The game I played most this week: 3D Lawn Darts

Yard Play: 3D Lawn Darts

This game is the sort of title you would only find on a Pocket PC. It's the sort of game that celebrates the mundane. Lawn darts!  It's a concept that's about as exciting as throwing wads of paper into a wastebasket. I remember playing it in the backyard way back in the late 70s and early 80s. The darts (I remember the game being called "Jarts") were made of metal (weighted at one end) with a spinning ring of plastic fins mounted on the shaft.

The "targets" were simply plastic rings that you'd place somewhere in the yard, and then you'd take turns throwing the darts hoping they'd land in the circle. The game was rather clunky: the "darts" got dirty easily, the lawn would get a little torn up, and the plastic fins broke off often.

3D Lawn Darts has two game play modes: normal and tournament mode, and you can play with normal lawn darts or "crown darts" (I can't really tell any difference). Both modes follow the same basic rules: each person takes turns throwing a dart, and the person who first gets to 21 points wins the game. The game's interface is simple but a little clumsy. The dart floats in space directly in front of the player, and you can aim the dart left and right by using the directional pad (the only factor affecting your throw is wind speed and direction, which appears in a little round gauge).

Thrust is determined by the usual sliding bar, which requires two carefully timed clicks. While simple, this scheme doesn't really give you a sense of control over the vertical angle. After throwing a dart, you get a nice 3D chase camera view that follows the path to its target, but the animation during these sequences (and in the game overall) is a bit sluggish. The graphics, however, are pretty good, although they don't support hardware acceleration. 

Oddly, the game provides "bonus" darts to give you an edge over your opponent. While having bonus weapons and powerups is a staple in action games and generally a good thing, in a simple game like lawn darts it comes off as a little strange and even seems like bad sportsmanship.

When you first start the game, you get a Nucleart (destroys everything), a "bomber" dart, a "splitter dart" (splits into three darts), "torcher" dart, a "lasdart" (laser-guided), and a few others depending on which game mode you play. While fun to play with, these darts of mass destruction seem a little silly in such a simple game, especially the ones which destroy the other player's darts. Another odd thing about the game is the locations, range from the ocean to the moon. Do we really want to play lawn darts on the moon? 

The issues with the interface make it more a matter of luck than skill and more importantly, don't seem to recreate the experience of playing the real game. I would think that for this type of game, a better approach would be something along the lines of Hexacto's Precise Stylus Input method, where you could actually drag the stylus to determine the angle, force, and trajectory of the darts. That would make the game feel much closer to the real thing.

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