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A Gaming Diary
Twin Blades (iPhone)
Feb 2nd
I hope it’s not damning this game with faint praise to say that it’s a great game to play while you watch TV. I’m not quite sure why, as you can’t take your eyes away from the iPhone screen without risking horrible, messy death, but although your eyes are fixed on the iPhone, your brain is free to listen to the dialogue on the TV and the brief pauses between levels are enough to flick your eyes over to the telly.
A saucepan won't save you, silly zombie!
Of course, it helps to have something on where you can recognise the characters by their voices. In my case, it was Smallville, which I’ve recently started watching on the Sci Fi channel. I’m up to season three now. I’ve no idea how many seasons Sci Fi have bought. I’m assuming not all of them. I might have to get the DVDs at some point.
Anyway, Twin Blades is good to have on when you’re watching Smallville: official.
Finger Physics (iPhone)
Feb 2nd
There are some games that I play, but never get around to blogging about. Sometimes I’ll play while I’m on holiday, then not mention them when I get home (e.g. Trenches, which I should be looking at again soon). Some I play for five minutes, delete and then decide that they’re not worth mentioning. (e.g. Zombie Pizza, which is perfectly fine on its own merits, but really not my kind of thing at all.)
Then there are games like Finger Physics, which I play for a minute or two every few days, or even weeks. I don’t play long enough to have anything much to say and I never take screenshots. As a general rule, if I play a game for less than five minutes, I won’t bother blogging about it.
Last night, however, I played Finger Physics for an relatively long time – between five and ten minutes, maybe more! – and took a screenshot.
I am a neat stacker.
It’s one of those games that’s fun for a level or so, then you find one that’s really annoying, so you leave the game for a while, then do the level easily when you play again – only to find another really annoying level is just around the corner.
At the basic level, you’re manipulating shapes to complete level goals – stacking high, making a stable pile, guiding an egg into a basket, etc. – but the game is constantly mixing things up and throwing different types of challenge at you. It’s not a case of the game having fifteen egg levels, followed by fifteen underwater levels – they’re all churned up together. It’s a good move and it’s a fine game – it’s just I’ve got no patience for it.
I may never blog about it again, but you can be sure I’ll play it again sometime. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even soon… but sometime.
Assassin’s Creed II Discovery (iPhone)
Feb 1st
A side-scrolling platform take on Assassin’s Creed that’s not going to be for everybody. It controls pretty nicely, though there are enough different things to do that in these early days I’m having a little trouble remembering what I can do when, it looks fairly pretty for a game with 3D models, there are collectables, achievements and multiple paths through levels and it seems to have a decent amount of content.
The combat's fun, but often you're told not to be seen.
I started it up for a quick go this lunchtime and found it very hard to pull myself away, but you might want to be cautious. Ask yourself a question:
Do you mind trial and error in your platform games?
Stealth kills haven't got old yet.
If you do, you may want to steer clear. Even in these, presumably simple, early levels, there’s a lot of learning to do. You’ll fall, you’ll die, you’ll run into guards you didn’t know were there. Worst of all, for some, there are an awful lot of leaps of faith. (Though, to be fair, they seem to be needed to take the best routes in a level, fall down and you’ll be inconvenienced, but not killed. So far, at least.) The general rule is to jump at the end of every rooftop when you’re running, stop and have a look around if you’re sneaking. Doesn’t work every time, though.
You're graded after each level. I didn't do very well here.
For my part, I’ve never minded having to learn games. I get knocked down, I get back up again and hope I’ve remembered where the problem was. It feeds the “one more go” factor and grabs me and won’t let go.
I like this game. Whether or not it’s worth the premium price tag I don’t yet know, but first impressions are good. It’s going to divide people, though, I’m sure.
Twin Blades (iPhone)
Feb 1st
Thought you’d killed enough zombies by now? Well, the developers of Twin Blades think differently. It’s a side-scrolling shoot ‘n’ slash, with gorgeous graphics, a nice upgrade system and online high scores. It starts very easy, but soon ramps up the difficulty and by Day Three I was really struggling.
Zombies. Again.
I don’t think it’s anything very special (except graphically), but it’s decent fun and it’s free today. I like it when games are free.
Bird Strike (iPhone)
Feb 1st
Like Doodle Jump and Skybound this tasks you with bouncing off things to climb higher and higher. Unlike either of those, when you reach a certain point you start flying back down, trying to hit all the obstacles that you tried to avoid on your ascent.
When you hit the ground, if you’ve done well enough, you’re awarded a medal based on your score. If you get a medal, you get to move on to the next level.
Simple.
Hang on... why does a bird need firework-power to fly?
Simple and pretty brilliant, actually. Well-presented, excellent OpenFeint integration, easy to control, it’s pretty much everything you could want from this type of game. (There’s even an endless mode on the way, according to the developer, which isn’t essential but would be nice.)
Battle of Puppets (iPhone)
Feb 1st
You have a castle at the left of the playing area, the enemy has one on the right. You have to destroy the enemy’s castle by generating troops, who march forwards until they meet an enemy. Either they die, or they win and then march forwards again. When they reach the enemy’s castle they break it into little pieces. That’s pretty much it, though there are some special powers you can trigger and some levels require survival, rather than the destruction of an enemy castle.
Go, go, little ninjas!
The strategy comes from choosing which troops to generate with your limited resources and when to use your powers. It’s all rather simple, but gorgeously presented and oddly compelling. It’s real time strategy boiled right down, but that’s no bad thing. I like it a lot.
(It’s fairly similar to Trenches, actually, and any number of Flash games, but I’ve not blogged about those as far as I remember, so that’s not much help.)
Battle Bears (iPhone)
Feb 1st
It’s not often that you see a giant unicorn aircraft carrier boss in a game, but Battle Bears has one.
You’re a lovely brown teddy bear and you have to kill all the other (mostly pink) teddy bears that are advancing on your sandbagged defenses. To do so, you move a crosshair around the screen and shoot their heads off, resulting in an arterial spray of rainbow “blood”. (Or you can just shoot them until the fall over, but let’s face it, nothing’s more satisfying than a good head shot.)
Shoot them! Shoot them in the head!
Don’t let the subverted cuteness of it put you off. It’s a proper game that doesn’t just rely on “Ho ho! You shoot teddy bears!” to keep you playing. (Because, let’s face it, if that’s all it had then it wouldn’t keep your attention unless you had very strange mental health issues.) The controls work very well, there are a lot of weapons to unlock, some absolutely huge bosses and it seems to have a lot of content.
I never find myself playing for long sessions. After two or three levels I’ve normally had enough and I go and play something else – but I always end up coming back for more. You wouldn’t want it to be the only game on your iPhone, but it’s nice to have as part of the library.
Compression (iPhone)
Feb 1st
It’s a bit like Tetris, Puyo Pop, etc. Blocks fall down the screen, you move and rotate them and try to get three of the same colour to line up, at which point they disappear. If you remove all the hollow blocks, the level ends and you start again.
Not a lot of room left. I may well die soon.
The twist is that every now and again the walls of the level move inwards, making it like playing Tetris and Bejewlled in the trash compactor on the Death Star. Only without Luke whining his way through the whole game.
But I needed a purple shape! It's so unfair!
It’s nice conceptually and it’s lovely and polished, but the controls let it down for me. Too often I’m trying to rotate the falling shape and find myself moving it across the screen, or vice versa. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s often enough to annoy me.
Trundle (iPhone)
Feb 1st
So, I finished the first world and made my way to the second. (The level with the big contraption that I couldn’t work? I just built up some speed on the previous screens and jumped over the whole thing. Doesn’t seem right, but it worked.)
I... hate... you...
The second world, though, was even more annoying than the first. Unless I was missing something again, you need to roll into that walking machine to make it walk through a few screens so you can use it as a platform to jump from. That would be fine, except every time I tried the walker would collapse in on itself on the last screen and I’d have to reset and go back to the beginning to try again.
Eventually, I just got so annoyed that I exited the game and deleted it. No regrets so far, I have to say.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Feb 1st
You owe me what? Some decent letters?
It seems that my letters had a hidden message for me this weekend. That was the only one though. Didn’t get anything like BURNHIM or KILLALL. Not that would, though, even if my iPhone told me to. I’m strong like that.
