A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Battle Bears (iPhone)
Feb 1st
It’s not often that you see a giant unicorn aircraft carrier boss in a game, but Battle Bears has one.
You’re a lovely brown teddy bear and you have to kill all the other (mostly pink) teddy bears that are advancing on your sandbagged defenses. To do so, you move a crosshair around the screen and shoot their heads off, resulting in an arterial spray of rainbow “blood”. (Or you can just shoot them until the fall over, but let’s face it, nothing’s more satisfying than a good head shot.)
Shoot them! Shoot them in the head!
Don’t let the subverted cuteness of it put you off. It’s a proper game that doesn’t just rely on “Ho ho! You shoot teddy bears!” to keep you playing. (Because, let’s face it, if that’s all it had then it wouldn’t keep your attention unless you had very strange mental health issues.) The controls work very well, there are a lot of weapons to unlock, some absolutely huge bosses and it seems to have a lot of content.
I never find myself playing for long sessions. After two or three levels I’ve normally had enough and I go and play something else – but I always end up coming back for more. You wouldn’t want it to be the only game on your iPhone, but it’s nice to have as part of the library.
Compression (iPhone)
Feb 1st
It’s a bit like Tetris, Puyo Pop, etc. Blocks fall down the screen, you move and rotate them and try to get three of the same colour to line up, at which point they disappear. If you remove all the hollow blocks, the level ends and you start again.
Not a lot of room left. I may well die soon.
The twist is that every now and again the walls of the level move inwards, making it like playing Tetris and Bejewlled in the trash compactor on the Death Star. Only without Luke whining his way through the whole game.
But I needed a purple shape! It's so unfair!
It’s nice conceptually and it’s lovely and polished, but the controls let it down for me. Too often I’m trying to rotate the falling shape and find myself moving it across the screen, or vice versa. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s often enough to annoy me.
Trundle (iPhone)
Feb 1st
So, I finished the first world and made my way to the second. (The level with the big contraption that I couldn’t work? I just built up some speed on the previous screens and jumped over the whole thing. Doesn’t seem right, but it worked.)
I... hate... you...
The second world, though, was even more annoying than the first. Unless I was missing something again, you need to roll into that walking machine to make it walk through a few screens so you can use it as a platform to jump from. That would be fine, except every time I tried the walker would collapse in on itself on the last screen and I’d have to reset and go back to the beginning to try again.
Eventually, I just got so annoyed that I exited the game and deleted it. No regrets so far, I have to say.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Feb 1st
You owe me what? Some decent letters?
It seems that my letters had a hidden message for me this weekend. That was the only one though. Didn’t get anything like BURNHIM or KILLALL. Not that would, though, even if my iPhone told me to. I’m strong like that.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (iPhone)
Jan 29th
Mainly rampages this lunchtime, which sits well with a quick go sat at my desk. No flamethrowers, sadly, but I did get to use a big, fun machine gun and an amusing rocket launcher. Shame I managed to blow myself up with the rocket launcher, but I did bisect a cop in the same explosion, so that’s okay.
He may be dead.
Nothing beats the mini gun I found in an Ammunation truck, though.
My precious...
That was special, for the few seconds it lasted. Managed to get away from the cops afterwards, too, which is always a bonus.
The Raging Dead (iPhone)
Jan 29th
I’m still very much enjoying this. I managed to finish a level with two survivors yesterday, a new personal worst. (Well, I’ve failed levels, which is worse, but that’s the worst success I’ve had.)
I love a shiny medal. Achievement unlocked!
I also managed to get a medal for completing half the levels. (And earlier I’d got one for finishing a level with no city damage.) Don’t let the little dots put you off, this is a very good little game.
Trundle (iPhone)
Jan 29th
Still no clue.
I’m still completely stuck on the same screen I was on yesterday. It looks like the water should turn that cog down the bottom, but nothing happens. I’m really not sure what’s going on with this. I should just delete the game, really, given how much it’s annoying me, but I just want to get past this one damn screen.
The Raging Dead (iPhone)
Jan 28th
This is getting a lot harder now. There are too many zombies to contain. Instead, I’m having to keep a few survivors alive in a corner while I try and kill the zombies near them and then work my way outwards, hopefully leaving a fairly safe zone for the humans to wander around in. You’d think they’d hole themselves up in a safe area, but, no, they just wander. Maybe they’re drunk.
Things aren't going well, but there's still hope.
It’s sometimes even a good idea to let a zombie run at them. If you can kill the zombie in time then the human will survive, but will be running away from the zombies, not weaving their way towards them. A risky strategy, to be sure, but as long as one human survives, the level’s not over.
Trundle (iPhone)
Jan 28th
To be fair, it didn’t take me long to get back to where I’d already reached last night. Then I managed to get a fair bit further. I’m completely bloody stuck now, though.
Fucked if I know.
Got no idea what to do now, but I’m stick not quite ready to delete it. It’s horrendously annoying and I don’t think it’s as well-designed as the graphics make it look, but it’s not bad. And it really is just a pleasure to look at. If I could just work out what I’m missing…
Trundle (iPhone)
Jan 28th
I really want to like to like this. It’s gorgeous, it controls well and it’s free. It doesn’t have any pesky lives and it checkpoints you on every screen. You tilt left and right to roll your ball and touch the screen to jump. The aim is simply to get from one side of the screen to the other. It should, by rights, be wonderful.
But, unfortunately, there’s a problem. The problem is that it checkpoints you on every screen, regardless of whether or not you’ve cleared that screen already. So you can clear a screen, then realise you need a bit of a run up to make a jump on the next screen, roll back to the previous screen, fall to your doom and – argh! – it puts you back on the left of the screen, meaning you have do the that screen again.
It's lovely, but I had to complete this screen far too many times for it to remain fun.
You can spend ages trying to make it past a tricky set of obstacles, only to have to do them again because you rolled back a little too far. It’s awfully annoying. I tried the “level select” option in the menu because I thought that would let me select the screen I wanted to be on, assuming it would show all my cleared screens, but no, it turns out the game consists of two levels, each featuring of multiple screens. When I went back into the level I was on, it had put me back on the first screen again.
I almost deleted the game then and there, but I’m going to give it another go, maybe, to see if I was just being incredibly stupid last night. I fear, however, that I’ve lost all my progress. Infuriating.
