Crush the Castle by Namco

Note: Crush the Castle is temporarily on sale for $.99 down from $4.99.

When I reviewed a game called Steel Shot in May I was completely unaware that a game called Angry Birds was topping the charts on the iPhone. Since then I've tried Angry Birds and while Angry Birds is a far more polished title in the same genre my core criticism of the game remains for both. Crush the Castle is yet another game of this type.

In Crush the Castle there are castles stacked high and filled wth nobles. You are equipped with a trebuchet and hurl rocks at the castles as you attempt to knock off all of the residents. The game features many kingdoms each with many castles and you're goal is to bring them all to their knees in as few shots as possible to maximize your reward. Each castle first shows you the castle and then scrolls on over to your trebuchet. It's all touch screen from there... tap to release and trebuchet's arm and tap again to fire your payload. You then spectate as the rocks fly and meet or miss their intended target. As nobles are crushed they bleed red, but there's no animation... only screams of death. The nobles themselves wobble like chess pieces.

The graphics are decent as is the sound, but nothing spectacular. The controls work although the sling shot in Steel Shot (and Angry Birds) is much easier to work with than the trebuchet. That said, this game does nothing to cure my feeling that this is like archery with the caveat that before taking the shot I am spun in a circle after being blind folded. Actually I think this game makes me appreciate the sling shot in Steel Shot.

Crush the Castle is nice in that it features additional types of ammo as the game progresses such as '3 rocks that split in the air' (cool) and 'bigger rocks' (not so cool). All in all, while I can't say that I'm a fan of this type of game there are aparently countless fans. And if you buy one I'd say it's a pick 'em between this and Steel Shot until Namco ups the price back to $4.99 and then it's Steel Shot all the way. 3/5 stars.

80s Arcade

I love the arcade classics from the 80s and 80s Arcade brings 33 of them to your Android phone for $2.99. Sound awesome? Well, it's only ok. First, I question the licensing of the games... is this legal? I seriously doubt 3D Studio has the rights to distribute the 33 original 'roms' that allow these games to be perfectly emulated for the low price of $2.99. But as I'm not certain of the I'll give them the benefit of the doubt (especially as I've purchased many of these games countless times over so I do own the right to use the 'roms'). Second, note the restriction on the controls and the fact that if you don't have a keyboard on your phone you'll need to use their Zeemote software. Again, I didn't test with the software that allows a WiiMote to be used with Android and maybe it works with that too, but if not then that stinks. It would be nice to standardize on one external joystick program instead of having six.

But the big issue is sound... it's delayed and in some cases horribly static-ey. For example, in Frogger I see my frog complete a jump and only then do I hear it hop. I have a hard time thinking a phone with a 500+ MHz CPU in it can't handle this when Dave Spicer was doing this on a 233 MHz PC 15 years ago. Still the games are fun and certainly playable even if the sound is messed up and there are some great here. Missing are Pac Man, Galaxian, and Galaga. At first I thought it might be a legal issue and fear of Namco, but Rally X is here so who knows? 3/5 stars for an average emulation job.

Game News

How about some bulk game news, today?

First we've got FastFoot-Challenge (trailer above). It uses your phone's GPS to create a real world game where a player (Player X) has to avoid 2-6 other players for 25-60 minutes. The other players (called Runners) get an update of Player X's location every 6 minutes and can voice chat as they use team work for find Player X. The press release is here. (And it appears to be free)

Next, we have Don't Forget the Lyrics... a new rhythm game that has you following the bouncing ball to tap your way through songs and filling in the missing words in a game show format (it's based on a game show hosted by comedian Wayne Brady whom I've not heard of). I also can't seem to find it in the Market, yet, so I presume it's "coming soon".

You want more? How about Wonton Drop (pictured on the right) which is a game designed by a couple (he does the coding... she does the artwork) from Vancouver, BC. This is their first game and it's a bit of a Kaboom! style game... wontons are falling and you have to catch them in the pot, but watch out for the falling Android robots... catch them and you'll lose a life. It's their first crack at a game and they are looking for feedback. I tried it and one thing I liked was the scoring... a point for every catch and minus a point for every miss. My first score was 37. Oh, and it, too, is free.

I'll be at Gen Con in Indianapolis for the next few days... hopefully I'll be able to sneak a review in here and there during the trip.

Android 2.2

If you've got a Motorola Droid you can now update to Android 2.2 (code name FroYo, although I tend to think all the food related code names are pretty silly) by downloading and installed the update direct from Googles servers. How so? Click here for details. I've seen several similar announcements for other models so if you're still waiting hopefully it won't be too much longer for you. So, how does the upgrade stack up?

First, speed. Yes, I think it is a little snappier. I had heard 2x to 5x faster because of the new Java engine. Don't expect a 'day and night' difference. One of my tests was with Homerun Battle 3D as I hoped the speed improvements would eliminate some of the lag in certain games. Initially performance was awesome. In fact I set a new record of consecutive Home Runs... 12 vs 5, but now things aren't too different so it was probably mostly because of the reboot and clearing out the running apps. App switching is a bit smoother and it's certainly not worse, but don't be thinking you're going to see a 5x speed increase.

Next, moving apps to the SD card... my biggest complaint has been rectified with 2.2. Or has it? Nope. Moving apps to the SD basically seems to mean Google provides some library support for moving a part of the game's data over to the SD card. For example, Crusade of Destiny is a 19 MB game... move it over to the SD card and it STILL consumes 7 MB of precious internal memory. I'm glad it can shed the 12 MB, but a) apps that offload lots of data to the SD card already such as Homerun Battle 3D will not benefit and b) it's still quite limited by the comparatively small internal storage of the Android. I had hopes of being able to download ALL of the apps I've paid for. No such luck and I feel that this had been sadly misrepresented in the media.

Flash support? It's there... had to download the .apk file from an external site (and it's a beta 3), but I just tried it on a favorite Flash game of mine. Everything is smooth except firing making the game unplayable, but it's impressive to hear the audio and see the animation as that's all very smooth.

All in all I'm a bit disappointed. Obviously it didn't cost me and I haven't lost anything with the upgrade (that I've noticed), but it's not the 'download a new phone' that it was advertised as being.

Tank Recon 3D

I was browsing the Market a few days ago and stumbled across this new game. And then it dawned on me how the old Atari arcade classic Battlezone is really quite under represented. Most people apparently prefer to fly a plane instead of driving a tank (Or is it that most developers prefer to write air based games? The world may never know.).

Tank Recon 3D is a tank game in 3D. It sports two modes of play: survival and mission. Survival mode isn't too dissimilar from the aforementioned arcade classic Battlezone. You cruise around in your tank killing as many enemy tanks as you can before being killed yourself. In Battlezone you have lives (each equating to taking a hit) whereas in this game you have a health meter and can pick up 'repairs' as in most first person shooters. Mission mode features three skill levels and gives you an objective making the game a bit more of a story than the "kill or be killed" of survival mode, but it's the same game with respect to controls and all. And the missions, even on Normal mode, are not pushovers. The first one has you knocking out communication towers and it's nice to have this additional option beyond survival mode as it's actually pretty satisfying to see one of those towers fall.

The graphics are good. Tanks explode into pieces with nice, fiery explosions before their parts disappear into the dirt. Scrolling is smooth and while the mountain landscape doesn't offer much to look at other than enemies and dead enemies what is there looks nice. Audio? Well, the game is almost eerily quiet. The only sound it makes is that of firing shells at your enemy. In fact it kind of puzzles me that the graphics are as good as they are when the audio is as non-existent as it is. I'd, at least, expect a nice little musical number on the title screen and the rumble of my tank as I move. Controls are all touch screen based... a familiar virtual DPad for movement, a fire button, and another fire button for launching one of your limited supply of guided missiles. There's no option to use a real DPad that I can see, and that might have been nice.

At US $4.99 this is one of the higher priced titles... a premium game if you will. This is a game that does so many things so well that I'd like to give it 5/5, but with the lack of decent audio and just the one environment (that is also kind of bland) I'd say 4.5/5. Also, how great would networked multiplayer support be? If you want an arcade oriented tank combat game then this suffices nicely. It's a fun game to play. A video of the game from the developer follows although, if you look closely, you'll see it's the Blackberry version of the game [and it's got a nice soundtrack]: