I should be annoyed about this – because I had the idea about six months ago and hadn't got round to doing anything about it – but I'm too pleased to care. Because the screenshot below will look very familiar to fans of Stu's Excellent World Of Pocketeers.

And the reason it does is that, fantastically, someone else already appears to be converting all the Pocketeers to iPod games.

Now, that last sentence isn't strictly accurate – "all" is just hopeful thinking on my part, and to be technically accurate they're converting the Japanese "PocketMate" incarnations of the games, which sadly means losing all the excellent cartoon artwork and having some less interesting names. (eg the Pocketeers "Tremor" becomes the utilitarian "Maze".)

But the tradeoff for that is that the games are all being significantly enhanced and expanded for their electronic rebirth, giving them a little 21st-century sheen as well as providing happy memories for those of us who loved them the first time. Not just with obvious bells and whistles like music and recorded scores, but also new gameplay elements.

For example, the "Field Athletics" game seen above (better known to British players as "Steeplechase") doesn't just feature a Freeplay mode, a Time Attack and an Endless game (go round as many times as you can until you lose your one life), in addition to a Training mode where you're instantly transported to one of four start points for practice, but also offers Night mode.

In Night mode, the playfield is dark (to one of three selectable degrees) except for a tiny lit circle around your ball-bearing, and you also have to avoid some wandering ghosts. It's excellently done, and even someone like me whose familiarity with Steeplechase goes back 30 years found himself forgetting the exact placing of the stepping logs.

The game isn't quite perfect yet – at the moment you have to have the music or silence (there's no option for just sound effects*),  there are no high scores for the Night game (just "CLEAR!" tags for each difficulty level), and the little boat moves MUCH too slowly, making the lake section agonising in normal modes and borderline impossible in Night mode.

(My first successful completion of the course – something I can do in about 15 seconds on the real thing – took a staggering 19 minutes, almost entirely due to the boat, which barely moves even if you tip the iPhone up on its end.)

Hopefully those things can be tweaked in an update, but the other two PocketMates released so far have fewer hiccups. (For one thing, Maze and Baseball both actually have sound effects in addition to the music, which Field Athletics doesn't.)

Maze adds a considerable amount to the Tremor design, not least two entirely new mazes to run around in. As well as time-attacking the three mazes, you can play a Checkpoint game (reach checkpoints against a time limit) and an Enemy Attack mode (basically the same thing except with multiple enemies to run over instead of a single checkpoint, and which records best scores as well as times).

You can either use the rotating tilt-disc of the original to tip the maze around, or the iPod's tilt sensor, which makes things considerably easier and really isn't in the spirit of the game. Maze takes account of this to some extent, awarding you only a silver "CLEAR!" for beating the Checkpoint mode with tilt, and a gold one for doing it properly with the disc. But it doesn't distinguish between disc and tilt scores in other modes, which is a bit poor.

This may be because the extra modes are staggeringly hard when using the disc. I haven't even managed to beat Enemy Attack in Easy mode using the tilt yet, so little margin for error does it permit, but it's excellent fun and highly addictive. If you're at all fond of Labyrinth-style games you'll enjoy this, and beating it in disc mode will challenge you for a very long time.

Baseball is even more interesting, and shows just how much PocketMates can be enhanced with the benefit of a hefty amount of computing power behind them. It's a simple bagatelle-type game which the iPod improves straight away by automating the lever you used to have to flick to move your "batsmen" around when you got a ball in one of the scoring holes.

But there's more to it than that. The app offers a brutally hard-to-beat CPU opponent (it adjusts to your own skill) for a three-innings game, a timed 30-second score attack mode, a home-runs-only game and a Quest mode where you're given 10 specific tasks to achieve with set number of balls.

(Ten doesn't sound like many but some of them are terrifyingly hard – such as the "natural cycle" where you have to hit the four bases in order with just four shots – and you won't be completing Quest any time soon.)

Finally, you also get an Arrange mode where the graphics and sound are prettied up, with the playfield rendered a bit more realistically, the steel ball-bearings replaced with proper baseballs, and some authentic ball-thwacking sound effects and scoreboard animations.

All the PocketMates are easily worth the 59p they're currently going for (apparently an introductory offer) – all three together will set you back less than a single real-life Pocketeer cost in the 1980s, and they do a lot more for the money.

They're great demonstrations of the fundamentally good gameplay design that characterised the series, and good fun even if you're too young to get a nostalgia kick out of them. As for me, I can't wait to see more. I just wish they were British.

 

 

* EDIT 31-8-10: All three games now have the option to have music, sound effects, neither or both.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under games, iOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.