actual words are good, the analogue stick appearing where you put your thumb help the controls… it just feels like someone sat down and actually thought about the game and didn’t just shove a World Cup skin on a standard football game template.
There are issues, of course. Player switching can be painful and there’s a distinct lack of teams compared to FIFA 10, obviously enough. I’m not even sure how well it would stand up to huge amounts of play. But for me, wanting just to play a quick game of footie now and again, this is just about right.
Of course, there’s X2 Football 2010 out now, which everyone’s raving about. I’ve not tried that (yet) and it might be a better game than FIFA, but unless I’m missing some horrendous bugs or exploits (perfectly possible given my limited time with the game) I can’t see anyone feeling too ripped off if they buy this.
Perfect Balance: Harmony (iPhone)
May 19th
I’m getting through this at a fair old lick, up to level sixty-something at the moment. It’s a bit of a tricky one, but I’m sure I’ll suddenly be all “AHA!” about it soon enough. And if not, well, you can skip up to three levels on your way through the game. Nice little touch, that.