Phony Gaming: Angry Birds

Phony Gaming is a new feature which will be appearing on Mondays here on out. In this feature I will be presenting you with some of the better gaming experiences within the phone (maybe tablet later on) gaming market. Right now the feature is restricted to the Android platform as I’m a proud owner (I fucking love my phone) of a Samsung Galaxy S3. As I was thinking about this feature the name ‘Droid Gaming’, but I don’t want this to necessarily be an Android exclusive gaming feature. In a more perfect world I would post about iOS games as well.

So the way that I’m going to start this of is by listing my top 10 favorite games, one game per week. Then when the whole list is complete I’ll dig into the Google Play store deeper and hopefully find some great new favorite gaming gems. As always please share your thoughts on the games and your own favorite games through out the weeks.

I had a hard time with the tenth place to be honest. As I’ve already shared some views on both Temple Run 2 and Tiny Tower I didn’t want to repeat myself over again. I liked both of them more than the highly successful finish developed Angry Birds. I don’t dislike Angry Birds per say, though it’s been over-talked for so long and has become that big essential phone game for Android and iOS devices alike. But maybe I can hit two birds with an Angry Bird and talk a little about all three games, let’s move forward to the actual post.

 

Phony Gaming

10. Angry Birds

You’ve surely heard of the angry birds long-lasting war against the thieving pigs. Developed by Rovio Mobile a development studio based in Finland. The game launched in late 2009 for iPhone and has since been made available on Android devices. They’ve also released four additional expansion packs Seasons, Rio, Space and the latest based on the iconic Star Wars franchise.

If you’ve never heard of Angry Birds it’s a puzzle game were you’re armed with a slingshot and shoot hot-tempered birds into increasingly more steady huts occupied by egg-eating pigs. The goal is to rid the level of all the pigs. You have arsenal of different types of birds each with a different skill, such as a blue bird which explodes into three smaller birds or a black exploding bird. They also have different effects on different types of building material.

I like Angry Birds well enough, I don’t think it’s the best game ever or that if it had been released a little later would had got so much attention. But they were early and got a lot of press for being on of the first successful mobile games, and that’s fair. It’s very charming, especially in the beginning. The ludicrous story, the cute art-style, the simple game-play and the great bird-noises go a long way but after a while you get quite tired with it. I haven’t picked it up to try out the later versions like the Star Wars one. I’ve heard some good things about it, I’ve just not gotten around to it, if I ever will.

Actually I would have rather talked about two other games for my tenth spot, management game Tiny Tower and on-rails obstacle runner Temple Run 2, but as I mentioned in the presentation I’ve already had them in two different Bobo’s x3-posts so I’m just going to add a few new thoughts on each game.

I stopped playing Tiny Tower short after the post because the game started bugging out and crash a lot. If it was some kind of memory crash or something else I don’t know, but to continue playing a game like that if it’s buggy can be a gamble. I had to abandon ship before I got to attached to my tiny inhabitants, would have been too rough to have them die on me in a game crashing, save swiping bug. I liked the game up to that point. It was a nice little management game which didn’t need your full attention all the time.

Temple Run 2 I just got enough of eventually for no exact reason. It’s a fun game and like Angry Birds is one of those well-known games that’s probably installed on the majority of phones whether you play or not. I think I brought up my thoughts on that game quite well so if you want to read about it. You can go read it here.

Well that’s the first Phony Gaming post. Will return next Monday for a new edition and my ninth favorite mobile game.

Bobo’s x3 12/09/16

Hey-uh!

This week I’ll tell you about a free mobile game called Tiny Tower available for iOS and Android devices, a comic series by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez named Locke & Key and the hit TV-series Breaking Bad.

Tiny Tower is a management-game where you are given a tower to look after. Your tower is built up by different floors and it’s up to you to choose whether they should be residential floors, which give your tower more inhabitants. These floors can also be built into different shops, studios or restaurants to offer your tower-people different occupations. Every resident have their unique skills and dreams to have in mind when sending them to do a job. So when you’ve got a bunch of inhabbitants in your tower and have them assigned to different jobs in your tower your job is to check the stock of each shop and restock when something runs out and just collect money to let your tower grow larger. There are also tower-bux which you can collect to make your tower restock or build faster. These can be bought with RL-money (and these are too expensive in my opinion ) or by exercising certain tasks. My tower is now 40 stories high with 70 different tiny people living in it with about 130 sales being made per minute.

This game has become something I do whenever I pick up my phone. After checking twitter and updating my rss-feeds I also have to restock and build on my tower. It could be compared to a tamagotchi, you just check on it for a short while every now and then. Although compared to a tamagotchi this game doesn’t punish you if you don’t check on it regularly.

Locke & Key‘s 5th volume just came out this past July and I just came around to reading it along with the previous 4th volume of the comic book series. These books follow the three Locke kids right after their fathers murder. After his death the kids and their mother move to live with their uncle in the fathers childhood home called the Keyhouse. Here the kids soon find some magical key with which they can do amazing things.

I think Locke & Key is fantastic in the way it portrays it’s themes of grief, childhood, alienation and of course the keys themselves. And one key in particular which has the power to open up a persons mind. They focus on this key and explores it’s power in really interesting ways. Unfortunately I have to say that I hate all the popular culture jokes that have come up in the later issues. I don’t get why you would want to have them in there. To me they just feel cheap and they’ll probably age badly. But all those stupid pop-culture references aside I can’t recommend these books enough, especially the second volume named Head Games.

Breaking Bad just finished it’s first half of the series last season. Breaking Bad, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a series starring Bryan Cranston (you probably recognize him for his role as the father in Malcolm in the Middle or as the dentist from Seinfeld) playing a high-school chemistry teacher who gets cancer and decides to start cooking meth to see to it that his family can manage economically after he has past away.

This summer they showed the first 8 episodes from their 5th and last season with another 8 episodes to conclude the series next summer. If you haven’t seen this series already then get to it already! It has a great cinematic look which you seldom get to see on TV. The characters are greatly written and well played. This series is great at giving you some dark humor, exciting heist-sequences and really unbearable character interactions. I’ve found myself watching some of this seasons harder-to-watch dialog-scenes through the cracks between my fingers while tangled up into a fettle-position with my hands over my eyes. This series is also great at giving you some really great looking montages of people cooking meth. A must watch!

Yeah, that’s this weeks “Bobo’s x3”.

See you around!
/Bobo