Gold Miner Joe :: Xplodus :: News 

The game I played most this week: Gold Miner Joe

All that Glisters: Gold Miner Joe

Gold Miner Joe is a budget title from Arcade Lab and was ported over to the Pocket PC courtesy of Viex. Gold Miner Joe is a pretty modest game that excels at what is was designed to be: a simple run-jump-and-shoot game that may not be cutting-edge but nevertheless shows a lot of development time and attention to detail. It’s also a rare example of a game that ports over remarkably well to the Pocket PC, probably because of its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t require a sophisticated interface.  

Not a great deal can be said about the game itself: the idea is to just explore a gold mine, collecting gold while avoiding various traps, including bad guys that will try to take you out. Your basic tools are your ability to run, jump, get out of the way, throw rocks, and drop bombs. That’s pretty much all you need to know, aside from the fact that game levels are accessible via a central hub (although they need to be unlocked before you can enter them) and you are given codes so you can return to levels you’ve already visited (I personally greatly prefer a more straightforward level progression with the ability save games anywhere, but that’s just me). 

Graphics, in VGA mode, are excellent, but don’t push the limits in terms of what the Pocket PC’s hardware is capable of (you’ll notice that the original PC version can run on a platform as modest as a Pentium 200). The visuals probably look a bit pixilated (and certainly dated) on a desktop monitor, but shrunken on a Pocket PC screen, they look excellent. Sound effects and music are also excellent and seem balanced. When you first play, the pop-up help screens will show you around the game.

This game makes me eager to check out Mteam, which I’ll review next week. One complaint: the demo is a bit stingy; you only get a few minutes of game play, and the status message smack dab in the middle of the screen sometimes makes it hard to see what you’re doing. If I were the developer, I’d create an unlimited demo that just features the first couple of levels or so.

Boom Town: Xplodus

What is it with all these Bomberman clones lately? Fine game, but aren’t people looking for more sophisticated titles these days? I remember about a year ago when there were almost none (apart from that one from Emcon Emsys, a company known for churning out tons of subpar, almost pathetic titles that look like they were the result of spare parts being slapped together), and now we have several decent representatives of this previously-neglected arcade game category. 

I guess there really isn’t much you can do with a game where the primary goals are to get past obstacles and obliterate enemies by dropping bombs and running away before they go off. You can always make the enemies and weapons a little more interesting, and that’s pretty much what PDAMill/Palmstorm did when designing this game. The graphics of course, are very good, the typical result you’d expect from the PDAMill studio. As with any title from the company, significant effort was put into the game’s backstory.

Although a plot isn’t really necessary in this type of thoughtless mayhem arcade game, it’s still nice to have, and creates the impression that a lot of thought went into the game’s other aspects as well. The overall tone of the game is tongue-in-cheek, as it should be with a crude game of this type. After all, these days, this type of game is more of a lark than anything else. To me the most interesting thing about Xplodus is the cartoon drawings in the menus, which appear to have been created by a professional cartoonist. Audio is also quite good, but not amazing.

The game play is very fast, with randomly-generated levels and the added complication that blowing up obstacles can reveal bonuses that’ll help you get the job done. I would say, though, that the character movement isn’t quite as smooth as I was expecting, but this could be due to my device. Controls are configurable, although I found using the default method of the d-pad for movement and the action button for bomb-dropping seemed to work pretty well.

News – Revamping Game Categories

Describing games is hard. Evaluating games is hard. Reviewing games is hard. And, let me tell you, categorizing games is no walk in the park, either. Over the past couple of weeks, several of us at the magazine have been undergoing the task of revamping the game categories in preparation for our annual Best Software Awards.

We’ve just about finished what is probably the hardest part of the task—redefining the categories. While it may seem easy at first, it really isn’t simple to come up with a balanced list of categories that will accurately and thoroughly reflect the large number of games out there. It may at first seem that most games are either remakes of old arcade games or Tetris/Bejeweled clones, but there’s actually quite a bit out there that’s not necessarily easy to lump into categories that are well-defined yet open enough to include the range of what’s out there. We’ve debated a number of ways of getting this done, from having numerous top-level categories to sub-categories to even having dedicated categories for games like Pac-Man, Breakout, and Bejeweled.

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