A Gaming Diary
iPhone
Harbour Master (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
I made my decision.
This is definitely, actually, without a doubt, better than Flight Control.
Draw Race (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
Finished getting gold trophies for all the levels at the weekend. This unlocks them for multiplayer and allows me to play against my own best time, rather than against a preset opponent.
In the grand tradition of Peggle, I should feel like this is where the game really starts, not where it ends. I have, in fact, been back a few times to try and beat myself and move up the online rankings. It’s just that now everything’s unlocked and I’ve got those trophies next to every track I don’t have forward momentum pushing me on and it all feels a bit empty to me. I’d love a few dozen more levels to play, maybe even just all the tracks again in reverse, or something.
I think the problem I have with just playing old tracks and trying to beat my own times is that the game doesn’t have the precision it needs. I can’t draw exactly where I want, nor at exactly the speed I want, so it all feels a bit random. I’m sure the game’s code is precise enough, don’t get me wrong, but my big, fat finger just doesn’t offer the necessary level of control.
Still, I don’t hesitate to recommend it for 59p. It’s interesting, more than anything else, and I’ve got a couple of hours of play out of it so far. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it pulling me back again and again, despite how I feel right now. We’ll see.
My Brute (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
I’m still playing this. I even made two new brutes to fill up my three character slots. (As I’ve mentioned before, there are nine character slots, but only three are open unless you recruit new pupils.)
Also, I got a small bear. He’s a bit rubbish, but he does his best.
I have such a love/hate relationship with this thing. I very much enjoy watching the fights and, especially, seeing what new goodies I get for leveling up, but I loathe the need to recruit other players in order to get the most out of the game. Some people might see that as just a type of social gaming, I see a pyramid scheme designed to sell as many copies of the game as possible.
Rope’n'Fly (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
Shall I explain the mechanics? I’m not sure that I have before. Okay, your little chap is falling to his doom. Press your finger on a building and he throws out a rope to that spot and starts swinging. Press again and the rope disappears, hopefully throwing your guy through the air. Press again before he hits the ground to throw out another rope. Try to get as far as you can before you die.
Death don’t often come from falling without a rope – normally you’ll make the rope too long and the guy will swing face-first into the ground. Or, at least, that’s how I normally die.
Even by the standards of small, casual iPhone games, this is very simple, with a bare-bones art style and, last I checked, no sound at all. It works well, though, as an enjoyable little snack when you’ve got a few seconds to kill. It’s not a simple idea polished to perfection, it’s a good idea done well enough.
Zombies & Me (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
What can I say?
It’s a simple little game I’ve written about several times before. I could mention that the fact I keep playing it means it must genuinely have something going for it, I suppose. That’s the thing about this blog, I think it says more about a game’s real qualities than if I simply made it a review site. I’d review games and base my rating on how much I thought I’d play them – and I’d invariably be completely wrong. This way, you can see some games come up again and again, while other games I loved for a day disappear off into obscurity.
Bookworm (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
Hardly touched this, but I wanted to draw your attention to a neat feature I don’t remember from the Flash version on the web site.
It keeps tracks of statistics, which you can view by turning the phone on its side. Magic, I think. Now, being a giant nerd – I keep a blog about which video games I play – I like statistics a lot. So this pleases me. Now I can see how rubbish I am any time I want.
There’s also a “gotta catch ‘em all” aspect, where certain words add to collections. For example, if you make YELLOW, that will be added to your Colours collection. A neat little feature.
Both of these things may have been in the full PC version, but I’ve only played the ad-supported web game. Anyway, they’re nice, but given the lack of time I put into this game over the weekend, not enough on their own to make me play.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Aug 3rd
I played this a lot over the weekend. A few wins, a few losses, lots of games still ongoing.
I was pleased to be allowed PUNNY, though there were many words I tried that it didn’t like. CUNTY, for example, is not a valid word. Ah well.
Minigore (iPhone)
Jul 31st
After being positive, but maybe slightly lukewarm about this in yesterday’s post I went and surprised myself by playing it a lot. Sure, there’s not much to it, but as I’ve said elsewhere, this is not necessarily a bad thing. A small, simple game can be just what you need and Minigore’s one of the best games of that type that I’ve played on the iPhone.
It’s also a lot better now I’ve turned Expert mode on. It doesn’t change any game mechanics to make things harder, it simply gets the game going more quickly. No longer do you spend the first couple of minutes hunting out small enemies – it gives you more enemies to shoot at the beginning of the game and introduces new enemy types faster. It’s not overwhelming, it’s not some sort of hardcore mode for the twitch-gods of gaming, it just gets you to the good stuff faster. Try it.
Zombies & Me (iPhone)
Jul 31st
Yesterday, I said that Minigore was the Zombies & Me of twin-stick shooters, by which I meant that it was simple, fun, good-looking and polished as heck. To test out whether it was a good comparison, I thought I better play some Zombies & Me, as I’ve been ignoring it.
Two things:
1) My comparison was correct, I think.
2) Zombies & Me is a very good game. Sure, you wouldn’t want it to be your only game, but as one of a collection of short games that are good for a quick go it works very well. There’s nothing else quite like it.
I think the current pricing on the App Store is skewing our idea of value. Sure, it’s nice that there are games for 59p that you can sit down with, then look up and be surprised to find that you’ve lost half an hour. That’s great. However, games that you can play for two minutes at a time do have an important place on an iPhone. Stuck in a queue? Having a little poo? Commercial break during a TV show? There’s nothing wrong with spending a small amount of money on a game you’ll play for a couple of minutes every few days, as long as its good. As far as those games go, simple little games like Zombies & Me, Rope’n'Fly and Racer have as much right to your 59p as things like geoDefense, Underworlds and Isotope.
Bookworm (iPhone)
Jul 31st
Well, it’s not Bookworm Adventures, unfortunately, but Bookworm has had a price cut to 59p. Probably to grab the coattails of publicity from the release of Bookworm Adventures 2 on the PC. It does what it’s meant to do, without fuss or bother. It’s just Bookworm. On the iPhone, not the PC.
And, yes, it does save your game when you quit out of the app. This is a good thing, because games of Bookworm never end. Seriously, the game never gets very difficult and you never actually lose a game on the PC version, you just have to close your browser after playing the same game for several weeks. It’s possible that the iPhone game might be rebalanced, of course. I guess I’ll find out… eventually.
