The game I played most this week: Raging Thunder

Note: I’ve decided to shake things up a bit this week and review a couple of Smartphones games. I had all but given up on the Smartphone six months ago as a game platform, but after checking out the various sites one more time, I did find a few games I felt were worth looking at.

Smart Racing: Raging Thunder

These Outrun-style racing games seem to be getting quite popular these days. Glad to see it: we need more good racing games. Now that Pocket PC devs are getting a lot better at non-accelerated 3D graphics, texture mapping, and physics modeling, we’re reaching a point where it’s possible to come up with higher-end arcade games that are viable for the platform. 

Polarbit’s Raging Thunder looks and runs so well that it’s hard to believe you’re playing it on a Smartphone. The game features four modes, quick race, arcade, time trial, and tournament and a number of cars with a range of strengths and weaknesses. Graphically, the game shows an almost perfect balance between visually quality and speed: the tracks show good design, with plenty of detail and variety in the buildings, bridges, and various other objects that whiz by you as you’re going down the track. Even when surrounded by other cars, the game is very speedy and never comes close to slowing down.

That’s pretty impressive for a heavily graphical game running on a Smartphone. The cars themselves, including the player’s, look sharp and don’t show the blurry textures and pixellization typically seen in Pocket PC racing games. The car physics are also pretty good: the player cars show some effort went into modeling the ways a real car reacts to a real road. Suspension, braking, and cornering are fairly close to what you’d see in some of the better racing games in the arcades. Steering seems about right, too: while some games goof and simply rotate the player’s car on a central axis when cornering, RT feels more like you’re turning from the front wheels.

Unfortunately, what’s holding this game—and many others—is the controls. Not necessarily RT’s implementation, but just how it works out on a Smartphone. To start with, RT doesn’t allow you to customize the controls any. This actually isn’t that big a deal, since RT thoughtfully already has the controls mapped to the numeric keypad as well as the directional pad. The directional pad on my Audiovox is useless for this game, and the number keys work fairly, well, but the car still isn’t very easy to control. It seems that when designing the game, Polarbit didn’t quite find the right balance between simulation physics and arcade physics when handling turning; as a result, the game seems to have a bit of over steer, and it’s pretty hard to take a corner just right without steering yourself into the wall.

If the controls were mapped to a proportional device like an analog stick or gamepad, it would be fine, but since button controls work in an on or off manner, steering is a bit frustrating. This is especially frustrating, since the game is very appealing otherwise. The game also has an auto-acceleration feature, which I guess is a necessary evil for a Smartphone-based racing game, but still feels a bit like cheating to me. If there was just some way of tweaking the steering sensitivity (something like this could be added to the options menu), the game would be heavily addictive and a ton of fun. As it is, I feel myself wanting to play it on a PSP, Nintendo DS, or even a good old Pocket PC. (BTW, I did try to install the game on my Pocket PC 2003 device, but I couldn’t get past the language selection screen.)

The steering control problem may or may not make the game unplayable for you. I’d highly recommend downloading the demo and seeing how well you can control the game on your device. If you can stand the controls, RT has enough going for it in other areas that you’ll want to experience the full version.

Little Sub: SubQuest: Rescue and Attack

SubQuest is another clone of the Atari 2600 game SubHunt, although this one is only very loosely based on the original. The idea is to move your little sub through hostile waters, shooting/dodging enemies and picking up stranded divers along the way. (Power-ups are frequent, so don’t miss out on them.)  The game’s requirement that you touch the surface from time to time to get oxygen is a neat little twist. The game has terrific graphics and great (although a little overdone) sound effects courtesy of the Hekkus engine. 

News – Guess who’s back?

PDArcade is now back up. Looks like they’re not 100% up to capacity and are running a pretty basic VB Portal setup. The good news is that they’re already posting articles on new games thanks to their staff and some volunteers.

Discuss...
 

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