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iTubes (iPhone)

That Rev Chap — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:52:00 +0000

I wish I could stop playing this, but it’s just too good.

I noticed last night that it’s done me out of two achievements.

I should the “score over 10,000 in Time Attack” one and, I assume, the one for completing level one – unless that’s only triggered on Normal mode, or something. (I’ve only played Easy and Hard.)

Another little oddity to round things off, though. Look here.

Yep, I’ve apparently played that mode twice, but don’t have a score for one of my goes. Hmm.

iTubes (iPhone)

That Rev Chap — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:36:00 +0000

Had a quick go of Time Attack here in the office, where I have a solid GPRS phone signal, but no wifi. No, the score didn’t get recorded, despite OpenFeint running fine.

Anyway, enjoyed the game itself, though I think I got stuck at the end, unable to make any paths. (They have to be over two tiles long.)

My fault for using my power ups too early, perhaps, but it would be nice if the game would allow a way out – or even end your game early – if there’s nothing you can do.

Of course, it’s possible I missed something obvious. You can check the screenshot above and see.

iTubes (iPhone)

That Rev Chap — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:32:00 +0000

Right, I’m going to do a lot of complaining in this post, so I’ll get this out the way first – the core game of iTubes is absolutely ace. It’s the only game I played last night and the “rotate blocks to make pathways” mechanic fits me to a tee. I love it, even if I don’t quite understand when bonuses are awarded.

So, what have I got to moan about?

Well, the first thing is that games go on for a minimum of ten minutes and there’s no way to save. You have to play the whole game in one go. For an iPhone, that’s pretty unacceptable. But the developer has said he plans to let you save in a future update, so I can let that go for now.

The second thing is, well, the game uses OpenFeint. You know the problems I have with that. The actual interface to OpenFeint has got a lot better lately, with the new version actually showing your position on the global leaderboards. If it worked, it would be pretty great.

I had some many problems with it last night, though. It was twittering my achievements fine, for the most part. Once it failed, but that seemed to get cached and went through when I next started the game.

My problem is with high scores. I was mainly playing Time Attack last night and made some decent scores, I think. However, none of those scores got recorded.

Some people managed to get scores recorded, but not me.

I didn’t often get error messages, but once I saw this screen.

Anyway, as I test, I tried Classical Hard mode. After playing I went to OpenFeint and saw the screens below.

That said, when I checked this morning, although I still had no Time Attack scores, my Classical Hard mode score was on the global leaderboard. So that was just a delay, then, and not a real problem.

I’m not really sure what the problem is. Are game developers just not checking for errors properly? Does OpenFeint actually have a way to check for errors? Are the scores failing to upload without an error somehow? I don’t know.

The only thing that may possibly be an issue is that in my house my phone signal comes and goes all the time, but my wifi connection is, as far as I’m aware, solid. Does losing the phone connection somehow put OpenFeint in an offline state, even though I still have a wifi connection? I don’t know.

It’s very annoying, though, whatever it is.