Bubble Swap (Game Review)

This is the second game I've reviewed from DS Effects. The earlier one was Blocked Car and I gave it a 3 (out of 5). I'm trying not to feature any one game company or game developer, but this came up next on my random list. Bubble Swap is a simple game and an interesting take on bubbles and swapping. The name is descriptive!

The little green "i" in the lower right corner is Help and just says "Swap and sort the bubbles in proper color order." Not sure that makes a clear image, but let's see what we have.

After playing a bit, I figured out you can swap bubbles. Here's a swap sequence. First you click on the bubble you want to move. Doing so makes it tiny.

Then you click on the bubble you want to swap it with.

I swapped with the blue bubble on the left. Once you figure this out, you can move fast.

But not fast enough. Before you expect it, you'll see this:

What happened? I was having fun! Turns out that the game only gives you 60 seconds. That's just not enough. Maybe I can learn to be fast enough, but I wasn't that slow.

This game is a perfect example of one that didn't put in enough time with beta testing. The game is an interesting idea and would make a fun exercise (make a note of that). It would have been smarter for DS Effects to allow the player a choice of Easy, Medium, or Hard, with the only variable being the time limit. The way it is now, it's too frustrating to end the game too quickly, not allowing me to learn strategies of motion and play.

Also, I had trouble because I thought you dragged. You just tap twice and that's your move. Help could have been more helpful. Also, when a ball is on its own color, the highlight is gone and you don't see it as well as I would like. I understand they want to mark the ball once it is placed (a flash would have been nice too), but maybe some other stronger clue that the ball is now where you want it to be. An interesting design problem.

I agonized over the score on this one. There are three problems. The major problem is that the time limit is too harsh. Almost as bad but may vary with other players is that it wasn't clear that it is a two-step touch, not a drag. Help could have been more helpful. And the art for a properly placed piece isn't as clear as it could be, but I wouldn't know what to do either. On the other hand, this is an interesting idea, so I'll give it a R3. If it had a better time limit and clearer directions, I'd be tempted to give it a 5.

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 3 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Blocked Car (Game Review)

I remember seeing earlier versions of this basic phone-type game on a Pocket PC. It was cool then, but in this case, maybe only okay.

This version is called Blocked Car and is brought to you by those busy people at DS Effects, who are a leading (according to them) producer of web and mobile solutions. They do games, virtual pets, and "dress up."

Here's how it works. You have a yellow car (at the bottom) and you want to move your car to the top and out of the parking lot. A world-wide problem, if ever there was one.

You move some of the other cars and trucks out of the way by flicking them. Here's after I've flicked a few cars out of the way. The two red cars, the blue on the right, the green on the right. Note that I've moved the purple-cab truck to the right, making space for the yellow car.

Finally, when enough cars and trucks are flicked out of the way, the yellow car can escape!

This is a simple game. Lots of levels, everything works. Good!

However, I had some problems at the start, some of which were me and others were the fault of the developer for not having good (or any) instructions. One point off!

Problem 1: In earlier games like this, the other cars can only leave through the one exit. But they can move back and forth. In this game the cars can leave on any side, and once they start moving, they can't stop and just move off the parking lot. In some ways this isn't as much a challenge, but that's okay and I don't want to take points off for having this game play differently than some earlier one.

Problem 2: I have trouble telling which way the cars move. For some reason, I couldn't get the idea that the eyes are in the front of the vehicle, maybe because the rest of the car is visually catching my eye. Again, no points off. Maybe I just need to watch the movie, Cars, a few more times!

Problem 3: There's no button that lets me replay a game. If I want to go again, I have to ram the yellow car into an obstacle. It would be nice to choose to play levels again, and this wouldn't be hard to implement. One point off here!

These problems aren't killer, but they do make me not rate the game as high as I would like. This is a nice little game and works well on Firefox OS!

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 3 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Captain Rogers (Game Review)

When I saw Captain Rogers in the Marketplace, it jogged a recent memory. Oh, yes, the guys who wrote Captain Rogers had an article about their experiences writing the app and putting it in the marketplace.

You can read that first if you want in this tutorial: http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/firefox-os/preparing-for-firefox-os/

The tutorial is called "Preparing for Firefox OS" and has some good things to think about. The game itself was written by Andrzej Mazur (coder) and Robert Podgórski (graphics). The tutorial was written by Andrzej and covers subjects like moz-opaque, CSS Transform Scaling, and Nearest Neighbor Rendering. Also references a cool article on optimizing for Firefox games at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/05/optimizing-your-javascript-game-for-firefox-os/. Andrzej even includes a manifest and permissions code, which is useful.

He wrote a separate article about working with Clay.Io at http://enclavegames.com/blog/2013/07/26/captain-rogers-with-clay-dot-io-the-joyful-fun-of-leaderboards-and-achievements/

Also, he lets us know that the game was written using the game library, Impact.js at http://impactjs.com/. which has a cool game creation editor and I seem to remember a book on Amazon Kindle!

And if that wasn't enough, he's shared a big fat set of links to information about creating HTML5 games. You go, Andrzej!

It's nice when people share and I hope to do the same when I get further along the coding road. Right now I'm splitting my time between playing games and writing them. So back to playing games.

How does Captain Rogers play?

Well, it has a user interface I still can't get used to after several tries. The art is nice and the idea of flying through asteroids and picking up power pills is fun enough, but the game is designed for one finger tapping. Which isn't a bad idea, but the way it is done is hard for me.

Captain Rogers flies through space from left to right. This is a common space shooter style. The asteroids are moving from right to left and you must dodge them. The issue is that you tap to move your ship up and ... let go to move to move the ship down.

I'm not sure if I'm just not cool with up and down in space. What pulls the ship down when you don't tap the screen? Gravity? What makes it go up? A hidden thruster? The concepts seldom really matter, but I can't get the hang of it. My I can't aim well enough and die pretty fast.

So it didn't work for me and I can't even tell you if there are different levels or what happens when you get to the end. Even the game "A Space Shooter for Two Bucks." Had more entertainment value!

On the other hand, I applaud using a different control mechanism. Most phone space shooters use a variety of places you have to touch to make the ship turn, shoot, speed up, or slow down.

Wait! I want to shoot things!!! There's no bullets. I've been shooting things in space since the first Asteroids arcade game and it just seems unnatural to hop/limp out of the way of the dang things.

But the game may work for you. So I'm going to waffle and give the game a 3 for effort and I'll be curious if anyone finds this control mechanism useful.

The Help was a little crowded but when I went back to look at it after playing a bit, it made more sense:

The art is fun and cheery, but I still can't wrap my finger around it. But there's a big plus to this game which is that it is on Git Hub (where?) and there are other Captain Rogers games already http://m.blackmoondev.com/crkarmax/. So give the Captain a break because he's trying to share what he knows.

Cost: Free
Genre: Arcade
Score: 3 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace