Freebie Friday

Two games to take a look at today while I continue my travels to Atlanta, GA and more specifically Loganville, GA...

Mole Miner is interesting as it's available for both free, or you can donate money to the cause of further development by buying the donationware version. When I first saw this game it looked like a Boulder Dash style game where you control a mole and have to collect the gems amidst several obstacles. Each level is essentially a puzzle and I had high hopes for the game given its obvious inspiration. However, I didn't find any real challenge in the early levels to warrant playing on. The game is pretty basic in terms of sound/graphics, but the swipe controls seemed to work well. The game's audio also pokes fun at itself with commentary making fun of the game's lack of excitement, and I concur that it's not very exciting. Others in the Market give this game pretty good ratings, but I'm going to dissent and call it mediocre. It needs more pressure to keep the game exciting early on and could benefit from a good soundtrack like the original Boulder Dash had.

Tilt Mazes had me thinking it was going to be like those wooden labyrinth puzzles that make such good use of the accelerometer, but instead this is a maze puzzle where you have to move the ball through the maze. It does use the accelerometer, but it's certainly not necessary as the ball moves until it hits a wall in this game so a DPad would work just as well. Worse, while playing and tilting my phone the game would switch between portrait and landscape display... serious problem. If you want this type of game you're going to want to buy the similarly titled Tilt Maze as the basic mazes here are of little challenge. Tilt Maze, and we'll look at the soon, has some real challenging puzzles in it involving multiple balls. In the mean time Tilt Mazes, aside from the aforementioned bug, is too easy.