A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Aug 31st
DYSWIDT? I am such a child.
Yes, I am still playing this every day without fail. It must have overtaken Animal Crossing for the “consecutive days played” record. Shame that I always stop blogging about daily games, so I can’t actually prove it.
Dodonpachi Resurrection (iPhone)
Aug 27th
I have many happy memories of playing DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou on my Playstation 2. Hours spent learning the scoring system and trying to get high scores. I never used continues, never saw the end, but I loved it to death.
Bullet heaven.
Now we have Dodonpachi Resurrection on the iPhone – Dodonpachi and a mobile fucking phone! – and it is glorious. I haven’t yet learned all the ins and outs – and I’ve only played the iPhone mode, haven’t touched arcade mode – but it’s wonderful.
Cave, I love you.
Shining Force (iPhone)
Aug 27th
Rumours are doing the rounds that Disgaea may be appearing on the iPhone. People are getting excited, but not me. I would dearly loved to see it, but I think it’s far more likely that any Disgaea that does appear will be a port of the “visual novel” Disgaea Infinite. Mark my words.
Instead, let’s all spend 59p to examine the roots of the SRPG genre with Megadrive classic Shining Force. It’s a simple emulation of the original game, with a terrible virtual d-pad that would ruin any game that wasn’t turn-based. Seriously, I’m completely comfortable with virtual pads and sticks these days, but kept finding myself moving in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter one bit in a game like this, but it’s a bit, well, shit. Surely Sega could do better?
The game itself, though, seems lovely. I’ve never played it before, but the non-battle parts are so classically 16-bit RPG that I immediately found myself warmed by a comforting nostalgic glow. It even starts with you being woken up after passing out. Ah, the good old days!
I really like the little character portraits of everybody.
After wandering around talking to townsfolk, it was time for the first battle. A simple grid-based battle system that didn’t require any sort of glance at the instructions.
Yes! Attack! Attack with all your might!
I lost first time – if your character “dies” then you fail, but got through it second time. Then it was on to another battle, this one taking place on the world map. It’s really rather lovely and I spent much longer playing it than I thought I might. I really hope I can concentrate on this long enough to finish it. If not, at least I’ve now played one of the founding fathers of a genre that I love.
Corporate Fury (iPhone)
Aug 27th
Originally a Playstation release, RPG/brawler hybrid Corporate Fury was only released in the US and in very limited quantities. It’s since become something of a cult classic, with copies fetching silly prices on eBay, but you can now play it on the iPhone. Hooray! It’s the same game, but has had a graphical makeover (using the original assets), has been nicely adjusted to the touch screen and has a much, much friendlier save system. (In the original, you could only save back at your quarters. While you can still do that now, there’s also a “save anywhere” system, making it much better for handheld gaming.)
I need to talk to the chap in front of me to enter fights to earn money.
Actually, no, that’s all bollocks. Corporate Fury is an iPhone original that just happens to feel like an old Playstation cult hit. Not any game in particular, mind, it just has that air about it. There are no camera controls, it’s got a nostalgic dark, neon-lit ugliness about it and the angular characters feel like they’ve been smoothed and refined from blocky, poorly-textured originals.
If it had been released fifteen years ago it would still be sitting happily in those “Best Games You’ve Never Played” lists.
It is, however, the space year 2010, so how does it work now?
Really rather well, actually. It’s got an excellent premise – you’re part of a company where you have to get promotions by fighting your superiors for them. It’s Fight Club meets Wall Street, with a hint of Klingon politics. I like the world, even if I’m not a fan of the way it’s portrayed. The graphics are technically fine, with solid environments and some nice lighting, but I find the whole look aesthetically displeasing. It’s all very dark in a 90s style and to my mind it’s just plain ugly. Which is partly the point, obviously, but that doesn’t make it fun to look at.
The game consists of running from place to place on the open map, aided by a game-saving GPS system. You talk to people, buy upgrades with credits earned in fights and, well, fight lots and lots of people. When you get into a fight you and your opponent appear in an arena (an empty swimming pool or a rooftop, for example) and then you get to punch and kick them into submission.
I will probably win this fight in less than ten seconds.
Fights are a fast and furious frenzy of wonderful button-mashing action, but don’t, yet, involve any sort of tactics. I’ve not needed to experiment with items and upgrades so far. I’ve changed my clothes and used an expensive terraforming device that seemed to do fuck all, but that’s it. (I’m saving up for a weapon now.) I think greater complexity may come later. (I think I’m playing on Easy, too, which probably means I’m not having to learn the nuances of combat as quickly as I might otherwise have to.)
It’s all a bit of a grind, having to enter lots of standard matches to earn credits to buy upgrades to progress through the story, but it’s a good grind. Being able to save anywhere means I’ve found the best way to play is to start the game between other games, do a few fights, then leave it for a while. As such, it’s perfectly suited to the iPhone platform.
It’s good stuff, basically, and seems cheap at the current price of £1.19. (Remember, this isn’t a review, only my first impressions. Let’s see if I stick with this one past the novelty phase.)
R-Type (iPhone)
Aug 26th
You know R-Type. Everybody knows R-Type. It’s been around since round about the time of the Industrial Revolution and everyone’s played it on at least six different formats. If any game’s a classic, it’s R-Type.
The question is not how good a game it is, but how well it works on the iPhone.
The answer: really rather well.
It looks like you're playing a real arcade machine! Sort of.
There are lots of control options, but I’ve only used the virtual d-pad option, which shrinks the screen so your thumbs don’t get in the way of the action. A sign of someone actually thinking when porting the game and very welcome indeed.
It’s also been released for the very fair price of £1.19, so if you need yet another version of R-Type in your life (and you probably do) then you could do worse than take a look at this one.
Dead Runner (iPhone)
Aug 26th
Remember Deathchase on the Spectrum? Well, this is like that, only without any shooting.
You’re in a forest and there are nasty ghosts (or something) behind you, so you have to run away, tilting your iPhone to avoid trees.
Run through the forest, run!
Now, in real life you’d get slower and slower as you ran, until you fell over and were set upon by angry ghosts. In the game, though, you get faster and faster, as you might expect. There are two modes – a simple distance mode and a points-based one with glowing orbs to collect.
It’s all very simple, but it looks very nice indeed, the controls work perfectly well and it’s another brilliant little game to add to the iPhone’s near-infinite list of such titles. Perfect bite-sized gaming.
NHL 2K11 (iPhone)
Aug 25th
It’s a hockey game. The ice kind of hockey.
Now, I know nothing about hockey, but I’ve been enjoying this. It’s fast, fluid and responsive. I can’t tell you how well it represents the sport, but it’s a good videogame.
I don't think I've won one of these puck drops, or whatever they're actually called.
I’ll probably delete it today.
Why?
Well, because it doesn’t save mid-game. It supports app switching in OS4, but if the app gets closed in the background while you’re doing other things, then you lose any game in progress. There’s also no autosave in season mode that I can see – you have to remember to save after every game. Which would be annoying enough if it worked, but the first time I tried the app crashed and I lost everything.
If it saved properly in the middle of a game I’d probably love it, but as it is I don’t think it’s worth the effort, unfortunately.
Monorace (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
Like Gravity Runner, but without jumping – a single touch sends you from floor to ceiling or vice versa.
Time moves faster as you approach the right-hand side of the screen. This is important.
It may not look great in screenshots, but it’s actually pretty brilliant. There are a ton of pre-defined levels where you need to be as fast as possible, rather than just get to the end, and an endless mode.
All three side-scrollers I’ve blogged about today are great, but this is the one I spent most time with over the weekend – and by quite a long way.
Monster Dash (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
Canabalt, Robot Unicorn Attack, Run… and now… Monster Dash!
You can pick up better weapons. The Machine Gun Jetpack is pretty amazing.
You run from left to right, avoiding spikes and pits and shooting enemies.
Simple controls, well-balanced, no obvious rough edges, great little game. Seems to be selling very well on the App Store and deservedly so.
Solipskier (iPhone)
Aug 23rd
My wife had a miscarriage last week, which was absolutely devastating, hence the lack of posts. You can read all about it HERE if you want more information, but I have no idea why you’d want to.
Anyway, on with the games!
I wasn’t in the mood or mentally up to anything deep over the weekend, but four quick, thrillsome games helped get me through. First up, Solipskier.
Arrows show where gates will be.
You draw the level with your finger to guide your little skier through gates and get him to jump. It’s insanely fast and great fun. The music’s bloody awful, but I play my iPhone games with the sound off ninety-nine percent of the time, so I don’t mind.
You can play the Flash version online HERE, but using the mouse is nowhere near as easy as using your finger on the screen. The iPhone version’s much more enjoyable.
