Category: video games

Aqua Forest review

The iPhone’s Aqua Forest game is another of those inventive rarities that could only exist on this platform. It’s simulation for simulation’s own sake: you draw on the touch screen a configuration of physical substances — from fixed walls and pivoted gears to water and fire and explosive powder — and it all begins interacting. Tilt the screen, and you change the effective direction of gravity. It’s a miniature laboratory with sufficient complexity that you can implement everything from your own marble labyrinth to a mesh of gears to something resembling a steam engine — at least in theory.

It really is pretty jaw-dropping. There are some cute little puzzles that are designed more to teach you the way the simulation works than to stump anyone for very long; it’s clear that the designers mostly wanted you to go out and play in the sandbox yourself.

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A Match-3 Game I Don’t Hate

The opening of Apple’s iPhone App store is a depressing demonstration of how much imagination the assembled developers don’t have. There are lots of re-implementations of old standards like Tetris. There are a gazillion to-do list applications, and a gazillion-plus-one Sudoku collections, which will I guess be handy if the world’s magazine stands and airport bookstores succumb to Dalek invasion. There are half-assed social networking things which will let you broadcast mindnumbing trivia about your day to everyone you know, but only if you get your fifty closest friends to use the same system. There’s even a little application to make it look as though your phone is a glass of beer, and it tilts when you tip it. Ha ha ha. I mean, I suppose if I were a developer for the iPhone I’d probably write some dumb prank applications for it too, but I’d like to think I would then have the sense not to market them. It’s a little sad how high a proportion of the offerings fall into that category.

However. There are also a small handful of items that make me think, the way the Wii did, that I’m encountering a genuinely new set of game possibilities.

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Sonny

Sonny is a flash RPG, mostly tactical fighting with level-up abilities. It’s a pretty nice piece of work, in that the design is smooth and there’s some nice voice acting and it starts out with a narrative hook in which it’s not clear that the protagonist knows who/what he is, though the player does.

The game totally irked me, though, because about 1/3 of the way through the putative plot, the gameplay stops pursuing it. There stop being narrative interludes. The rest of the play is hack-and-slash stuff with no framing. There isn’t really an explanation for why this happens.

From looking at the comments on Krinlabs’ forums, it looks as though the designers just ran out of time writing the original, and intend maybe to come back and address some of the loose ends in Sonny 2. But grr. I feel as though the first game cheated me of what it promised — and didn’t even offer a good explanation about why the story cuts off where it does — so why should I trust that Sonny 2 will make up for these sins?

Instead, I made up an interpretation of the game which makes it make sense on its own. I find it aesthetically pleasing. It’s not the canonical reading, and I’m sure Sonny 2 will blow my interpretation out of the water. But if you’re interested, spoilers after the tag.

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Time Management, meet Tower Defense

At least six months ago, lured in by the Chocolatier and Tradewinds games, I joined Big Fish Games’ Game Club, and now I get a game credit every month. The last few months, I’ve been at a loss for how to spend it. That’s partly thanks to the relative dearth of material for the Mac, partly to the grinding uninventiveness of some segments of the casual game industry. I don’t like hidden object games or platformers or shooters very much; despise match-3 and mahjong. I enjoyed Diner Dash and the first few of its clones I played, but now there are so many that I wince at the sight of any two-word-title ending in Dash, Frenzy, Fever, Mania, or Madness.

This despite the fact that I’ve played a whole bunch of tower defense games, and enjoyed them all. Some game mechanics are inherently more resilient than others, and the resilience has to do with the strategic richness of play. It’s easy to introduce new strategic problems to tower defense games. Continue reading “Time Management, meet Tower Defense”