The game I played most this week: Pocket Sand

Platforms: Pocket Sand

Pocket Sand is this insane new game with absolutely no purpose. You will either think it’s stupid within 5 minutes, or you’ll develop a minor obsession with it, forsaking all your other games and loading up your device whenever you have a free moment.

Game play consists of four basic elements: water, sand, salt, and clay, which fall in a stream from above. The game also consists of walls (which you build to direct the streams) as well as fire, plants, and a ceramic material you can use to build walls. The idea is to build platforms in order to mix the elements together in different combinations in order to see what you can come up with. The game is about redirecting, watering, growing, burning, mixing, and just generally seeing how big a mess you can make. The game really doesn’t have any structure or point besides that, but that’s quite enough, since the combinations of things you can do are virtually endless.   

I’m glad that the game runs in VGA, since lower-resolution graphics would probably fail to recreate the texture of the various sands. Pocket Sand is very casual in its approach, but it’s as addictive as it is pointless. Sure, it’s just a time waster, but what a way to kill time!  It takes me back to the days of spending hours in the sandbox, and it also reminds me of that colored sand you could buy when I was a kid. I wish the game had a save feature or at least a minimize button. On the desktop version of the game, you can fire it up and just let it run all day, coming back to it whenever you feel like it. I wish the Pocket PC version had a similar feature. 

Track Racing: Death Drive

Death Drive is a new road race combat game which is being directly compared to the mid-90s game Carmageddon. Honestly, Carmageddon was a poorly constructed piece of garbage where you’d run over pedestrians in your car. The controls and physics were pretty bad, and the game ended up being another bad copy of Doom. 

Fortunately, DD is assembled much better and is really a very different kind of game. Rendered entirely in 3D using Voxel Space (which allows you to render large distances and still have very high game speeds). DD isn’t really groundbreaking; it basically just involves racing around a variety of tracks shooting enemies with your car-mounted gun.  

The idea is nothing we haven’t seen before in games like Gangsta Race and Dreamway, but Death Drive has a couple of points in its favor: 1) it has excellent visuals and a fast pace, and 2) its interface is very well designed and goes out of its way to compensate for the control limitations we have in Pocket PCs.

DD features only one game mode (although there is a test drive mode), which is a multi-track tournament. Some of the tracks require you to take out all the other cars, others require you to simply come in first place. When in the game screen, DD features only one view mode, which places you inside the car. The 3D cockpit looks fantastic, but I found the viewpoint to be a bit too low to the ground. I wish the game supported other camera modes such as a hood or chase camera, or at least something that would give you a better perspective on upcoming changes in the track, not to mention the other cars.

The graphics in the game are quite good, although the Voxel Space doesn’t allow for much texture detail. This really isn’t a problem, since everything is moving by at a pretty fast clip anyway. Since the tracks have plenty of curves and trees along the side of the road, the game gives a very good impression of speed. The other vehicles are pretty well detailed, and you’ll probably spend most of your time focused on them anyway since you’ll usually need to take them out.

Controls are very easy, thanks to the effort developers put into making the game as automatic as possible. Throttle control consists of a cruise-control type of scheme where the speed will automatically “lock” at a certain setting when you hit the throttle. While it’s possible to momentarily kick the speed up or down a little, the throttle will only stick at one speed, a speed I sometimes found to be a bit too fast. (I often like to tailgate an enemy vehicle and just keep pumping them with bullets until they die, which was a little hard to do with the control scheme the game uses.)  

Steering is one aspect of control that racing games often flub, but DD’s handling physics are fairly close to what you’d experience in a real car. Thanks to the Voxel Space, the game is absolutely smooth all the way through. Combat is a big part of this type of game, and DD handles this very well with an automatic targeting interface that shows you how much remaining life your current target has. If you’re using guns, the game features and auto fire function that allows you to juggle driving while you’re trying to take out your targets. 

DD features five cars, which can be purchased once you earn enough cash. Each vehicle can also be upgraded in terms of firepower (via rockets, mines, and so forth) and performance (via engine and tire upgrades). Suffice it to say that DD has enough game to keep most players hooked until they reach the end.

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