Review: HighBowling
Score:
59%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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Megasoft 2000 have a pretty good track record with games for PDAs, but I'm afraid HighBowling lacks the usual sparkle. As you'll gather from the screen shots, it's a bowling simulation and there's nothing wrong with the initial presentation or indeed the physics or scoring system.
Unusually, HighBowling runs in two completely different modes. Here's Arcade:
Here you simply stop the trajectory bar at the right point and off the ball goes, down a nice 3D perspective lane. As an alternative, there's Swing mode:
Here there's a top-down view instead. Again you stop the ball (vertically) and then release it, applying a measure of swing via the 'Go' indicator, using the arrow keys. Again, this all works as advertised but without any real excitement.
The presence of the two distinct mode implies that the development team couldn't make their mind up between the two different interfaces and so decided to implement both. They would have been wiser to have combined the swing system into the 3D mode and thus only presented one really good interface to the player rather than two mediocre ones.
Realism is also a problem for HighBowling. In seven games I only got one strike, which is appallingly low for real life, let alone a computer game, which should (in theory) be easier. When hitting the central pin, from various angles, it's almost impossible to knock all the pins down. And it's not helped by not being able to change the ball speed, faster or slower.
Yes, HighBowling's only $10, but for my money I'd expect something that gives me more than ten minutes of idle curiosity. You can't even play against the computer, and for a sole player there's very little incentive or excitement.
Back to the drawing board, Megasoft2000!
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at