What could be more simple than touching the screen of your smartphone? That, in essence, is what most games make you do, and Fruit Ninja is no exception. But what it asks you to do with the touchscreen, and how it presents it, that's where the skill of a game design team comes in. Read on for my review.
Do you like to play Ping-Pong, whack away at Wiff-Waff, tinker with Table-Tennis? Whatever you call it, the sport that went from the garage to the Olympics is now available to play on Symbian in the form of Virtual Table Tennis 3D. As the name implies, this is a 3D rendered version of the perennial sports simulation, available on Symbian^3 through the Ovi Store.
I love games that come from a very simple concept, games that add in a little something devious from the author, and then get stuck on my smartphone. Word Find, from Grovr, joins that list. Presenting you with a 4x4 grid of single letters, you are challenged to find all the words you can make. The only twist is that you need to trace an uninterrupted path from letter to letter.
Symbian^3 has Worms. No jokes please, I mean the perennial video game! Yes, Worms has been around since 1995, allowing gamers to partake in the pleasure of parabolic persecution. That’s right, it’s not just the Angry Birds who have been exploiting ballistic bombardment for our entertainment! Read on to see how well the slithering scrimmage plays out on Symbian^3!
'Running' games are something of a trend in the wider smartphone world (e.g. on iOS) and so it's not surprising that one such has turned up in full commercial form for Symbian. I Must Run offers oodles of polish and atmosphere, all desperately trying to disguise the genre as the one-trick pony that it is. Still, it's good value for money at a mere £1 in the Ovi Store, even if its main purpose is to keep your teenagers happy in the back of the car for an hour on your next journey.
So, now that the Soccer review is out the way (Pro Evolution Soccer, yesterday) it’s time to turn to American Football. But not the whole game, just the bit that’s fun to play. Can Backbreaker take a three hour stop and start marathon of a sport and make it into a mobile marvel? You better bet it can.
Tom and Jerry. Norman Wisdom and Jerry Desmond. Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier. Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer and Electronic Art’s FIFA series. Yes the world is awash with competitors, and that’s what makes it interesting. So how does Konami's football game measure up in its first season on Symbian? Let's kick off and find out.
Sometimes you want a game with depth, complexity and a story that will last for hours (in which case head over to David’s review of Crusade of Destiny). Other times you just need a quick blast of reflex testing, putting aside any idea of a over-arching plot, acres of help files and a dedicated corner of the brain reserved to remembering all the commands. Tez Ball is the latter.
In the great explosion of Tetris clones in the mid-eighties, many companies sought to tweak the format very slightly to have a game that was a bit like Tetris, but couldn’t be called the same if it ever came to court. One of the more popular alternative formats that’s still programmed by developers is the “spinning block of four colours/try and match three colours in a row” format.
While not a stand-out genre in the mobile world, the addition of accelerometers into mobile handsets has brought about the frustrating return of the marble rolling game. If you can recall the little puzzles of your childhood where you rolled a marble around a maze to get to an exit – then this is exactly the same - with even some pseudo 3D thrown in. Just don’t throw your phone against the nearest wall in frustration!
