4 In A Line for Symbian OS

[slitchfield]

Krisse has been looking at yet another very solid ZingMagic conversion of a classic game to Symbian OS. In this case, 4 In A Line for all S60 and UIQ-powered smartphones of all vintages. You won't buy this for the soundtrack or graphics, but you can't beat the classic gameplay. It's also probably great for children for long car journeys 8-)

Read on in the full article.

I bought 2 Zing Magic games: Reversi and Checkers. To be honest I found the game intelligence to be piss poor. I beat every single level up to Grand Master level of Reversi loosing the first game then usually beating the second. The games themselves seem unfinished. Options like changing graphics style only gives you one option: classic. Their support teams response was "well we think its OK"!

[krisse]

To be honest I found the game intelligence to be piss poor. I beat every single level up to Grand Master level of Reversi loosing the first game then usually beating the second.

Well, this depends a great deal on the individual. Personally I found Zingmagic's Reversi quite challenging, and Gomoku was very very difficult. (One thing I would warn against is judging the AI because you beat it early on, I did that with Reversi but found it challenging in the long term.)

This is the most difficult thing about writing reviews of well known board and card games. For almost any given game, many people find the AI too difficult while many others find the AI too easy, depending on how much they've played the game before in real life or other simulations. Skill levels can vary particularly wildly in this genre, and it's impossible to know who you're meant to pitch the review to.

Regarding 4 In A Line, I think people who haven't played connect 4 since their childhood will be surprised by how tough this game is, and how addictive it is to play on a phone, hence the fairly high score. If I was an avid fan of the board game who played it all the time, perhaps I wouldn't be quite so impressed with the AI.

By the way, I agree about the graphics packs being missing, but I don't think graphics are that much of a factor in a game like this.