Windows Phone Thoughts: "Centipede & More Classic Games" Reviewed

Tennis Addict
As with the chess game, Tennis Addict offers a lot of choices, including your own player's characteristics (Figure 12), your opposition's characteristics and the court surface (Figure 13).


Figure 12: Picking your player.


Figure 13: Choosing the court surface.

The game includes a training module that allows you to practice the user interface, from serves to returns. A problem with this sort of game though, when you play it on a device like the Pocket PC, is that the user interface bears no relationship to how you would normally play the game. This means that you don't have any real feel for how to improve your play. The only indication of what you are doing is the game showing you where it thinks the ball is going to land. Unfortunately, that is dependent on your opponent sending the ball straight to you - if you've positioned your player badly, you either aren't going to hit the ball at all, or you are going to end up clipping it.


Figure 14: Playing on grass.

The game is well drawn but I'm afraid it didn't really hold me enough to even finish a game.

Spellbound
This is a curious game - a premise that seems to be easy to achieve but one that in reality is very, very difficult. You are shown a grid of letters, as you can see in Figure 15. From that grid, you need to find letters that are touching in order to make up a word that meets the goal specified for the current round. Simple, eh? Yes, except that the letters made available to you seem to conspire to be arranged in no helpful order whatsoever.

When you are fortunate enough to find a word, the letters are removed a new ones drop in to take their place.


Figure 15: The Spellbound grid.

There are three different levels, essentially differing on whether or not the game is timed and how quickly.

I consider myself to have a reasonable vocabulary but, as I've mentioned, I found this game very difficult to play. It might have been better if, instead of changing the difficulty through timing, the game had more intelligence built into it and put tiles onto the board that would definitely make words.

The Emperor's Mahjong
This, I think, has got to be my favourite game of the pack. The rules of Mahjong are really simple - find matching tiles and so long as they aren't blocked in, you can remove them from play. The tiles in this game are beautifully drawn as you can see in Figure 16. You can play a single game, a two-player game or work through the Emperor's Challenge.


Figure 16: Playing a game.

Regardless of your choice, there is a huge choice of layouts to play. In both single and two-player games, you can pick any layout and then a difficulty level. However, it isn't really clear what the difference is in the three levels. When you are playing a single-player game, you've got undo, hint, shuffle and reset options. When you are playing a two-player game, you take it in turns to remove pairs and the winner is the one who takes the shortest amount of time.


Figure 17: Six levels and twelve games per level.

With the Challenge, the difficulty options go away and the aim is to play each of the different layouts. Once you've completed the first five levels, the Emperor's levels become unlocked for you to play. Each layout tells you how many tiles you must remove in a given time. The status bar at the bottom of the screen shows you the time left and the number of tiles removed.

I found this to be a really addictive game. There were some layouts that I had to try several times in order to finish successfully. I haven't got to the Emperor's levels yet, but I will … just as soon as I finish writing this review :D.

Slurp
This game is very similar to Jawbreaker - the idea is that you tap on contiguous areas of colour to remove them and the other blobs drop down to fill the gap you've just made. Slurp goes a bit further with the added complication of leaving grey blocks (Figure 18) where you failed to completely remove the blobs from the previous level. Ultimately, this means that you are going to run out of screen space.


Figure 18: Slurp those blobs away!

You have a bit of control over how difficult the game is by choosing the number of different colours there are, from 3 to 7. The more colours, the harder the game.

If you enjoy playing Jawbreaker, this will be an interesting variation for you to try out.

Conclusions
As I said at the beginning of this review, choosing whether or not to go for a compilation will amount to whether or not there are enough parts that you want in order to make up for the parts that you don't want. MDM give you excellent value for your money - if you add up the individual costs for the games, the total cost is a lot higher than $29.95 - it is actually $104.65, not including Centipede, which I couldn't find as a separate product.

Whichever way you cut this particular compilation, I think that there's likely to be something in here for you, so it then comes down to whether or not that presents good enough value. For me, I'd probably stick with playing three or four of the games, which does represent good value to me.

Philip Colmer is Head of I.T. for a global electronic publishing company. In his spare time, he enjoys researching his family history, developing his videography skills and going shopping with his wife.