Chaotic Tortoise | David Hing's blog for ordinary geeks

Zombies, Run! An excellent way to keep fit and look paranoid

June 3, 2015 by Ding·Comments Off

As far as motivations to run go, being chased by zombies is a very compelling one.

Zombies, Run! is an app that blends fitness tracking with some light gamification to create a more interesting way of staying in shape. Pitching you into a standard zombie apocalypse scenario through audio snippets piped into your headphones, the game feeds you instructions and updates whilst your phone keeps track of how far you have run and how quickly you are running.

The gamification elements come from supplies that you ‘find’ whilst out for your run. Once you’re back at home and collapsing on the sofa in a sweaty mess, you can spend these resources to build up your virtual survivor town with new buildings to help other inhabitants of your post apocalyptic world.

Evolve review: a shallow shooter or the perfect 20 minute monster movie?

May 27, 2015 by Ding·Comments Off

Sometimes you want to eat your friends. Co-op games often further compound that and Evolve is no different.

Maybe the medic always seems to be off having a coffee whilst your limbs are being chewed on by playful jungle critters, or maybe the support keeps calling in an airstike at either the other end of the map or a millimetre above your head. Maybe the assault guy just hasn’t worked out that he needs to shoot at the giant house-sized monster as opposed to just running towards it and getting swiped.

A surprisingly agile monster leaping towards your face is also going to ruin your day.

Thankfully, Evolve has an excellent method of dealing with this. You can decide that what you really want to do is play as a giant house-sized monster that will eat your friends.

One More Line: The lonely smoker’s perfect game

April 24, 2015 by Ding·Comments Off

One More Line might very well be the best cigarette break game on the market right now.

Taking on a neon art-deco Atari-esque aesthetic, One More Line gives you a small dome-shape to control and sets you the task of travelling as far as you can without crashing into discs strewn in your path or the walls to either side of you.

The reason that this makes for such an excellent cigarette-break game lies in its extraordinarily simple controls. Easily controlled one-handed, pressing your thumb onto the screen locks your little ship (we’ll call it a ship for lack of a better word) on to a nearby disc and spins you in an arc around it. Releasing your thumb makes your ship let go and beetle off in the direction it is now facing, mostly like directly into the path of a wall or another disc.

One More Line is surprisingly difficult to master. A single run takes a matter of seconds and how long you play will probably depend on how long you’ve got. There is admittedly a bit of a compulsion to keep playing when you first pick the game up, but once you’ve got used to it it’s very easy to put down again and get on with your life.

Can you use video games to learn another language?

April 24, 2015 by Ding·Comments Off

I convinced the day job to let me write about video games on company time and set about offering some suggestions on how to use video games to learn English.

It’s definitely possible -submersing yourself in any form of media will give you the edge when it comes to learning another language. The frustrating thing is that video games have a real potential to be more than that and I’m yet to see a developer successfully pulling it off.

Admittedly, maybe attempting to learn English through Telltale’s Game of Thrones might be a little on the ambitious side.

What’s more, the success of apps like Duolingo show there’s a real market for interactive media that teaches these things and video games have so much potential to really react to the individual student.

Hey Internet, let’s go easy on Kanye West’s video game perhaps?

February 24, 2015 by Ding·Comments Off

Kanye West is six months into the development of a video game about his mother’s journey through the afterlife.

There are going to be a lot of people that are going to jump on this and have a good old laugh about the notion, partly because it does indeed sound absurd. You hear the above and all sorts of terrible and tasteless ideas fly through your head.

You can also easily picture the Photoshop contests, the Reddit memes and the comedy Twitter hashtags popping up to make fun of this (I’m even sneering at the idea a little bit with my choice of images below, but what can I say, I’m a horrible hypocrite). Maybe you see this as a tasteless side scrolling shoot-em-up, or a first person shooter flight-sim hybrid, but maybe we should be giving Mr. West the benefit of the doubt here.