Mini Shot Basketball

Visit any amusement center and along with the arcade games, the skee ball machines, and air hockey you are sure to find the timed basketball hoops. If you're not familiar with these allow me to recap. These arcade machines give you a time limit to shoot as many baskets as you can. Furthermore, they may mix thing up a bit by moving the basket to make things more difficult while awarding more points for each successful basket.

Mini Shot Basketball brings all of the thrill of these arcade basketball machines to your Android device... not! Visit the developer's website if you'd like to learn absolutely nothing about this title. To my amazement, it's not even mentioned there. Figure that out.

In any event my big problem with this game, and it's not a problem with the developers, is how are you going to simulate a two handed throw in a 3 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional device with a finger flick. You're not... that's how. And that's it in a nutshell. Once you figure out the right gesture its basket after basket. No real challenge. Even when the basket moves back to increase the distance of your shots it just requires a minor adjustment of a longer vertical gesture line to continue with amazing success. Sometimes I wonder how someone thought this would make a good computer game.

Perhaps they saw how well the officially licensed Skee Ball is doing on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform. Having tried that, yes, my same criticism works for that game as well, yet they are making lots of cash from their highly ranked game. I played it a handful of times and that game got boring real fast, too.

If you're still not satisfied and insist this is the game for you then go for it, because the game itself is well done. The graphics are decent, the audio is good, and the game plays smoothly enough. However, for me repeatedly flicking my finger in a straight line down the middle of the screen just didn't quite do it...