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A Gaming Diary
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone)
Aug 12th
Sometimes a game just seems to come out of nowhere. I hadn’t heard of this before release. I even ignored the thread about it on the Touch Arcade forums. I kept seeing little mentions of it, though. And then Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote about it. A PC site, writing about an iPhone game? It must be pretty special.
So I bought it.
And guess what?
It’s pretty special.
I can’t comment on the music, which everyone seems to adore, because I’ve not played with sound on yet. I will say, though, that it looks lovely, the spider moves as a spider should, the controls are perfect for the iPhone and it’s compelling and satisfying.
Basically, you are the spider of the title and you proceed through 2D levels spinning webs to catch insects, then moving on. You have a limited amount of silk, replenished by eating bugs, so you need to work out where the insects go and spin in the right places. Some insects run away from you and you have to herd them into your webs. Some you can’t catch in webs, but have to attack directly by leaping at them. That sort of thing.
It’s just obviously been together with great care. There’s no Lite version to try, but I’m confident that if you spend your £1.79 on this you won’t feel cheated.
Civilization Revolution (iPhone)
Aug 12th
I love Civilization, always have. I’ve been playing it off and on for fifteen years or so.
This doesn’t mean I’m any good at it.
I’m not.
I never make any long term plans. I build whatever I feel like at the time, research technologies more or less at random (unless I actually have a clear goal in mind, which only happens if I start on a small island, or whatever), let cities decide which squares to use and generally just bumble about. My only real goal in any game is to try and get the borders of all my cities to touch so I can have a unified country.
I generally, therefore, play on the easy settings. I’m not above playing on the very easiest setting, just so I can do whatever I want without worrying. At the moment, though, I’m playing on one level above that, on Warlord. I’m Genghis Khan this time around, which means I should be running around on horseback kicking people in the teeth. (Historians: please check.) Instead the Romans have defended their cities like crazy, stopping my expansion and everybody but them keeps declaring war on me. I’m not in any danger – the odd enemy unit that wanders over to my little empire doesn’t live long – but I haven’t got the same free reign that I have on the easiest difficulty level.
I’ve pretty much decided not to bother going for a domination victory. I even switched to democracy, which means you can’t declare war on people. I’m leading the tech race at the moment, so I might go to space.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking back to the Civ game that I played on my last mobile phone, Civilization 3. That had no diplomacy, no naval units, not much of anything. (You can read a few brief impressions by clicking the “civilization” label at the bottom of this post and scrolling down.) That was rather what you expected from mobile games back then. Now, one phone later, we have this. Amazing.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Aug 12th
As always, I played several turns of this last night.
And, as always, results were mixed.
Timeloop Lite (iPhone)
Aug 11th
One of the developers pushed me in the direction of this game over on rllmuk this morning.
It’s a puzzle game, where you make copies of yourself so you can perform more than one action at once. You start the level, do something, click the Timeloop button, which then resets to the beginning of the level, but a “ghost” of your character performs the actions you had him doing before you reset and you can go off and do something else.
I didn’t explain that very well, did I? Oh well. It’s very reminiscent of Cursor*10, so go and take a look at that.
Anyway, look at the graphics.
Lovely, aren’t they?
As I said, I tried out the Lite version. If consists of five very simple levels that take no time at all to figure out. That’s a bit of a shame. I’m intrigued, but I’d love to see a later level to see how interesting (and difficult) things get once you’ve been eased into the game proper. Also, I had trouble with simple actions like going through doors and clicking on things during my time with the Lite version – though that was getting a lot better by the time the demo ended.
In short, the Lite version has me interested in the full version, but hasn’t made me run to the App Store to get it.
Batman Arkham Asylum Demo (PS3)
Aug 11th
I played through this again last night after putting the PS3 on to watch Resident Evil: Degeneration. (It’s not awful, but not great. The action’s good and the plot seems okay, but the actual way the plot is told is woeful.)
I spent a lot of time playing with the final bad guy in the final room by bouncing my batarang off walls and railings behind him, terrifying him and panicking him into spraying bullets into the dark. Great fun.
Civilization Revolution (iPhone)
Aug 11th
What a surprise!
I had no idea this was going to be released on the iPhone and when I saw the price – £2.99, though it’ll be going up to £5.99 in the next day or so – I assumed it must be some mini game using the name, not the full thing. But no, this is the same game as the other versions, just on the iPhone.
So how does it hold up? Very, very well. The interface on the 360 version is better, but the iPhone version is much better than the DS version. It’s easier to control and looks a whole lot nicer.
The core game itself is the same across all formats, so you’re getting the full single-player Civilization Revolution experience on your iPhone. This may be a bad thing in terms of productivity, relationships and nutrition, because Civilization Revolution is a brilliant, brilliant game.
The only reason not to buy this right now is that there are reports of it playing poorly on pre-3GS devices. Though many people say their old iPhones and iPods handle it fine. There’s a very generous Lite version available, so if you’re worried go and download that now. If you’ve got a 3GS, skip the Lite and buy the full version. Just do it.
Glyder Free (iPhone)
Aug 11th
Went back to this to see if I wanted to buy the full version.
I’d already got all the blue orbs when I played before, so decided to seek out the other colours. I couldn’t find them anywhere, but after flying around aimlessly for a while, I found a thermal taking me higher than I’d ever been before, finding new orbs (or jewels or gems or whatever they are) along the way. Then there was another thermal, then another. I went higher and higher and higher.
I went above the clouds.
The sky got darker.
Achievements kept popping up as I ascended until I was flying kilometres over the island.
It was tense, exhilarating, lonely, atmospheric and utterly, utterly brilliant. In terms of how it made me feel to be up there, near the edge of the atmosphere, with just a few thermals to keep me going up, I can only compare it to Ico. Isolation, the sense of being a tiny, near-helpless figure in a much larger world, all of that.
And all on an iPhone.
And then, when I’d got as high as I thought I’d get, I dived back down to earth, reaching terminal velocity as I twisted down and down and down.
When I finally got back down to the island, I checked the achievements for the game and noticed I could have got even higher. That broke the spell. I couldn’t be bothered to glide all the way up again, nor could I face the thought of doing it all over again in the full version of the game. So I didn’t buy it.
Rather anti-climatic, yes. I think I will pick it up at some point, but I think the feeling I got from the game was a one-off, never to be repeated.
Doodle Jump (iPhone)
Aug 11th
I enjoyed the mini-version in Pocket God so much that I spent 59p on the real version.
It’s very good and feels better than the Pocket God version. Not much to it – and I think even having to tap to shoot monsters gets in the way of the core tilt-to-land-on-clouds game a bit – but it is, as absolutely everybody says, incredibly difficult to stop playing once you start.
High scores are integrated very well, too. You get little markers on the screen when you pass your own best scores and also those of other people. How it decides which scores to show, I don’t know. It might be people close to your skill, it might be people who have recently played, it might just be random.
It’s really just one of those games you have to have on your iPhone. I feel somewhat remiss for not having purchased it earlier.
Harbour Master (iPhone)
Aug 11th
So, Pocket God got Harbour Master and, at the same time, Harbour Master got Pocket God. By holding down the logo on the title screen for a few seconds, you can play Harbour Master with some of the ships replaced by pygmies from Pocket God.
It’s a neat, silly little easter egg, but after playing it that way for a few games, I switched back to the vanilla version.
