Ancient Evil :: Crazy Jack :: Thought of the Week :: Letter of the Week 

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The game I played most this week:

Ancient Evil (review copy)

Dungeon Fighter: Ancient Evil

We haven’t had many major blockbuster releases so far this year. Now that we’re getting toward the end of the summer, it’s nice to see a high-end action RPG game like Ancient Evil finally arrive. Developed by Silver Lightning Software and set in a large dungeon known as the Crypt of the Ancients, AE is a 3D isometric hack-and-slash game directly descended from the mid-90s PC hit Diablo.

The predictably simple storyline involves exploring the spooky 25-level dungeon and ridding it of monsters while pursuing an ultimate confrontation with an evil that threatens the world. The game’s initial setup involves a contest held by a character named Alaric, one of only two people to enter the crypt and make it out alive.

Just like Diablo, AE is a single-player adventure that focuses almost entirely on combat. After generating your character (classes include warrior, spellcaster, ranger, or thief) you’ll take to the dungeon and enter the hack-and-plunder fray. Aside from the usual character attributes, your character has two main life forces: health (to keep you alive) and mana (to cast spells). AE runs in landscape mode, with the interface unobtrusively taking up a small portion of the screen at the bottom.

Most of the buttons in the menu tab involve interacting with the environment: searching, taking, identifying, and dropping items. As with most games in this genre, AE has lots of switches and levers to pull as you make your way through the increasingly difficult levels. Treasure chests are everywhere, of course, as are books, doors, keys, runes, and the like. Although the levels tend to look similar after a while, there’s a lot to battle against and a lot to interact with.

As I said before, your character has a one-two punch of magic and armed combat. The actual magic is pretty much standard fare for this type of game (basic healing and offensive spells), and the actual spells available to the player depends on level and the number of runes the player comes across. Although multiple ways exist of switching between armed combat and magic, the easiest way is to simply hit the appropriate button on your device’s directional pad.

Combat itself is pretty simple: just hack with your sword (or blast with magic) your enemies until they’re dead. Since your character has a bedroll, you can rest virtually anywhere you think is safe. I found the added element of having to eat a bit of a pain, since food isn’t always readily at hand (when your character starts to starve, you’ll take a one hitpoint health penalty every few seconds until you remedy the problem by grabbing a bite).

Playing the game is a blast. AE does a good job of taking the challenge-reward ratio of action-based RPGs and delivering it to the handheld platform. However, like any mobile game that’s based on an idea intended for systems with more horsepower and exponentially larger screens, it inevitably highlights some of the problems inherent in shrinking a game down to fit a handheld.

While combat generally works well in the game, it can be a little dodgy at times. Enemies have a habit of darting off when the battle isn’t going in their favor, and sometimes it’s a little hard to chase them down with various ground objects in the way (the rooms can be a bit cramped). This is compounded by the fact that your character doesn’t always directly face enemies when attacked. Problems like this probably wouldn’t be noticeable on a machine with a larger display, but they are on handhelds.

A related problem is the graphics. While they look fantastic (even if they are a bit fuzzy in low res), the isometric camera angle and the lighting combined with the alpha blending (which allows you to partly see through walls) can make the dungeons difficult to navigate when lighting is less than ideal. I often found myself walking into walls and getting stuck when trying to navigate the different maze-like rooms. The best way to play a creepy-crawly dungeon romp like AE is in a dark room with very little lighting.

Performance on my iPaq 2215 was pretty good, although it did get a little sluggish with multiple enemies on the screen at once. I didn’t get to play the game on a hi-res device, and to be fair, these problems may not be as noticeable on those devices. The preview copy I played (which wasn’t quite final code) seemed pretty stable, although I did experience a couple of crashes during testing.

Regardless, AE is a terrific game and a pretty well-executed derivative of Diablo. As we move into the

latter half of 2005, it and Arvale stand side-by-side as the two action-adventure games to own for your Pocket PC.

Dancing Moose: Crazy Jack

Crazy Jack is a 70s-themed platform scroller that looks and plays like it might’ve come out around 1986 or so. Starring a purple, afro-clad moose whose mission is to collect fruit and defuse bombs, CJ goes out of its way to be campy. Jack himself seems a rather one dimensional character, since all he really does is walk stiffly with a Travolta-esque frontward slant, and jump really high, trailing stars as he flies through the air. As with most non-combat platform scrollers, game play involves mostly collecting stuff and avoiding other enemies (birds clad in old fashioned pilot gear, in this case). CJ has decent graphics and runs smoothly enough. I’d probably place it in the top half of platform scrollers I’ve played as far as how well the mechanics come together.

I’m trying to figure out why the game doesn’t quite work. I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that, conceptually, it’s incoherent. I’m thinking back to Groove Snatchers, the campy version of Space Invaders based on some of the black exploitation movies that came out during the 70s. That game at least made sense if you had a cursory familiarity with some of the movies that they made back in that era. But something about Crazy Jack, if you’ll pardon the expression, just doesn’t jive. I have nothing against Jack, but something about a purple disco moose just pushes the limits of believability a little too far for me.
 

Thought of the Week — Play Taps and Wave Goodbye

A month or two ago, I reported that it looked like the Tapwave Zodiac was going to bite the dust before too long. It’s now official; the company itself is in the process of shutting down. Although I never got to play with one, I heard plenty of good things about it and the (albeit sparse) games that were available for it. Although it was based on the PalmOS, its thoughtful design allowed it to be a robust and very usable gaming device. But the market is already dominated by the likes of Sony and Nintendo, two companies with entrenched products, deep pockets, and ruthless business strategies. Remember the Nokia N-Gage?

Personally, I don’t see the point of making an unabashed game machine based on an operating system meant for more serious and mundane handheld machines. I don’t see how they can penetrate the market. In my area, I’ve never even seen a Zodiac or Gizmondo in person. Speaking of the Gizmondo, this news could be either good or bad for the device, which is based on Pocket PC technology. I wish the Gizmondo the best of luck, but I have to wonder if it’ll make it.

Letter of the Week

Joe writes:

Dear Allen, or perhaps I should say MR. GALL!

Are there any games similar to Age of Empires for the Pocket PC in existence or under development?

In addition, how about turn-based war games? I am an old fan of SSI games on my PC. I loved the games “Panzer General” and “People’s General” by SSI on my PC and am wondering if it is possible to “port” either of those games to my Pocket PC and if so, how?

Joe-

There’s always Age of Empires itself (which you might’ve missed). The king of the turn-based games, in my opinion, is Warlords 2: Pocket PC Edition. There are a few others, too, including King’s Crown. You may have played the original since you’re an old-schooler, and now there’s an excellent handheld edition available. Also be sure to check out Pocket War, which has evolved substantially in the several years it’s been available.

As for SSI, it looks like they’re now owned by publisher Ubi. (A lot of the old game companies were eventually bought out by other companies/publishers over the years.) Ubi now has a rather anemic selection of strategy titles, and none of them are credited to SSI (Ubi owns several different game companies). So it looks like SSI is either dormant or has been completely absorbed by Ubi. Shame. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that difficult to port some of the old tile-based strategy games over to Pocket PC, since I recall them being pretty simple as far as hardware requirements. In these days of instant-gratification real-time strategy games, though, there just isn’t that large a market for the more thoughtful and gentlemanly hexagonal turn-based titles.
 

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. It is edited by Duncan H. Brown.

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Allen Gall’s The Week in Games  Copyright © 2005 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.