A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged trucker’s delight
Ten iPhone Games To Play In June 2010
Jun 8th
Here’s a list of ten games to play during this month. They won’t be the ten best iPhone games – any list without Angry Birds, Doom and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is not a list of the greatest iPhone games – but they’ll be selected based on a mix of quality, novelty and relevance to the month’s events.
Carcassonne
Mostly excellent conversion of the classic board game. The interface is lovely, playing against the AI is fun and it’s a wonderful conversion. It’s let down a bit by what appears to be a completely broken online implementation – many games I’ve tried to play have been full of baffled chat messages and no actual game – but when it works it’s excellent. Easy to pick up, but brain-twisting in the best possible way as you try to make long-term plans based on hopes and educated guesses. Buy it as a single-player or local-multiplayer game with a possibility of bonus online multiplayer against friends and you won’t be disappointed.
Civilization Revolution
The App Store is built on novelty. Games appear for pennies, are the best thing ever for ten minutes, then disappear. Civilization Revolution is different. It eats both hours and battery life with equal abandon and is almost impossible to put down once you’ve started a game. You start with a small, wandering prehistoric tribe capable only of building a small settlement. You end up with tanks and fighter plans and nuclear weapons as you struggle to dominate the world through your military, cultural, economic or scientific might. It’s all incredibly absorbing and doesn’t deserve to be left to rot as you devour the latest, greatest arcade novelty.
Cubed Rally Racer
Of course, there’s a lot to be said for arcade thrills and Cubed Rally Racer is one of the best of the newer games on the App Store. Essentially it’s an isometric driving game, where the aim is simply to make it to the end of the randomly generated course with as many points as possible. You simply choose how long you want the course to be – ten sections for a commercial break, twenty-five sections for a serious challenge – and then try to get to the finish line without crashing. Hard to put down, seemingly infinitely replayable, this is a serious bargain.
Dungeon Solitaire
Fed up of traditional Solitaire? Has even Spider Solitaire got tiresome? Try this. It’s very much a Solitaire game – it’s all based on a deck of cards and the shuffle is as important as the strategy – but you’ll also have to engage your brain. It’s a great game with the default deck, but there are numerous expansions that add new cards, often with new rules. It’s nothing like Magic The Gathering, despite the screenshot suggesting otherwise, but it is the best Solitaire game I’ve ever played.
FIFA World Cup
This would not feature in a list of the ten best iPhone games, but you can’t really get more topical. And if you do get swept up in World Cup fever and want to play with real players on your iPhone, then EA have had the decency to put a decent game in this bit of merchandise. Nice features like arrows showing where your passes will go and excellent replays mean that this is a very solid game. Will you be playing long after the World Cup is over? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good game to have right now.
iNetHack
It’s always good to get free games. It’s especially good to get free games when they’re absolute classics. Initially baffling, if you can work your way inside NetHack, you’ll be rewarded with a deep, endlessly-replayable roguelike. You move through the dungeon, killing monsters, trying strange potions, attacking shopkeepers by mistake and, inevitably, dying. Just don’t get too attached to your pets.
Orbital
An absolute, stone cold classic. This should be preinstalled on every iPhone. Today, for example, the queue in Spar was huge, so what did I do while I waited to buy my Mini Cheddars? Yes, I played Orbital. Three game modes, all worth playing, all sorts of high scores and a cold, yet beautiful, aesthetic. Absolutely essential.
Robot Unicorn Attack
This is one of those arcade novelties. Maybe you won’t play it forever. Maybe it’s not as good as the free Flash version. Maybe it’s overpriced at £1.79. Whatever. Right now, today, this is great fun. And it makes a change from Canabalt.
Slay
If Civilization Revolution seems a bit too much, play Slay instead. Games are quicker, military conquest is the only option and, well, it’s not even remotely the same, apart from being turn-based and based on conquering territory on a map. It’s been around for many years, but the fact that it’s the same as the ancient PC game shows how well the mechanics have stood the test of time. Easy to overlook if you’ve not played it, this really deserves your attention.
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One
And let’s finish off with another novelty. Beautiful graphics, simple yet addictive gameplay and a fairly worrying backstory based on a music video. I played it solidly for two days and haven’t been back since. I keep meaning to, but somehow things get in the way.
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 20th
I said yesterday that this was great fun. I wasn’t lying. Not an awful lot more to say about it, though.
Anyway, here’s the music video it was based on. It’s not NSFW or the sensitive. My wife thinks it’s awesome, I find it slightly troubling.
And I’m surprised that the current version of the game got past Apple – I don’t hold out much hope for future episodes.
Trucker’s Delight: Episode One (iPhone)
May 19th
A bit of a departure for Mobigame, Trucker’s Delight is a bizarre, faintly troubling and fantastically entertaining mix of Chase HQ and MotherHEAT. (Look, when an Xbox indie game becomes a reference, it must be good – go download MotorHEAT right now.)
So, right, you’re a trucker and you espy a lovely young lady in a sports car. So you decide, as you do, to chase her down the road and ram into her car as much as possible… which somehow earns you money. You tilt to steer your truck down the undulating landscape and use bizarre power ups, trying to ram the sports car, disable pesky bikers and police cars and get to the next checkpoint before your time runs out.
The pixel art style of the game is absolutely lovely, it runs at a fair old clip and it’s very, very moreish.
There are some very, very minor niggles – it can be hard to see ahead of you going uphill, power-ups always come in the same order, very occasionally there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid a collision – but I don’t hesitate to recommend it at the current price of £1.79. And if you find the boobs distasteful then, well, I’m sure Apple will demand their removal sooner or later.