A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Glyder Free (iPhone)
Aug 4th
Fantasy-themed Pilotwings-a-like controlled by tilting your iPhone around.
Not a quick fix game, it’s more something to wallow in, like a hot bath. Takes a few minutes to get used to using thermals and maintaining your speed, but it soon starts to feel more natural.
There are orbs (or whatever) to collect of varying colours. I collected all the blue orbs and got told that if I had the full version I’d have unlocked the next level. I’m reasonably tempted, I have to say. I’m just worried that later levels might get annoying and lose the laid-back feel of the demo level. I’ll have to give it another go before I decide whether to spend my £1.19. I’ve got a lot of iPhone games already and there are a lot on the App Store that I want. I need to make a list somewhere and work out what to buy. Why doesn’t the iTunes Store have a wishlist feature? Oh, I know there are third-party solutions to that, but none of them seem perfect and it would be natural for iTunes to build the feature in directly.
Resident Evil 4 (iPhone)
Aug 4th
Last night I ignored Mercenaries mode and decided to attempt mission six of the story again. I upgraded my shotgun and stepped into the church. Tch, these poor, poor European peasants. They can’t even afford decent textures in their church. They need a fundraising drive.
So, yes, I blasted some chaps in the head with my shotgun a few times. Might seem blasphemous, but I’d been starting to think that this church had been deconsecrated some time ago. After killing one of the Gross Tentacle Men™ I found a key, which let me into the room on the second floor in which Ashley was being held.
After, er, introducing ourselves it was time to leave the church. I found a nice spot to get out the rifle and shoot back down into the main body of the church. I then jumped back down to the ground floor, caught Ashely when she jumped… and then got stuck behind her and couldn’t move. I tried shooting the advancing peasants, but managed to shoot Ashely in the head by mistake.
Mission failed.
Escort missions, eh?
So, I started again and this time managed to get us both out alive. Phew.
Racer (iPhone)
Aug 4th
Hooray! I finally managed to get a screen shot with a few cars on the screen.
Of course, I died a couple of milliseconds later, but that’s the price I pay for eye candy for my blog. On another go, though, I managed to get a new high score. I had been in 535th place in the world when I last checked, so I synced my scores with the global server again and waited with baited breath to see what position I’d be in with my new score.
845th.
Oh.
Bother.
I guess the world has moved on without me.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Aug 4th
I’m part of the rllmuk ladder for this game and I’m doing quite well, despite not deliberately playing other people on the ladder.
I won’t be starting many new games right now, though. I’ve got a lot on the go. Five are awaiting my next move as I type, so I better get on with it, really.
Skybound (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
Suddenly remembered that I hadn’t played the excellent Skybound for ages and ages, so had a go.
Not only was it just as great as I remembered, but I got a new high score! Hooray!
Shame it seems to use the ringer volume for its sound effects, though. I hate it when games do that.
F.A.S.T. (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
To keep with the tradition of long, stupid game names, this game actually appears to be called “F.A.S.T. — Fleet Air Superiority Training!”, which is just ridiculous.
Anyway, it’s a flying game. You’re a plane, you have to shoot down other planes. And by “planes” I mean “dots that your lock-on system tells you are planes”. And by “shoot down” I mean “hit the missiles button as soon as your lock-on system makes a long beeping sound”.
So it’s really just about tracking down your enemies before letting the lock-on system do its thing. And by “tracking down your enemies” I mean “tilt your iPhone to follow an arrow until the lock-on system says you’re looking at an enemy plane”.
So far, after five or so missions, it’s either incredibly easy and you just lock on and shoot down targets within seconds, or it’s impossible and the arrow to your target keeps moving around and you can never find the bugger and then you die.
This is not a problem with the game itself, I don’t think. It’s just that I have never been able to track targets in 3D space when I’ve got full 3D movement. Games with planes in them are not for me – but this was only 59p and it got great reviews from people who like these sort of games and it looks really very nice… and I have been enjoying it after a fashion. More so in this little lunchtime session than I did over the weekend, actually. It may have started to click, possibly.
For the record, there’s also a big online component that I haven’t dared try.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
This has another stupidly long name, with symbols and seemingly random capitalisation and everything else that marks out a licensed EA Sports game, but I’m not having any of that. They’re lucky I put the “PGA Tour” on the end and didn’t just call it Tiger Woods, quite frankly.
I’ve been eyeing it for a while, so when it went down to half price, I grabbed it. And it’s… well… it’s a golf game. It’s been put onto the iPhone with care and attention. It’s got a lot of courses. It feels right in that if you stay on the fairways and greens it’s pretty easy, but landing in the rough is a real problem. When I want to play some video game golf, this is a very good way to do it.
It’s really not very exciting, though, because it’s, you know, golf.
Star Hogs Lite (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
The full title is “Star Hogs Lite: Online & Campaign Battles”, but I’m not putting all that in the title. That’s just silly. Anyway, they should just call it “Star Hogs Lite: Like Worms, But In Space”. Except, for all I know, this is a remake of a game that came before Worms. Possibly.
Whatever. It’s like Worms, but it’s in space. And it includes customisation features for your little space ships. And it’s online, unlike the current version of Worms. (Except, though, that when I tried to play online I couldn’t find a game. And tried quite a few times at different times of day.)
It’s really quite good, as far as it goes. You get attached to your ships, as you’ve added parts and painted them up and chosen their weapons and named them and everything. The control system is very well thought out and works well, though the pinching and zooming goes a bit funny sometime. A lot of levels are set in 360 degrees around a planet, so you really have to think about gravity.
It’s also only 59p right now, compared to the £2.99 cost of Worms.
So, a slam dunk for Star Hogs, then? Well, no. It only loses out to Worms in one area – and bear in mind I’m talking about the whole Worms series, not the iPhone version as I’ve not tried that yet – and that area is charm. Worms is a charming game, full of personality and funny. Star Hogs has graphics and presentation that are functional at best. It shouldn’t matter when everything else works so well (apart from the online, as mentioned) but, for me at least, it makes a world of difference.
Playing this Lite version didn’t really make me want to buy the full version of the game – though if the online had worked, I probably would have – but it did make me want to play Worms again. Worms is £2.99, though. Decisions, decisions.
Resident Evil 4 (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
I didn’t play this at all on Saturday, but last night I went back and decided to earn some money playing the Sniper’s Hand mission I blogged about in a previous post.
(You do realise you can click the labels at the bottom of each post to get all the posts for that label, right? So if you click “resident evil” you’ll get all my posts about Resident Evil games I’ve played since I started using labels on my posts.)
Things didn’t go to plan, though. It turns out that even a single day away from the game made me lose all my skills. I tried several times before I managed to complete the mission again. Which should have been frustrating, but it really wasn’t. Every attempt was great fun, even when – especially when – things went horribly wrong and I found myself surrounded.
And the yelp of satisfaction and relief I let out when I finally completed it was loud enough to be heard three villages over. So if you were in Cranbrook or Headcorn yesterday and you wondered what the noise was, that was me.
I also tried the sixth mission in the story, which is where Ashley comes into the story. Yep, it’s escort mission time! I haven’t completed it quite yet, but I’ve only made a couple of attempts. It’s a lot more compact than previous missions, so I’m going to have to upgrade my shotgun as my rifle is a bit useless up close.
Minigore (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
Expert is the only way to play. It’s still not really fast enough, though. I long for a game mode that gets you into the thick of things even faster.
My high score is still one I got when I was playing Normal mode, but I’ve got reasonably close to it a few times and Expert is just more fun. This is a lovely little game that has stayed surprisingly fresh, given its simplicity, but I do hope the developer keeps adding new features.
