A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Street Fighter IV (iPhone)
Mar 10th
Breathe easy. Street Fighter IV works as well as we could have hoped for.
I can’t pull off fireballs all the time, but I can’t in any version I’ve ever tried. (Hurricane kicks, however, come out a lot more easily, though still without any regularity. Again, like all versions I’ve tried. I think my thumb just likes going backwards.)
You’ve got a big virtual joystick that works well. You can see directions light up as you move it, so you can see exactly what you’re doing if you look down there.
There are four main buttons – punch, kick, special move and focus, which do the obvious. What type of punch and kick you perform seems to be dependent on how you’re holding the joystick, according to people who have investigated more thoroughly than me. Pressing forward and punch will do a heavy punch (when out of throw range) and pressing down and back and punch will do a light crouching punch, or something like that.
Take that, stupid Guile! Ha!
To do an ultra you can hit your little ultra bar when it’s lit up.
In a way, then, you’ve still got the tactical game, with some of the timing/moving skills removed.
There are a couple of options to make things easier. There’s Auto Block, which is on by deault, and a Special Move Assist, which is off. It apparently makes it easier to pull of specials, but I’ve not investigated it yet.
There’s not a lot in the way of the modes. You’ve got the main tournament mode, where you battle the other seven fighters. (Eight are included, I suspect more will come via DLC before too long – possibly when SSFIV comes out on the big consoles.) That means there’s no Seth, thank god, and you fight M. Bison last. Or I did, anyway, when I played. After winning you get shown a SSFIV trailer, which is a bit cheeky, but cool.
I’ve been through once on Normal I lost a few rounds, but no matches.
Apart from tournament, you’ve got sparring, training and dojo. Not looked at those yet.
There’s also multiplayer, which I have a feeling is Bluetooth only. Don’t think there’s any online play.
You can save match replays, but you can’t do anything clever like save them as iPhone movies or upload them to YouTube. Missed opportunity there.
Most importantly, it runs very smoothly and feels great. I really, really like it, arcade-stick-owning hardcore players will probably hate it and I suspect most other people will be probably be in the middle, leaning towards the happier end of the spectrum.
Silent Hunter (iPhone)
Mar 9th
I’m honestly not sure what to make of this arcade-style sub-’em-up.
You’re in a submarine during World War 2. And you’re on the side of the Nazis, which is a bit uncomfortable. You travel around on a map of the North Sea, until you hit some ships, then you get a 3D view of the sea and have to kill all the enemy ships and planes.
It's quite atmospheric at times, I'll give it that.
You’ve got torpedos, big guns for firing at ships and anti-aircraft guns for shooting down planes. It’s all very easy to use (though the anti-air guns could use an option to invert the y-axis), but there’s not a lot of tension or danger. I’ve died once because a ship hit me, but other than that I don’t seem to have been in any danger, even when the icon in the top left of the screen showed I’d been spotted.
It’s not bad, really, but it’s all a bit lifeless. I’m still playing it now and again, hoping that it might click, but I can’t honestly recommend it based on the first hour or so of play.
Final Fantasy (iPhone)
Mar 9th
Played a lot of this over the weekend. I got in my boat and found a new village, defeated an evil elf, returned someone’s crystal eye, gave some powder to a dwarf so he could blow things up, that sort of thing.
I'm on a boat...
After having an easy time for the first five hours or so, I’ve now found a cave that’s said to house an evil vampire. I went in and left as soon as I could – not easy, with an encounter rate that went through the roof – because I was being pummeled. I think I need to level up a bit before trying again. Time for grinding, hooray!
Power Pros (iPhone)
Mar 4th
Started a season yesterday as the Panthers. I’ve changed the difficulty to Normal and set fielding to Semi-Auto, so I need to throw to bases, which makes for a much better game. At this level I’m always in danger of losing, but know that I can win.
It’s definitely an arcade representation of the sport, but it feels right, though it’s very reliant on home runs for scoring. The vast majority of runs the AI and I score are from homers, with very few scored by getting people round the bases a little at a time.
Still, it’s really good stuff, now, even I don’t know what half the stuff on the menu screens mean.
A little help here, Konami?
I guess the faces show happiness/moral and affect performance and the colours under the player names seem to show the positions they can play. I think. Shame there’s not more help for that side of things.
Go Panthers!
When playing ball, though, it’s absolutely great and I think it’s my favourite baseball game on the iPhone. I find that the best way to judge a baseball game is by how enjoyable the pitching is compared to the batting. In many games, pitching seems to be a chore to get through before you can bat again, but Power Pros has an excellent, quick pitching interface that means I rather enjoy that side of things.
I’m even manually selecting my pitchers and making substitutions during a game, which shows I must be getting into it.
Dungeon Solitaire (iPhone)
Mar 4th
Lots of this last night. I’ve only managed to improve my best score by one hundred points, from 28,000 to 28,100, but that’s not really why I’m playing, anyway. It’s just a lovely, lovely solitaire game.
I just need to turn over one more hero card and I've won.
The dragons are very hard to deal with if they come out early, but there are ways to see them off. I especially like using the potion that makes cards very powerful, but which kills them after their next fight. I get monsters to drink it a lot more often than I give it to one of my heros.
Final Fantasy (iPhone)
Mar 4th
Went on a bit of an adventure last night, crossing the continent I was on, looking for anything I might have missed.
A bit of imagination turns this into an epic adventure through a dark, dank forest, full of spooky sounds and strange, shifting paths. Okay, a lot of imagination.
After of lovely experience-giving battles, I found myself outside a cave. Dare I go in? What horrors lurked inside?
A hint! If only I could decipher the cunning code!
No horrors, actually. Just some Fantasia-style brooms and a man who’d lost his crystal eye. It didn’t seem to be lying around, so I guess I’ll find somewhere along the way.
Battled my way back to town and had a kip at the inn, so tomorrow I think I may well be setting off in my pirate ship across the sea.
Ten iPhone Games To Play In March 2010
Mar 3rd
A break from the usual list of the ten iPhone games I judge to be the best, here’s a list of ten games to play during this month. All will be great games, but they’ll be selected based on a mix of quality, novelty and relevance to the month’s events.
Angry Birds
It's... smashing!
Angry Birds is one of the very best games you’ll find on the App Store. You pull back a catapult to launch birds at structures set up the evil, egg-stealing green pigs, aiming to knock them and destroy the pigs inside. The levels are wonderfully designed, for the most part, with luck playing a much smaller part in proceedings than you might think when you first play. It’ll take a few days to get through all the levels – there are about a hundred of them now – and there’s tons of replay value in trying to get all three stars for every level and get good scores on the global leaderboards. A huge, well-deserved success.
Canabalt
Your daring escape is doomed to fail.
The devloper’s next iPhone game, Gravity Hook, is coming out soon, so what better time to revisit Canabalt? Not that you need any excuse. Canabalt is a masterpiece of one-touch gameplay and atmosphere. Perfectly playable without sound, the soundtrack nevertheless heightens the tension and makes the simple act of running and jumping feel like humanity’s last hope for survival.
Dungeon Solitaire
Spend two minutes going through the tutorial and this screen will make sense.
New to the App Store, this is a fantastic solitaire game, based around fighting with fantasy-themed cards. There are monsters, zombies and dragons stacked up against your band of heros. Though the luck of the draw is important, as in all solitaire games, a wide variety of cards and tactical options make this much more interesting than your standard solitaire game. Very highly recommended.
Final Fantasy
Turn-based battling like grandpa used to make.
Also new to the App Store, but a long, long way from being a new game, here comes the game that started it all. Updated graphics and toned-down difficulty make for a much friendlier game than the NES original and the lack of story and cut scenes means you’ll be able to spend a lot of your time actually playing the game. It may be simple compared to later games in the series, but that doesn’t hurt a bit on a mobile platform.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Yes, it's quite violent at times.
A giant of a game, this towers over the other games available on the iPhone, puts its hands on its hips and roars with laughter. An absolutely huge game, with great controls, this brings the humour, the carnage and the city you love to the iPhone. Alongside the story, there are all sorts of side missions, along with a hugely addictive drugs economy that you can use to earn money. It’s pretty much perfect and, for my money, is the best game on the App Store by a country mile.
Noby Noby Boy
It's a toy, not a game, but it's a good one.
Not, perhaps, the best game you’ll ever play on your iPhone. In fact, it’s not really game at all, simply a suite of little toys and mini apps. Think of it as a toy, though, and it’s brilliant. You can mess around stretching, flicking and breaking BOY, check the time, import photos, even browse the web. It’s all very silly and lightweight, but has a huge amount of charm. If you’re anything like me, you’ll keep coming back every now and again, just for the joy of it.
Orbital
Make circles. Then destroy them.
Everybody loves Orbital. Well, okay, not quite everybody. It’s a harsh mistress, where a single mistake spells death, so some lily-livered types find it off-putting, but most people play a couple of games and fall in love. It’s all about angles and sensible shooting, wrapped up in neon explosions in the emptiness of space. It’s horribly addictive – especially if your Facebook friends are also playing it – and all three modes offer something different. It’s not got the humour and scope of Grand Theft Auto or the cartoon charm of Angry Birds, but it’s got claws of cold steel that grab you and won’t let go.
Power Pros
Play ball!
It’s March, which means baseball is back. There’s a whole host of baseball games on the App Store and most of them have something going for them, but at the moment I’m playing Konami’s Power Pros. It’s easy to pick up, well-presented and cute. It may not have real players, but it feels right. Go Panthers!
Robot Rampage
Die, puny buildings, die!
If you’re playing Canabalt, you might as well play this, too. It’s the flip side of that game, where instead of being an escaping human, you’re a giant robot bent on destruction. Why you’ve been programmed to be unable to move past a city block unless its been completely destroyed I don’t know, but that’s the situation you find yourself in. You stomp through the city, destroying everything in your path. Buildings, trees… and the army. Soldiers are fried and squished, tanks explode, helicopters fall in flames. Eventually the armed forces will bring you down, that’s inevitable, but it’s great fun to see how far you can get before you fall.
Words With Friends
It's not quite Scrabble... but it's pretty close.
You always need Words With Friends. It’s a bit unstable at times and not as balanced as Scrabble, but it makes up for it with a huge userbase and ease of use. If you’ve got any interest in word games, you need this. There’s no single player, but that doesn’t matter given how easy it is to start an online game. I’m always up for new challengers and I’m easily beatable, so if you want a game, I’m ThatRevChap. So good it’s got a permanent space on my dock.
Dungeon Solitaire (iPhone)
Mar 3rd
Well, that didn’t take long. I thought I’d be able to resist buying the expansions for a good long while, as the core deck is quite good enough to stand up to repeated play, but I caved in yesterday afternoon.
Things are getting complicated here.
Each expansion costs 59p and adds seven cards to the deck. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to add spice and variety to the game. Things like the dragon slayer sword add more tactical interest to the game, though obviously the main determinant of success remains the luck of the draw. As I keep saying – this is very much a solitaire game. Just a bloody good one.
I may even be overstating the amount of luck in the game. I’m definitely winning more games than I was when I first started. So much so that I’m now starting to consider my score when playing. You see, during the game you earn gold and your total gold at the end of the game is your score. There are worldwide and local leaderboards, as well as achievements for getting big scores. (The first achievement is for getting a score of 50,000 – my best at the moment is 28,000.) You can really improve your score by using treasure cards to make monsters stronger, but worth more gold. It’s a very risky strategy and I’ve always come a cropper when trying to maximise my score, but I’d really like to at least hit the top spot on the local leaderboard sometime.
(There’s a also a free expansion, by the way. Enter the code 033-084-049 in the game before the 30th of April and you’ll get some nice extra cards for free.)
Power Pros (iPhone)
Mar 3rd
Big day for baseball fans yesterday, as spring training started with a win for the Mets (boo!) over the Braves (yay!). Not the best possible start, then, but it’s always very exciting when the baseball comes back. The new release of MLB At Bat came out yesterday, costing a whopping £8.99. However, it’s a brilliant app, including audio streaming of all regular season games, video streaming of some, push notifications of events, video highlights of every game, etc. If you’re a baseball fan with an iPhone it’s a necessary expense, rather than a luxury.
Anyway, I decided I need to play some baseball, so dug out Power Pros, which I’d bought in some 99p sale and never really touched.
Cute little baseball guys. Aww.
All I did was a three-inning Exhibition match on the default settings, so I haven’t got much of an opinion yet. It certainly seems good, but I need to investigate further.
It was very, very easy – I won by miles – but that may have been a fluke. If not, I’ll just have to play with the difficulty settings until I hit the sweet spot.
What I do know is that it looks nice, runs smoothly, controls well and is easy to play as it’s all done in portrait mode. I think I like it rather a lot, but we’ll have to wait and see if I can get a decent challenge out of it.
Final Fantasy (iPhone)
Mar 3rd
Go on! Kill the... oh. Never mind.
No real excitement last night. I was just wandering around outside my current town, battling monsters for money and experience. (Mainly experience.)
At one point Martha died, because I wasn’t paying attention to her hit points, but a quick trip back to town sorted that out. She’s fine now, no need to worry.
I do hope that these games sell well enough that we see later games in the series ported to the iPhone. I’d have thought all the games up to VI should be easy enough.
