A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Oct 12th
Despite feeling bad about making a nasty little word a couple of weeks ago, just for the points, I made another offensive word this weekend.
Much less offensive than the last one, though, to my mind. I get a bit uncomfortable, but it doesn’t seem to stop me. Especially when I’m way behind, as I was in that game.
Minigore (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Yes, you’re seeing that right – I have unlocked Expert mode! Managed it on my second go this lunchtime.
The game is now brilliant again. It’s funny how things that annoy you become things you love about the game when you start enjoying it.
For example, when trying to reach the 2,000 points I needed to reach Expert mode, I was getting really very irritated with furries appearing from out of the shrubbery and killing me. Since unlocking Expert mode I now love the way that to stay alive you really need to stay in open space so the enemies can’t hide, but that you also need to keep moving. The balance between trying to stay away from cover and keep away from approaching enemies is one of the things that makes the game great.
Oh, and it is great. Now I’ve unlocked it, I can see that Expert mode works better than the original. It doesn’t start off like Normal mode but ramp up faster, oh no. It gives you 2,000 points and starts you off at that level, with enemies coming thick and fast the moment you start playing. It’s great.
Oh, and for the record, it’s so frantic that I don’t even mind having three lives instead of two. I worried that the extra life would extend the game too much, but that hasn’t happened.
Basically, the Minigore I loved is back, but now it’s better. It’s just a shame that it was unlocked at the beginning and that I had to suffer through several fairly dull attempts to get it back.
Unfortunately, now I won’t have time to take screen shots any more.
Mourn its passing, for you shall never see its like again.
Rope’n'Fly 2 Lite (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Liked the original version of this game, so tried the demo of the sequel.
It appears to be the same, except with weather effects, a rubbish 3D look to the buildings and some sound effects.
No compelling reason in this Lite version for me to upgrade and it looks rather like an update, not a sequel, but for 59p games I’m not going to complain too much about that.
Minigore (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Minigore got updated yesterday. It was sold as an episodic game, but bad luck and bugs have conspired to make it seem like an age between the release of the game and the first update. It’s finally here, though, so let’s have celebration.
Or not, as it happens.
There are a couple of big bugs in this update, for starters. If you flip the screen orientation in the options, the game will freeze and will need to be reinstalled. If you choose not to use OpenFeint the first time the game asks, then you’ll never be able to use it.
I didn’t get hit by either bug and I liked what I saw when I first started the game. There are now little icons round the edge of the screen showing where the enemies are, which makes them easier to track down during the slow early stages of the game and provides a useful indication of danger later on.
This is a good change. The update also includes the latest version of OpenFeint, which is far better than earlier versions. I, as you’ll know if you’ve been reading this blog, have had my problems with the OpenFeint system, but Minigore seems to use it well and actually uploads your scores when you go online if you were offline when you got them. Good work, Minigore developers, may other developers follow your lead.
The bad news is, though, that this update has pretty much broken the game for me. The problem with Minigore is that it starts far too slowly. In a fast arcade shooter like this, you shouldn’t have to spend the first few minutes of the game hunting down enemies. You should be the hunted. The new system for showing off-screen enemies helps with this, but it’s still a pretty boring game for the first few minutes. I don’t much like it.
Of course, this can all be solved by switching to Expert mode, which ramps up the difficulty much more quickly and turns the game from a slog into an enjoyable shooter. Except it doesn’t any more. Now, you need to earn 2,000 points in Normal mode to unlock Expert. Which means I’ve had to play eight games of boring Minigore so far to try and unlock good Minigore. My best score is 1,868, so I haven’t managed it yet. It’s getting very old, very quickly. I’m having to play a game I don’t like to try and unlock a game I do – and which I could play quite happily until the update hit.
There’s no option to play the old version. The game I liked has just been taken away from me and replaced with a game I don’t.
The other major change is for the worse, too. In the old version you had two lives, in the new version you’ve got three. No, no, no. Minigore works best as a fast, frantic short-lived blast. Extending the length of a game isn’t making it better in this case, it’s making it worse. I don’t want games to last ten minutes, I want to be struggling to last two.
I’ll probably keep plugging away at boring old Normal mode to unlock Expert mode, just because I want to get back the game I liked so much. Even then, though, the extra life may well extend the game past the exciting stage and into slog territory. I’ll just have to see.
Minigore has had a coveted place on the first page of my iPhone games since it was released, but I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to last.
Squareball (iPhone)
Oct 9th
Squareball got an update!
Look at the menu:
You can now change the skill level from Pro to Amateur. (Amateur is much slower, Pro is the same old speed.)
I, of course, am having none of it and am still attempting to complete level nine at the same old difficulty. I’m getting better, but I’m not there yet.
If more people enjoy the game now there’s an easy difficulty level, that’s a good thing, but I reckon the game’s utterly fantastic as it is.
Canabalt (iPhone)
Oct 8th
After not playing the game at all yesterday, as far as I can recall, I found myself completely out of practice today.
I was missing jumps, running into obstacles and generally just fumbling around like a gorilla trying to put together an IKEA wardrobe. Without instructions. And with a couple of screws missing, but he won’t realise that until near the end. If he ever gets there. Which he won’t. He’s just a gorilla. Mighty, fearsome, possibly in control of the global black market in bananas, but really not suited to putting together furniture.
Still, it didn’t take long until I was doing reasonably well again. You know you’re there when you only realise you need to jump over an obstacle after your character is already half-way over it.
I didn’t end up with a new high score, but I did reasonably well.
Tap Tap Revenge 3 (iPhone)
Oct 8th
What an absolute mess this game is.
Let me tell you my story.
I started the game for the first time and created an account. As part of that, I had to create an avatar, except the game wouldn’t load any of the pictures, except one, which I ended up choosing just to get past this step.
Then into a tutorial. Like most rhythm games, circles scroll down the screen towards the bottom. When they reach the bottom you tap the correct circle and all is well. That works, though the fact that your finger obscures the thing you’re hitting means it can be tough to see if you’ve hit it correctly.
Then the game introduces arrows, which also scroll down the screen, and which require a shake in the direction that the arrow points when they reach the bottom. These didn’t work for me. I got every up arrow perfectly, even when I wasn’t trying, but the left and right shakes never registered. The developers seemed to realise that there was a problem with these arrows, because you can turn them off in the options screen, which I have done.
After the tutorial I chose one of the three – three! – included songs, which turned out to be a guitar-based abomination that had my wife issuing death threats and making me promise never to play the game within her earshot ever again. Still, the game itself was quite fun.
I got some coins for doing well and I could use those coins to buy new clothes for my avatar. This is all done online and the servers were still struggling, so I spent a lot of time staring at screens like this and waiting.
Eventually I ended up looking like this.
I’m not sure that I’ll be bothering with much avatar customisation.
I decided it was time to download some tracks. I didn’t want to pay for songs, so I looked at the list of free tracks. It’s a long list, but I’d only heard of three artists, I think, and I only like one of those. For some variety, though, I decided to download the pack of free songs for the easy level of the game. You can’t seem to download them in the background, so I had to wait for ages and ages and ages and ages before they were loaded.
One of the free tracks was by Freeland, an artist I genuinely, actually like. So I sat down on the toilet and started his song. I’d never heard this particular track before, but it was excellent and I tapped away and instantly forgave the game everything.
So, yes, this game is a colossal pain the neck, but when it works, it’s lovely. I’m not just not sure I’ll bother fighting through the sea of crap to get to the good stuff very often.
Maybe they’ll update the game and upgrade their servers so it all works faster. Maybe they’ll start releasing some free songs by artists I’ve actually heard of. Or maybe it’ll stay slow, broken and expensive.
Rock Band was announced for the iPhone this morning. Tap Tap Revenge better watch out, because I’m longing to defect.
Dr. Awesome Plus+ (iPhone)
Oct 8th
I thought this would be like Trauma Center, but with your finger, rather than a stylus or Wiimote, standing in for scalpels, tweezers and the like.
It’s not.
It’s a tilt-controlled Qix clone with medical theming.
Luckily, it also happens to be great fun. The controls work well and it’s polished and the difficulty is based on your level, which can go down as well as up, so it’ll never get too hard.
The best part, though, is that it uses people from your contact list as patients.
I felt pretty awful when I killed my sister last night.
The only really eyebrow-raising part of the game is that it seems to only give you twenty-four real hours to save a patient, so you’ve got to play every day or they’ll die. Seems a bit harsh.
This version is free and is supported by some pretty ignorable ads, by the way. I’ll take a small ad at the bottom of the menu screen for a free game, but I don’t like how long it takes to download your data from the net every time you start the game.
