The game I played most this week: G4 Pocket Space Fighters

Vertical Scrolling Action: G4 Pocket Space Fighters

Space Fighters has a pretty generic name, but the game itself is also pretty generic and doesn’t really have that much to offer. It’s not that the game is awful—it could have been decent. Sure, the graphics are mediocre and grainy and the controls aren’t that great. But the levels have a pretty good mix of enemies and the game play seems pretty balanced. The screens do have a good use of color, and there’s a lot of variety in what you’ll see going on the screen at once. The actual enemy and player graphics looks a little fuzzy and cheap, but that could be overlooked if the overall package was good.  

The big problem with the game is that you can’t remap the controls, which means you’ll have to either push down on the action button or use the other default button the game uses to fire your weapons. Depending on which model you have, this arrangement can work out really well or terrible. On my Dell Axim X51V, the fire button by default is mapped to a button on the left side, which doesn’t work out too well for me since I’m right handed and always use that hand for tasks like firing.

As for everything else with the game, it just doesn’t stand out. There’s just nothing particularly gripping about the game or the way it plays.

With games like Sky Force in the mix, the bar is going to be set pretty high for vertical scrollers. G4 Pocket Space Fighters is yet another example of a game that isn’t necessarily bad in of itself, but just isn’t competitive since it follows in the wake of some higher-quality titles.

Soldiers In Chess: SmartDrops

Those of you who were around when the platform was first starting to take off probably remember a very crude game called “same” or “lines.”  Several clones of this game popped up around when the platform switched names from WinCE to Pocket PC, and I still see a few of them coming out from time to time.

Fortunately, SmartDrops isn’t yet another tired clone of that game. While it’s clearly based on the same idea, SD has some sophistication and is sort of the thinking man’s version of that old game. The first thing that sets the game apart are the graphics, which are among the best I’ve seen in the object-swapping game category. They’re not quite VGA quality, but the shading and lighting effects are pretty good. The second difference is a minor tweak that turns the whole game on its head: pieces can be moved in only one direction (indicated by an arrow on each piece). This variation introduces some strategy to the game, since you’ll have to plan your moves a bit more rather than just eyeball the play area until you find matches. The game also has bombs you can tap on that will blow up surrounding game pieces. Apart from that the game works pretty much the same: the idea is to clear as many pieces as possible from the board as you can, and new pieces will appear as you remove the old ones. Still pretty simple stuff, but another feature the game has going for it is the ability to tweak the game’s difficulty in three different areas: the number of game pieces that appear in the beginning of the game, the number of new ones that appear after making a match, and the number of “bombs” that appear on each level. Games are also automatically saved.

Not a bad effort and a surprisingly good revamp of an old game that’s been overdone. Those of you who like the basic concept of the game should definitely give SmartDrops a look.

News

Werner (also known as Menneisyys on the forums; he’s become quite the celebrity in the Pocket PC scene lately) has released a nice little news roundup. In it, he focuses on some lesser-known titles that have been ported over from other platforms. These days, I tend to avoid ports, since they often involve more hassle than they’re worth (IMO, anyway).

From the PocketGamer forums on 3/13:

There is a lot of Windows Mobile gaming news to report on:

1. After Ben Stanley’s excellent review, Just Another Mobile Monday has also published a review of probably the best and, what is more, TCP/IP multiplayer-enabled, turn-based strategy game even released for the Pocket PC, Orions: Legend of Wizards. It's available here and is highly recommended. Note that I'll also publish a Strategy Guide to the game (I'm also an author of several Starcraft Strategy Guides so the genre, the ideas of micromanagement etc. are pretty well-known to me) later, as soon as I have some free time (not in the next two weeks, I'm afraid). (News source: PPCT).
   
   BTW, note that a new, 1.01 version of the game was released some days ago; it, among other things, fixed the multiplayer functionality, which was entirely useless in the initial version. Now, multiplayer is working just great and, as it's IP address entering-based, really flexible and even allows for playing people in another continent (that is, it's not local-only). (News source: I worked very closely with the excellent Moregames Entertainment folks to quickly iron out the bug.)
2. Pocket Fallout, the highly recommended, free (!) Fallout clone (review here) has just received a dedicated website. (New source: private e-mail from the developer.)
3. Byte@Hand is working on a real (!) Pirates! clone Caribbean Adventures 1600AD. Unlike the other two piracy-related games on the Pocket PC, High Seas and Tradewinds (please read the full story here), this is promised to bear much more similarities with the classic Pirates! (News source: have run into the announcement while checking out the following title.)
4. The same developer, Byte@Hand, has just released a space shooter Space Prospector. I haven't tested it as yet; based on the screenshots, it doesn't seem to be as good as SkyForce Reloaded, the best vertical scroller game available for the Pocket PC. I may be mistaken, though. (News source: PocketGamer.org)
5. The excellent Doom port (which, as can also be seen based on its name, supports the 3D hardware built into Intel 2700G and GoForce-based Windows Mobile devices) DoomGLES has been updated to version 0.5. There are two main things of interest in here (among other things):
   - music support (at last! Previous versions only offered sound effects)
   - can be played in Portrait mode, which is certainly very good news for Dell Axim x50v/x51v users sensitive to the polarization problems of the cheapo Dell screen in Landscape mode.
   
   All in all, checking out the new version is a MUST for all 3D hardware accelerated Windows Mobile device users. (News source: forum announcement over PocketGamer.)
6. Interactive E Books Ltd has released Jurassic Adventure. It's an interactive e-book where you play the role of a research physicist sent back in time one hundred and fifty million years into the past. Don't, however, expect anything like a "real" adventure game. In my opinion, Interactive E Books's games are far inferior to that of, say, Legend Entertainment on the PC or, on the Pocket PC / Palm, Fade Team (Fade on the PPC / Acedior on the Palm - do they ring a bell?). However, it's pretty cheap and, if you're into the genre, you may want to give it a try. (News source: PocketGamer)
7. The free, highly recommended Transport Tycoon Deluxe has also been updated; the new features are as follows:
   
   - Now works on VGA devices
   - Loads the PC version of OpenTTD's save game files!
   - Right-click emulation via hard buttons.
   - Fast landscape graphics via custom raw frame buffer drawing routines.
   - Full threaded sound effects and music.
   - Palm TTD provides full 480x320 Tapwave API accelerated graphics
   
   (News source & related discussion: PocketGamer)
8. Tetraedge has released the long-anticipated multimedia (which is bad news for fans of the "traditional" textual or Lucasfilm/Sierra-like genre) adventure game Syberia 2 in both English and German (French, Spanish and Italian versions will follow later). Note that I can only provide you a ClickGamer link (and this one for the German version) because the official homepage of the developer still doesn't have any information on the new game. Note that, while originally there wasn't, now, a trial version is also available. (News source & related discussion: PocketGamer)

9. PocketGear offers a 20% rebate for all their products in March with the coupon code MARCH20 (News source: PocketGamer)

Note: I actually reviewed Space Prospector in the last issue. Werner is correct in that the game is not nearly as good as Skyforce.

Thanks, Werner!

-AG
 

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