Maze Climber (Game Review)

Some games are simple and some are complex. Simple works well on a phone, and Maze Climber is such a game. The premise is simple. You're in a maze and you must climb.

Why must you climb? Well, something bad will happen to you if you don't! At first you won't know that. You start out in a side view of a maze like Lode Runner or early Mario. But you might notice that there is a pool of red stuff at the bottom. What can that be?

You are that little white character near the middle, and you see red ladders and blue bricks. You can climb the ladders but not walk through the bricks.

Oh, no! The red stuff is rising and it is shooting out little fireballs. I bet it's lava, but I'm not going to sit around to find out what it is. I'm going to climb!

But if I don't climb fast enough, the lava will get me. It is very close. I'm hidden behind some fireballs near the edge of the lava, slightly to the left. You can see my head peeking out.

They got me. You can see me on the left, flying through the air. Owwww!

And I died!

But I can do this again and again. Here are some scores, showing the data, time, and how many meters I climbed.

Here's the home page in case you want more games from Short2Games!

And from the website, here's how to play!

Dig? What's this about dig?

If you touch a nearby brick wall to your left or right, a magic ray shoots out of you and blasts away at the wall. Hadn't noticed it! Makes it a little easier to get to ladders that go up!

By the way, the top right has a pause button. If you touch it, you get these choices.

I like the choices. Give up, play another game, or go back! Let's go back!

 

Now watch carefully. I'm going to drill a hole in the wall to my right.

I drilled through the wall on my right and climbed up the ladder. But the lava is coming up fast!

In case you are curious, here's a little bit more about the creator of this fun little perfect-for-the-phone game.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that he lists lots of programming languages, and even my all-time favorite, Forth! It's nice to see that someone still uses it (actually there was some Forth programming in the One Laptop Per Child OS) but it was very popular in the early 80's when BASIC was king and C was barely known.

By the way, there are sound effects for the rising lava and a cool whistle when you die! No music, but the lava noise would drown it out anyway.

Cost: Free

Genre: Arcade
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open C
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace
Developer:  Short2Games
https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/mazeclimber

Color Puzzle (Game Review)

Sometimes there are games I like because I used to play them in some earlier time. Color Puzzle is one of those tames.

Harken back to those early days on the Internet, around 2005 or so. I was really in love with the new iGoogle home page. It not only helped me to collect all those links I needed, but had these cool things called widgets. You could plaster them all over your home page and get the latest weather, news, and games! One of those games was called Flood-It and it had a simple but appealing game play. You chose a color and tried to fill a block by flooding.

The game was by Lab Pixies. Alas, iGoogle is no more and according to Google, we don't need no stinkin' home pages. And Lab Pixies were bought up by Google and are now doing something cool for Google. Who knows what? You can still get Flood-it on Apple and Android at least, and now something similar to it for the Firefox OS Marketplace called Color Puzzle.

By the way, Flood-it was so interesting that some academic researchers wrote about it and you can study their research here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4420. Interesting. But we're here to talk about Color Puzzle, which looks like this:

 

This screen shot was taken from my Geeksphone Peak and it might have been nice for the creator to fill in all that boring white space with some design or a distracting ad, or anything. White space isn't cool. Responsive game design hasn't come to Color Puzzle!

So the game is very simple. How simple? Here's the help screen for this game:

That's pretty exact and works well. A simple game, but that research paper I cited above is a 20 page PDF. Whew!

This game also has score boards so you can see how well you do against others. You get to those scores by clicking on the "hamburger" on the upper left. Yes, that's what the three bars are called (or was that hot dog? Or a trigram for the I Ching?)  Click on the three bars and you get these choices:

Interesting! The black menu on the left goes all the way to the bottom of the Geeksphone Peak, but looks fine on the ZTE Open. Responsive after all, but doesn't fill that white space.

You've already seen "How to Play" and here's what the "My Profile" looks like:

Wow! My first game and I got a score of 5,649,661. In fact, I'm ranked number 3496 in the world. Maybe I should become a professional Color Puzzle gamer. Well, maybe not, when I see that Nicole has a score of 46,010,683. 

But the screen continues:

 I got some badges. Scrolling down more:

And more badges!

When I go to the Leaderboard menu item, I see that I'll never be a player! Apparently the scores above are just current, perhaps for the day or week. Here's the real players:

OMG! A score of 1,186,632,207,378. Maybe they should use scientific notation! I bow down to Mustang Sally, the first trillionaire. Clearly this not only a game of skill, but also one of speed. 

So how do you play?

Here's is a typical screen:

You have six large squares at the bottom, each a different color. You start out by looking at the light blue square at the top left. You want it to expand, to flood, by picking the color it should change to. Your best choices are yellow or orange. If you pick orange, you get two squares for your first score. They will turn orange. But it you pick yellow, you'll have three squares and they will be yellow.

The strategy is to expand the number of blocks as much as you can with each move. So I picked yellow and got this screen:

The next step is obvious. Pick green! That way you will increase the number of blocks you "own" to eleven! Sometimes it is obvious, but like many other strategy games, sometimes you will choose a shorter gain for a longer gain, something that will take you to a big gain. 

I picked green.

What next?

I picked orange because there were four orange blocks touching the green. 

Now it looks like this:

 I'll skip the next several steps and show you what it looks like near the end:

Here we can see that the field is nearly flooded with dark blue. What to pick next? The answer is NOT purple. If you do that you can't flood the purple square in the lower right corner this turn. So the next move would be to flood something else and open up the purple corner. 

How about orange? Yes!

Now it doesn't matter. Pick purple and then green and the game is over! That's how I got my score, but I'm sure I wasn't fast and you can do a lot better. Maybe even take on Mustang Sally.

Here's my first score:

Actually my second, but I wiped the game and started over again so I could get better screen shots. You can see that the score is a factor of moves and time. I'm not sure how it is calculated, but maybe someone more mathematical than I can figure it out. My only math skills are Boolean.

Anyway, this game is just great and works as advertised. No music, a little too much white space, so this only gets a 4 out of 5, but it was close to a 5. Maybe a 4 because this isn't an original game and Lab Pixies got there first!

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open and Geeksphone Peak
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace
Developer:  Catlin Software
https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/color-puzzle

Tower Jelly (Game Review)

Well, I've been busy putting together my book, but now I'm back to new stuff and today will be a review of Tower Jelly from TweenSoft.

Actually maybe the title is Tower Jelly Blocks, or at least that's what the About page says:

You be the judge! Anyway, this is a cool, casual game that is perfect for waiting in line. It won't strain your brain, but you'll have to be alert and tap the screen at just the right time to keep playing.

The basic play is pretty simple. And TweenSoft makes it easy to figure out. They have a Help screen that tells you what to do.

Essentially you have a jelly cube swinging from a rope back and forth, and when you tap, it drops. The first cube lands and you must make the next cube land on top of the first. You get extra points if the second cube lands on top of the first. But if you miss the first cube entirely (or enough so you fall off), you lose a life. Three lives lost and the game is over!

And just in case, when you tap Start Game, you'll get some help again!

The only difference from the Help screen that you get to by tapping Help on the Home screen is that you can tap on Next to continue on to the game itself. Here's the start of the game.

The little X in the lower right corner will let you quit any time. If you tap it, you get this:

Which takes you back to the beginning screen or back to the game you are playing. But you don't want to do that, you want to play! As you drop cubes of jelly, they start piling up and the screen view moves up.

Here's a shot of a cube about to land on another cube. The score at the top right is 100, for dropping one cube. On the top right is the number of lives, represented by three linked hearts. At the lower left is a representation of the current stack. There's one on the stack!

After a few more plays:

There are 8 jelly cubes in the tower stack and I've lost two lives. The higher you go, you see stars and also moving clouds. But when you miss a drop for the third time, you see this:

 

You can see the current high scores (and I'm not one of them).

All in all, a nice little game for taking up a few minutes while you are waiting in line or otherwise bored. Which is a good thing for phone games!

But there are two things that knock off points a little.

Screen Size

The game doesn't fit on the Geeksphone Peak screen. You'll notice a large black area at the bottom.

When I loaded it on to my ZTE Open (both phones running FxOS version 1.2), the screen looks like this:

The screen now fits the phone! And two things that interest me. The bottom of the screen has a little bit of landscape that adds a touch of interest. And I like that little Firefox logo at the bottom that doesn't show up on the Peak. More work needs to be done by TweenSoft to adapt to different size screens. Not easy, and I'll be doing some research and a few posts soon on this subject of screen size.

Audio

There is none. No sound effects, no music. While not required, sound effects add to the fun and a little bit of music is cool. And no one has any excuse to leave out sound effects or music because they can read my post on Adding Music to Your Game at http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2013/12/adding-music-to-your-game-game.html.

Kudos

When I went to download Tower Jelly onto my ZTE Open, I noticed two apps in the Featured Apps section at the top. The first was RingTone Picker.

I follow @Mte90Net on Twitter and I suggest you do also! It is really cool to be at the top position!

Also I was pleased to see esviji in the #2 spot for all apps! This is a really cool SVG game from Nicolas Hoizey which I reviewed at http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2014/01/esviji-game-review.html. Way to go!

Score

Cost: Free

Genre: Casual
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: Geeksphone Peak and ZTE Open
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/tower-jelly

Space Fox (Game Review)

Anything with Fox in the name is worth investigating, and Space Fox is no exception. As you may have gathered from my post on Heroine Dusk, I'm an RPG game fan from way back. But I have a new interest I've been pursuing the last six months, which is space shooters. And Space Fox is definitely a space shooter!

This is a simple game, in that it doesn't have a lot of options and doesn't have music. Your white ship with orange fins is shown at the bottom left. The meteorites are orange. So is a firefox!

Here's the opening screen. You'll see it every time you crash.

The score is based on the kilometers you travel. The highest I've gotten so far is 43, but I'm sure you can do better.

There are instructions on the Marketplace page:

Discover the dark side of the space and kill all the space invaders.
- Move the ship rotating the device with the accelerometer.
- Tap the screen to shoot.
- Portrait mode only. 

The controls on this game are unusual, but very interesting for phones. I've played half-a-dozen space shooter games on the Android, but the controls were awkward and difficult to master. Most of them have little buttons that you have to press on the screen. Space Fox doesn't have any buttons. It has two basic ideas:

1. Tilt the phone down on the left or right edge. The ship will slide in that direction. You do this to avoid the meteors. This game is in portrait mode, so it's easy to tilt side to side and learn a smooth rocking motion.
2. Tap anywhere on the screen to shoot. If you can't avoid the meteors, you can shoot them.

That's it! The developer, Luis Jesus Maldonado Varela, probably will be adding things in the next version, but Space Fox is an interesting way to do a space shooter with controls that work for a phone. I covered the concept of tilting in my article on  Device Orientation, and the technology is fairly easy to use.

The game has a few extras. It does have sound effects for the explosions and shooting, and every once in a while if you destroy an asteroid you get something good. But the main point is that this is a different approach to space shooters, one that tries to use the new technologies of the phone!

I'll take off one point for no music and the lack of change (it's just asteroids with no extra scenery), but because this is original and has the name Fox, I give it a 4. The directions are on the Marketplace page at https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/space-fox-1.

Cost: Free

Genre: Arcade
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Bouncy (Game Review)

Bouncy is a perfect simple Firefox OS game. Not fancy, not from a big developer, not special art. But it ... bounces. Maybe the developer likes bouncing balls. My games have them too. Bouncy, written by Hebert Phillipe, is fun to play and challenging and doesn't feel like a rewrite of an iPhone game.

So when you touch the smiling pink-faced icon, here is what you get.

 Here aren't any instructions, but the Marketplace page says:

Bouncy is a platform game. Your objective is finish the levels, get points and unlocks new balls.

Fair enough, but I really want games to have instructions or at least pictures and diagrams. Well, on the other hand, the game is pretty obvious how you play. It's a platformer, and you just bounce from left to right.

Here's the select level screen, where you can choose the level you start with.

 Well, when I read that page, maybe this was written for keyboard use somewhere else. There is no A/Right or D/Left on the phone. All you have is your finger. But it's easy to guess that all you do is tap on one side or the other of the screen to move the ball.

Here's the opening game screen.

You'll notice your score at the top middle, three hearts on the left, a Pause button on the right, with a percent of how far you've gotten in this level. What you quickly learn is that the spiky bits will cause you to lose part of one of the hearts. Three hearts gone and the game is over.

The controls are simple. Tap on the right to bounce right. Tap on the left to bounce left (but watch out for that wall of spikes). In mid-air, you can tap again and jump higher. The important thing is to keep moving and get to the end of the level.

You get points for grabbing gold coins, and you bounce along happily. Any plumber would be right at home. But this game adds one more problem for you to solve.

The wall of spikes on the left are following you. If you don't keep moving right, the wall of spikes will get you.

Here's a later game screen:

The spikes are still following you. And there's one more problem. If there is a hole at the bottom (there's a small one in the middle and a large one on the right), you fall and lose part of a heart! Ouch!

And as you go along, the going gets rougher. This turns out to be a real game of skill and you'll have to be careful that you don't get mad and toss your phone out the window when you fall into the pit or the spike wall gets you.

Here's the beginning of the next part, where you have to jump very carefully.

Timing of your taps is everything. But if you like a game that is a challenge, this one has it.

You will, however, get familiar with this screen:

Also, this game is a great example of how to do an HTML platform game. You'll notice that the game is on a grid and that there are very few unique tiles. Because games on the phone have to compete for space, the more space you can save, the better.

I knock of 1 point for not having the rules, but the rest all works and is fun. I try and judge each game by what it attempts, how well it succeeds, and how much I like it. More platformers!

Cost: Free

Genre: Platform
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace

Jewels (Game Review)

This game fooled me a little and then confused me but finally is one I'll keep as a good way to spend a few minutes. That's what phone games are, a happy way to spend a few minutes. Or not. Maybe longer games have a place and if you know of any longer games that work on Firefox OS, let me know. For example, I'm also playing through the Legend of Zelda on a Nintendo 3DS and having a blast doing one or two screens at a time.

But back to Jewels (by Tweensoft). Note that Tweensoft also makes an HTML5 game called Jeweled, which looks more like a bubble shooter games. Interesting marketing!

I like bubble shooters, but this is more of a genuine puzzle. You must rotate groups of balls and if you get four to match color, they vanish. An unusual variation on match three.

So here's the opening screen:

Note that you can see high scores and get more games. Tweensoft has a lot of them!

Here's the instructions. I'm always glad to have those, but (later) I'll add a few tips.

Sort of simple, but this screen will make it more clear:

You have 16 jewels of different colors. At either lower corner you have a circular arrow that determines which way the jewels will rotate. The four that are enclosed (green, green, red, blue) will rotate counter-clockwise if you tap inside the circle.

Select different sets of four and rotate them until you get four jewels in a square -- but the square can be larger than 2x2. When you have four matching at the corners, those corners disappear and new jewels fall down from the top to fill any holes.

I first got confused because I thought this was a simple match three game like Bejeweled, but it wasn't. Maybe a grandchild of Bejeweled. I would have preferred a more descriptive title like Four Corners or, well, that's a great name for this game.

But then when I tried to play it, I couldn't figure out how you select. Sometimes clicking one a jewel would select the connected four so that the jewel was in the lower corner, and other times in the upper corner. Then I finally realized (here's the tip) that you tap in between the four jewels you want to rotate. Perfect! Now you can tap fast and furious!

My only real grip, now that I know how to select and play, is that I would have preferred that the game be in portrait, not landscape. I like to hold my phone in portrait and have a good grip on my ZTE Open while I'm tiptoeing through the tulips. But maybe that's just a preference.

Oops, I forgot one thing that makes this a game of skill. On the right side of the screen is your life meter. Every time you get a 4-way match, your life meter goes up. Every time your rotations don't cause a match, the life meter goes down. When it gets to the bottom, the game is over. You then see the final screen and have the option to enter a high score.

A nice game. Simple, but colorful and fun. I don't like that I had to puzzle over where exactly I had to tap, so the game loses one point. I'd almost deduct only 1/2 a point because the rest was perfect.

Cost: Free

Genre: Puzzle
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: ZTE Open (Firefox OS)
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace