iPlay Skipping Stones - Mobile review

2 September 2005 0:28 GMT / By Stuart Miles

It's always the simple things in life that bring a smile to your face and Skipping Stones from iPlay is certainly simple. Like that annoying penguin-clubbing yeti game on the internet, you will either love this like it's some kind of Sudoku-style addiction or merely not get it. For us, and luckily for iPlay, we love it.

Pure pick-up-and-play at its greatest, Skipping Stones will take you 30 seconds to complete and a lifetime to master. Just like the real life hobby, the aim is to skip a stone as far as you can across the sea. To do this the game is broken down into two parts. Part A requires you to set the power of the throw on a fluctuating power bar, while Part B requires you to press a button when it's about to reach the surface of the water in order to splash it on.

There are two modes, Splash and Distance, both of which are as simple as each other. Where the game succeeds is that drive to do better than last time. In Distance mode for example the closer you press the button to the shadow the better the skip, too high or too low and you lose power very quickly and that can only means less skips in the bank.

Verdict

If you're looking for a 30-second gaming fix when you are waiting for a bus, this will fill that urge. Likewise, we found whole train journeys disappear as we battled to beat our previous score. Mixing it up a bit are random pickups that either help or hinder and this adds a bit of craziness into the mix. We aren't sure why they appear, and there is no reference to them in the instructions however they do offer that occasional curve ball.

For us, Skipping Stones is what mobile gaming should be about. Remember Snake on the old Nokia handsets, derived from Atari's Qix three decades before, and how addictive that was. Well this is our new crack.