InvertY.com
A Gaming Diary
Canabalt (iPhone)
Oct 16th
A gaming diary is a stupid idea. It sounds like a decent concept. By writing about every game you play each day you can end up with long-term reviews. A game might be the best thing ever, but disappear after a couple of entries, meaning it burned itself out quickly. You might see something that seemed unspectacular on first playing become part of your staple gaming diet.
The trouble is, there’s not much to say about a lot of games.
Canabalt, for example. All you need to do it click the label below this post or do a search in my shiny new search box at the top of the screen to find everything you need to know about the game, which isn’t much.
I keep playing it, but there’s nothing else left to write about. If I had a sparkling wit and could lead words in a fantastic dance then that might not be a problem. I don’t and I can’t, however, so you’re just left with stodgy entries that don’t say anything. And even my blog posts that do say something tend to fall into a pattern.
1) “I bought/went back to this game yesterday.”
2) Description of game mechanics and/or the level I’m currently I’m playing.
3) If it’s a high score game, mention whether or not I got a high score.
4) End with “It’s not/quite/great fun not/possibly/well worth buying.”
There. By following that simple guide you too can write your own InvertY.com blog posts. Let’s try it now with Canabalt:
I went back to this game yesterday. Despite being out of practice, I eventually got back into the rhythm of the thing, though I died far too often on the drills that drop down. I didn’t get a high score, though I wasn’t doing too badly by the end of the evening. As I’ve said before, it’s great fun and well worth buying.
Perfect! Another blog entry completed! Now to add an image of the start of the game and press the Publish Post button.
I don’t want to be boring, but I can’t seem to help it.
Cash Cow (iPhone)
Oct 15th
Imagine Big Top Ten, but far more relaxed and based on American farms and not Edwardian circuses.
Basically.
Instead of making chains of numbers that add up to ten, you’re dealing with US coinage. You can make five 1c coins into a nickel, two nickels into a dime, two dimes and nickel into a quarter, four quarters into a dollar. (Or any combination of ten coins or less that adds up to another coin or a dollar.) Once you make a dollar, the coins are removed from play and added to your total. Don’t worry, it’s easier to play than to explain.
Between the main levels are fun little interludes.
Sometimes you get tilt-controlled bonus levels.
After every level you get to spend the money you earned on improvements to your farm.
It’s all jolly good-natured, with a jaunty hoedown soundtrack and a forgiving difficulty level. It’s worth the current asking price of 59p, I reckon, though it’s thoroughly unspectacular and not a patch on the furious intensity of Big Top Ten.
Blades of Fury FREE (iPhone)
Oct 15th
Gameloft’s take on Soul Calibur is now available in demo form, letting you choose one of two characters and have a fight against the other. One’s a big, slow brute, the other a quick, nimble lady.
Seems pretty good, based on a few rounds, if a little slow. The female character is rather more fun, but she’s not the kind of whirlwind fighter you might expect from a game of this type. Once you get used to the somewhat sedate pace, though, you can appreciate what appears to be a well-designed little fighter.
It also looks very nice and gave me the first “this is running on my phone!” moment that I’ve had in ages.
Soosiz (iPhone)
Oct 15th
Remember how yesterday I was saying I was stuck on a blue coin level? Well, I completed it within seconds of writing that post. Well, minutes. Might have been a couple of hours later. I’m not sure when I posted and when I next played the game. Point is, I finished the level easily.
I then proceeded to get hopelessly stuck on a completely different blue coin level. This one doesn’t rotate when you go under platforms, nor does it scroll. Instead you’ve just got a fixed-view, flick screen level. It’s basically a glimpse of what Soosiz could have been, had it gone horribly wrong at some point in development. It’s still fun, though, just very, very hard. I’ve still not got all the blue coins, but I’ve settled for silver medal and have moved on.
Now I’m finding a regular level quite tricky but, again, not in a bad way. The game boots up so quickly that you don’t feel committed to playing for ages when you start it up. I tend to have three or four attempts, then shut it down and check the Internet, then come back a little later. Keeps it fresh and helps keep the frustration demons at bay.
I really want to get to the last level of the second world so I can see how annoying the boss is. I have a feeling it’s going to make or break the game for me. Mind you, even if I do give up at that point, I’ll still be very pleased I bought the game, given how much I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played.
Minigore (iPhone)
Oct 15th
Got myself a new high score last night. Not especially impressive – about 4,362 or thereabouts – and a long way off unlocking Insane mode, but I was pleased.
Fantastic game, it really is. You go online and there are all these people moaning about the lack of “depth” in iPhone games like this, but here’s a game that’s a shallow as a Saharan puddle and is one of the very best games on the platform. Really, honestly, who needs depth when you’ve got THRILLS! and EXCITEMENT! and HEART-POUNDING TENSION! and OTHER THINGS WRITTEN IN CAPS AND FOLLOWED BY EXCLAMATION MARKS!, eh?
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Oct 15th
This game is now, thankfully, over. There was never any space and trying to fit words on to the board was an absolute nightmare.
Soosiz (iPhone)
Oct 14th
Didn’t play much last night. Had a bath, watched Stargate Universe, Electric Dreams and some other bits and pieces, didn’t find much time for gaming of any sort. I did, however, have a few games of Soosiz over the course of the evening. I was trying a blue coin level, which are bonus levels where the aim is to collect all the blue coins within a time limit.
In this one, you have to make bits of the level appear and disappear by jumping on buttons, but the changes only last a set amount of time. I can only get so far, because there’s one section where the part of the level I’ve just made appear suddenly disappears with no warning. I suspect there might be some sound effects letting me know what’s happening, but as I play with the sound off that’s not very helpful.
When the level disappears, I disappear along with it, until I press the jump button, suddenly reappear and then plummet to my doom.
It’s not as annoying as it sounds, though. I know I’ve just got to work out how to do that section more quickly. I’ll keep plugging away.
Minigore (iPhone)
Oct 13th
A lunchtime spent playing Minigore is a lunchtime well-spent. (Should that be hyphenated? It feels like it should be.)
Sometimes, though, Minigore makes me sad, because I know that however many furries John Gore shoots in the face, eventually they’re going to overrun him and kill him, the poor box-headed bastard.
And then I realise that that’s a bit like life. We spend our days “shooting furries” (literally in the case of Blake Shelton, less literally when you’re a software developer living in Kent), but eventually we die.
And then I realise that, far from making things pointless, like all French people think while smoking cigarettes in coffee shops and getting unsatisfying blow jobs from philosopher-groupies under the table (subs please check), that it just means that that the fight is the thing, the point and that life is made all the more meaningful, not because we can someday “win”, but absolutely because someday we’re going to “lose”.
And then I remember that that was the message of the TV show Angel, which seemed to spawn countless numbers of (mostly Canadian) vampire detective shows, but we shouldn’t hold that against it.
And that reminds me that I have to spend this weekend watching season one of Dollhouse, because it’s filling up my Sky HD box and season two starts soon.
Shadow Complex Demo (360)
Oct 13th
Though maybe it wasn’t Red Faction’s fault after all.
I started Shadow Complex, got annoyed with it at the beginning when I didn’t realise I had to shoot the helicopter, started to enjoy it for a bit, then died and had to restart at a checkpoint a few rooms back and turned the game off.
It seems like it might be a very good game. It felt a bit awkward to control, but I’m sure it would be fine with a bit of practice. It just completely failed to keep me interested.
Probably just a phase I’m going through.
Red Faction: Guerilla (360)
Oct 13th
This has now been sent back to Lovefilm, uncompleted and surprisingly unloved.
I’m not sure what the problem was. I loved the demo when I played it a few months ago and I expected that I’d love this game, but it didn’t come together. I could blame too many dull drives or the slightly awkward shooting. I think, though, that I might be to blame. I just don’t think I’ve got any patience at the moment. Every moment that wasn’t the Best Thing Ever, every death, every restart, they all put me off the game.
I’m just so used to iPhone gaming these days, which consists of five minutes of fun, a check of Twitter, a refresh of some forums, a peek at Google Reader, back to a game for a few minutes, etc.
That might not be it, either, though. I just might be one of those restless phases at the moment.
Though, that said, I played Arkham Asylum to death for a few days not so long ago, so maybe Red Faction simply isn’t as good as I wanted it to be.
