[iPhone] Review - Papa Sangre

[This is an opinion piece on "Papa Sangre", by SomethinElse. The official website is here.]

Strange little game this one. You have to walk your character around in pitch darkness, using sound as your only sensory input. For the most part it works fairly well. You have to collect gently tinkling "musical notes", before locating the exit and reaching it. The main hazard are monsters which are only ever described as "hogs". You will have to let your own mind decide how they look, but they sound pretty nasty. Passing close to a sleeping hog is fairly nerve-wracking, and the first time I woke one up and I listened to it mauling me while my character screamed repeatedly, I decided that this was a pretty good game.

You tap your two thumbs to make your character walk, and pull your finger across the top half of the screen to turn around. The 3D sound is brilliant. Run too fast and you'll fall. Run into a wall and you'll be stopped dead. Since all the graphics are "rendered" inside your own head, the image quality will vary depending on your hardware. If you're running with just Intel on-board graphics (ie., you have the visualisation capacity of  a moron), you might fail to be drawn into the game at all. If you've got a Radeon HD 6990 (ie., a good brain), you'll find things very creepy indeed.

As you progress through the levels, the game introduces new challenges. These include patroling hogs, dry bones that snap when you walk over them which causes the nearest hog to charge to that location looking for you, a crying baby that you can choose to rescue, quick sand which forces you to move slowly ... I'm only about 25% into the game so far, so I expect more variety to come.

It also includes different terrain types within the same level -- for example in the marsh level, you will move through wet reeds, knee-deep water, and the soggy soil of an island in the middle. Of course you have to map all this out within your mind.

The interesting part of this game is playing it with your eyes closed, and forming a mental picture of your surroundings, based purely on the sounds entering your ears. I can't recall any other game making you do this, and I've been playing games since about 1987. So for that alone, Papa Sangre deserves some kudos.

It's not a brilliant game, but it tries something completely new, and pulls it off very well. It's immersive, fresh, interesting, engaging, and occasionally quite terrifying. I'd say most modern triple-A titles fail to tick all of those boxes. And this goes for around $6 I think.

Just make sure you play it in a dim, quiet room.

Papa Sangre - 4 out of 5

-Gray

[iPhone] iPhone 4 purchased

Was showing the dude at work how shatter-proof my Sonim XP3 was ... and I shattered the screen.

So got myself an iPhone 4 tonight. In white for extra coolness. I asked the guy "Have you sold any white ones to guys, or only chicks?" He said "Oh no, plenty of guys have bought them."

I said, "Yes but, were they gay?" and he pauses for like 3 seconds and goes, "Not that I know of." completely straight-faced. Brilliant. But a cover will hide it anyway. I just bought one for $40. Absolute ripoff but what can you do.

Interestingly, I can open the App Store on the iPhone, and select an option to list all "Purchased Items". These are apps which I already paid for using my iPod Touch, and can now be downloaded straight onto the iPhone 4. Brilliant! Apple really is doing something right. It really is no wonder that Macs are gaining popularity around the world. (Are they actually gaining popularity? I have no idea. Somebody throw some stats at me, I'm interested.)

So, now that I can run all the games, I'll be buying and playing more. I bought a lot of games for my iPod Touch 2G. Probably spent $100 on games, not including music of course. But this iPhone runs things so much more quickly, I'm more inclined to use it.

Tonight I bought "Papa Sangre", "Infinity Blade" and "Hanging with Friends". Hanging with Friends is obviously fun. Infinity Blade I haven't run yet. I've only played Papa Sangre for 10 minutes but I was very, very impressed. This is exactly the type of game I'm attracted to. Keep your Call of Duty 6: Future Warfare: Aliens in Space Edition. I'm a fan of Minecraft, text-based MUDs, ADOM, Dwarf Fortress (although I never overcame the ridiculous learning curve), and other off-the-wall type of games.

Papa Sangre has the best graphics of any game I've ever played. By that I mean, it has no graphics. It's purely sound-based. You tap your thumbs on the screen to walk, or run, but don't run too fast or you'll stumble and fall. And as you navigate the room, you'll build a picture of what's around you based on the sounds you're hearing. There's awful, terrible monsters. Tip-toe past a sleeping "hog", and tell me you're not a little bit scared. It's over 100 MB, with no graphics, so that should give you some idea of the quality of sound in this game. It's 3D sound.

Now, don't start arguing that "How can you have 3D sound? You only have 2 ears!". You have 3D sound in the real world, yes? ... Using only 2 ears. So proper use of headphones replicates this effect. I'm also a fan of "Naturespace" which is billed as "holographic audio environments". A huge fan, actually. I might review that another day.

In fact I'll just review Papa Sangre another day, after I've spent some more time with it.

For now, just know that I'm rocking the iPhone 4, my credit card is starting to run hot on the App Store, and I'm slightly tipsy from a very strong brandy and lemonade. God bless.

-Gray

PS. Oh somebody Face Time me. That shit is all kinds of awesome. Absolutely pointless as far as I can tell, but all the best technology starts off that way. Imagine when they invented the "telephone". People would have been like, "Oh, so if you have a phone, and the other person has one, you can call them? Why not just walk around to their house? So pointless." But yeah, anyway, face time is kind of cool anyway. I like it.