The game I played most this week: K-Rally

Combat Racing: K-Rally

From Infinite Dreams comes K-Rally, their attempt at making a overhead racing game in the same vein as Death Rally (on the PC) and a few other similar games such as Gangsta Race (on our own platform). Infinite Dreams is the company that developed Sky Force 1 and 2, the well received shooting games. The Sky Force games were known partly for their interesting 3D engine, which allowed a form of parallax scrolling where trees and building seemed to scroll at a different speed than the ground. This created the illusion that they were rising into the air and made it feel like you were really riding through the air just above them. All those blended sprites and particle effects make for a little blurriness, but it’s still a neat effect. 

This technique is used quite a bit in K-Rally to good effect. Although the cars look a little small on the track, the trees and other objects fortunately don’t impede your view of the race. K-Rally is visually in the same league of Sky Force, and offers the usual features found in top-shelf racing games: such as the ability to do a quick race, a career mode, a championship mode, and even a ghost mode (well known in the racing game category, “ghost mode” allows you to race against a recorded image of your car going around the track on a previous lap).   

K-Rally’s game play is pretty typical combat racing: fly around the track as fast as you can, taking out enemies with your weapons, picking up bonuses and avoiding mines. K-Rally moves at a slower pace than other games of this variety, but that is actually a good thing since it makes it easier to focus on cornering and maneuvering around obstacles. After all, with the overhead perspective, sometimes you’ll need to reverse left and right to get around a corner.  

Another feature K-Rally has in common with most of the better racing games is the ability to upgrade your vehicle. K-Rally even offers experience points, which is becoming something of a trend in racing games on other platforms. For example, Black Bean’s Evolution GT, which I’m currently playing on my desktop machine, has a fairly sophisticated RPG-like advancement system where you can advance levels and a point system allowing you to strengthen skills such as “steering precision,” “brake timing,” “intimidation,” and several others. The ability to develop a set of skills is one of the primary appeals of role playing games, and it definitely benefits racing games as well. It’s nice to see this trend trickling down to Pocket PCs, as well.  

Toy Sand: Gloop Zero

Gloop Zero is an odd little game that I can’t help but think was inspired at least a little by that falling sand game that’s a big hit on the Web and is now available on your Pocket PC. GZ is a bit different, though: whereas, sand doesn’t really have any point to it and is more of a toy than anything else (not a bad thing, really), GZ is about getting little globs to reach their destination by drawing little ramps and barriers to direct them. You don’t have to get all of them to the destination, and a meter will tell you how close you are to getting enough to their destination to complete the level. You can only do a certain amount of “drawing” on the screen at one time, and many of the levels require you to  shift gears after you’ve successfully gotten the globs to a certain spot. 

GZ’s graphics are pretty blasé. The audio is, too, and the whole product has a certain lack of vitality that prevent it from rising above the fray. The game also has a few development issues. The physics of the globs don’t quite appear realistic, and sometimes they appear to fall through gaps that aren’t really there. Also, when you’re drawing lines, the tracking of the line is very unforgiving: if you’re trying to steer the globs over a chasm, the slightest dip in your line will cause a traffic jam.  

News – IPhone

Maybe it’s just me, but is the IPhone  really that big a deal?  It’s really amazing, after all these years, to see the cult of fanaticism that still surrounds Apple. Oh, sure, the IPod  is a terrific device. And it was the first digital audio player that was so well designed and executed that it went from being a “hey, that’s neat” impulse buy for geeks to an essential accessory for a lot of people.

I can see that happening with the IPhone, as well: like most things from Apple, it’s almost guaranteed to have better usability and greater design aesthetics than most competing products. But it is, after all, just a phone with a lot of extra features, and it comes at a rather large cost. It has the potential to be the next trendy, must-have gadget, once the price comes down to more reasonable levels. In a way, it’ll probably be like the first generation of Pocket PCs. While the incredible momentum from the IPod will no doubt help out the IPhone, the mobile phone market is already pretty crowded. I don’t really follow the phone market all that much, but to me it seems there are an awful lot of different phones out there with a lot of different operating systems. Do we really need another souped-up mobile phone?

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.