Category: Game Releases

I have never been good at pool, partly because I was never in reliable proximity of a pool table in my formative years. As I got older, it became easier to get a rack going as there seems to be one stuffed in the corner of every bar in America. These days, though, my pool agnosticism is a choice. Ultimately, I find easier ways to embarrass myself for the cost of any given game.

But Pocket-Run Pool has me rethinking my entire relationship with billiards. Since it graced my iPhone, I’ve YouTubed pool competitions. I’ve watched trick shot exhibitions. Zach Gage developed this game because he couldn’t find a pool app he liked. Unbeknownst to him, he introduced me to a new hobby.

I’m setting myself up for failure, because there’s something wholly unique about this pool experience. Gage has developed this knack for turning the puzzles in the back of your Sunday papers and those games that come pre-installed on your computer into this unbelievable concept that no one knew they needed.

Pocket-Run doesn’t dramatically change the concept of eight-ball, just as Flipflop Solitaire didn’t completely overhaul the classic procedures of Patience. You still rack up a triangle of balls and use a cue ball to knock them into pockets. Good players still think shots ahead, computing both how they will sink what’s in front of them, and where their cue will end up post shot to sink what’s left.

From there, the liberties start. Firstly, there are only ten balls with numbers spanning from 2 to 13, omitting 5 and 11. There’s no required order to sink these in, nor are there solid or stripe restrictions. Everything on the table, save for your cue ball, needs to find a pocket to call home. Maybe the biggest, most “a ha!” of changes, that make pool suddenly the most infatuating single player game ever, is that each pocket has a score multiplier.

When you sink a ball, it’ll get multiplied by the number the pocket shows, from a measly 1x to a mighty 10x. Every time you sink a ball, the pockets rotate clockwise. Now, not only are you trying to control the board based on ball contact, but also based on how you can anticipate the most valuable scores will be.

Every time you ‘scratch’ the cue ball, you’ll lose one of your three lives. Altogether, pool stops looking like an indoor sport, and takes more the form of a puzzle. It seems strange, considering his gameography, that he’d dabble in a parlour room game until you realize it’s just another way to sneak a brain-teaser into an unassuming entertainment staple.

The actual act of aiming and shooting is its own meta version of borrowing an established concept and tweaking it into something that makes too much sense. You rotate your cue by dragging your finger around the ball. An outline of your shot will project itself forward. When the ghostly ball makes contact with another ball, a smaller line will predict its path to a lesser degree. This secondary line gets bigger and smaller the most solid the impact with the cue ball, making your aim more or less accurate depending on the angle you choose to play it.

When it’s time to shoot, you tap one of the arrows and a cue pops in from the side. With a swipe of your finger, the cue thrusts, and the ball is let loose. How fast you swipe will determine how hard of a shot you produce. There’s no minute details like cue ball English to speak of here, which is a good and bad thing. You don’t have a great deal of control of how your cue ball moves after you shoot. You can’t reliably get it to stop on contact or manipulate it in different directions. Its absence does take the pressure off of you when shooting though. Not having to worry about all that stuff means you really just get to swipe and move on, letting the balls fall as they may.

The randomness doesn’t stop there. You have no control over the rack position during breaks. When your scratch, you have no control over where the ball goes. The latter can be devastating when you’re deep in a round of Standard Run, the game’s main mode. One scratch can put you out of position for a big score, and without the ability to try to influence your cue ball during your shot, any given exchange becomes a crap shoot. It’s possible to work around, if some of the outrageous scores on the leaderboard are to be trusted. A novice may have a hard time coping with that fact.

There are other, even more puzzle-y modes to try your hands at. The Break of the Week gives players a table of already arranged balls and tasks them with making the highest score possible with them. The static features and the endless re-playabilty make this one of the most engrossing parts of Pocket-Run. After a set a score, I’m always returning to try and find a new sequence to try and push it to the next level. Experimentation can lead to breakthroughs in your technique that can travel back to Standard Run.

Insta-Tournaments are like hyper versions of BotW. It begins with a pre-set break, but you only have one attempt to set your best score. Once you sink all balls, or run out of lives, that is your contribution to that rack. New Insta-Tournament racks spawn every few minutes, so you’ll always have a new chance to make a mark.

They spiciest mode in Pocket-Run is High Stakes, where you bet tokens that you’ll win your game. Your pay-out multiplier varies based on your score. Score less than 500 pts on the 1000 token table, and you’ll actually lose money. The variation doesn’t end there. After your break, you take a spin on a wheel that will further modify your game with crazy variables. Adding a time limit or randomly changing the sizes of your balls even further creases the game of pool into some happy perversion of it that I’m all in for.

Ironically, Pocket-Run Pool’s greatest trick is that it makes me wish I could regurgitate this in the physical world. I want to run down to my local watering hole, take the cues out of patrons hands, and show them that there’s been a better way to play this game the whole time, and it was right under our noses.

Aristotle, the hero of Minesweeper Genius, takes a rather literal approach to mine disposal, whipping out his broom to sweep the surroundings for deadly devices. He is a peculiar little character, so proud of his superior brainpower that he keeps his smarts in a glass dome that is attached to the top of his head. The silly plot concerns aliens and scientific experiments, but sweep this aside and you are left with a smart update of a game that has its origin’s in the earliest mainframe games of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The most well-known version of Minesweeper dates back to the early 1990’s, when it came bundled alongside Solitaire with Windows 3.1.  It may not have had the same mass appeal as solitaire, but countless hours of productivity were wasted by those bored office workers, who wanted something a little more tactical than just arranging playing cards. Better still, the unobtrusive graphics, consisting of a small grey grid, were much less likely to catch the eye of a wandering manager.

Actually, Minesweeper Genius has just as much in common with number puzzler Sudoku as it does with its original namesake.  Aristotle begins each level placed in a grid, the exit will be marked but the rest of the spaces will be unexplored and could contain deadly mines. You can infer which spaces are safe from the numbers that appear along the edges of the grid. These reveal how many mines are in each row and column. On each level, Aristotle gingerly makes his way from square to square. He is never allowed to backtrack, and should he tread on a mine then he is returned to his starting position.

Minesweeper Genius consists of thirteen islands, each with ten levels apiece. Upon completing a level Aristotle will be awarded a star rating and the next level will unlock. Sometimes, after completing an island, a number of optional advanced levels will also become available.  As you progress, more features familiar to those who played the original minesweeper will become available. From the second island onwards, you can flag squares that you think contain mines. Simply press on a square or drag your finger across multiple squares to place flags. The third island introduces radial indicators; these appear in certain squares at the beginning of some levels and display a number that signifies how many of the adjacent spaces contain mines.

To spice things up, the game also introduces a range of special squares that trigger as soon as Aristotle steps on them. There are ones that allow Aristotle to belie his advanced years and leap over a square. Others will slide squares from one end of the grid to the other or swap entire rows and columns. All of the special squares in a grid must be triggered in order to successfully complete a level.

My initial impressions of Minesweeper Genius were extremely favourable, the graphics are clear, the controls responsive and the puzzling initially feels very rewarding. It is obvious that the developers have spent a lot of time polishing and refining their game. It is also commendable that the game offers a generous amount of levels and comes as a complete package, with no extra purchases required. Unfortunately, after playing for a while things began to go downhill pretty fast. Some of the issues are easily remedied; the background music soon begins to grate, but it can be switched off, as can the annoying sound effects that have Aristotle nodding off and snoring after only the briefest period of inactivity. The old dear’s desire for frequent naps may initially be mildly amusing, but I soon felt like grabbing his broom and whacking him over his stupid fishbowl head.

Unfortunately, the game’s biggest issue is not one that can be so easily resolved with the flick of a switch. Minesweeper Genius really suffers from a lack of variety and challenge. Each island follows a similar pattern, starting on small grid layouts that gradually increase in size. It soon begins to feel very formulaic, even the graphics hardly change from island to island. Minesweeper, like Sudoku, is all about making inferences from the limited information on offer in order to build up a complete picture. A large part of Sudoku’s appeal is down to the leaps of logic that you have to make in order to arrive at the correct conclusion.  In comparison, the decisions here are much more straightforward and consequently less satisfying.

So, whilst you may initially think, wow, that’s a neat twist on an old classic, Minesweeper Genius soon becomes a bit of a slog. It may make a neat casual game that you can play on your daily commute, but, in the long-term, the repetitive gameplay is a big disappointment. I’m no puzzle genius but still managed to cruise through the first sixty levels with ease, racking up a complete set of three-star ratings. Even at this relatively advanced stage it wasn’t really getting any more difficult. It seems that the game is too obliging and eager to help you succeed. This is largely down to the fact that the puzzles aren’t individually designed but procedurally generated.

Initially, this seems to be very neat and clever, an insurance against player frustration. Yet it turns out that it also makes things too easy, even the special squares that should really add some extra challenge turn out to be a big disappointment.  You would think that switching around the grid would really increase the challenge, but actually, the special squares just feel like they are just a point on the board that you have to reach. No matter how drastically they change the layout you can be assured that there will always be a valid move. Consequently, there is never any need to think further ahead than your current move, which is never that taxing, even if you are not a genius.