Dreamway :: Omniflash :: Thought of the Week

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The game I played most this week:

Dreamway

Racing Around: Dreamway

Dreamway, unfortunately, is one of those novelty racing games that looks terrific but frustratingly doesn’t deliver in the game play department. Like myriad other games, Dreamway involves racing miniature cars in a variety of fantasy environments. There’s a bank plaza, an asteroid, an ogre’s castle, and several others. Everything in the game, from the tracks to the surrounding scenery to the planes that whiz by overheard to the actual cars have great cartoon rendering. With great use of lighting and perspective, the various landscapes all look fantastic enough to be eye-popping yet just realistic enough to stay on this side of believable. After you’ve been around the tracks a few times, there’s enough little details to keep the scenery interesting without being overtly distracting.

Control is a little unbalanced. Although it’s possible to make it around the track acceptably without crashing too often, handling feels a little too sloppy. This problem is compounded by the deliberately loose camera angles, which make the cars seem more like boats. Dreamway accepts stylus and directional pad as input methods (keys are mappable), but it doesn’t quite feel right. I’ve played quit a few racing games that end up floundering due to bad controls, and I’m sure it’s not easy to create functional handling and physics modeling on limited devices like Pocket PCs and Smartphones. While Dreamway certainly isn’t the worst in this regard, it could benefit quite a bit from some improvement in this area. The interface was also confusing, especially when trying to exit the game.

On the other hand, the game does have a lot going for it in other areas. The aforementioned tracks are varied and balanced. As with other arcade-based racers, Dreamway has numerous weapons, power-ups, and obstacles to keep the game interesting. Your enemies are pretty aggressive, and while they aren’t the greatest drivers, they won’t just sit back idly while you blaze past them. Dreamway is probably in the top 50% of racing games I’ve played, and while it’s passable as is, with some more work it could be great.

Breaking up Bricks: Omniflash

Omniflash is one of those ideas that sounds good but for whatever reason seems to fall short in its execution. A cross between breakout and vertical shooters, Omniflash involves shooting various types of weapons at block formations while managing the usual slew of positive and negative power-ups. Kind of a neat idea, but this one just doesn't materialize into anything enjoyable. One of the major problems is the lackluster graphics, which are mediocre at best. On my Ipaq 2215, the game trudges along at a snail's pace and noticeably lags when there's a lot going on in the game.

On the plus side, the game does have some features which could probably be taken and developed into a better game. One neat feature is "smash," which allows you to hit your ball and set it aflame so it can burn through enemies. You also have a shield you can use to brace yourself from enemy attacks. This game is apparently part of an ongoing series and is heavily Japanese-inspired. Figuring out the game's storyline and underlying concepts requires a lot of work, thanks to the nature of Japanese-inspired games and the terrible writing in the game. While the game falls a little flat in its current state, I feel this is yet another game that could've been a lot more if the idea had been fully realized. I'd only recommend it to hardcore players.
 

Thought of the Week — More Memory?

I saw this new application from a compression technology company called WindSpring advertised in a Handango e-mail, and it immediately struck as me as having questionable usefulness. WindSpring Mobile, the company’s first and only Pocket PC application, is one of those software utilities which promises to increase your available memory by compressing programs in the background while they’re not being used. (The description says it uses a format called “micro data format,” which WindSpring apparently created. They want people to think of it as “miniaturization” rather than compression, but it has to be some sort of on-the-fly compression.)

Just thinking of the concept immediately reminds me of similar such programs on the desktop which came out in the early-mid 90s and claimed they could increase memory or hard drive space. Overlooking the really bad ones (SoftRam and Microsoft’s train wreck DoubleSpace), the good ones did a fairly good job of increasing space, although the extra CPU time needed resulted in a performance hit. (Incidentally, Windows NT had its own compression software built into the operating system, and it’s still a component of Windows XP. I’ve never heard of anyone using it, though.)

The only problem with these gimmicks is that, apart from slowing things down, they were unable to compress files that were already shrunken. I haven’t tried WindSpring, but an unfavorable customer review on Handango indicates that the title doesn’t compress Pocket PC databases, which is a major drawback. I’m guessing that games probably wouldn’t work too well with the software, either. Developers already do a lot of compression in order to get all their sound and graphics data into a manageable size footprint, since it’s understood by everyone that space is limited on Pocket PCs. If anyone tries the software out (back up your data before installing!) and has an opinion on it, please drop me a line.

Allen Gall’s The Week in Games is a free service of POCKET PC magazine and POCKET PC magazine ONLINE: in-depth articles, tips, an Encyclopedia of Software and Accessories, and links to the best Windows Mobile PDA and Smartphone Web sites. It is edited by Duncan H. Brown.

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Allen Gall’s The Week in Games  Copyright © 2005 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.