Freaking Math! (Game Review)

Here's a fast-paced game from Hungary that will force you to wake up!

This is one of the simplest games I've seen in the Marketplace, but it is very satisfying and forces you to react quickly. The premise of the game is explained when you start:

You are shown a simple math expression and you must decide is the answer right or wrong.

Well, is 1 + 1 = 3 or not? If you think about it, of course it is wrong. But can you react in one-and-a-half seconds to click on the X button?

Maybe, and maybe not. I seem to remember that the human reaction time in general is 2.2 seconds, but if you are hyper-alert, you can do it faster. But how long ago did you learn your math tables?

If you get the right answer, you must instantly do another one, and another, until you wait too long. Each time you fail, you'll get a score.

You can see that my high score is two right answers but my last score was only one! But keep at it. With a little practice, I did get better.

The game creator is Adam Balogh of Hungary and he has a newer version of the game that does division and multiplication. Unfortunately I can't buy it!

I'm fresh out of forints anyway.

But this is a fun little game

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open C
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace
Developer:  Adam Balogh
https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/freakingmath/

Announcement One - Thomas Palef has written a book!

Thomas Palef has been amazing us all by writing one game a week. You can read about it at http://www.lessmilk.com/.  Part of his secret (aside from being just brilliant) is that he uses an HTML5 library called Phaser. You can read all about Phaser at http://phaser.io/.  But Phaser is a little hard to grasp how the pieces fit together, even though it seems like it will help you write HTML5 games more efficiently.

Well, up steps Thomas Palef, who will shortly be publishing not only a book, but will include complete games with the source code. You can read about it at http://www.lessmilk.com/phaser-book/ but he sent out an email to his subscribers with more data.

"The book will focus on building a full featured game from scratch that works on desktop and mobile devices. You will control a little guy in a blue world, trying to collect coins while avoiding enemies.

"Here are some of the things we will cover while building the game step by step: sprites, labels, groups, states, animations, particles, arcade physics, local storage, tilemaps, game scaling, touch inputs, and more.

"With all this new knowledge you will be able to create your own 2D games in HTML5.

"What You Will Get

"I created 3 types of content to help you learn the Phaser framework:

"- The book. The step-by-step guide to Phaser. It's 125 page-long, DRM-free, and available in 3 formats: pdf, epub, mobi.

"- Code. Some resources to help you build your own games faster: the source code of every chapters of the book, a Phaser cheat sheet, an empty game template, and other things. 

"- Games. I built 3 full featured games with comments that you can learn from: a space shooter, a match-3, and an infinite runner."

I'm definitely buying this even if I have to go without lunch for a few weeks!

Andrzej Mazur (Enclave Games) has written several games in Phaser that run well in Firefox OS, so I think that Phaser might be very useful to Firefox OS folk. I'll investigate it when I get back.

Announcement Two - I'm Going on Vacation

Yes, I know I'm on a permanent vacation, but I'm taking time off from this blog to travel around the country and visit some old friends, and I won't be online, and even when I am, I won't be typing!. So I won't be blogging most of the summer. But I'll be back and I'm sure there will be fabulous things to write about. I have a big list of topics, but they will have to wait. 

So come back in September and until then, stay tuned, but not iTuned!