For a start they’ve misjudged both of us – we do not identify with our technology as if it’s a part of us, as if it’s a fashion accessory. I’d have thought people would know me better than to think I’d be that sort of poser… I enjoy using technology and enjoy being continuously blown away by what it, in various different configurations, can do. I just got an app that will, in seconds, digitise newspaper Sudokus – and solve them. Why? Because it can – it’s neat. An equally valid question would be why are you doing Sudokus?

It’s interesting, because people don’t roll their eyes and complain they’re bored or that you’re showing off when you show them something neat on a web page. When I show you something on my iPhone I’m not saying “Look at me I’ve got an iPhone”, I’m saying “Look at the pinnacles of godliness that man has reached – Hepheastus himself could not craft such wonders!”

And another thing – let’s also get over the notion that because you’re looking at a screen that’s unsociable. We are always communicating with each other through a medium be it through the common language of sports, text in a book through the ages, or through avatars on a screen. Is anything short of a fucking Mindmeld not sociable enough for you? I’m being sociable – I’m just not being sociable with you. Perhaps you ought to look to yourself.

Right. Parallel Kingdoms. It’s a mobile GPS MMORPG. Suck it. Lee and I found it was available on iPhone and Android and after a little false start from my iPhone (grrr – letting me down in front of the competition), we got to business. The way it works is based on your location as determined by the admittedly somewhat ropey GPS software, you are given a radius of real map to move your avatar around in; fight monsters, gather ‘phat loot’ and resources. If you want to explore further, you’ll have to get off your fat MMORPG ass and go somewhere else and press the ‘relocate’ button. This means you can be taking care o’ business at home while at work as long as you didn’t relocate yourself on the commute in. It can be hard to bring yourself to do this because a commute is a great way to rinse your battery on Parallel kingdoms – ‘relocate’ anywhere on the journey to get a brand new fertile ground to kill everything. When you’re done, just ‘relocate’ again and continue the rampage.

The other way to get around in Parallel Kingdom is to use expensive ‘Roc Feathers’ to relocate to other players if you can persuade them to invite you. The Global chat is vibrant so this shouldn’t be too hard a task. I believe the farther physical distance you travel the more Roc Feathers are consumed. You can also travel to your own flags (provided that you can see them on the larger local (but not visitable) map – I hope this will be rectified in an update so that I can visit flags wherever I place them. As it stands it seems only feasible to start an empire near where you live or work and very costly and dull to travel from one frontier to another. If the game can’t handle a scaleable map then at least a list of all your flags and the nearest roads they are on would be a fine solution.

There is no levelling but gold can be used to upgrade weapons or armour +1 per upgrade. At the present the main point seems to be building flags to mark out your territory. For the ability to travel. So you can get more reasources. To maintain your territory. Bear in mind though that radical updates are happening – it launched in October I think, and we’re already on our second age. As an MMO it’s not deep – combat is just a matter of watching the HP roll away. But in it’s lack of depth, it’s casual; which is ideal for a mobile game.

They have already, since I started playing updated to account for a major flaw in the concept – that things are a lot easier to destroy than they are to create. Lee and I waltzed through a rival’s flags, sending taunting messages along the way. We later joined a group in Canada and tore through about a dozen flags and kilometres of territory. Shortly after we started, ‘hardening’ a flag for additionally resources meant that it could only be caused one hit of damage by a single player every 6 hours. This is a good update as it means a well upgraded group of about half a dozen or a dozen noobs could still tear through some claimed territory, but a new player could not single handedly. Great news for me and lee – not so good for the people whose territory we’d pillaged only to erect wholly more defensible markers in their place.

It’s always good to see brand new approaches to a new genre of gaming. Tapping into a longing for MMOs is also a factor in capturing the imagination of Lee and I. After just over a week, I must confess I don’t think I’ll revisit till a new update, with about 8 or 9 flags in play and the territory becoming a chore to patrol. However, for the week in question Parallel Kingdoms kept up my interest and my hope in GPS enabled gaming. Kudos.

“There’s just one small problem: getting past the fourth level of Eliss is a feat comparable to making a fleet of forklift trucks levitate with your mind.”

This really put me off and I almost didn’t buy it. However, it was a really long wait. Thank you, Clare.

Eliss is an action puzzle game a la Tetris or Bust-a-Move. It’s much harder than they are. There are coloured planets – like colours can be brought together to combine and become bigger, while different colours must be kept apart on pain of health meter reduction. Planets can also be split in two with two fingers. Planets are constantly spawning after a second or two’s warning and they will happily spawn on top of an opposing colour while you’re in the middle of something if you’re not paying attention. When a planet is the right size it can be dragged to the appropriately coloured hole-thing, where it will harmlessly explode. Get rid of enough planets and you move on to the next sector. Levels consist in different sizes of ‘hole’, different planet sizes and spawn-speeds as well as throwing in hazards – like comets and vortexes. Vortexes will suck all planets towards them; requiring you to hold as many as you can in place until they vanish.

Multitasking is the order of the day. You can probably get through the first couple of levels with one or two fingers but by about the third level, if you’re not at least prepared to be playing with three fingers on screen at once you will fail. Some later levels feel like they’re only possible with an additional hand. But that is hyperbole – I’m currently on Level 15 of 20 and the past 10 levels have all seemed impossible the first two dozen tries. Then, just as you’re on the verge of quitting they start to seem possible. Eventually, you have the unduplicatable run of your life and somehow you manage to do it! On to the next. Some level types are easier than others so you might say the learning curve is all over the place. Get over it – it’s a new way of playing a game and that is enjoyable & intuitive without being easy or shallow. It’s incredibly satisfying to succeed – not just at a level but at a tricky manoeuvre. It’s got replayability.

And here is where I’m going to have to take real issue with Pocket Gamer – Eliss is not too hard. It’s just hard. I’m not exactly the most dexterous person in the world and yet I’ve completed almost five times the number of levels that Pocket Gamer had through persevering with a game that was fun to play. Pixeljunk Eden was not too hard. It was hard but Lee and I, with some perseverance (because the process of play was fun) finished it. Not out of completionistic obsession but because we enjoyed the process of play and the discovery of the new. Making it less hard would deprive me of play time. People bitch and moan all the time that games are too easy these days. When games come out that are proper solid, I don’t ever hear them getting praised for that – I only hear complaints. Granted it’s probably not the same people doing the complaining (although it might be) but still is it any wonder gaming feels like it’s being dumbed down if a professional game reviewer’s only complaint of one of the best games of the year is that he can’t get past the fourth level because it’s too hard.

Eliss, like all great puzzle games has a necessarily economic aesthetic and a beautiful, hypnotic soundtrack. And I can’t put it down, as Jim found out the other week. And Lee found out when I missed his station on the way to his (totally worth it). One of the more exciting things about Eliss as a multi-touch game is that it could easily become an all time classic multi-touch title that is played in some form or other for years to come – because the concept is practically begging to be scaled up. I can’t stop thinking about a Microsoft Surface port, which requires four players using both hands – communicating and passing planets to each other – clearing the way for large ones and generally trying to control the mayhem.

I can’t recommend it enough – It’s a shame that it would only really work on the iphone/ipod touch. If you own either of these devices buy it now. It’s a killer app, baby.

Eliss Trailer

Tap of War does what it says on the tin. It’s a tug of war except instead of tugging you tap. One, or both, of you need to hold the iphone steady with one hand, while the other hand frantically taps the ‘tap’ button. The faster the tapping, the harder the virtual rope is pulled. There is a single player, but what kind of loser is playing that – I’m not sure. A game is between 15 seconds and, what seems like, 15 minutes long.

It’s stupid. It’s fun. Play against me, unless you’re scared.

Tap of War (Losermode)

I like board games because at heart I’m a game designer. I just don’t have any skills in programming. It’s fun to tinker with the rules – many a time we’ve made games a lot better by doing so. Sometimes it seems that games haven’t been play-tested at all considering the simple modifications that could be made to vastly improve them. Thankfully, BattleLore does not have many instantly obvious flaws that need modding, rather, it specifically encourages scenario creation as well as army customisation. Marginally less geeky than Warhammer – considerably more interesting than dry battle re-enactment.

BattleLore is a 2-player or 2-team battle game – as distinguished from a risk-style conquest game in that it is a battleground with units of specific attributes use terrain, represented by hexes and their unique abilities to fight a single battle. In this case, the battles are loosely based on the 100 years war with French and English replaced by fantasy units. The game provides you with about a dozen scenarios, which populate the premade battlefield with unit placement and geographical features. They take you through a fair learning curve of basic battle mechanics, to the addition of special units (including a Giant Spider), to the inclusion of a ‘magical’ advisor – who adds spell card effects and ‘Lore tokens’ to manage, to an entire war council – which adds a variety of different types of advisors with different ability card types, to the point where you are able to customise your own war council and design your own scenarios.

All in all there’s a lot to take in the first time round. Second or Third, if you’re anything like me and Chris, you’ll be really keen to start adding in new game mechanics as soon as possible. They’re good, they’re well thought out, they mix it up and they keep things unpredictable enough to be replayable. That’s particularly good because the only thing that does need modding about this game is the victory conditions of the pre-made scenarios. Victory conditions consist of something like ‘eliminate 6 units’ or ‘take a control of certain space’. On both occasions that Chris and I played that week we were able to predict which side had the advantage and ended up winning – yet on both scenarios the victory conditions were equal. On replaying these, we would modify the victory conditions.

Apologies that I cant go into too much detail about the intricacies of the rules of the game but that would not be interesting reading. It is a good battle game – if you have two people who might be interested in playing several 2p battles, lasting about an hour per game then I haven’t played a better, there are plenty of expansions available including some which, in tandem make the game 4 player. It’s reminiscent of BattleMasters, which I played as a child – but it’s much more playable, more sophisticated and more customisable. I nicked my copy off my dad; The Orcs Nest sells them for £60. OK. Boardgames are expensive. But you’ve got to bear in mind that you get a lot of physical product with a board game; there’s still publisher’s cuts etc and there’s a near lifetime of designing and play-testing. Support the board game industry guys… if you’re in a financial and social situation to. After all… it is Game of the Week!

I downloaded Pegs in Space and it’s a good game for a mobile – so incredible casual that you would not mind for a second being interrupted and have to abandon a game but still, on some primal level, a very satisfying time-sink for those moments between moments (aka the bog). It would be completely remiss of me to review ‘Pegs in Space’ as a separate entity to Peggle. Peggle deserves the credit. What ‘Pegs in Space’ brings to the table is that it is on a mobile device. Oh, and also there’s a tilt peg that uses the accelerometer. Its greatest strength is that it’s an utterly shameless clone so it’s a carbon copy (minus the surreal unicorn themes) of the bafflingly addictive original – if you had told me it was by Popcap I’d have believed you. Not that there’s a lot to get wrong with Peggle.

Peggle, see’s you bouncing marbles at pegs to make them vanish in an effort to clear the board. Carefully line up the trajectory to hit as many of the right pegs in one go to maximise your multiplier and your chances of clearing the board before running out of balls. That’s pretty much it. There are some power-up pegs as well but you don’t need me to go into detail. It’s not the sort of game you can sell – you just have it placed in front of you and then an afternoon is gone.

There’s a movement in the Gamerverse that says this kind of casual time-sink game is not a ‘proper’ game. As if all games must have narrative, or humanoid characters with guns otherwise they are not ‘serious’. That abstract gaming is for women or people who don’t take their games seriously. Or worse yet – that games are art – but only when they are replicating other forms of art and that “casual” games are the mere entertainment. I’d like to flip that notion back at this segment of the gaming fraternity – I put it to you that casual games like this are games in their purest form unfiltered, unprocessed play; the joy of a motion that you had an autonomous role in setting off or keeping going. That being said, neither Pegs in Space, nor Peggle warrant a score as high as any of the other GotWs so far. You are not a gamer unless you’ve obsessively played an abstract, one/two input only game. Helicopter is my favourite. But I didn’t play Helicopter that week. I played ‘Pegs in Spaaace’!

Demo for Peggle is Available Here

Peggle

Pegs In Space

‘What’s wrong with more depth if you want it though?’ I hear you cry. What’s wrong with extensive and difficult move lists is that it puts the casual player further and further away from being able to compete, and therefore play, and therefore ever improve at the game if a single person in the room is much more experienced. Fighting game fans may passionately disagree with me and claim that I’m over simplifying. Perhaps I am, on some level, but the above is the reason that the rest of us know that it’s a dead genre!

The above is also the reason that Street Fighter Turbo II HD Remix is the only fighting game that I’m going to want to play and almost certainly the only fighting game that is ever going to earn a ‘Game of the Week’. It’s Street Fighter in High Definition. They’ve redrawn all of the sprites and backgrounds to look shiney new. I much prefer the aesthetic to that of Street Fighter 4. If you’re feeling particularly nostalgic/old skool/cant get over the change to Blanka’s face-shape you can switch the sprites back to original SNES sprites. Unfortunately the backgrounds stay in high def so it looks truly horrendous. Obviously Capcom decided that they’d let you go back to original sprites but only so you could appreciate all their hard work. Appreciated capcom, appreciated.

A few moves are slightly rejigged – only slightly, mind. You can play as any of the characters that appeared in any of the versions of Street Fighter II – and that’s good because I got a chance to check out this Cammy chick (who’s British!) and I like her move set and she has a nice bum.

Oh yeah, and it has online play. Online play is pretty good to pass the controller round – when we were playing it people weren’t so l33t that we NEVER won; just hardly ever. You’re better off sticking to local multiplayer if you have any friends.

I like to think I’m pretty hot with Chun Li and Lee’s character of choice is the undisciplined joker* Ken. I dunno why everyone seems to like Ken over Ryu so much. Lee and I fought until our hands ached, with Jim and Dan spectating for much of it. And that’s it, with Street Fighter looking this good it almost becomes a spectator sport. I’m not going to say it was totally balanced but I had great fun, even watching. I was instantly transported back to my 9 year old self and had to be told to contain myself as I was getting over-excited. Any game that can reduce me to that deserves to be Game of the Week.

*This, I recall from the manuel to my original SNES copy. I’m paraphrasing.

Street Fighter II Classic

Street Fighter II High Def

While geocaching, which simply sees you input coordinates and then go to them, seemed an archaic pastime as compared to a LBG, in which the device actually responds and reacts to your physical location. I’ll confess that knowing there was a geocaching app on the iPhone was one of the secret nerd reasons that I went for an iPhone over an ipod touch. When I had my iPhone and discovered that the geocache app was £5.99 for what was essentially just a list of gps coordinates and another map program. Searching the app store for something else related to gps games yielded the free and far superior GPS Mission.

GPS missions are checkpoint-to-checkpoint tours and adventures. Physically reaching (getting within 20 metres) a checkpoint will display a picture, a message and sometimes a riddle/question that must be completed before the next checkpoint will appear. The missions also contain gold to ‘collect’ as well as photo points, which prompt you to take a photo and upload it to the mission profile on the website for all to see. The only value of gold is to ‘buy’ trophies that are made available on completion of missions and as a measure of your overall ‘score’, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can also upload photo ‘waymarks’ of areas of interest to be viewed by other players.

The best thing about GPS mission is that the missions are mostly user generated and this means that as long as you live near a major urban centre, the chances are you are within a reasonable distance of some diverse kinds of missions.

The first mission I did was a story-based, kind of spy mission. It involved lots of text at each checkpoint to progress the story with riddles and even gold placement that explicitly related to the narrative. Picture points prompted us to record suspicious activity (outside the MI5 building no less) adding to the immersion. While Chris and I naturally didn’t take it too seriously we couldn’t help but admire the effort that had evidently gone into making it. A couple of days later I received a message through my GPS mission website account, in character, prompting me to go to a local bookshop and take a picture of a certain book and upload it as a waymark ‘to prove that the channels of communication were safe’. After this was done I was given the password, necessary to complete a second mission – part 2 of the still ongoing saga.

Another mission, “Shoreditch Street Art Safari” took myself and some friends on a two-hour stroll around Shoreditch, with each checkpoint and photo point directing us to another stunning piece of street art. Several other missions are strolls round nice areas or historical tours. Today I went mushroom picking in Tunbridge Wells woodland – at each checkpoint the riddle involved judging whether each ‘virtual mushroom’ was edible or not.

The mission editor on the website is straightforward to use, it is a shame this is not useable from the phone – so research and any pictures you need taking needs to be done before you start building the mission at home. I made a ‘Samuel Smith’s pub crawl’ mission, which features a logbook to sign in behind the bar at the final pub (inspired by geocaching).

GPS mission is not a ‘gamers game’. It’s the sort of thing I think you’d either ‘get’ or ‘not get’. I’ve had and am still having a lot of fun with it and I see so much potential – for multiplayer missions with simultaneous checkpoint activation requirements, nonlinear missions and in-game chat. I’ve found the community to be generally very warm and friendly – The mushroom mission was actually made by a woman in Germany for me because there weren’t many missions in Tunbridge Wells, the guy who did the Street Art Safari signed my logbook. And they are working hard on updating it – the latest iPhone update for the app arrived at the end of March, drastically improving stability and usability. A recent event in the UK saw the placing of five massive gold stashes that vanish once somebody gets them as an effort to explore some competitive play. Because it takes place in (or at least overlaid onto) the real world, it’s a game that gives you stories to tell, stories that are colourful, funny and interesting to people that don’t play the game – and how many games can you say that about?

It’s available for iPhone, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile phones with internal or external GPS devices. Sadly, no Android support as of yet, but I daresay that’s only around the corner. As the mission editor gets more sophisticated, this game is only going to get better and become an even richer experience for a wide variety of audiences. I was tempted to give this game of the week two weeks running, it so captured my imagination.

In Left4Dead you play as a group of four survivors of the Zombie apocolypse. You need to help each other survive. You need to help each other to survive. Sometimes, all the well-intentioned teamwork in the world wont let you survive – Zombies run at you from everywhere. And then there are the ‘special’ infected (special in a ‘shit!’-way not special in a ‘hehe, stupid Zombie’-way). Special infected come in different types; Hunters pounce and pin, Boomers attract & spawn the horde, Smokers drag you away, Tanks and Witches are just scary as hell. It is a truly terrifying game. Not in a particularly subtle way, although the dynamic music and dynamic zombie spawning is a pretty sophisticated way to keep you on the edge of your seat the seventh time around.

I think the important thing that sets Left4Dead apart is that the enjoyment comes so very much from just the excitement of play and the satisfaction of killing shitloads of Zombies that it does not rely at all on generating satisfaction from the ‘closure’ of completing levels. There’s no real story to need to progress, just different environments to be soiling yourselves in. The upshot of this is that Left4Dead is very much a game in which failure is acceptable – failing a section doesn’t really diminish you’re enjoyment. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you are waltzing through levels without failing ever then you’re missing out. This fact is really important for PVP play.

Playing LAN is great because you need to be able to call over help without typing or faffing around with voice chat. Generally not having to dick about with morons or know-it alls is a good thing too. The element that solidified Left4Dead as game of the week was playing as the special infected. This game mode pits a team of four players as the survivors against four players as the special infected. Playing as a special infected is a little like being a dungeon master – you choose where to spawn (anywhere out of sight of the survivors) and then try to use your special power, teammates, normal zombies and terrain to do what you can to stop the survivors… surviving. When you are shot you will choose where to respawn as another random infected after about 12 seconds. A chapter is played by one team, with the other team as special infected trying to stop them. Whether they survive or not the other team then has their chance to get through the level. At the end of each round points are awarded depending on how many, if any, players made it to the end or how far they got etc. This is a great game mode, that I personally wouldn’t want to play unless my other team mates were in the same room. As much as survivors need coordination, Zombies are so weak they’ll die in a shot or two so a successful attack needs everyone to go together, at planned points.

If you’ve played any valve game or any FPS then you’ll be familiar with the controls. Graphically it doesn’t wow but it does look good and I’m told it’s playable on most machines that can run Half-Life 2. My only gripe is that I’m not going to be able to play it in the optimal environment very often so I may only ever get two or three more sessions of it properly. It’s not what you’d call a leap forward for the FPS, or even co-op games but it’s a masterful new line of flight for them both. It’s easily the best Zombie game I’ve ever played and it’s easily the best game that I played that week.

Left4Dead Trailer

The game is object is the same as that of Splitter – get a ball to the end point (in this case a crayon star) using your wits, physics and a lot of trial and error.  Philosophically, it’s the anti-splitter because rather than reaching the goal by destroying objects, in Crayon Physics you reach it by creating them.  Draw on the screen with your finger to spawn that shape where you draw it.  At first this consists of drawing a simple line to bridge gaps, it later evolves into creating wedges, weights, pivot points for swinging clubs to give the ball more momentum and ease it on it’s way.  Drawing with your finger is actually surprisingly accurate, so there are rarely catastrophic mistakes, though the double tapping a created object to remove it can be a little more pernickety.

When a level works well this sensation of creative, problem-solving freedom feels incredibly satisfying as you bask in the warm internal glow of your own ingenuity.  Unfortunately, while the physics and physicality of the newly created objects works surprisingly well, if you think about how tricky that might be to program, many levels can be solved ‘badly’.  For example, shapes drawn on top of pre existing things tend to ‘snap’ into the nearest free space and this can mean that with some perseverance you can free a caught ball by drawing loads of triangles directly underneath in the hopes that the ball is, by chance knocked into the right space.  The result is a distinctly graceless resolution to the problem.  And that would be fine – I’m all for the freedom to solve puzzles in ways that the designers did not intend – but as in most puzzle games, at least the first half of the levels are spending times teaching us new concepts. So if it is possible to be stumped, then finish a level in another way, you may well be missing out on fully grasping a game concept that will become very important later.  It’s not totally game-breaking, it’s pretty unavoidable and I did find that showing the game to others and watching them play often taught me what I had missed with my ‘uber-lateral’/cheating play-style, which allowed me to progress in my game.

The aesthetic and music are lovely.  Neither are going to be winning any awards but they really create a sense of serenity and complement one another and the concept as a whole.  The level lengths are appropriate for a mobile game, although the load times can be tiresome.
I’m glad I bought it and it was a very strong GotW. I like having it on my phone and I still pick it up from time to time.  It scores slightly less highly than Splitter because of the issues of neatness and elegance – which I think are crucial to nail for in success in the genre.  It may also have scored higher in my eyes had it been free, but nonetheless a great idea, well executed.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

The first thing to say about Rolando is that it’s not Loco Roco.  The second thing to say about Rolando is that it’s not a Loco Roco clone.  The third thing to say about Rolando is that it’s kind of like Loco Roco.  If you get that far then the fourth thing to say is that it’s a proper game and actually pretty darn good.  The fifth thing is that it’s not as good as Loco Roco.

OK, so it looks JUST LIKE Loco Roco and you’re protecting cute little things.  But you’re getting them to the end of levels, controlling them directly and you’re solving ‘puzzles’.  Not proper puzzles, of course, but more puzzley than in I dunno, say, Loco Roco or most platformers.  And you don’t tilt the world to move the cute things (Rolandos) but you do tilt the iPhone to move them and flick to make them jump.  You can control them many at a time or one at a time and they come in different types.

It’s fun and there’s depth here in as much as a lemmingsy-platformy thing can be ’deep’. What won it game of the week was that it was a very nice proof that you can control a game of some depth with the necessary precision without need for any of them “sooo 2005″ buttons.  It is neatly designed and deserved praise and attention for that.  It was also the first game I played on my iPhone.

As for my fifth point – ‘its not as good as Loco Roco’ this may either be something you very much agree with or very much disagree with dependant on how cute/annoying you found Loco Roco to be.  It’s probably a bit more sophisticated as a game than Loco Roco.  I found Loco Roco, particularly when stoned, to be as much an experimental multi-media/art package as a game; the bold graphic direction and mesmerising audio that literally sang distilled happiness into your earholes was art.  If you found Loco Roco creepy and/or incredibly irritating you may prefer Rolando’s ‘whacky’ but in actuality considerably more sober style.  Both games are good. I played ‘Rolando’ that week.

It is a good game, but to be honest – I never bought the full game.  Whether this was because there was so much else to distract me on the iPhone that was free or whether it was just the best of a bad week we’ll see.  Also, curiously the first time I played my trial it allowed me to continue playing much further than the trial should have allowed – when I rebooted after a charge much of my progress had been lost and when I completed the last level it let me play I got prompted to buy.  So while I only ever got the trial version. I actually played a good deal more. I think.

I showed it to a few people at the party I had been travelling to that night (after a charge) and while a few of them saw what I was driving at re:control and it not being a Loco Roco clone, the collective verdict was a resounding ‘Meh, it’s not as good as Splitter.’