Guitar Hero franchise keeps expanding and has now reached the smallest screen available: your cell phone. Guitar Hero III Mobile is based on the latest console Guitar Hero III. By eschewing the plastic guitar, you have to rely on your phone’s keypad to rock. Instead of 5 frets, you have to contend with 3 only - activated by keys 1, 2 and 3. Of course there are blue glowing notes and when you hit a series of notes correct, you can collect star power.
The effort to shrink the experience to the small screen is overall succesful. The game ships with 15 songs initially, and there are 3 new downloadable songs each month. If you’re into the Guitar Hero franchise and you’d like quick fixes outside of your home (or when you don’t have a DS around), Guitar Hero III Mobile is perfect for quick diversion.
Rating: 80%
Spot the difference is a pretty popular game that gets tiring quickly, and Crazy Spot for Windows Mobile (and Symbian) devices suffer from the same fate. Your goal is to compare 2 photos and find the 5 differences in each photo. Sometimes it is easy to see - thanks to some bad Photoshop jobs - and othertimes, they made it maddeningly difficult.
If you think spotting the difference is a game for you, you can try the demo for free, or download the PC version for no charge whatsoever. It is perfect for short burst games while you’re waiting for something (such as the bus…) but don’t expect a marathon gameplay out of this one.
[Download Crazy Spot for PC, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices]
Herocraft’s game Robo has a simple concept: navigate a level and get through to the exit without getting killed by many lasers in the level. To do so, you must disrupt laser’s path using rocks and mirrors, move them or blow them up with bombs scattered throughout the level. While the premise is simple, the game is incredibly tough to beat as simply moving things around at random will not get you to the exit.
The game requires a lot of advance planning and strategy as you need to figure out how to change a laser’s path and which one to take out. Even if you think you have something figured out, you will have to try a level many times as it’s tough to anticipate every move. Robo does feature an undo button but you can only undo one move… the game would have benefited greatly from undo button that can take you all the way to the beginning of the level.
The biggest problem with this game is the difficulty spike. First 4 or 5 levels are pretty straightforward, and then you are suddenly stuck in a level where nothing you do makes sense. Often, there is only one way to get through the level, and it can take a long time and many tries if it didn’t click in your brain.
If you like a lot of strategy in your puzzle game, you will definitely enjoy Herocraft’s Robo. With 76 levels, you will get plenty of game time out of Robo. This game is available for many devices such as Windows Mobile (where I tested it) and even TomTom navigation devices at various prices (ranging from $7.77 to $15.85).
Rating: 75%
[Download trial and buy full version from Herocraft website]
Based on the PC game Westward (available from BigFishGames), mobile version was developed by Astraware for Palm OS, Windows Mobile Standard and Professional. It bills itself as a Wild West adventure, and it mostly delivers. Graphics are great for a mobile game, gameplay is very engaging and deep and it is an overall fun game.
You experience the life of a frontier settler by building towns, giving your folks places to live, employ them to produce food and gold, defeat bandits as you track down Mad Russian to bring him to justice. There are over 20 levels in the game and it will give you plenty of gameplay. The game is perfect for you to be playing in short bursts as it is easy to save and return to the game later.
It isn’t exactly bug-free though. On several occasions, I encountered game-stopping bugs such as characters not responding to commands. It is also pretty difficult to control multiple characters at the same time when your town grows to a certain size, particularly with the limited input options on the Smartphone version. You basically move the d-pad to select and issue commands, and when maps get big, it’ll take a long time to scroll anywhere.
Nonetheless, if you’re interested in a town-building game with some action/adventure components, this is perhaps your only choice. Priced at $19.95, it is a reasonable deal for the amount of fun you can get out of this game provided you don’t encounter too many bugs.
[Download trial/buy game from Astraware]
*Reviewed on T-Mobile Shadow running on Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard
Tower Defense games are everywhere, from your computer to your PS3 console. Resco Defender is a well-executed handheld version available for both PocketPC and Smartphone devices. The objective of the game is to prevent monsters from reaching your castle wall by building defensive structures to kill them. There are basic attack towers, advanced towers, rocket towers, freeze towers, glue towers, teleport towers and magic towers, each with different abilities and damage.
The game is simple to understand, but it is quite addictive. You will spend a lot of time customizing your play field, to maximize monster deaths. With each monster destroyed, you earn gold which you use to build new towers and upgrade existing ones. At about $15, this is a good purchase if you like tower defense games and would like to play on the go. The repetitive nature is perfectly suited for short-burst handheld gaming.
[Download trial and buy full version game from resco.net]
Back when print newspaper was relevant in daily lives, people used to do the games such as crossword and wordsearch. Pockster brings those games in addition to Crypto and Sudoku in an unappealing package that is overpriced for its own good.
It includes 50 crossword puzzles, 50 wordsearch grids, 50 crypto puzzles and 75 sudoku games for a total price of $19.99 (yes, that’s $19.99). To put it in perspective, you could get a puzzle title on the Nintendo DS (such as Brain Age 2 which comes with 17 minigames, and 100 sudoku puzzles).
How does this game stand on its own? Not so well. The interface isn’t ideal on a smartphone, the graphics look incredibly dated and the puzzles aren’t as interesting as they could be.
There are much better options if you want puzzle games on your phone than this overpriced package of mediocre games. But if you’d still like to give it a try, visit their website.
Creatonia, a RPG game for Pocket PC and Palm touchscreen devices is now free to download and play. Featuring 28 characters in 13 different classes, the game promises over 150 world areas, 400 item types and 150 skills, all in the palm of your hand. The game hasn’t seen much update since August 2006, but now you have nothing to lose as it is free.
This game supports both VGA and 320×280 resolution Pocket PCs.
[Visit Creatonia download page]
SPB Brain Evolution is a collection of loosely-affliated games that are supposed to evolve your brain by following through the daily training. Wheter you believe these claims or not, the game nonetheless gives us a few good games.
- Arithmetics: simple calculations
- Quadronica: create rectangles
- Memorics: memorize where different shapes are located
- Sudoku
- Numbers: create sums of several numbers
- Minesweeper
- Balltracker: guide a ball to the exit point through a maze
- Guess Who: use a series of clues to find the right shape
- Encyclopedia: memorize useless trivia
- Matches
Some of the games such as Minesweeper and Sudoku offer a great amount of replay value whereas others are simple one time diversion. Each game has 4 difficulties ranging from Easy to Maximum. The goal is to play each game and level up in order to unlock new ones. It is a pretty nifty idea (albeit lifted directly from Brain Age series) but the latter games aren’t compelling enough to struggle through the game.
 In the end, if you really need some sort of daily brain training on your Windows Mobile device, this is probably the best and the most compelling package out there. At $20 USD, it isn’t the best purchase you could make (especially considering there are free alternatives to most of the games in the package).
Rating: 50%
