Mobile

26.14km

So that’s one mid-week challenge completed already, then.

It won Best Mobile Game award at this year’s 3GSM event in Barcelona, so I thought I’d check it out.

It’s very simple. You use one button to keep a stone skipping over water. Press the button at the correct time, you’re fine, press it at the wrong time and you lose some of your energy. When your energy is gone, your stone sinks.

If you start doing well the game throws a random effect at you, which could be good or bad. More often bad, because anything that changes the stone’s behaviour is going to throw your rhythm off.

None of them are as bad as playing on a bus that’s throwing you around country roads, though. That really makes the game hard.

Anyway, like those Flash games involving yetis and penguins, it’s an addictive little bugger and it’ll probably end up getting more play than anything other mobile game over time. Fills the same gap as King of Fighters M2, but has the advantage of actually being good.

My best distance score is 3.23km and my best splash score is 24. Rubbish, but I was playing on the bus, like I said.

Yes, it’s King of Fighters… on a mobile phone! Well, sort of. The ant-sized sprites do a good job of looking like the fighters they’re meant to be. All four of them. And I don’t think there’s room for any trademark Mai breast-wobble. Or maybe I just need new glasses.

Anyway, it’s a game best explained by it’s control scheme.

1 – Jump Left
2 – Jump Right
3 – Taunt
4 – Move Left/Guard
5 – Move Right
6 – Attack

Though it’s slightly more complicated than that. Successfully blocking knocks a point of your guard guage, which can be recovered by taunting. Once you’ve attacked enough to do a special move you can activate it by pressing and holding the 6 button. You then have to hammer it to fill a gauge within a time limit. If you succeed then you do a super strong attack. There are also other special attacks you can do if you guard against a super or hit five times in a row without taking damage. These require different inputs. Terry, for example, may have to play a quick rhythm action mini game, where the 6 button has to be pressed at the correct time. Mai gets a very annoying game where a nine-digit number has to be typed in within an extraordainarily tight time limit. That sort of thing.

Is it any good?

On the one hand… no, of course not. It’s a fighting game that uses a mobile phone keypad. And you thought the Xbox’s d-pad was bad? And it’s only got one attack button, as noted.

On the other hand… it’s admirable. The developers have actually realised that they’re working on a mobile phone and have tailored the control scheme to it, it’s responsive, fast (on my K750i) and it does actually look quite nice, even if the fighters are about a centimetre high. And it seems fun in a “sneaky couple of rounds at the desk after lunch” type way.