I still feel cheated by the way the Israel footie team knocked me out of the World Cup in FIFA on the PSP.

Lovely new World Cup skin, which has you jumping up a football pitch, avoiding enemy “players” and jumping through the goal to move on to the next opponent. Very clever rejigging of the core game. It’s therefore a crying shame that it doesn’t have its own leaderboard or high scores, given that it’s harder than the standard skin.

That’s what the release notes said.

So I downloaded the update to see what was so amazing.

In the jungle...

You can play the game with an optional rainforest theme, which looks nice, but covers up important parts of the screen.

Um…

Okay…

Er…

Sorry, I don’t get it. These novelty themes for Doodle Jump are interesting for a game or so, but aren’t anywhere near as good as the original theme when it comes to actually playing them. If they had separate leaderboards there might be some sort of point to them, but without that, I really don’t see why they exist. I could just get some shiny star-shaped stickers and put them on my iPhone screen and call it Galaxy mode, it wouldn’t amount to the same thing.

Doodle Jump’s one of the very best games on the iPhone, though it took me a long time to realise that. These other themes do nothing but add novelty and annoyance. As soon as the novelty wears off, which doesn’t take long, all your left with is the annoyance.

Still, nice rain effect in that forest theme, I’ll give them that.

I'm not thing they think I am at home, I'm a rocket thing.

Got a new high score last night. Not amazingly higher than the one I’d had before, but I’ll take any improvement.

The thing is, there’s no reason for me to die. It’s not like the game suddenly gets really, really difficult. Of course it gets harder the further you go, but I’ve not reached a height where things seem to be impossible. (Though I always – always! – die if flying saucers turn up.) I guess I can only concentrate for a certain amount of time.

Doodle Jump, less a game, more a concentration span measuring app.

I still don’t like the bits where you have to touch the screen much, but I’m getting better at them and they don’t spoil the experience as I used to think they did.

There's no time to take screens when I'm actually playing.

I always get a bit grumpy when I change my mind about a game, because I don’t like to have been a Mister Wrongface, but on the plus side, it shows the benefits of a gaming diary like this over traditional review sites. People may like numbers and “definitive” verdicts, but games aren’t really like that – especially score attack games without a beginning, middle and end.

On the other hand, there’s not a lot to say about some games, so when I keep playing them I start to struggle for something to say. Which leads to nonsense about cats and getting all meta about the point of this blog.

I died for your sins... well, screen shots.

This seems to be my “commercial break” game of the moment. As soon as, for example, Glee went to the ads, Doodle Jump came out. It’s a good thing that I’m not good enough to play for long. Didn’t get a new high score last night, but came close enough to get into my local top ten.

Let’s not mention the times that I got distracted while starting a game and fell to my death with a score of zero, eh?

I'm going to die. I know it.

It started with a tweet. One of my friends posted their high score, so I responded with my high(er) score. They then beat that score and we went back and forth for a while until I got a 32K monster score that’s going to take some beating.

(Not that 32K is huge in the general scheme of things, but it’s a lot bigger than the scores we’d been getting before.)

I still don’t like tapping the screen to shoot, but you can mostly get away without doing that and playing for a long time has helped me realise how well-designed the random level generation actually is. It must take some skill to gradually make things harder without ever making it impossible.

I’m a convert.

So I pleased when I saw the game had had an update allowing you to play in Classic mode, without any of the extra stuff that’s been added in updates.

Two problems with that, though.

1) It seems that the game actually had enemies in the first version.

2) It seems to share high scores with the current version, unless I’m missing something, but seems to be a fair bit easier.

Hmm. Anyway, I just put it back to the current version after a game or two of the classic version.

Whichever way you play it, it’s good fun and all, but I still don’t like the extra complication of having to tap the screen to try and shoot enemies. I never seem to hit the buggers, anyway.

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.