A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged angry birds
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 20th
Fifteen new levels! Hooray! Good levels, too, though three-starring them hasn’t been much of a problem so far. I’ve only got three or four left to do and only started yesterday lunchtime.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 7th
So, I’ve now three-starred the latest batch of levels. Can I have some more, please?
Angry Birds (iPhone)
May 6th
So, after playing Crush The Castle for a bit I had a hankering for some Angry Birds. I had four levels left to complete with the full three star ranking, now I’m down to three.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Apr 27th
Didn’t play much on the old iPhone last night, but I did get some Angry Birds time in. I haven’t finished the new levels yet and they’re going to be very hard to get three stars on, from the looks of it. Not that that’s a bad thing, I don’t think. It’s great to have a new bird to play with, especially as getting the timing right for the boomerang move is pretty tough.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Apr 26th
New levels!
New bird type!
Joy!
It’s really very impressive how the developers have supported this game since release. They’ve released more than enough content to justify a sequel, yet it’s all been free updates. I suppose they can afford to, given how much of a (deserved) success the game’s been.
Ten iPhone Games To Play In March 2010
Mar 3rd
A break from the usual list of the ten iPhone games I judge to be the best, here’s a list of ten games to play during this month. All will be great games, but they’ll be selected based on a mix of quality, novelty and relevance to the month’s events.
Angry Birds
Angry Birds is one of the very best games you’ll find on the App Store. You pull back a catapult to launch birds at structures set up the evil, egg-stealing green pigs, aiming to knock them and destroy the pigs inside. The levels are wonderfully designed, for the most part, with luck playing a much smaller part in proceedings than you might think when you first play. It’ll take a few days to get through all the levels – there are about a hundred of them now – and there’s tons of replay value in trying to get all three stars for every level and get good scores on the global leaderboards. A huge, well-deserved success.
Canabalt
The devloper’s next iPhone game, Gravity Hook, is coming out soon, so what better time to revisit Canabalt? Not that you need any excuse. Canabalt is a masterpiece of one-touch gameplay and atmosphere. Perfectly playable without sound, the soundtrack nevertheless heightens the tension and makes the simple act of running and jumping feel like humanity’s last hope for survival.
Dungeon Solitaire
New to the App Store, this is a fantastic solitaire game, based around fighting with fantasy-themed cards. There are monsters, zombies and dragons stacked up against your band of heros. Though the luck of the draw is important, as in all solitaire games, a wide variety of cards and tactical options make this much more interesting than your standard solitaire game. Very highly recommended.
Final Fantasy
Also new to the App Store, but a long, long way from being a new game, here comes the game that started it all. Updated graphics and toned-down difficulty make for a much friendlier game than the NES original and the lack of story and cut scenes means you’ll be able to spend a lot of your time actually playing the game. It may be simple compared to later games in the series, but that doesn’t hurt a bit on a mobile platform.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
A giant of a game, this towers over the other games available on the iPhone, puts its hands on its hips and roars with laughter. An absolutely huge game, with great controls, this brings the humour, the carnage and the city you love to the iPhone. Alongside the story, there are all sorts of side missions, along with a hugely addictive drugs economy that you can use to earn money. It’s pretty much perfect and, for my money, is the best game on the App Store by a country mile.
Noby Noby Boy
Not, perhaps, the best game you’ll ever play on your iPhone. In fact, it’s not really game at all, simply a suite of little toys and mini apps. Think of it as a toy, though, and it’s brilliant. You can mess around stretching, flicking and breaking BOY, check the time, import photos, even browse the web. It’s all very silly and lightweight, but has a huge amount of charm. If you’re anything like me, you’ll keep coming back every now and again, just for the joy of it.
Orbital
Everybody loves Orbital. Well, okay, not quite everybody. It’s a harsh mistress, where a single mistake spells death, so some lily-livered types find it off-putting, but most people play a couple of games and fall in love. It’s all about angles and sensible shooting, wrapped up in neon explosions in the emptiness of space. It’s horribly addictive – especially if your Facebook friends are also playing it – and all three modes offer something different. It’s not got the humour and scope of Grand Theft Auto or the cartoon charm of Angry Birds, but it’s got claws of cold steel that grab you and won’t let go.
Power Pros
It’s March, which means baseball is back. There’s a whole host of baseball games on the App Store and most of them have something going for them, but at the moment I’m playing Konami’s Power Pros. It’s easy to pick up, well-presented and cute. It may not have real players, but it feels right. Go Panthers!
Robot Rampage
If you’re playing Canabalt, you might as well play this, too. It’s the flip side of that game, where instead of being an escaping human, you’re a giant robot bent on destruction. Why you’ve been programmed to be unable to move past a city block unless its been completely destroyed I don’t know, but that’s the situation you find yourself in. You stomp through the city, destroying everything in your path. Buildings, trees… and the army. Soldiers are fried and squished, tanks explode, helicopters fall in flames. Eventually the armed forces will bring you down, that’s inevitable, but it’s great fun to see how far you can get before you fall.
Words With Friends
You always need Words With Friends. It’s a bit unstable at times and not as balanced as Scrabble, but it makes up for it with a huge userbase and ease of use. If you’ve got any interest in word games, you need this. There’s no single player, but that doesn’t matter given how easy it is to start an online game. I’m always up for new challengers and I’m easily beatable, so if you want a game, I’m ThatRevChap. So good it’s got a permanent space on my dock.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Feb 17th
Angry Birds is only game I played last night. I only had a three or four levels left to get three stars on and, though some were tricky, I made it in the end.
Still some achievements left to get. There’s an interesting one I need to do by upping my score on the first batch of levels by 20,000 points, but the others are all “destroy X of Y” snorefests.
After that there are the leaderboards. Apparently, I’m top of one of them, but there’s no easy way to check, so I’ve no idea which level I’ve achieved godlike status on.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Feb 16th
If I could change one thing about Angry Birds, I’d have it display the score targets for the star rankings somewhere. There’s nothing more annoying than beating your old two-star score by a few thousand points only to find that you still have reached the elusive three-star score.
It happened several times last night. Everything went right, I beat my old score with ease, I expected to see three stars pop up, I was disappointed. I did manage to get three stars on another two or three levels, but the last few are proving very, very difficult to get. I’d at least like some sort of target.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Feb 15th
Up to two stars on all the new levels now, but I’m having trouble getting three stars on some of them. I need to think harder – I’ve found that, generally speaking, if you’re having trouble getting three stars the problem lies in the plan, not the execution. Accuracy is important, but pixel-perfect positioning and blind luck don’t play as much of a part as many people think.
Angry Birds (iPhone)
Feb 12th
It’s back! A huge update came out last night adding achievements, leaderboards and – best of all – twenty new levels. (Actually, I have a feeling it’s twenty-two new levels, I’ll have to check.)
However many there are, I’ve completed them all now, but I need to go back and get three stars on them all and get all the achievements. Then maybe I can check out some leaderboard scores for some levels and see if I can get to the top of one of them.
If you’ve not got this game yet then there’s no excuse not to grab this, assuming you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Obviously.)