The game I played most this week: Atomic Dreams

Rockets and Asteroids: Moon Base Defender

The first of this week’s games (both are free titles, by the way), is Moon Base Defender, which, as some of you might’ve already guessed, is a clone of the old game Defender. The idea behind the game, of course, is to aim your cannon in such a way that your rockets and as many asteroids as possible will get caught in the resulting explosions. Pretty simple stuff, but the game involved a little bit of strategic aiming that wasn’t always present in a lot of the older shooting games. The highly-graphical MBD has graphics that are a little overdone and feels a bit chintzy as a result, but the game play is surprisingly good. Taking out the asteroids, of course, is straightforward enough, but what makes things interesting are the little UFO's, who dart in and out and are relatively difficult to take out.  

Especially with its free price tag (for the time being, at least), I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the game to those who enjoyed the original Missile Command and don’t some pretty mindless entertainment. Note that you can download the game from Diane Dumas’ Hot Downloads section of our site. (To get rid of the nag screen, you’ll need to sign up for the developer’s newsletter.)

Diane’s Hot Downloads section of the site is here and the developer’s Web site, and the full version of the game are here.

FORE!: Nine Hole Golf

While not exactly a new title, Nine Hole Golf is now a freebie title thanks to Microsoft. (Hey, thanks, Microsoft!  I was almost positive you’d forgotten we existed!  So when’s Midtown Madness for the Pocket PC coming out, huh?)  Some of you will remember the game coming out more than a year ago, and some of you might also remember reading about the game in Werner’s very good roundup of golf games in the April 2006 review of Pocket PC magazine (read the review here.) 

The game was developed by OmniG Soft, a company known more for flashy graphics than solid game play. The game is pretty much a middle-of-the-road title. The graphics are pretty good, but not the best, and while the game features three courses and an impressive number of features like the ability automatically line up the player with a shot, the ability to select from a number of player stances for the type of shot (these are chosen automatically by default), the game walks a fine line between the realism of Links and the pure arcade “fun factor” mentality of the mini-golf inspired games like 3D Mini Golf.

NHG offers only four clubs, and the game will automatically select a club for each swing (although you can choose your own club easily enough). Depending on your attitude toward golf, having only four clubs can be either a hindrance or a great way of simplifying your swings. The game’s physics also follow a middle-of-the-road philosophy; they’re workable but don’t quite feel like real golf.

The game’s strongest suit is probably the GUI, which appears as a set of pop-up menus along the bottom of the screen. It’s sort of like the Pocket PC operating system interface, where you tap an area and a set of options pops up. The weakest area of the game is the swing interface, which is a two-stage linear power bar. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, NHG’s implementation of it is so fast that it requires exact timing and has very little margin of error. Getting the player to even hit the ball takes practice, and while testing I had several missed shots where the player didn’t even swing. 

News – Call of Duty

So it looks like Call of Duty 2 is finally out for the Pocket PC and Smartphone. If you haven’t played the original, it’s a very popular first-person WW2-based  combat shooter. I just started playing the PC version, and while I don’t like games that are heavily scripted, the game is still pretty good. The screenshots of the Pocket PC version don’t look too bad, although you’ll of course need 3D-accelerated hardware to get the most out of the game. I don’t think I’ll be reviewing this one, since I lack the 3D hardware necessary to see the game in its full glory. I haven’t read any reviews on it, but if you want to play the game on your non-accelerated Pocket PC or Smartphone, you’ll still have to cough up the fairly steep $29.99 price tag, fairly high by today’s standards. (I could point out that you can get Call of Duty 3 for your PlayStation 2 for only $10 more. I’m sure the licensing fees Aspyr had to pay for a top-shelf PC franchise like CoD weren’t cheap, but still….)  To me, the only platform worth paying $30 for (unless you’re a really hardcore CoD fan) would be a 3D accelerated Pocket PC, since we know that the Smartphone version won’t be nearly as good due to sacrifices necessary to make it run on that platform.  So, I’ll leave the reviewing to those with the necessary hardware.

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