FuzzyCo

One of my rules for reviewing things here at FuzzyCo is that I only write up reviews for media I've finished. Now for books and movies, finished is pretty straight-forward. But for games it's not always so easy to decide. For example, for FPSes with both a single-player and multiplayer modes does it count as finished if I just play through the single-player campaign (for me, yes). And what about all the iOS games where the model is to release packs of levels at regular intervals? Angry Birds, for example, I'm sure I've completed all the levels from the very original release of the game, but at this point I'm at least 20 or 30 levels away from completing the whole game. All this musing is to say that I'm going to grab an opportunity where I am caught up on all the currently released levels for one of these sorts of puzzle games to say that I'm finished. And even when the next set of levels comes out, it'll only be a few hours until I'm caught up again—I get a little obsessive.

The game is Where's My Water? and it's in the broad category of physic-sy puzzle games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope. The conceit of the game is that Swampy is an alligator who lives in the sewers, but he's a clean alligator and would like to take a shower. You have to dig channels in the dirt, open gates and valves and so on to get water from some reservoir into an intake valve for his bathtub to get him enough water to clean himself up.

It's from Disney and it's probably meant for kids, because I find it just challenging enough that I feel like a champ when I finish a level.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

The Secret of Grisly Manor is in the genre of point-and-click adventures and I suppose it's 99¢ worth of adventure, but barely. Many of these games, if you analyze it too closely, are mainly just "click on everything and then click on everything with everything in your inventory" but the good games make you forget that with a good story or characters or puzzles or something. TSoGM reminded me a little too often.

FuzzyCo grade: C-

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust [iTunes link] is a fun little iPhone game. There's a little narrative about a giant space conglomerate trying to buy up your family space mining business (you know, as often happens). Mostly, you zoom your little mining ship around, blowing up asteroids and bad robots and sucking up space ore. Just about the time you might be bored of the slightly repetitive game play, you're done.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

This is a game I liked so much, I bought it twice. I got the Mac version when it came out and I loved it, but I was low on free-time-in-front-of-the-computer and so it languished. But when it came out on the iPhone [iTunes link] I bought it again and the combination of commute-playability and zombie-cuteness made it to plow through. It's in the category of "tower defense games"—where you have little direct effect on the attacking hordes of, in the case, zombies, but you can plant (literally, in this case) defenses in their way.

Spudow!

FuzzyCo grade: A

The current model of some iPhone game development leads to another problem with my "review games only when I finish them" system. A significant number of iPhone developers release their games with a certain number of levels, and then as sales allow them to put money back into the game, they issue updates with even more levels. To this point, I've 'finished' Angry Birds [iTunes link] several times now. I think I'm currently caught up on the original version, but then they released the separate Halloween and Christmas themed Angry Birds Seasons [iTunes link] and I'm way behind on those levels.

Angry Birds, if you're not familiar with the smash hit, is a simple-in-theory physics game where you fling the titular birds at egg-stealing pigs, ensconced in rickety fortresses. Destroy all the pigs and you move on. Writing it out like that, it sounds kinda dumb, but it's terribly addictive, and just cute enough to be fun on top of the frustration.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Whew, OK, so I'm all caught up on movies. Another category in my obsessive documentation is video games I've played. Now my usual rule is to only review a game when I've finished it (and I'm getting better in my time management in just deciding that a game is going to be no fun and giving up before sinking dozens of hours into it*) but there are some kinds of games that don't have a narrative or levels and that you never finish, you just play over and over. Like Words With Friends (iTunes link), which doesn't even have a computer opponent option—it's all games against real people.

WWF is Scrabble**, more or less (though the location of the bonus tiles is shifted around, and the point values of a few tiles are different). It's also, at least amongst me and my friends, very much a play-by-mail model: you take your turns at your leisure and then send them off to your friends to return in their own time. There's often multiple days between turns, which none of my friends seem to mind. Oh, another big difference to in-person Scrabble is that there's no mechanism for challenges, the game just won't let you play a word that isn't in its dictionary. This occasionally leads to a trial-and-error method of play that drives some people crazy. If you're not one of them, I'm "fuzzygerdes" in WWF.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* Abandoned this year, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, Prince of Persia, and LEGO Harry Potter, among others.
** There is an official version of Scrabble for the iPhone, but where WWF has their own multiplayer infrastructure, Scrabble uses Facebook and somehow I'm just not comfortable giving Facebook yet another hook into my life.