Review: Arcade Park
Score:
70%
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An unashamedly cheap and cheerful port of HeroCraft's game portfolio from other platforms, Arcade Park nevertheless contains enough fun and frolics to be worth the $12 (£7) asking price. As you'll gather from the opening screen, shown on the right, there are 8 games in all, of varying vintage and quality, each playable using the stylus on a Sony Ericsson UIQ 3 smartphone - at least, in theory.
(Incidentally, the HeroCraft logo on each screenshot merely signifies that our favourite screenshot utility for UIQ 3, AutoCam, wouldn't work on this game - hence the screens are from the developer.)
Arcade Ball is a typical bells and whistles Arkanoid clone. It's well done though, with a pumping techno soundtrack and more powerups, bullets and bad guys to get in your ay than you'll have seen for a while. Stylus control works well, but will wear out your touchscreen if you drag that bat around for too long. On the M600 and P990 at least, you can also use the left/right arrow keys, along with the jog dial selection keypress to 'fire' the ball.
Riverside Assault works slightly better with the stylus, if only because your taps aren't continuous but rather as-needed - they're still in one line though, but with the option again of arrow key control, thankfully. The game is a rather fun plane-based shoot 'em up. Essentially, you weave in and out of the terrain at ultra low level, blasting bridges in your way and also the various fuel pods and baddies. As you progress through the various levels, the speed of the vertical scrolling increases, to the point where you'll only survive a few seconds, fitting in well with Arcade Park's remit of delivering quick fix games.
Galaxy Invaders (not shown here) is a simplified clone of arcade classic Galaxians. It plays well (and hard enough), again using the stylus for left/right/fire, or the arrow keys and jog dial. With such an intensive game, yet again the physical logistics of not having a proper d-pad on the UIQ 3 phones restricts you to awkward keying or heavy wear and tear on the touch-screen. If only the developers had at least mapped one of the keypad keys to 'fire'...
Digger is a strange Boulderdash like game in which you have to collect diamonds and (in theory) avoid falling bags of money, all the while avoiding chasing 'nobbins'. I say strange because even after collecting all the gems, I wasn't able to complete a level. Obviously something I was doing wrong, but... not really my cup of tea anyway. Control is with the stylus, indicating which way to move next.
Next up is Real Tanx, in which you control a miniature tank on a crudely drawn battle field, manouevring around the scenery to get shots in at the enemy tanks. The action's fast and furious and a little frustrating with just the stylus to help determine direction and to fire your shells. As with several of the other games here, you'll be done in a minute or so, don't expect long term military strategy.
Gold Hunter is a fairly standard platform game, in which you walk, climb, hang and dig your way around various levels, avoiding the bad guys and collecting gold nuggets. Stylus control is quite fiddly here, not helped by the scaling down of all character icons to the point where your eyesight needs to be top notch if you're to get anywhere.
Rushman is a Pacman clone in every way and here again the need for stylus control lets the game down slightly. It's just too easy to mistime a directional swipe and have your character miss his turn and thus waste time or get gobbled up.
Finally, you'll recognise Asteroids at once, of course. Again, it's not a true clone but rather a simplified version, suited for handhelds. As with the last few games mentioned, the fact that stylus taps and swipes are over the whole screen surface means that it's more practical from a wear and tear point of view. Thought has gone into the way your ship is controlled in Asteroids, with a tap and hold activating the thruster and a double-tap firing, while taps around the ship turn it in that direction. All quite intuitive and lots of fun to play and to master.
Arcade Park, with its touch-screen background on the likes of Palm OS and Pocket PC, is in theory a good fit for UIQ, but on all of Sony Ericsson's UIQ 2 and UIQ 3 smartphones the lack of a d-pad (i.e. proper up/down/left/right controls) means that each game is almost completely dependent on stylus control. Although not a huge problem in itself, I do worry about the potential for touch-screen damage caused by heavy gaming.
Luckily, each game in this pack is designed to be over fairly quickly, from as little as a minute to perhaps ten minutes, which will limit some touch screen concerns.
It's worth noting that Arcade Park has been properly ported to Symbian OS and doesn't use Java (etc.) - as a result, it's quite efficient with RAM, especially important on the RAM-starved UIQ 3 smartphones, using up less than 4MB when running and behaving itself when interrupted by a call or by you wanting to do something else.
Arcade Park is a fun diversion and, as long as you're not a hard core gamer wanting something to be really immersed in, is good value for money.
Steve Litchfield, 14 Mar 2007
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at