[ WWW.TECHLIFE.NET ] [ 045 ]
EVER SINCE FLAPPY Bird was released —
aka The Game About Navigating A Bird
Through Tight Passages Between Pipes —
I’ve longed for a similar game featuring
a whale. Except instead of navigating the
whale through tight passages between pipes,
you’re slamming the big fellow onto the
roofs of skyscrapers and, sometimes, even
razing them on your journey ever onwards.
That’s what Ookujira is, and with the
subtitle ‘Giant Whale Rampage’, its
simplicity mirrors the bluntness of that
description. While the learning curve is
very forgiving, actually learning how best to
launch your whale into the various obstacles
— and crucially, knowing when to ground
pound stuff into oblivion — is where the
gamerly mastery comes into play.
Another thing going for it is that its
monetisation isn’t too in your face —
you won’t need to grind for coins or wait
for timers to tick down in order to fling your
docile whale around the place again.
It’s a dumb game, but a bright and
cheerful one, well-equipped to hold your
attention until you get a social media
notification or your Quarter Pounder Value
Meal is ready to pick up.
[ SHAUN PRESCOTT ]
YOU MAY HAVE heard of ‘machine
learning’. It basically refers to computers
observing and categorising the world
around it without being programmed.
Deep stuff.
Quick, Draw Google! can be seen as a
slightly frivolous example, where your finger
drawings bolster Google’s search engine
collection of doodles. The game asks you
draw an everyday item — a cup, a pair of
binoculars or an envelope, for example —
and gives you 20 seconds to do your best.
Your phone screen becomes a canvas, and as
you draw, the AI guesses what the item is.
Pictionary by another name, perhaps,
except that, if you fail, you still go on to
complete the six rounds. It’s all over pretty
quickly, and good fun with added pressure
when the timer starts to tick below five
seconds. Your results are then assessed,
and you can compare what you’ve drawn
with other participants — some are laden
with talent, some will make you think that
Google believes a peanut can look like a
mouse. No app is required, and you can also
play this on your desktop computer through
your web browser. [ PAUL TAYLOR ]IF WE COULD describe this game in one
word, it would be ‘gorgeous’. This is a puzzle
game which has two distinct parts — puzzles
and story. The puzzles are essentially a game
of draughts on an increasingly difficult board
that you have to navigate. If two dots are
sitting beside each other on the board, one
can hop over the other to the neighbouring
blank square. If that blank square has another
dot next to it, then you can string together
multiple hops in a single go — just like
draughts, but not diagonally. It gets harder
once the boards get bigger, and elements
such as portals, buttons and barriers get
introduced. Each level will likely require
multiple goes to get it right, and it can get very
frustrating at times!
There is an option to get a hint, but after
your three free hints are used up, you’ll either
have to watch an ad to get one more, or pay to
get six. You’ll want to pay the $1.49 to get rid
of the invasive ads, too, as they’re super
annoying, but this game is worth paying for.
The secondary element to this game is the
story of the fox, but frustratingly, the captions
that appear come and go too quickly for you
to read them, meaning you’ll likely forget
there’s a story at all. But to be honest, you’re
not here for the fox, you’re here for the puzzles
and the puzzles are very good.
[ CARMEL SEALEY ]Ookujira
THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BET TER TIME
TO SMASH BUILDINGS (AS A WHALE).
Free | ookujira.comQuick, Draw Google!
PAINT BY FUMBLES.
Free | quickdraw.withgoogle.comJourney of Return
A PUZZLE GAME WITH SOME FOXES
THROWN IN FOR SOME REASON.
Free with IAPFreemomogame.net21 / (^2441) / 2
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