A short talk where Scott Kim makes a couple of interesting points about the nature of puzzles, games, and toys.

Oh my good god .. Ports of Call. I spent countless hours playing this on my Amiga 500 in the late 80s/early 90s. I’ll guarantee you that I won’t be doing this with many of the titles that are coming out at the moment, but this classic manages to still capture your attention.

Controls – The user interface is directly copied from the Amiga version. We’re not talking about a conversion here .. it’s literally the same game. This also means that the UI isn’t designed for clumsy fingers on an iPhone screen, but despite this, it’s actually simple enough to work. You do have a few difficulties hitting the right button from time to time, but overall it’s okay-ish. However – there are in fact two sets of UI’s, the original one, and a custom iPhone one. I wouldn’t recommend the custom one, though, because it is quite simply rubbish

Gameplay – PoC is all about building your shipping empire from humble beginnings. You start out with 5 million US dollars – just enough to buy a couple of cheap, run-down ships, or maybe a single one in a bit better condition. From there on, it’s all about scoping out the good trade routes.
There are a number of action elements in the game as well, such as ‘steer the ship clear of the icebergs’, or ‘steer your ship into the proper spot in the harbor’ … or indeed ‘steer your ship away from the other ship on collision course’. Overall, there is a lot of subgames of the ‘steering’ variety – but it’s all good, because on this iPhone version… you can disable them entirely! Awesome!

Multiplayer – There’s no multiplayer via internet or bluetooth, only hotseat. This is just as it should be, to be honest, since it’s like the original. Oh yeah.. this IS the original, silly me.

Sound – There isn’t a whole lot of sound in the game. In fact you sometimes wonder if there’s any at all. A scritchy-scratchy noise of an elevator coming down, or a tinny sample of wind blowing. That’s about it.

Fuck it, it’s Ports of Call, who cares!!?

Conclusion – I’ve tried a few iPhone versions of classic games now, and I wasn’t expecting a lot. But as it turns out, the iPhone is a rather good fit for this type of game. In general I think the iPhone is best suited to turn-based games of some sort, since you won’t have problems with obscuring the action, like you do in realtime action games.

Ports of Call absolutely does what you expect. It’s the same game that you knew and loved back in 1986 when it came out. It still has the draw and long-lasting appeal, and now you can bring it along in your pocket! Saving and loading is easy and fast, and there’s an auto-save feature as well. There are a few negative points as well though:

The game doesn’t auto-save on exit, so make sure you’ve saved before you close the game! This is uncool since most other iPhone games (and Nintendo DS/PSP/whatever) ‘just lets you close’ and it’s saved once you start it up again. The UI is another slightly negative thing, which can make hitting the right buttons an issue. The iPhone specific UI is horrenduous – but luckily the original one works okay. So all in all, it’s highly recommended!

I had this recommended to me by some guys on a game developer forum, and I have to say it’s one of the few really shining examples of “easy to learn,  hard to master” gameplay in the casual games genre – although this is really a case of a “light” version of this particular principle.

Controls -  are extremely simple – there is in fact only one control, which is “tap anywhere” to fire the cannon. The cannon itself rotates from side to side automatically, so there is no need for anything else. Just tap when it’s in the angle you want to fire.

Menus & Interaction - The menus are simple and intuitive, just as they should be. You can view online leaderboards, as well as post your highscores to Facebook.

Gameplay – You start with an empty screen. Every time you fire your cannon, your “bullet” bounces off walls or other spheres, until its kinetic energy has been spent. It then grows until it hits another object (i.e. it grows to fill the maximum amount of space possible before colliding with something.) This means that you in effect create the play field yourself.You have to hit spheres three times to remove them. Once removed, you get a point. Simple, right?

There are two game modes: pure and gravity. Pure is quite hard, with a completely linear bounce off of objects and walls. Gravity is a bit easier, and more interesting in my opinion, as your shots in this mode are attracted to the large bodies in the game area (basically it works as if the spheres are on a surface that bulges down, like the classic portrayal of how gravity works in space. Hence your shots will gravitate towards large objects, which means you can “spin” your shots.

Multiplayer – there is indeed a few options for multiplayer of the ‘hotseat’ variety. Works very well!

Sound – the audio is some of the best I’ve heard in an iPhone game. There’s not really an awful lot of it, but there is a great, mellow soundtrack that doesn’t intrude – it just sits in the background, layering a pleasant atmosphere over the game. Sound effects are also simple, but effective. It’s clear that the audio aspect of the game has been considered just as important as the rest of it.

Conclusion – The game is priced at 99cents in the AppStore, and is well worth it – because despite the initially deceptive simplicity of the gameplay, the game is actually addictive. It’s something that you can pick up and play very easily, and still enjoy after you’ve played 20+ games, which to be honest I find is usually not the case with iPhone games. It’s easy to learn, hard to master, to use an unusually worn-out cliché. It fits very well in this case. As mentioned, it shines through that the developers took a great deal of care ensuring that the controls suit the platform, that the functionality is as you would want it to be, and that the audio just works. You should go get it right now!