Review: QBubbleMP
Score:
84%
Version Reviewed: 0.65
The defining characteristic of a smartphone, of course, is that it's (potentially) always online, with applications able to make full use of the wider Internet. In some cases, this means automatic updating, in others it means up to date financial or weather information. In QBubbleMP's case, it means being able to play against other people in real time, whether they're in Reading or Rio, in London or Los Angeles. The game works on all Symbian UIQ smartphones, letting you play what appears to be a pretty standard game of 'fire bubbles and try and match the colours' either in single (boring!) or multi-player mode.
Despite claiming to be in 'early beta', I found QBubbleMP very playable and slickly put together. When tapping on 'Multi player', you're taken to the author's own dedicated QBubbleMP server, which handles the ineraction between players. The 'lobby' shows at a glance how many players are online and how many game sessions are in progress. With one tap you can join an existing session or create your own (and wait for others to join in).
It's early days yet for the game and traffic isn't that high, so I opted to create my own session. Within five minutes, a bleep alerted me to the fact that someone else had joined the session and one tap later we were playing against each other. As you clear blocks of bubbles from your own screen, they are posted randomly on that of another player, and vice-versa. So it becomes an exciting race to clear bubbles faster than the other guy. Or guys, in this case, as my second game had a third person join in, with even more incentive to be the fastest bubble popper.
QBubbleMP's is fairly frugal with your GPRS connection, I used up just 50K of bandwidth in 10 minutes of playing. This represents negligible cost on most sensible contracts, it was only 30p on my expensive pay-as-you-go system. Control of the bubble shooter was good with the Sony Ericsson P900's Jog Dial, though I couldn't test it on a Motorola unit.
It's easy to chat with others outside of an actual game, to invite them to start, to thank them for playing, or simply to chat about the weather. The real-time interaction with others over the Internet really lifts this game above the pack and points the way forward for gaming in the future.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at