The game I played most this week: TubesMix

Shapely Pipes: TubesMix

TubesMix is about assembling pipes into a certain shape.  It might sound a bit like the old game of pipes, but the difference is that the pieces are scattered about in a maze.  Moving them about is a bit tricky: you can move them in any direction, but they’ll keep moving until they hit a wall or other obstruction.  The trick, as you might’ve guessed, is to get them all into the right place in just the right order so you can move on to the next level.  Lots of possibilities exist here, since the maze can vary in complexity, as can the object you’ll need to build.  This one gets bonus points for the originality of the idea and also for the easy-to-look-at graphics.

Vertical Shooters: WWII Airfighters

Here we go (yet again) with another idea that’s good on paper but that stumble and falls flat on its face due to poor implementation and a lack of attention to detail.  G4Pocket’s WWII Airfighters is a vertical scrolling shooter based on a World War II air combat theme.  Sure, it’s an old idea that’s been done before even on the Pocket PC (Siberian Strike X) and 20 years ago on coin-op machines (1941), but vertical shooters are still one of the few categories that hasn’t already been flogged to death by developers, so there’s still potential there in the idea.

The first sign that WWII doesn’t stand out are the lackluster visuals.  They’re not terrible, just excessively mediocre and not much fun to look at.  The explosions are unremarkable and seem as identical as the endless swarms of planes.  Had the game come out in 2002, they would’ve been acceptable, and in 2001 they might’ve even been good.  But today, they just look like crap.  There are a couple of bright spots, like the clouds that scroll by at different speeds and look 3D and the detail of the ocean far below, but other than that, the game just doesn’t look like much.

The game play isn’t much to get excited over, either.  First, the game is oblivious to your device’s stylus, which means you’ll have to hit the buttons to get anywhere in the game (Come on, people, the stylus is easier to use than the buttons when you’re navigating through menus and such).  So you’re stuck using the d-pad and buttons to navigate menus, and the developer didn’t include the ability to remap the keys.  It surprises me how many developers to this day seem convinced that the best method of input is to navigate by the d-pad while hitting the action button to accelerate/fire/jump/whatever.  Don’t they know that for those of us with an action button in the middle of the d-pad, trying to hit that button while maneuvering with the d-pad is very clumsy?  The game isn’t very fast, either.  While the game offers a speed setting, the game is a little jerky regardless of the setting.  The setting determines the speed at which things happen, but doesn’t affect the game’s smoothness, which is a problem.

The game offers only one mode, which apparently is a campaign of some sort.  There’s not a storyline or briefing to tell you what you’re doing.  Sure, this kind of game is pure action, but it’s nice to know that you’re part of some sort of overall story, since the game is based on the greatest conflict of the 20^th century.  The game lets you fly two sides: American’s or German’s.  Now we can ignore the historical incongruity of German war planes flying over the South Pacific Theater, but they don’t really seem to handle any differently.   

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright ) 2006 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.