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Review: Deer Hunter 3D

Filed Under: Reviews by James — Leave a comment
17/01/2012

I suspect most people who read this weren’t planning on buying Glu Mobile’s Deer Hunter 3D. Deer hunting isn’t exactly big over here, and even among that small sect I doubt many would want to recreate their hunting experience on a phone. DH3D is yet another game I picked up during the Android Market 10p sale that I’ve only just got around to having a go at. And so far it’s the only game I feel like I should have had change from. Certainly the asking price of £2.99 is a joke. The basic mechanic is that you move your weapon’s target reticule over Bambi’s mum and then tap it to fire. But such a simple combat mechanic used against adversaries that don’t even move until you start firing is just downright boring. The only thing livening it up is that the reticule lurches around sickeningly in an attempt to simulate trying to find your target and breathing. But this just comes across as frustrating- lining up a perfect shot is fiddly, and if you miss your first shot (or want to shoot more than one thing) then it will stop you getting a second hit. There’s no button based control scheme as an alternative to the shonky touch controls, and by the time I’d unlocked my first unlockable I was bored. The graphics are attractive if utilitarian and the few sounds aren’t anything to write home about. The only thing I can get behind is the fact there’s a free demo so if for some reason you did like the idea of it you don’t have to commit any money before you change your mind. Overall recommendation? Don’t buy.

Yeah, take that, DEER

Oh deer

Android Market: Deer Hunter 3D (Demo)

Developer: Glu Mobile

Xperia Play Optimised: No

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Review: Reckless Getaway

Filed Under: Reviews by James — Leave a comment
02/01/2012

The pitch for Reckless Getaway is pretty simple. It’s a bit 2D GTA, and a bit Burnout. You play a bank robber, you are followed by police down public highways, and you get points for avoiding crashes (or causing them, in the works-the-opposite-to-how-you’d-think Wreckless mode), driving into oncoming traffic, knocking police cars off the road, and picking up coins that litter the track. Doing well gets you points, and stars for unlocking further levels. If your car gets wrecked you carry on, but you’re denied the ability to earn the maximum of four stars- each wreck knocks one star off the available total. Aside from that there’s a few powerups, and that is pretty much the game. And it’s really very good. Simple to play but difficult to master, individual levels are short enough that you can beat one on any given trip to the toilet, and it’s genuinely fun. That’s all the boxes ticked for a really good mobile game. At the moment there’s 84 levels in Getaway mode and 80 in Wreckless, and the developer’s website does suggest that there will be more levels in future, so there’s quite a lot to work your way through.

One things get going it's not unusual to see cars flying all over the shop

There’s a cartoony styling to the graphics which is nice, and the introduction cutscenes being in the form of comic book panels is very neat. On my Xperia Play I’ve not seen any kind of lag or slowdown so it should run perfectly on most newer handsets and I’d expect it to do reasonably well on older less capable phones. Bear in mind that there is a 25MB download required before you can play- this is automatically stuck onto your SD card. I’ve got very few gripes- my main one is that while there are multiple routes around the level, they’re not highlighted particularly well so you can find yourself bashing against a wall you expected to squeeze past. Also there’s only two or three background tunes in the game, and while they aren’t bad, you will soon find them tiresome and turn the volume down a bit. It does have online leaderboarding which requires you to sign up to Polarbit’s Fuse Connect service, but aside from a global leaderboard there’s no other advantages, so if you want to compare high scores with friends, you’ll need to do it the old fashioned way, by telling them and gloating.

In Wreckless mode you assume control of a truck to cause MASSIVE DAMAGE

Reckless Getaway is only £1.27 on the Android Market at the moment, though if like me you bought everything and anything in the 10p sale before Christmas you should find that you already have a copy. At either price, it’s hard not to recommend. The only downside is there’s no free/demo version to try out before you commit, but I reckon it’s definitely worth the pound and a bit.

Android Market: Reckless Getaway

Developer: Polarbit

Xperia Play Optimised: Yes

 

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Xperia Play: A Review

Filed Under: Reviews by James — 1 Comment
28/12/2011

When the Xperia Play was released about six months ago, I wrote it off fairly quickly. The price was too high, Android games weren’t that great, and playing games on a phone means the battery dies and then you have no phone. So you can imagine my surprise at finding myself buying one last Tuesday, following a price drop that brought it down to a mere £150 unlocked (O2 Christmas deal, for those interested). And it wasn’t a whim- following an earlier sale, this time the Android 10p apps for 10 days promotion, a quick count revealed that I owned over thirty Android games, the most games I have ever owned simultaneously for any console. I’d not even played most of them, but it was clear Android gaming was certainly possible now.

A screenshot from Galaxy on Fire 2

Some games do look better than others- this is a good one

So what of the hardware? Well, it has ups and downs. The obvious thing it has over every other phone on the market is the gaming controls. The D-pad is smashing, the four Playstation buttons are clicky and responsive, and the Start/Select/Menu buttons are perfectly placed for maximum usefulness. The twin touch-sensitive thumbsticks are less of a success- with no kind of haptic feedback and being kind of small they’re a bit fiddly and it’s hard to really give them any plaudits. But given that these problems exist when you’re using on-screen virtual thumbsticks as well (shudder), at least these let you see the screen you’re trying to play the game on, so it’s difficult to give them too much of a hard time. A promising start, maybe, but there’s definitely room for improvement. Lastly, the shoulder buttons- they are there, they are usable, and they could be better. The fact that they’re not squarely on the shoulders isn’t such a big deal because they are where your fingers tend to rest naturally when gripping the phone.

There is a game behind all those fingerprints

Not just indie fare either- big name games do appear on the console. Dead Space is pictured.

Closing away the gamepad and looking at the Play as a phone, it continues to be a mixed bag of great bits and poor ideas. The screen is very very good- despite not being the top-of-the-line Android level now, it’s crisp, clear and very bright.  But the screen is too close to the four Android control buttons at the bottom- I’ve often found myself pressing the back button and then being taken off elsewhere because my thumb has brushed a touchscreen button. If the screen was pushed a little bit higher up the phone this wouldn’t be such a problem. But by far the worst thing about the phone is the power button- it’s right on the corner of the top right of the phone, right on the join between the two halves of the slide mechanism, and pressing it reliably is an exercise in frustration. It seems like Sony Ericsson realised this, and so they made the Home button on the front able to wake up the phone as well as a tap on the power button. On the bright side, this means you can switch on the screen one-handed. On the downside, you still can’t switch off the screen one-handed, and the home button is also very easy to press whilst it’s in your pocket, leaving that beautiful display burning away your battery while you’re not looking. Very poor show, really.

Android does have a tendency to look like Android wherever it goes

The Android software is fairly standard- if you’ve used any other Android phone then this is little different. It runs very smoothly, with only rare slowdown even after I’ve loaded up loads of apps on screen. The included widgets are nice although nothing to write home about, and there are a few included apps for managing your games (the Playstation Pocket app stores only the few ported games from the original Playstation- any “Playstation Certified” apps are stored separately in the Xpera Play app). Battery life is reasonable, with games sucking surprisingly little power (the biggest hog is the display, but this is true of most modern Android phones) . The only other real complaint I have is the inbuilt and inclusive memory- there’s only 400MB built into the phone, which is simply not enough – I got twenty or thirty apps loaded before I had to start manually moving stuff to the SD card, and it’s now something I have to do for every new game I load. It doesn’t help that the included games can’t be moved to the SD card to protect them from pirating. And as for the Micro SD card… included with mine was an 8GB card, but it was only class 2- the lowest and slowest spec SD card available. And it shows. When the equivalent class 10 card (the highest spec) is available for barely a few quid more it really is unbearable cheapness on Sony Ericsson’s part. I plan on picking one up separately, and once I’ve got it I’ll let you know what kind of improvement I see.

To summarise: the Xperia Play is quite a mixed bag, so I don’t feel I can just outright recommend it to anyone. If your mobile gaming is restricted to Angry Birds and Flick Soccer then you can probably carry on as you are. But if you’re a lifetime GameBoy fan like me, then you can probably look past the flaws and enjoy it as the only real Android gaming machine around. And if I’m right, it will be the only one for a long while- Sony and Ericsson are parting ways soon, leaving Sony making the phones. Sony have a new PSP out soon that they really cannot afford to divert portable gamer’s attention from, so I would be very, very surprised to see a new proper Playstation phone any time in the next two to three years. Nobody else seems likely to make a similar phone, either. But phone companies- if you were to make a gaming phone with next-generation specs, the phone Sony won’t be making, then it would be a very, very easy sell to me.

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Pompei and Pizza: Ten Days, Nine Nights in Naples

Filed Under: General Babble, Self-Centred Babble, Total Rubbish by James — Leave a comment
26/10/2011

For ten days- well, nine plus a full day’s travelling- I roamed (not Rome-d, that’s northern Italy) the Campania region, from Naples to Amalfi. An utterly amazing part of the world. I picked Naples as a destination for three reasons; primarily Vesuvius, because I find volcanoes fascinating, secondly the fact that it’s one of only a few mafia strongholds in the world, and thirdly and most importantly, it cost less than a train ticket around the UK to get there. Using the cheap and cheerful Fabric hostel as a base of operations, I was set for a hard week-and-a-bit of holidaying.

As a lone traveller in a notably rough part of the world, I skimped on the usual tourist accoutrements. Reasoning that nobody really cares about holiday photos, and that as a camera autism I’d spend the whole time staring through a lens instead of enjoying myself, I left behind my cameras and instead took a Parker jotter and a blank notebook to record the trip. I also left behind my usual mobile and instead took a credit-card sized, blue-screened calculator-esque phone which was switched off and hidden away in a fake tub of suncream in case of emergencies. Both of these turned out to be excellent decisions- as a tech geek by career and by personal habits, switching off was hard, but it made everything that much more enjoyable.

I’m not going to list off all the places I visited- it’s massive, and it will give me nothing to talk about later on. But there are a few places I just cannot recommend strongly enough if you are looking to visit. The first is kind of obvious- it’s Pompei. I won’t go on about it too much as it’s documented much more rigourously elsewhere. But it has to be said, because few things are as mind-blowing as wandering around an abandoned ancient city. The corpse-casts are creepy (though most were missing from the site- I think there’s a display elsewhere that I couldn’t find) and the view along one of the streets directly up to Vesuvius is quite chilling. The whole place is just stunning.

The next location I’d recommend seeing is La Reggia at Caserta, which was the set of the Naboo palace in The Phantom Menace.  The palace of a historically unimportant king, it is the most obscene building you will ever see. Rooms big enough to fit whole houses in, with floor-to-ceiling polished marble crested by innumerable gold-painted cherubs. A central corridor you could drive a double decker bus through. My inner lefty kept shouting about how much money was wasted on this monstrosity and demanding a riot, but it’s too late for that now, so instead it stands as a glorious monument to somebody most have never heard of. Everyone should visit La Reggia once in their lives, then at the end of their visit they should be told “if you ever have enough money to do this, and this is what you do with it, you’re a prick”. That said, all my anger washed away in the gardens. They are exquisite. As mad and ridiculous as the palace itself, but you cannot be angry after having to rent a bike to get from one end of a garden pond to the other. Up at the top of the garden, there’s a waterfall coming down the mountain which feeds the giant fountain which feeds a further two fountains down the length of the main corridor- a total distance of around a mile and a half from the rear of the castle. By that waterfall, on a sunny day, the whole lunatic project makes sense.

If you have a third day and you don’t mind taking your life in your hands, head to Sorrento and rent a scooter from Mr Jolly (slogan “Welcome to us”). Then take it down the Amalfi coast. Without doubt, one of the most beautiful stretches of road I have ever seen. An amazing, if terrifying place to teach myself to drive a scooter. The number of sheer cliffs and crazy Italian drivers meant that I rapidly became familiar with the sound of my own terrified whimpering but somehow I survived. The danger of what I was doing was brought home to me on the return trip to Sorrento- I found myself overtaking traffic rather than vice versa, and came to a corner where a young man had obviously had a rather nasty scooter accident.  The rest of the journey was completed at a more sedate pace, I got a better view of my surroundings, and I upset a lot of drivers who got stuck behind me. Such is life.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I recommend the Via de Tribulani, home of some of the best pizzerias in the world. Go after 7.30pm because they don’t open for dinner until then, and then drop in and be amazed at the taste, and the cost- I deliberately went out of my way to have the most expensive things on the menu on my last night (got to burn those leftover euros somehow) and only managed to reach a total of about €13 for a giant pizza, cold beer and a dessert as well. A stark contrast to the burger, cold chips and cider that I had on my return to Stansted, which clocked in at an absurd £19. But then again, the worst part of any good holiday is the shock of discovering yourself back home.

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PlayFest 2011, Or How My Life is One Long String of Awesome Coincidences

Filed Under: Reviews, Uncategorized by James — 1 Comment
03/06/2011

So, last weekend I went to the first ever PlayFest, a festival showcasing the musical talent of a bunch of East Anglians. I’ll admit, that wasn’t the first thing that attracted me to it- after getting angry at The Futureheads for not having any tour dates on their website, I hopped over to Frank Turner’s gig list and discovered that he was headlining the Saturday night, and that The Futureheads were headlining the Sunday but hadn’t thought to mention it on their site. The thought of seeing my two favourite bands at a weekend festival costing under £70 (ridiculously cheap, Download was looking to be more than twice that) I booked my tickets instantly and then utterly failed to convince any of my friends to come along with me. This didn’t phase me though, as I’m a very brave and handsome man. Car filled with pear cider and gin, and driving past the Stig on the way, I rolled into a field on Friday evening and very quickly made history by having the first ever burger served at the first ever PlayFest. Who’s cool? I’m cool.

Souvenir Programme

Sadly, there wasn’t a whole lot organised for the Friday night- a couple of bands played short sets in the dance tent, but it became clear that the event proper didn’t start til Saturday morning. Having had a damned long day, I settled into my tent before midnight (ROCK AND ROLL!) and tried to get to sleep. After a while though, I was disturbed by the sound of a guitar outside. Slightly bewildered as it clearly wasn’t coming from any of the stages, I stuck my head out the door and discovered that I had inadvertantly parked my tent directly opposite half the members of Crumbs for Comfort, who originally hadn’t been invited to play. Then at the last minute they’d been invited to fill an afternoon slot. And on Saturday, they got promoted to headlining the second biggest stage on the Sunday night. Lead man Ben Chenery was the one with the guitar, and he sung a few songs and we had a bit of a chat with the small crowd that had formed around my tent. This turned into a jam session, as Solko, whose tents were behind mine, joined in. It was around 5am that the ushers got slightly fed up with the fact the entire campsite had been kept awake so long and the group disbanded for the morning.

Saturday started rather quieter than planned- the acoustic stage, which was supposed to open first, didn’t. Rather embarrassingly, it was because there was no power. Which is possibly the worst excuse for stopping an acoustic performance I can think of. Still, the other stages got started eventually and I got to see some truly brilliant acts. Special mention goes to Empire, my standout act of the Saturday. They don’t seem to have much online at the moment, so like them on Facebook and wait for them to post something. You will not be disappointed. Later on I was pleasantly surprised by Films of Colour, whose blurb in the programme was the biggest pile of meaningless wank I’ve read in a long time. Luckily their set more than made up for it- they were a proper treat to listen to. And then, clashing with the loud and rather bland Kabeedies, was Hello Bear, who first rocked and then got big laughs by doing an unexpected and awesome mash-up of Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme.

Frank Turner headlined the night, and without gushing too much he was absolutely awesome- he invited the crowd to sing along from the very first song, and sing along they did. He knows his audience, and his audience knows him damned well. There were some of his older hits but also a tantalising taster of his new albumen (it’s out three days from now!). Minor sadface at the fact he didn’t do an encore, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

Sunday was, quite aptly, the first time the sun showed itself, and it shone down upon the newly-fixed accoustic stage, where I discovered Penny LeSquire, an utterly amazing reggae group who have barely any web presence. But their Facebook wall does reveal this awesome live sesh which is well worth a listen. Following them were the Woodland Creatures, a pair of girls doing some quite excellent folky type stuff including an amazingly fast irish jig type thing. They became my first CD purchase of the weekend (only partly because there wasn’t a lot of CDs on sale- SORT IT OUT, BANDS). Standouts later on in the day were the manic Killamonjambo, with a party-band feel and a name that’s great fun to say out loud, and The Barlights, who have an almost Bluetones-y sound to them which was a real treat. And of course I can’t not give a massive shout out to my camping buddies Crumbs for Comfort- they were properly shafted by being put up against The Futureheads, and if it had been any other band playing the main stage I would have stayed for the full set rather than the half set that I was gutted to have to walk out of.

But walk out I did, just in time to hear the opening bars of Heartbeat Song, the pop-punk hit from The Chaos, my favourite album of last year. And where Frank Turner had the crowd singing along last night, Barry Hyde had the entire conglomeration bouncing up and down like fools. Their set wasn’t perfect- there were a few slips which were more than a little embarrasing, and for their encore they did a song I have never heard before and I’m not really fussed about hearing again. And only partly because it wasn’t Jupiter, which they did as an encore at the Roadmender last year, an utterly brilliant way to wrap up a gig. On the bright side, they did give a taster of their new, all-a capella album in the form of a song from the 17th century about a pub catching fire, and the men sent to put the fire out locking themselves in the cellar with all the booze. Not entirely what I was expecting, but enormous fun nonetheless.

The one photograph of me taken all weekend

I nearly managed to go all weekend without being photo'd. Nearly. Well done, Garrod.

Aside from some early morning goodbyes and a low pass by a Globemaster on the trip home, that was my weekend. What surpised me most was the number of talented acts at the festival- I came for two bands and two bands alone, but thirty acts later I’m struggling to make sure I’ve named all the best in this blog post- I’m sure I have missed some, and for that I can only apologise. But PlayFest has set an amazingly high bar for the other local festivals I’ll be going to this year- the Northampton festival week is beginning to look frankly embarrassing in comparison.

To finish up, here’s some minor awards. The best song title of the weekend goes to the Olympians, with the brilliantly named “You don’t have to be a prick to work here, but you are”, the “most likely to be frisked by guards” award goes to me as I got my wallet searched at least five times in the weekend, and the “best reason to be ejected from the site” goes to the man who stood at the top of the thirty-foot-tall inflatable slide stark bollock naked. You, sir, are a brave and terrifying man.

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