Weekend Games Corner: Neon Zone, Soul Calibur, and Curveball Are Our Picks for This Week
Sooner or later, everybody plays some sort of video game. It’s a mark of how much gaming has evolved. Even if you’re not rocking the latest Call of Duty or sinking hundreds of hours into Skyrim, chances are you’ve played some sort of video game recently. No worries- we all do. There are so many awesome games available for smart phones that it’s hard not to play them. Mobile games are everywhere (or at least Angry Birds is).
However, that huge selection can get a little bit overwhelming. When you have so much to choose from, how do you choose? That’s where we come in. At Vikitech we like to play mobile and PC games just as much as you do. To help out our readers, we compile a list every week of some notable and fun games for Android/iPhone/PC. The PC games are Flash titles, stuff that doesn’t require a new graphics card to run. Interested in some quality games? Read on.
Neon Zone (Android)
Neon Zone is a game that very clearly aspires to be a clever physics puzzler. In many ways, it succeeds. Players are tasked with strategically placing and manipulating a glowing cube and collecting… something. Glowing dots. Hey, it’s a puzzle game. Don’t expect a story.
The player can manipulate the environment in three ways. First is the original placement of the block. Wherever the player touches on the screen, that’s where the block appears. It is subject to gravity and will immediately fall to whatever surface is below.
This brings us to the second method, gravity. By tilting the phone, players can make gravity go in any direction. This is quite useful for puzzle-solving. That hard-to-reach platform that lies just out of reach is within easy range when you change the gravity.
The final control method is jumping. By tapping the square, players make it jump upward through platforms. Jumping and changing gravity are usually used together to string together paths across the level to the glowing dot things.
Neon Zone is pretty cool and succeeds as a moderately interesting puzzle game. However, we really did not like its scoring system. NZ sets up its puzzles so that they can all be completed with relatively no challenge. Between jumping and changing gravity, nothing is too hard.
The challenge is supposed to come in with the scoring. Neon Zone keeps track of how many times you change gravity or make the cube jump, as well as time for completion. The idea is that you’ll try to finish within the constraints the game gives you before each puzzle.
If you play right, then the number of gravity shifts and jumps will be equal to or lesser than the constraint the game tells you. However, Neon Zone never really enforces those limits. You can solve every puzzle with 100 jumps apiece and the game won’t stop you. It just sort of expects you to obey the rules.
We would have preferred a different approach to puzzle design. Good puzzle games like Cut the Rope and Portal focus on making the player experiment in order to simply complete the puzzle. Neon Zone sort of expects you to study each puzzle beforehand and mentally plan out your route. Experimenting with routes is far more fun than planning them.
If you can live with the subpar scoring system, there’s a lot of good puzzle content to be found in Neon Zone. The app ships with a decent amount of levels and the developers promise more to come.
Soul Calibur (iOS)
Among fighting game fans, there are few classics that are considered truly timeless. Outside of Street Fighter II, the only other classic fighter that comes to mind is the original Soul Calibur. Originally released on the Sega Dreamcast, SC’s colorful graphics and flashy fighting moves left a lasting impression on gamers everywhere.
Fast forward to 2011. Jumping on the remake train behind Chrono Trigger, Capcom re-released Soul Calibur for iOS. Is the result worth playing (unlike the notoriously bad iPhone port of Street Fighter)? In a word, yes.
Soul Calibur’s brutal gameplay has been translated quite well onto touch screens. To be clear, touch screen controls are still far more imprecise than a real controller, especially in a fighting game. The good part is that the touch controls are still pretty darn good. We never once felt strained while playing SC for iOS.
Those who have never played a Soul Calibur game are in a little bit of trouble. To understand the complex battlefield rhythms of SC, you need some practice. Thankfully the computer is more than happy to send an endless wave of bots against you.
That’s something that might throw off casual players- Soul Calibur is not an easy game to learn. There’s a certain art to knowing how skillfully parry, attack and counterattack. Once you start to understand the combat, though, the game flows beautifully.
Bottom line is that Soul Calibur is a great way to experience a fighting classic on a new platform (and with Retina graphics, no less). The only strike against it is the price. At $16, SC clocks in as one of the priciest games we’ve ever seen. Still, serious fighting fans shouldn’t pass this by.
Curveball (PC)
Curveball is simple to the point of absurdity. It almost seems like a relic from the 1980s. It’s basically Pong in three dimensions. You play against a computer paddle and bounce a ball back and forth. The idea is to get it past the computer’s paddle.
It’s fun in a sort of mindless way. The perspective lines are a little off-putting, but you get used to them. What makes Curveball cool is that you can do exactly that- curve the ball. Just like in real ping pong, hitting the ball while moving the paddle causes it to curve through the air.
That’s it, really. Curveball is not complex by any measure, but it is fun. You can reach a sort of Zen state by bouncing the ball back and forth. It’s an enjoyable game.
Have you played any of these games? Which are your favorite games on these platforms? Share with us in the comments.
