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A Gaming Diary
Sword of Fargoal (iPhone)
Dec 7th
This is blindingly good. I liked it when I first played and it’s only been growing me. I played for a long, long time over the weekend and didn’t die. I’m currently on about level eleven, taking my time before going to each new level and going back up to old levels to check I’ve not missed anything.
The longer a character lasts the more tense things gets, because a single mistake can destroy hours of progress and send you right back to the beginning. I’m not sure I’ll ever retrieve the Sword of Fargoal from the depths of the dungeon, but I’m definitely going to try my best.
I just hope it doesn’t get too tense and I stop playing because I’m too scared of letting my character die. That’s a real possibility, you know.
Ramp Champ (iPhone)
Dec 7th
Throw balls at targets to get points and to complete level-specific goals. Spend the points on pictures of carnival tat. That’s about it. Fun, though, with well-designed levels. The fact it was free is a bonus, too. (Even if there are loads of extra levels to buy for real money.)
Samurai: Way of the Warrior (iPhone)
Dec 7th
This was free on Saturday, which prompted me to pick it up again after a long hiatus. Thankfully, it’s just as good as I remember. Once you get into it and the moves start flowing it feels wonderful, with you instinctively sidestepping enemies and then countering with your own attacks.
I finished off levels five and six while lying in bed on Saturday morning. Challenging, but not too hard, exactly what you want from a game like this. And, of course, it’s as graphically gorgeous as it ever was. Great stuff.
Modern Combat: Sandstorm (iPhone)
Dec 7th
Pff. Yes, pff. I’ve probably spent more time playing around with the control settings than playing this game. It only saves between levels, which sucks rancid monkey juices. I got it when I was having trouble with my previous, broken iPhone, so I’ve played the training level about a hundred and fifty thousand times, the level after that about eight times and never seen any more of the game than that. Still, I rather thought that the twin stick setup with the sensitivity on maximum was reasonably playable…
…but playing online has proven that to be very, very wrong. Oh, the game gets points for actually working online. I didn’t see any obvious lag and it was easy to jump into a game.
However, I couldn’t really play it. People kept killing me without me seeing them. When I did see someone, I got killed while I was struggling to put the sight over them. And if by some miracle I did get some shots off, they never seemed to die before turning around and killing me.
So, not unlike Modern Warfare on the 360, then. The main difference being I didn’t feel it was my skill letting me down, but my inability to control the game with any fluidity. A very frustrating experience, as you can see from the statistics below.
I guess it could have been hidden lag getting me killed, but it’s probably just that I was playing against kids who have somehow become one with the control system. Oh, if it had the control system from CoD: Zombies things may have been different. (A bit.)
I think I might delete this game, you know. I’m never going to actually play it, unless they patch in mid-level saving, and it uses up an awful lot of space.
SONG SUMMONER: The Unsung Heroes – Encore (iPhone)
Dec 7th
To my surprise, I barely played this over the weekend. I’m not sure if I even made any story progress, I think I only played a couple of free battles. I did, however, manage to generate a Gold rank trooper from “Dick In Dixie” by Hank Williams III, which was nice.
Anyway, for those that asked, here’s the password I got when I completed the Lite version.
I don’t know if it’ll work for you, but feel free to give it a go.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Dec 7th
An enjoyable weekend of word-based fun. I won some games, I lost some games, but I don’t remember any getting overly frustrating. I believe I even used up all my letters in a single move once or twice. You don’t get as many points for doing it in Words With Friends as you do in Scrabble, but it’s always satisfying nonetheless.
SONG SUMMONER: The Unsung Heroes – Encore (iPhone)
Dec 4th
Yes, I had this on my iPod Nano (still do, even) but there are several good reasons to get the iPhone version.
1) The screen is bigger and thus it’s easier to see what’s going on and read the text.
2) The touch screen interface is much, much better than the Click Wheel interface.
3) The game includes all of the iPod version, plus the content from an unpublished sequel.
Still, it’s worth trying the Lite version out before parting with your £5.99. Not only will it give you a good idea of whether or not you like the game, but if you complete it you get a password you can give to the shopkeeper in the full version that will get you a whole load of goodies.
If you’ve not heard of the game before, it’s basically a simple Final Fantasy Tactics title, the twist being that your units are generated from songs on your iPhone.
Let’s try Boulder to Birmingham by Emmylou Harris.
We select the song and then see the results.
Excellent, it’s a Silver-ranked Monk. I’ve not had a Spirit Velocity before, so that’s good. Her stats aren’t great so she only gets a C grade, but that’s good enough. I can up her rank to Gold or Platinum by spending pearls you earn in battle and raise her level by listening to her song a few of times. (Or more slowly by listening to songs I’ve made from other troopers.)
Once you’ve got a team together (and you’ve been through the initial cut scenes and tutorials) you’re sent out into the big wide world on a possibly epic quest to find your brother and, I assume, save the world. You spend a lot of time reading dialogue and playing around in menus, but the meat of the game lies in the battles, which are your standard turn-based tactical affairs.
It’s all very good indeed, requiring thought but not (yet) being overly difficult. I’m very much enjoying it and I’m already much further through this version than I ever got in my iPod Nano version.
The only real problem is the lack of documentation. There are some basic help screens, but you really only find out how things work by getting stuck in to the game. I’m fairly comfortable with it now, but I had to work on it. It’s slightly off-putting to have pages of numbers and tiny icons and no real idea what they mean or how everything hangs together. Still, it’s been worth the effort.
Sword of Fargoal (iPhone)
Dec 4th
My love of roguelikes began way back in the midsts of time… or 1981, to be precise. My future wife was off being born, I was playing games on my ZX81. One game I didn’t have was Catacombs. My friend Neil had it, but I didn’t. Whether I ever played it or only watched him play, I don’t remember, but I do remember being absolutely amazed by it.
You waited five minutes for the game to load, then about two minutes for it to generate a level (showing only a blank screen during that time, as the level generation was done in the ZX81′s fast mode, which stopped the computer showing any graphics) and then you were in an amazing world of adventure.
Behold!
Have you ever seen such glory? Back then, I actually hadn’t. Not in terms of the graphics – obviously, they were basic even for the time, but there were random dungeons to uncover, monsters to fight, treasure to collect and walls to tunnel through.
Back then, I didn’t know it was based on a game called Rogue. (Though I think Catacombs may have been real time, rather than turn-based.) I never forgot it, though, and it was only really when I started playing ZangbandTK a few years ago that I made the connection.
So that was then. And a couple of years later, unbeknownst to me, a very similar but far superior game called Sword of Fargoal was released on various Commodore machines. (I was a Spectrum kid, Commodore was the enemy. No fanboy console wars can compete with the intensity of the Sinclair/Commodore wars of the early eighties. Thank goodness we didn’t have the Internet back then.)
And now Sword of Fargoal is back, in a gorgeous version I can play in the palm of my hand.
Okay, so you can’t tunnel like you could in Catacombs, but nobody’s perfect.
I didn’t play too much last night, as Song Summoner took up a lot of my time, but I started a new character and managed not to die stupidly, which is a victory of sorts after yesterday.
Bayonetta Demo (360)
Dec 4th
Stupidly OTT third-person gorefest, like the mad aunt nobody mentions in the Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden family. I surprised myself by actually managing to pull off sensible moves and dodges, despite everything being too busy for my conscious mind to process. One of those games where you really have to go with the flow. If you stop to think about what to do, it’s all over, but if you let your thumbs and fingers do the work, magical things can happen.
(I wasn’t that great at it, mind. I died a few times during the demo and ended up with Stone rank overall, despite getting some platinum medals along the way.)
It’s all very, very silly. You’ve got guns attached to your boots, you can turn you hair into stiletto heels and iron maidens and you can pick up angelic trumpets that act as shotguns. It’s videogaming filtered through a fever dream that’s been sped up to twice its normal speed – and probably quite brilliant, though it’s hard to tell.
Sword of Fargoal (iPhone)
Dec 3rd
I’ve been killed twice now. Both deaths were, of course, completely avoidable. The second one was by far the more stupid of the two. I’d been merrily wandering around, bashing in skulls and collecting several magic sacks, when I came across a room with several enemies. I’d been having such an easy time of it that I just wandered in and started slashing away.
I saw my health get low, but you auto-use healing potions when necessary, so that’s fine… or would have been, if I’d not already used them all. I had a ton of options left that could have saved me, but I just decided to keep slashing away, secure in the knowledge that I was safe from death. Except, as I said, I wasn’t.
I was shocked when the death screen came up, then once I’d recovered I gave myself a good kicking. No matter how simple the roguelike, you really, really can’t take things for granted like that.
I’m an idiot.
