Portent

This is a bigger review than usual, complete with animated gif which I’ve put together from screen dumps. I’ve been playing LootWars for a week or two now on my iPhone so feel qualified to give an in-depth review.

Its a Multi-player Mobile Game (MMG or MMO?) which is significant itself and not that expensive at just over £1. the object is to get to the top of the leader-boards by picking up scrap and bashing othr people to steal theirs. But you are limited to holding just 6 pieces of scrap.

Gameplay: After you run the App you get the first screen with rusty logo. Top right is your three important stats: A for attack total, D for defence and E for energy. the latter is important as it maxes out at 20, is used when you scavenge or fight and only recharges at the rate of 1 per 20 minutes of realtime. The game is server based but plays over 3G, Edge or Wifi.

At the start you loot (2nd icon) and when players trash your items after they beat you in a fight. The 2nd screen shows my player (portent by the way!) not looking too healthy because I’d just scavenged two low power items. the attack is the sum of the 6 items attack, defence is the total of the items defence. Scavenging gives you the odd good item but mostly crap so you have to beat people and swap your inferior items stuff for their better ones.

Fighting takes place in the arena. You can search for players matching a name (or part name so a matches a number) but you only so 24 or 25 maximum. It would be better if you could see more or there was a next button. If you put in a and search you get the first 24 that match a every time. Press refresh and you get a random selection. Once you pick someone- I picked ordieth who was a lot stronger than me (the colour codes show green weaker, yellow about the same and red stronger) a fight takes place which I won. Items always seem sorted by total value with weakest at the top. Ordieth had what I call a 80-93 spread. His weakest item was 80, strongest 93.

After I defeated him, I swapped my weak Sheriff badge (26) for his strong DVR box (93!) that must have pissed him! (There are over a 1,000 items with levels and other factors that are hinted at in the help. You can trash someones items rather than swap yours with theirs.

So it’s a simple albeit repetitive game that is quickly played. I tend to leave it for a few hours, do a few fights to recover what I’ve lost and hopefully get stronger. I get the feeling that the creators are tinkering with the game. Some people were dropping crappy items so they couldn’t be attacked. If you have 5 or 6 items you are vulnerable. 4 or less and you can’t be attacked. But they have stopped players dropping items temporarily.

I think that with a few minor tweaks they will have a better game; its not bad now but could be improved. I could think of a few different ways to improve it but they can’t make big changes suddenly. for instance you can visit the town to mingle and swap items but I’ve never seen that work. Some more info on the item colours would be good.

So my experience has been scavenge to get initial and replacement (for trashed ) items then fight to improve items. I’ll keep you updated on how this progresses. Currently I’m starting to find it a bit stale. But I think it will improve so I’m hanging in there. They do encourage feedback but haven’t responded or acknowledged mine. You can also visit the their website.

Graphics are very nice though are just window dressing. It works well even over edge and they’ve just changed servers which suggests they’ve got overwhelmed with players. It’s significant as one of the first wave of multi-player games for the iPhone. So if you like games and have an iPhone, give it a try! Rating 7 out of 10.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

This games takes the defence scenario but extends it by giving you the ability to build armies (using mana which is obtained by killing the baddies) and then you can go on the offensive. It’s a simple 2d left right scrolling and can be played with keyboard or mouse.

You have artillery in the shape of a bow and as well as earning mana during the battle, you also gain experience that can be used to upgrade your weapons, give you new types of troops. Great graphics, an ok sound track and just fun. Excellent.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This is quite tough as my lamentably poor score demonstrates. It’s table tennis (aka ping pong) playing against a touch computer opponent.

Just move the bat left or right with the mouse. Bounce angles seem determined by the point at which you hit- hitting the ball off the table is all too easy! But if you’re looking for a simple (albeit frustrating) game then give this a try.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

If you want to show an iPhone application to impress your friends then this is it. Back in the early 1990s Solitaire tile games (aka Mahjong) were very popular and you could even get all sorts of tile sets for them. Now it’s here for the iPhone as both a commercial version and a free taster which I’m reviewing here.

This is in 3D and the iPhone touch controls let you rotate, slant and zoom in or out. It makes very nice use of the touch pad and works at all angles. Just touch both matching tiles and they fly upwards. That’s a clever bit of work to have the touch display work for tile selection at all viewing angles through as you’d suspect it can be easy to hit the wrong tile when you’re zoomed out.

The free game comes with 4 boards and 2 backgrounds. The commercial gives you 25 plus a layout editor and 5 backgrounds with more promised. Everyone I’ve shown has been impressed with this; you will. The only misgiving is that many people will probably be happy with just the free version- it’s that good! Released September 6th 2008.

Link (to the game in the App Store)

Popularity: 2% [?]

This takes a few seconds so have patience! Spore is a newly launched game by veteran game designer Will Wright- famous for Sim City and of course the Sims.

Spore is his latest and possibly greatest game in which you sort of play God! Starting with a tiny single cell critter, you evolve it to a bigger critter then move into land, form a tribe conquer the world and then go into space. What makes it so compelling is that you get to select the path of evolution by choosing all sorts of legs, fins, flippers, tentacles; a massive collection of parts which the game is able to animate. that’s the really clever part. And it gets better- you can share your critter or use others and the Sporepedia (pictured) now have over 8.2 million.

Earlier today it had 8.1 million so that’s over 100,000 added today. As the game is being launched thats probably to be expected but still quite remarkable! I have ordered a copy of Spore so the Portentaurus when I have created it might yet grace these pages…

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I think this has been well thought out. Some levels are very easy whereas other take a bit more effort.

You get a set number of bombs on each level and have to propel the main character to the exit door. On some levels there are barrels which explode after a while or tnt which blows immediately. Add in crates and it gets interesting. As you can see I’ve reached level 19 so far. Not easy as on some levels you have only one bomb- eg level 16.

You don’t have to solve all the levels in one go. Once you’ve done a level you can restart anytime at that level. Nicely implemented with great graphics. Recommended.

Link

Popularity: 2% [?]

This is my mini city- not much to look at, but the more visitors it gets the higher the population becomes and then I can add industry, set up proper transport infrastructure, security, business and the environment. I’m not sure if they have to be unique visitors but would guess so or else repeat visits would clock up the numbers.

For once the link goes to my city called Portent999 rather than the site itself but you can set up your own free city and invite visitors. It’s a neat idea so long as people visit so come on everybody- turn my humble patch into a sprawling (but green!) metropolis…

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Popularity: 4% [?]

It looks rather bleak- you have a ball on the end of a piece of string. the other end moves with your mouse cursor so you have to drag it (the ball falls under gravity) and try and click on it.

I found it almost impossible until I learnt a trick. (Warning Spoiler). Drag the string to the left or right edge so the ball is half off the screen. then move the cursor off screen until it’s a few pixels away. Then a quick mouse move and click should hit the ball. What does it do? That would be telling!

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Popularity: 4% [?]

This is quite remarkable. In this day and age of virtualisation technologies, this is part of a research project at Oxford university to simulate a PC 100% in java. Emulation means that the software acts as a processor and reads all the instructions then runs them.

Judging by the speed I’d say this is running at maybe 5Mhz or there abouts, sort of 1988-1989 PC speeds. Still the fact that it works is pretty remarkable.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is something of an epic game! One of the few Flash games that has a campaign. It’s the usual tower defence game except the view is sideways not a top view.

You’ve got 4 turret positions with a wide variety of weapons, most of which you can’t afford to start with but you earn points as you progress. It has the dumb logic that as your country’s last hope you are given a weak initial defence and the enemy always attacks starting with the weakest and gradually progressing to strongest. Still it wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise!

Beautiful graphics, decent but ultimately irritating music and great game-play make this an excellent diversion. I suspect it could be a real time killer so you have been warned!

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Popularity: 15% [?]

This is quite a fun diversion. In the centre is a rotating arm with various coloured balls attached. You have a ball shooting gun that revolves around the perimeter. You have to shoot the ball to hit other balls of the same colour so they fall off the centre.

It’s all about the timing and the first few levels are pretty easy. After that…

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Popularity: 13% [?]

This is a word guessing game. You enter the word in the box on the left and if you get one of the words, it appears on the map.

Some words are on the edge of the screen and open up into other maps. The white square in the centre of the pink rectangle in the top left represents this map. There are lots of others so i guess it will take quite a while to guess them all. You can share your game with someone else as well for a collaborative effort. It’s simple, but well done but might take a few weeks to solve.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

This is a competition with the deadline of November 16th 2007 so you have three weeks. After that the winning team (there must be at least three of you) gets a couple of thousand pounds to complete the design and launch it with the full and not inconsiderable marketing muscle of Cancer Research UK.

Wikipedia as best sums it up. “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.

The form is typified by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants’ responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game’s designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multiple media (such as telephones, email, and mail) but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.”

As a sometime games designer I’d love to have a go at this but am just a wee bit too busy.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

A nice colourful and simple to play puzzle. It works on the same principle as the plastic sliding blocks puzzles I did as a kid, where I had to slide the pieces to solve the puzzle. I.e. there is one gap so you can move any piece that can go into that gap.

Here you click on a car to drive it into the space and continue until all the cars in each level are in their colour coordinated parking spaces.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

This is a very polished game with beautiful graphics and excellent sound track.

You have to reposition tiles by clicking on them and then clicking the destination, within a time period. It’s pretty frenetic, as there are big piles to reduce and holes to fill in. Each level has a jump code so after completing it you can get straight back to it in the future. It’s very well done; nice backdrops as well.

Link

Popularity: 9% [?]