A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged words with friends
Words With Friends (iPhone)
May 24th
Barely touched my trusty iPhone gameswise over the weekend. Saturday was spent in London, taking my wife on a magical mystery tour for her birthday. Went to the Natural History Museum, the V&A and then finished off the day at the Legally Blonde musical. (Hugely enjoyable stuff – and not just before my Doctor, Peter Davison, is in it.) Then Sunday was spent with Red Dead Redemption.
I did, however, manage to find time to keep up with my games of Words With Friends. It would be more accurate to have taken a screen shot of a solid but unspectacular move, but I just wanted to show off a bit.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
May 10th
Haven’t got many games on the go right now. If you want a game, please start one against me. I’m ThatRevChap.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
May 5th
Fewer games than ever, but still enough for several moves a day.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Apr 28th
This has all calmed down a bit, in that I’m playing fewer games. The people left playing, though, seem to be the hardcore, so I’m probably playing almost as many moves per day as I ever was.
It’s been an absolute bargain for 59p, that’s for sure.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Mar 18th
I know, I know, I’ve not blogged about this for ages – but I have been playing it. More than any other game, at least in terms of number of times I start the app.
So, no, I’ve not got bored of it. It’s even still sitting in my dock. It’s special like that.
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.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Mar 2nd
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I couldn’t think of a decent caption. Still playing Words With Friends several times a day, still got loads of games on the go. Still going for Triple Word spaces whenever I can, as a spoiler tactic as much as anything.
I’m not doing so badly, either. I thought I was going through a bit of a rough patch, but I’ve actual won six out of my last ten games. Not too bad.
The game crashed last night and wouldn’t start up again – just kept crashing out. I deleted it and redownloaded it and when I logged in everything was fine, though, so no harm done.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Feb 25th
Oh, come on! BROMANCE is a word! Okay, maybe it’s not in your fancy, la-di-da leather-bound “dictionaries“, but it most certainly is a word!
Talking of which, they should add LOLcat speech to the game, too. HAZ would be a very useful word sometimes.
Also, how about just allowing combinations of letters that look like they should be words? I mean, if they look right they’ll probably be actual words soon enough, right? Right?
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Feb 24th
Yesterday I was saying that gambles are never worth the risk – and last night I had a classic example of that, shown above. I knew that it was dangerous to make the word HIP up there, but took a chance anyway – and it backfired in spectacular fashion. Will I ever learn my own lessons?
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Feb 23rd
My tactics are very simple. Try to score as many points as possible without opening up any of Triple Word squares unless I absolutely have to. Seems very simple and obvious, you’d think, but I’m playing a couple of people at the moment who actually seem to be trying to open up Triple Words for me. It’s very gratifying, but a bit odd.
Also, I’ve found, it’s not a good idea to gamble. If you notice that a letter can be added to a word you play that will get your opponent a huge number of points, it’s almost always the case that they’ll have that letter. Always assume your opponent has at least one S, for example. That way you won’t be caught out.