Jet Ducks  ::  Turbo Reaction  ::  Story of the Week

Jet Ducks

Jet Ducks is one of those target shooting games that attempts to recreate the gentlemanly sport of duck hunting. As in real life, you’re equipped with a shotgun capable of shooting two shells before needing to be reloaded. Just like with a real shotgun (and I've shot a few, myself), you can see the trail of buckshot off in the distance, which can help your aim. And also as in real life, the ducks themselves are equipped with helmets, goggles, onboard paintball machine-guns, and occasionally, jet engines.

Actually, Jet Ducks is a VERY well-developed game, and you can tell it has matured quite a bit in its alternate lives on Mac, Linux, and Windows desktop machines. The game runs very smoothly, with a sleek but unobtrusive GUI that looks a bit like Linux or OS/X. The cartoon ducks have several different flight paths, some of which are predictable and others of which are more erratic. The aforementioned machine guns make the game a little more even-handed, since in a video game it's always more fun when your targets can shoot back. My one major complaint about the game is that the ducks are a little too hard to hit. Or perhaps they're just capable of taking an inordinate amount of ordnance before heading off to that great duck pond in the sky. You'll see quite a few of them on the screen, and when you do manage to hit one, they'll sometimes pop open a parachute or act like they're dive bombing into the water. For me, the best strategy is to focus on one duck and keep plugging away until it finally goes down.

Jet Ducks is a stylish and heavily-polished target shooter with a good enough design to make it worth a look. The pastel watercolor graphics and multiple game modes should be enough to keep it interesting, since after all, it's just standing and shooting targets. JD is an impressive effort, and hopefully some of Absolutist's other titles will make their way to the Pocket PC sometime soon.

Turbo Reaction

It may not have the greatest name, but Turbo Reaction is kind of a neat (if not overly original) concept. Basically it involves tapping small, round objects that appear on the screen. The objects, range from 3D rendered balls to automobile wheels. They start small and gradually grower larger. Your goal, of course, is to tap them before they shrink again, and you're penalized for any missed shots. TR shows a lot of polish in its execution: the game uses nice psychedelic backgrounds that make the game look prettier but don't detract from game play. When you tap a ball, it will either fade out or scurry off the screen. Pop-up numbers appear and tell you whenever you've gained or lost points and quickly fade into the background. Four game modes are offered, which basically control the pattern in which the balls appear. Several different movement patterns can be found in the game, some of which are far more challenging than just having the shapes pop up at random. Turbo Reaction may not be the most sophisticated game out there, but it's a well-developed example of a simple but enjoyable concept. This is the debut title from Russian company MoreGames Entertainment, and I think they did a pretty decent job on their first title.

Story of the Week – Amazing deal, just for you

I had some time to kill last Wednesday after eating lunch and before my shift started at my day job (My day job happens to be at Robert Morris College, which we featured in an article a few months back.) Anyway, there's an Office Max practically next door to the Hardee's where I ate, so I thought I'd head over there as it seemed like a suitable way of killing the aforementioned time.

As I pulled into the parking lot, a white delivery truck comes by and I hear some guy yelling, so I roll my window down. He asks me if I want to buy some speakers, so I tell him OK, since I figure it'll kill some time.

The guy pulls into a parking spot, and in a well-rehearsed but somewhat overwrought sales pitch, I find out that he's selling these rather large wall-mounted surround-sound speakers from some brand I had never heard of. He then tells me he had to deliver these speakers somewhere in Peoria (they were from Schaumburg, which is near Chicago and a couple hours north of me) but he somehow ended up with too many and didn't want to go back home looking like an idiot. So he pulls out an "invoice" as proof and shows me a catalog that lists the speakers at $3,000, and says he just wants me to make him an offer. I thought about probing him a bit about some of the logical inconsistencies in his story, such as what kind of store would sell speakers to anyone who had a little cash, and where they were stolen from, but I was lazy and just muttered something non-committal about not having enough room for a pair of speakers that size (which is actually true). The guy then got belligerent and after a couple more attempts to badger me into forking over some cash, hopped into the passenger side of the truck and told his buddy to take off.

So remember, if you see a couple of guys trying to sell speakers from a truck in a parking lot, you should probably pass, since you'll probably end up with a speaker box filled with cheap off-the-shelf components. Do they work? No guarantee. Will they stop working later? No warranty.

Allen Gall’s The Week in Games is a free service of POCKET PC magazine and POCKET PC magazine ONLINE: in-depth articles, tips, an Encyclopedia of Software and Accessories, and links to the best Windows Mobile PDA and Smartphone Web sites

This Newsletter is published by Thaddeus Computing, Inc., 110 North Court Street, Fairfield, IA 52556.

Allen Gall’s The Week in Games  Copyright © 2004 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.

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