Title: Mile High Pinball
Price: $9.49 ($2.99 for 1 day, $6.99 for 7 days)
System(s): N-Gage
Release Date: May 5, 2008
Publisher (Developer): Nokia (Ideaworks3D)
ESRB Rating: “Everyone”
Pros: Nearly endless pinball action. Great sound effects and pretty decent bumper action. Good pinball-on-the-go game.
Cons: Some boards feel too congested while others have too few but annoying features. Ranked game only as good as your wireless connection.
Overall Score: One thumb up, one thumb sideways; 84/100; B; * * * out of five.
Pinball wizards never want a game to end. The idea is to keep the ball in motion as long as you can to rack up points in a seemingly endless bout of bouncing ball action on a single board. It’s truly man versus machine.
Developed by Ideaworks3D, Mile High Pinball takes that idea to a new extreme offering a tall stack of boards for wannabe wizards to conquer with their thumbs and often, but not always, overcoming the obstacles of a cell phone screen.
Bouncy Bouncy
For the N-Gage rendition of Mile High Pinball, the object is to progress up through more than 45 boards stacked on top of each other while scoring as many points as possible. Each board is two screens high (except for some bonus boards that re only one screen) and, as you cross to the second half, the view slides to that section of the board. Exit through the top or bottom and you leave that board and enter the next.
Boards include the usual pinball game bumpers, spinners and secret areas as well as moving opponents that must be hit multiple times to be defeated. There are also some powerups that allow you to multiply your balls, points, earnings (which can be cashed in at the power up store) and damage, as well as more videogame powerups that turn the ball into a super bouncer, missile, helium balloon and other sometimes useful tricks including slow motion, frozen opponents and warping back to the previous area.
A Ranked game accesses the N-Gage Arena to log your score and you can also compete against other gamers in various head-to-head matches. The Practice mode lets you play offline.
Fun, Fun, Fu-Disconnected
As a basic pinball game, this is very fun. The boards are usually pretty interesting with detailed, sometimes moving backrounds. Flipper placement changes with each board except for at least one flipper (often many more) at the bottom of the screen to allow you to try and prevent a ball from falling to a lower level.
The screen size does mean that boards are disproportionately tall and, when more than a few objects are on the screen, things can get pretty crowded and confusing. Usually that means easy points but it can also mean some frustrating backtracking to the lower level when you repeatedly are unable to line up the perfect bump to move up the board. It’s really only an issue for a few levels but it means you’ll be on those boards much longer than the others.
Powerups are sometimes useful, especially the Instant Store where you can sell off the useless powerups filling your inventory, allowing you to buy sometime a bit more rewarding. A few, like floating up and the missile that shoots you straight up require the ideal board and precise timing to work. That means they’ll usually go unused unless you like a lot of trial and error.
The Practice game does not show any type of score, only the height of the ball, so there’s no scored single-player offline mode. That puts a lot of emphasis on online play, which seems a bit odd for a cell phone that can only be used by one person.
Also, if you don’t want to pay for pricey web connectivity for your phone, you’ll have to connect via wireless Wi-Fi. Then your online game is only as steady as your internet connection so, if you have a setup or firewall that can cause even tiny drops in connectivity, your game will instantly stop. It is pretty frustrating although it does save your ball’s exact position (and powerup) and resume it when you reconnect, unpause and get back into the game.
I did try to play against other gamers online but there wasn;t anyone to play with (sounds like a sad school yard).
Join the Mile High Club
If you dig pinball and have an N-Gage capable phone, you’ll certainly get many, many hours of flipping fun Mile High Pinball. The best part of the game is that, if you use a bit of backtracking, you can exploit bonus areas and powerups to rack up points all day long. I’ve been sporadically playing the same game for about four days.
At worst you’ll have to find a quick way out of a few boring boards and trade out useless powerups. All in all, that ain’t so bad for a take everywhere pinball game.
Product Page [Mile High Pinball]
No comments:
Post a Comment