Mini-reviews: Unpleasant Horse & Biolab Disaster (Both free on iOS)

Unpleasant Horse

You control a cute black pegasus with skull tattoos on its butt and an eye that stares into your very soul. Your task is to hop from cloud to cloud to avoid plunging to a gory death in the buzz-saws below. Along the way you’ll come across pretty white pegasuses (pegasi?) that are minding their own business flying along. You can hop onto them and weigh them down until they hit the buzz-saws and disappear in a din of death-neighs and flying entrails before you hop off toward the nearest cloud. 

There are also birds you can fly into to collect feathers for a maximum of 5. Each feather you collect gives you a mid-air jump, which can be crucial when there’s nothing else to hop on to.

The heavy metal that plays at the title screen is pretty epic. The Blue Danube that plays during the game itself is quite a nice accompaniment as you sail through the sky, and would be quite soothing were it not for the horsey death cries and bloody guts spewing every time you sadistically kill one of your white friends.

But hey, you get points, so it’s all good.

Biolab Disaster

A short mini-platformer with retro graphics and sound effects. As far as I can tell, there has been some disaster in a biolab and you’re the poor schmuck they’ve popped into a hazmat suit and armed with some sort of blaster to go in and clean it up. Kinda feels like and extremely stripped down version of Megaman or Metroid. 

It’s only got 3 stages and is pretty short, but is a pretty fun distraction. 

Review: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

There are all kinds of games on the market. But not a large variety. The gaming market, as we all too well know, is dominated by shooter games. In fact, browse a gaming store and you’ll notice (and I’m guesstimating here) at least 50 different shooter games. And then like 20 other shooter hybrids. But that’s not the point here. The point here is that I’m reviewing a game that isn’t a shooter game. Oblivion is one of those RPGs. But unlike a standard turn-based ‘get the best equipment’ RPG, it’s a sandbox, free-for-all fantasy realm where you’re free to fool about. Or save the world.

Unicorns. You can ride them.

Oblivion is (as previously stated) free-for-all RPG. You begin in a jail for who knows what, you’re apparently some kind of slave. And as a slave, your job for the first 2 minutes of the game is to sit and listen to a guard taunting you. Then, the emperor comes along, and talks about how assassins are after him. And oh wow, the secret back door out of the Imperial Jail is located none other than…in your cell! Astonishing.

Very soon, after venturing through some kind of cavern behind the jail filled with cult assassins, goblins, rats, and one lone wandering zombie, you’ll find yourself stocked and ready for the world of Oblivion. Which is a beautiful place. The landscape is adorned with foliage, flora, and fauna - and the little structures (or in some cases, remains of structures) that dot the landscape are amazing to explore. Abandoned forts, caves where vampires meet, and even gigantic ruins from long lost civilizations hidden in well…caves. There is so much to explore that just walking from city to city will leave you bewildered at the sights and sounds of the land of Cyrodil.

Speaking of which, the game is lore-intensive (which means it’s got tonnes of history and background). Which is a good thing, because it immerses you in the game world, and makes you feel like you’re playing a character, not controlling one. Plus, it’s good for those who like lore too.

I suppose I should start talking about the gameplay. It’s an RPG. You, at the most basic, walk around from place to place, do quests, buy equipment, save the world. But not quite. Let’s break it down.

• Walk around from place to place

Exploration and how you move from place to place is important for everyone. Whether you’re taking a horse, walking or running, the sights and sounds are awesome. But that’s not gameplay.

• Doing quests

This game is littered with quests, from buying out a house built on top of a burial site, getting a wine collector yet another exquisite limited edition wines, or joining the three guilds and making some money (Thieves, Fighters and Mages respectively). Or you could hit the arena and bet your money on some contestants or duke it out in the arena itself with your life on the line.

• Buy equipment

Oblivion is full of items, equipment, and all the clutter in between. Ranging from katanas from the oriental land of Akavir, to dwarven warhammers or long lost mighty artifacts hidden in the most treacherous tombs, Oblivion supplies every adventurer with everything.

• Save the world

The main quest has you closing Oblivion Gates (essentially gates to this hellish world) and solving the mystery of the emperor’s assassination, leading up to some form of epic conclusion I am nowhere near reaching. That’s because there’s just so much to do - becoming a gladiator, becoming Arch-Mage, or just buying out some houses and brewing some potions, or hanging out in the local tavern watching a bar brawl break out. Let me stress it again: too much to do. And that’s a good thing.

In short, Oblivion is the epitome of an RPG. It also shows that you don’t have to be a shooter to outclass the gaming market. Four years old, and it’s got a strong community backing it. And the fifth in the series is being released very soon.

Did I mention you can ride a unicorn? Because you can. And a flaming horse too.

Dwarf Fortress - Micro-management at its’ best.

A few days back, or a week, even, who knows how time passes - I reviewed Minecraft.

Dwarf Fortress is similiar, you mine - and you craft. But not in that aspect. It’s not first-person mining, nor crafting, but controlling dwarves from above, like in The Sims, micro-managing their daily lives. 

So in that case, what EXACTLY do you do? Well, mainly if you play Fortress mode (the other two modes are Adventure and Legends), you build a fortress for your dwarves and SURVIVE. Similiar concept to Minecraft, heh?

Not exactly. They are similiar but different. Can get that? Yeah.

So…fortress building. There’s more to it obviously. To craft a fortress, you have to mine into a cave or build a wall above ground. The world is displayed on a 2D top-down map using ASCII art so it can be quite overwhelming to get over first. But hey, gameplay > graphics, right?

Besides, I just use a tileset to change everything into sprite art - easier on the eyes, and easier to understand for new players too. It’s called May Green. Just google “May Green Dwarf Fortress tileset”.

Anyway, this is digressing, so back on track. Workshops are an important part to play in Dwarf Fortress - allowing you to create everything from thrones to tables to mechanisms to surgical benches to soap. And more. You can use these things to make more things, like mechanisms to pulleys, wells and the like. And you can assign rooms, a bed can designate a zone to use as a bedroom, a table a dining room, a statue - a sculpture garden, a cage - a jail, and more.

Managing the lives of your mini mythological minions is another thing (see what I did there?), you have to take good care of them, supply them with food and drink (dwarves like ale) - which you can make through brewing at a still. Food can be obtained from hunting, or farming - the better and more efficient option.

And if they get sick? Build a hospital and designate some doctors. If you can think of something to do, it’s probably in the game. Build a hospital? You got it. Build a meeting hall? You got it. Execute thieving dwarves? You got it.

Build a Dwarf Fortress?
You got it. 

Minecraft

MINECRAFT is a game about exploration. And mining. And building. And it is EPIC on levels. 

Firstly, the main reason I play Minecraft is that it is non-linear. That is to say, it has no actual goal - you can do what you want, when you want it. Want to build a fortress? Go ahead. Want to mine to the bottom of the world? Go ahead.

Want to go fight some zombies? Go ahead.

———

So in that case, what do you do in Minecraft? The title explains it all very briefly - you MINE and you CRAFT. By mining, I mean crafting a pickaxe, and going into a cavern, and mining your way down looking for ores, ranging from coal to iron to the very rare diamond and redstone. Each ore has its own properties - you can make diamond pickaxes, much better than stone ones, or use redstone dust to make electric circuits to operate doors and traps.

The world is procedurally generated in chunks. What that means is that the world is generated as you walk around - not all generated in one go, and the map size is roughly 1.6 times the size of Earth. That’s big. And each map is generated in chunks - large bits of area, roughly 256 “blocks”. This saves on CPU processing power. But enough of this, on to crafting.

CRAFTING is another aspect of Minecraft - go scavenge for resources, maybe you can use your hands to dig away at the ground to collect dirt or sand, cut trees for logs using an axe, mining for ores like gold and diamond and so on. Using these resources, you can craft a wide variety of things - blocks of steel, compasses, boats, or even minecarts and buckets. The possibilities are…less than endless but the game frequently updates, and new content arrives at a frequent pace.

And this is what is so addictive - the crafting aspect, constantly striving for that next recipe up the tech tree (albeit having no tech tree in-game), from your stone axe to your diamond axe, or crafting a hoe so you can start a farm, and so on.

The possibilities are endless, in that aspect.

But MINECRAFT doesn’t stop there. You can FARM, HUNT, and most importantly BUILD and SURVIVE.

BUILDING is the enjoyable part that lets your creativity flow - you start simple on the first day building say a house out of cobblestone or planks, and move up to building a fortress out of stone with a glass observatory. Or something like that. The day/night cycle in-game means you have to manage your time wisely - Gather resources and build a shelter by the end of the first day or you’ll be camped out in the night, vulnerable to the array of monsters out to get your brains.

Like zombies, skeleton archers, giant spiders or even the dreaded CREEPER who makes a “ssss” sound before blowing you to bits. Seriously. 

And the building isn’t limited to that. Build whatever your creativity desires - a greenhouse of glass, an underground tree farm, a underwater base, a man-made waterfall, a cabin in the mountains, a warehouse to store your goods, or even a minecart rollercoaster track. The possibilities are endless. No, really.

This is not a review. It’s a general idea of what you can do in Minecraft. The next update for Halloween brings even more content - portals, biomes, watches, fishing and jack-o-lantern pumpkin hats. Minecraft is the game that keeps on giving. 

That is, if you can stand the old-school pixelated art that has absolutely no polygon count whatsoever as far as I know. Not that that’s a bad thing - considering it’s a sandbox game where the world is quite literally made of sand.

And that sums up Minecraft. I’ll post a review next time. Until then, if you were inspired to get it, then DO GET IT. It’s a choice you won’t regret.

Cut The Rope

Story: A knock on the door. No one there. You look down and notice that a box has been left on your doorstep. You have no idea who, but two little eyes peek out at you. Inside you find a little green… thing (cutely named Om Nom). The label on the front says to “feed with candy.” ‘Nuff said.

Gameplay: This is a physics-based puzzler, and basically you have to feed the little green guy candy. It’s not as simple as it sounds though, as the candy is often suspended on a rope (or ropes) away from Om Nom and you have to figure out a way to get it to him by cutting the rope(s). Along the way, you’ll have to contend with different obstacles and tools like bubbles, whoopee cushions, and spiders that want the candy. Each stage also has three floating stars. Although getting the candy to Om Nom can in itself be quite easy, getting all the stars tends to make each stage more complex; it may take a bit of thought and a number of attempts to get all stars in a stage before getting the candy to Om Nom’s waiting jaws. It really helps that the physics are spot-on and feel quite balanced. 

Graphics: Colours are vibrant and graphics are cartoony which suits the game well. Also, Om Nom is super adorable. I’d love a plushie of him.

Sounds: The music fits the mood well. Upbeat and cute without being too distracting. Om Nom’s little sounds only make him cuter. The “gaah” sound he makes when he opens his jaws is quite endearing.

Replayability: For anyone who has ever wanted to tear their hair out because of a difficult stage in Angry Birds, this game shouldn’t be too rage-inducing. The puzzles may cause you to pause and think a bit, but probably won’t take too long to get past. There are four boxes, each with 25 stages, and 300 stars to collect altogether. Also, more stages have been promised in a future update.

Overall: Last time I checked, this little gem was sitting at #1 on the App Store, with Angry Birds looking more pissed off than usual at being shoved to the #2 spot. Stealing the top position from Angry Birds isn’t easy, but Cut The Rope is awesome enough to do it.

Tested on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1.

The Incident

Imagine you’re about to hail a taxi. Why the heck aren’t there any taxis around when you need one? You then have the sudden urge to look up. The next thing you know, a hail of stuff from goodness-knows-where is crashing down on you and you’re dodging for dear life. That, in a nutshell, is The Incident.

Gameplay: Dodging stuff, collecting coins, diamonds and extra lives. Oh, and climbing the mountain of stuff as it piles up to reach a set goal height. That’s pretty much it. And it’s addictive. The first few stages are quite leisurely, or at least about as leisurely as it can be when you’re dodging everything from mailboxes to minivans. Later stages get more hectic as the debris falls at a faster pace and you’ll quickly find yourself tilting frantically to avoid the constant hail. Great tilt response, checkpoints, and multiple lives make the adventure a bit easier.

Graphics: If you don’t like retro graphics, you’re gonna think this game is plain ugly. This is a loving homage to retro graphics, and it really shows. This isn’t some haphazard pixel mess though; the attention to detail in this game is meticulous. You will realize this the first time you see a Smart Car.

Sound: Utterly awesome midi soundtrack. The opening menu screen has music that’s slightly eerie, like some thriller movie. Once the game starts, the music is frantic and the retro sound effects are also really great, with the coin sounds and crashing effects fitting well. The main character’s footsteps sound a little bit odd though, as if he were wearing tap shoes. My fave part is the wicked pause menu music. Like funky elevator music.

Story: There really isn’t much in the way of a story here. Stuff just falls from the sky without much explanation as to why, although if you watch the menu screen for a few minutes, you’ll see debris being pulled up by some unknown force. But you don’t care. You’re just a guy trying not to be buried by all the crap falling from the sky.

Replayability: The Incident joins the ranks of games like Doodle Jump and Canabalt; it’s easy to pick up and play for short bursts, and also has the addictive factor that makes you strive for the high score for hours.

Overall: If you’re into retro graphics, and like simple fun gameplay that draws you in, this is a great game to have. I’m still wondering where all the debris in the sky is falling from.

Tested on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.0.1.

Helsing’s Fire

I’m not a fan of the puzzle genre in most of its forms. I just don’t get Rubik’s cubes, match-3 games bore me, and I can’t stand Zuma.

But Helsing’s Fire caught my eye. Although a puzzle game at heart, don’t be turned off if you’re not into puzzle games. HF is a unique take on the genre, and even throws in boss battles with action elements.

Story: You play as Dr. Helsing, accompanied by your assistant Raffton in a quest to rid the terrible scourge that plagues the land. Fun premise, and the humour and wit made me smile.

Gameplay: Your goal is to eliminate enemies, and your main tools are torchlight and potions. Each stage has obstacles such as rocks and monoliths, all of which block your light. The aim of the game is to position the torch so that the light will shine between the monoliths and on the monsters, then tap the appropriate potion to send out a wave of coloured light to dispatch them. Monsters comes in different sizes and varieties and this is where the puzzle element comes in to play; some move to a different spot when hit by a light wave, others have different coloured shields that need to be taken down first, and some will even attack you. Also, if you hit a monster with the wrong coloured potion, it will actually give that monster a shield, forcing you to restart the level. Another great feature is the boss battles. Not only do you have to avoid the boss attacks, every so often they will unleash a dark light wave forcing you to hide behind a rock. Nice way of turning the tables.

Graphics: Each monster is drawn well. I’d say they were almost cute. Both Helsing and Raffton look pretty similar, though I suppose that’s not so surprising since it was probably the ‘in’ look of the era. I especially like the win animations. Seeing the men give each other high-fives and other such cool gestures is a nice touch. Colours are vivid and vibrant, and one really noteworthy feature is the option to adjust the game’s colour scheme to accommodate colourblindness, something the developers realized would be important in a game reliant on colour recognition. Kudos to them for taking this into account. 

Sound: Great medieval soundtrack. Each track is great by itself, but when put together they really give the game personality. Each sound effect is good, right down to the sound the torch makes when it hits a monster. 

Replayability: Each stage and its obstacles and monsters are randomly generated, so there’s plenty of replayability here since you’ll probably never play the same stage twice (aside from the boss stages). Also, a recent update just added a second chapter.

Overall: A puzzle game with action elements, Helsing’s Fire is an awesome addition to any iPhone gamer’s collection.

Tested on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.0.1.

Veggie Samurai

A parallel game to Fruit Ninja, but instead of ninja slicing fruits, you’re a samurai slicing veggies. Also, whereas in FN you’re avoiding bombs, in VS it’s bottles of poison.

Gameplay: Just like FN, this is pretty addictive. It’s easy to keep trying over and over just to raise your high score. A cool mechanic is the ability to dice your fruits after you slice them the first time, building up a dice chain and adding to your total score. There are six different modes, including your basic Samurai mode where you just slice veggies and avoid poison, Harmony mode where you slice as many veggies as you can before time runs out, and Chaos mode which is Samurai mode on crack.

Sound: The background music throughout the game is pretty authentic, with Japanese flutes, drums and stringed instruments setting the atmosphere perfectly, with the occasional vocal effect “oooowOOOH!” The slicing noises are spot on, with squelches for the juicier veggies and duller sounds for the non-juicy types. I quite like the sound when I slice a potato.

Graphics: Variety of different produce, though I don’t think a tomato is technically a veggie. Don’t even get me started on onions or potatoes. Nice splashes across the back wall when you cut a veggie though.

Story: Like FN, no story. I guess Japanese people just hate fruits and veggies?

Replayability: It’s quite addictive to keep slicing veggies over and over, and when you want a change of pace, just switch over to the other modes. But just like any other pick-up-and-play game on the App Store, this is the perfect game when you have a few spare minutes with nothing to do.

Overall: Fun, addictive game and good competition for Fruit Ninja. Either app is worth the purchase. I’m interested in seeing how each app develops.

Reviewed on an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.0.1.

Weekly Game Update #2

Sorry about the weekly game update which became some kind of septoquadweekly game update but on with it nevertheless:

DS GAMES

* Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies

* Monster Rancher DS

APPLICATIONS

* Garage Band 

Yes, ive been toying around with Garage Band making random jams and trams and prams and cams and all that rhymes with hams and all that stuph. Will post next time when the full jam tracks are all compiled into my “Jukebox Jams”.