A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged ninjatown
Ninjatown: Trees of Doom! (iPhone)
May 10th
Played a lot of this over the weekend and finally managed to get above 1,000 metres. Or feet. Or whatever scale it’s using. I can’t remember offhand. Let’s just call it points. I got over 1,000 points. There. Good. Let’s move on.
It’s a great little game, but I’ve got a bigger problem than the splash screens I mentioned earlier. Let’s look at the picture below.
Branches are springy.
You see that arrow? That shows where you’re going to land when you jump off the branch. You aim by pulling down and releasing. Seems simple, but every now and again when I take my thumb off the screen the arrow changes and instead of leaping to safety, I leap to my doom.
It wasn’t much of a problem at first, but now I’m getting better at the game, I’m finding that most of my deaths come from these bad leaps. It’s starting to get annoying. Either I’m going to have to find a way to let go of the screen without changing my aim or I’m going to delete in the game in a fit of frustration.
I hope it’s the former, because everything else about the game is just lovely.
Ninjatown: Trees of Doom! (iPhone)
May 7th
It’s one of those “climb as high as you can” games, but doesn’t use tilt controls. Instead, you’ve got two trees up the side of the screen. Touching the side you’re on makes you climb up, touching the other side makes you jump across the gap to the other side.
Red guy kills you, purple stuff kills you, red toadstool thing bounces you.
Your goal, as normal for these things, is to avoid obstacles and collect power ups as you ascend. It makes the most of its ever-so-slightly novel control scheme and is slower paced than many games, often giving you a good amount of time to decide how to proceed. (Though as you get higher the more sections that require quick reflexes there are, with slippery wood, moving demons and nasty chaps with blow pipes and spears.)
It feels a bit fiddly at first, but once you become comfortable with the controls it does start to get its claws in. I certainly found myself playing it more than I expected after my first few goes left me feeling a little cold towards it.
The main problem is that it’s the sort of game you start up for lots of short sessions, but has a load of annoying, unskippable splash screens when it starts up. It’s quick and easy to restart once you’re in the game, but if they could shorten the initial boot time it would be lovely.
