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Review

Room 102

by J Nash (November 21st, 2010 at 10:01 am)

Compilation: 101 Games. Publisher: Nordcurrent. Authors: None credited. Price: 59p/€0,79/99¢. Buy the compilation.

First there were 35 with swaying. Then there were 80 with SCIENCE. Now I, wily J Nash, fail to be out when the morning post is allocated and review a 101-game compilation with manly fortitude and SHEER BLOODY-MINDEDNESS.

Let’s pause for a moment first. Who buys these things? They’re everywhere; Nordcurrent’s own site advertises 101 Genre X Games for several other formats and it seems the first thing anyone does on receiving their Apple dev licence is to collate some illegally horrific Javascript ineptitude with misplaced pride.

The only logical answer is that overstuffed compilations are end of the aisle pound shop toy knock-offs for the 90s: they’re obviously going to be rubbish and possibly catch fire, but they shut the recipient up for a bit by the simple effort of scything through the undergrowth — there, the alluringly jagged plastic shivs that immediately snap off, here the painfully endless multi-menus. Companies make them because they’re the default purchase of desperation.

IF YOU BUY THESE COMPILATIONS YOU ARE A BEWILDERED GRANDMOTHER SHOPPING WITH A TRAGICALLY MISTRANSCRIBED BIRTHDAY LIST FOR A SULKY CHILD WHO WILL HATE YOU.

Roll the basics.

You can’t immediately play all 101 games in 101 Games

101 Games introduces the additional labour of — no! But yes! — unlocking by points won. Games are split into groups of 10 except for the last which contains 11; the first batch is open and the rest steepen rapidly in price. Points per goal (or shot, or whatever) generally rise with the bands, and when you first beat a game’s arbitrary target (usually a score of X within Y seconds) you receive a bonus of at least the game’s initial cost.

Some games award significantly more points than others. Obviously you don’t know which. (I do by now, so STAY TUNED.) In fact, you don’t know anything about a locked game except its name; the question mark icon that displays the rules vanishes if you tap an unopened title.

(The latest update introduced a possibly deliberate bug in that you can click where the question mark should be to display the rules anyway. This is less help than you’d think, because the only description that’s immediately obvious as not worth the bother is the sudoku one. To its credit, 101 Games is slickly coded, unlike All 80 Games’ lumbering hamfistedness, and manages to pack in q a few uncommon genres. Noticeably absent, for instance, is the usual crutch of scrolling thing-punchers.)

You’re probably therefore going to unlock the games in order. This requires (20,000 x 10) + (30,000 x 10) + (45,000 x 10) + (60,000 x 10) + (80,000 x 10) + (100,000 x 10) + (120,000 x 10) + (140,000 x 10) + (1,200,000 x 11) = (1,795,000 x 10) + 1,200,000 = 19,150,000 points. As an extremely rough guide, a basket in the first game, Basketball, scores about 1,000.

Yep.

I have played 101 Games to the end. Plus the bonus five in the latest update.

I would not trust myself in a room with Nordcurrent and a rowing oar.

This is a Nintendo DS port

Podgamer’s own RevStu told me this; I wouldn’t have noticed until Turtle Marathon (game 48) which accidentally leaves mention of a stylus in the rules. Once you know that, of course, it’s obvious. For example, the upper half of a 101 Games screen is generally wasted on a background picture; and the controls are rubbish.

I have never, ever played an iThing game that as capriciously ignored swipes and taps as the 101 Games set. (There’s no tilting, even when a game’s clearly suited to that, like game 75, Tightrope Walker.) You’ll soon respond with a harrowed quiver to yet another command to “drag your finger over X.” Any push-buttons are hateably small (because, obv, they were intended for a radially tiny poking stick). There are no relative joypads: if you’re controlling something in two axes your finger’s always in the way (because, obv, you were intended to fly with a radially tiny etc).

For about the first 31 games I was convinced the erratic controls were my fault — that the constant swiping was rubbing away vital fingertip oils leaving the sensor befuddled by what appeared to be dry popping taps, etc. No: it’s the port. Rhythm games like Tomato King (bonus + 5) will happily refuse to accept any taps at all.

(Adding to the confusion, different games with the same control schemes appear to use different backstage methods. You can test this with twin-directional swiper Climber (game 93), for example, which fails to mention it likes to ignore anything that doesn’t swipe the height of the screen.)

There are no options. This means you cannot switch off the music. Each game will randomly play one of approximately two generic music tracks. You will come to hate these tracks with double the intensity reserved for someone who has run over your picnicking family with a rumbling tractor. If you manually disable the iThing volume, you miss vital audio cues in several games.

Every time a game ends, regardless of whether you’ve “finished” it or not by meeting the target, a screen pops up to tell you to finish the game by meeting the target.

The game-selection menus are excellent, because sensibly they’re just normal Apple swipe screens.

There are games with sums in.

Okay! That’s enough intro. Let’s look at the 101 games in 101 Games.

COST: NOUGHT

The first batch is auto-unlocked.

Basketball

Lob the “ball” into the “basket.”

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: “Flick” (ie, drag).
Cue J Nash: After throwing the ball, you can freely seize it at any point below the top of the fence. Presumably this is to save time after a bad shot (you’re lobbing against the clock, you can’t lob again until the ball’s at rest and the physics are solemnly bouncy) but means your first glimpse of 101 Games is the ability to stop a ball dead in mid-air and drag it through the crust of the earth.

Tornado Hockey

Air hockey against a robot.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Competent but predictable opponent (we use this to our advantage for the point-boost trick. STAY TUNED) outweighed in interest by the soupy regioning which means you can run your paddle over the centre line or, indeed, off the sides of the table.

Circus

Keepy-uppy.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag and tap.
Cue J Nash: Tap the multiple rings to pause them in mid-air for a point bonus; swipe to juggle them up again. No matter what you swipe, the rings will immediately lurch to the hard left of the screen, which conveniently groups them for easy cycling.

Bouncer

Keepy-uppy.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: No problems here. The ball bounces off the screen sides rather than wrapping around, which is a welcome change.

Sushi

Stab as many blobs in a swipe as you can.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Wait for the blobs to line up. Notice again the indicatively shoddy controls where sometimes your swipe isn’t taken as “powerful” enough so your stick decides to stop halfway up the screen.

Curlers

Curling.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: No opponent, so it’s a straight flick-moderating accuracy test. Slightly wonky in that the final few millimetres of a stone’s path take an amusingly wheezing couple of seconds to work through; the 101 Games physics in general are very nearly good enough. The first game I actively enjoyed.

Sky Hunter

Shoot falling things.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Openly buggy: you’re supposed to wait for the wafting targets to fall (at which point their baskets randomly reveal score or power-up icons) but you can tap the blanks as soon as they appear for no measurable loss in score. (It took me a couple of goes to realise you weren’t just frantically hitting everything before it could fly off to the right, which is in fact more fun.)

Darts

Materially costly darts on a ship.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Arrows, really; the scoring’s in concentric circles rather than wedges and you just keep firing a single dart at a time for region-set points instead of trying to exactly zero a number.

Dirty Gold

Oil zips through a maze of pipes; guess the destination rig.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The oil predictably changes direction at junctions, but ignore all that and wait until it passes the last bend to tap the rig; there’s no bonus for guessing early. (To be fair, later rounds speed up considerably so you have to start tracing.)

Aquarium

Grab bubbles for points, but they increase your size; grab sweets to shrink again; avoid fish.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: “Hello, my finger’s in the way.” You’ll be getting used to that. Random fish mean you can be trapped going for a bubble anyway.

COST: 20,000

Invigorated by the initial freebies, you parlay your score to the next level OF THRILLS.

Flies

Shoot your tongue to catch what in fact appear to be Purple Hairstreaks.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Your tongue takes time to propel and retract, so you have to anticipate the flittering. (The “flies” travel in straight lines, but at varying speed.) Not bad, but too slow for me.

The Descent

Swerve down a perilous vertical shaft.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Incredibly slow-moving bat means you can’t reliably pick up point-bestowing sweets without inescapably crashing.

Crossed Wires

Rearrange connected knitting so none of the wool is crossing.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Elegant, tricky puzzle that’s so out of place it’s laughable. Push the balls around for a bit, give up. If you hit on the answer, you didn’t do it fast enough. Cheers.

Serpent

Snake.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: I hate “drag joypads” — it’s why I couldn’t get on with Official Pac-Man at all. (The other control methods were also terrible.) Anyway, this rudimentary and jerkily block-moving Snake stands out among the general polish of everything else. At a guess, the compilation’s Patient Zero.

Diamond Box

Box-spinning logic problem; shuffle awkwardly interacting shapes as a group to clear path for diamond to exit.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Swishly done, but like Crossed Wires doesn’t seem to belong. I carefully thought through one box, then it turned out there’s a series so I banged the next one back and forth for a bit until I think I was fatally trapped. (The game doesn’t tell you when you’re fatally trapped.)

Urban Skydiving

Plunge through hoops; deploy parachute before crashing.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Another CONTROLS!!! moment when you realise that 101 Games doesn’t know about second fingers; if you hold rather than tap, then you can’t change direction. U Skydiving itself unsatisfyingly omits a reward: there’s a funny animation if you crash, but opening your parachute whips your character off the top of the screen, there’s a boring pause, then he begins to reappear and we cut to the next jumper.

Cookies

Sweets appear in scattered pairs; spot the odd one out; tap the equivalent on the circling plate below.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Deceptively tricky pattern matcher; the faster you spot the gooseberry, the more points you score. The port works in the game’s favour, because you’re splitting your attention vertically. I like this one.

Bombs Away

Bombs weave across the screen; tap the equivalent on your console to blow them up.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Fiendishly, the console lays out the bombs at unusual angles, splintering the visual match. This was too goggly for me, but I can appreciate it with a curt nod.

Missiles

Avoid missiles.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Another “drag joypad” monstrosity, which lethally weakens the solid core of woozying around and ducking the explosions — the missiles are harmless until they explode. You’re supposed to steer based on the missiles’ slowing (they blow up when stationary) but sheer weight of numbers swiftly renders game a lottery of positioning.

Serenade

Catch roses; evade rubbish.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Controls are fine (you only move left and right so there’s a dead area, and the dragging keeps up) but in a situation to be echoed throughout the compilation the purely random disbursement of prizes versus obstacles against the clock means that even for the fleetest-footed note-gargler it’s a fluke whether or not you satisfy your quota.

COST: 30,000

GOOD LORD THE TENSION AND DRAMA. You pause to wipe your brow with a spotted handkerchief then upend your purse for the next round.

Apple Worms

Gangs of worms leisurely arise; tap only the flashing ones.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Bafflingly dual-ruled Whack-a-Mole. (Possibly the port wasn’t up to the speed you’d expect from Whack-a-Mole.)

Romeo’s Plan

Adjust angle and speed to land Romeo on Juliet’s balcony.

Skill or Luck? Apparently skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The first landscape game of only a handful, and the first with the angle-speed mechanism that’s going to cause you a lot of trouble. The thing is, you can’t take either back: tap once for angle, tap again for speed, happen to tap wrongly and you’ve wasted your turn. (This is particularly noticeable for Romeo’s Plan because you have to land correctly all three times to win.) Even worse, if you tap too flat an angle for the bottom balcony, you don’t go anywhere. In short: neat idea, tumbling dominoes of fumbling unfriendliness.

Beat the Machine

Symbol matching; you don’t see the clue and choices together.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: A couple of symbols are simple puzzles (eg, pic of plate plus knife = fork); pleasing effect is spoiled when you realise there are only about four symbols repeated until the clock runs out.

Speed Chaos

Don’t crash.

Skill or Luck? Apparently skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Another slow-moving drag, but it looks like the traffic is arranged so there’s always a navigable gap. (I didn’t play long enough to see if the game accounted for the gap, say, being far right when the previous set swerved you to far left. What do you think?)

Sudo Master

Sudoku.

No.

Sharpshooter

Archery with a horizontally moving target.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Drag to cock the bow, release to fire. Variable draw strength equates to hit region. Target doesn’t speed up or anything. Yawn.

Tanks

Control two tanks versus two robot tanks.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Tap beside tank to move; tap on tank to fire. Each side’s walls unaffected by own shells. Just busy enough to keep you interested without overwhelming your lobes and the robots put up a reasonable fight. I q like this.

Perianth

Drag coloured petals into appropriate bowls.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The petals regenerate immediately as a random colour, so all you have to do is stick to the lowest leaf (ie, the one equidistant from the bowls) except when the game decides you touched the one to its left instead (ie, approximately all of the time). So poor, the game icon is the irrelevant bird on the fence.

(“Lift” — Ed) Escape

Jump from a plummeting lift at the last moment.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Steady speed and huge flashing arrow mean you can score the maximum each time. Your terrified character wearing a bunny suit for no reason and leaping into pillow-selling boardrooms for no reason keep you entertained for just long enough to play it through once. (The incredibly long intro of the lift breaking dissuades a return.)

Invasion

Primitive Galaxian.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Aliens fire randomly and there’s always one weavingly descending at any one time. It’ll take you about 15 seconds to realise that if you shoot two adjacent columns you can sit unharmed in the gap because the weave covers exactly double an alien’s width. No bonus for hitting weaving aliens. Slow. Generally risible. Clear single screen to win. Impossible to conceive of a review site giving this much more than 77%.

COST: 45,000

You strut with newfound confidence and chin aloft and people are noticing you in the street and not just because you inattentively ankled off the kerb. WHAT CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

Cup and Die

Cup and Ball.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: This was where I should have guessed it was a DS port if I’d been paying attention, because the distractingly posed hustler plays no part; the game is in the narrow strip at the bottom. Keeping track of the correct cup with your pointing finger works as it always does for this. Introduces the next common failure of 101 Games — you have to play for two minutes, ie far beyond the point the fun runs out. Extra points to the programmers for not using “dice.”

Shurikens

Swipe things at target.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Another rare landscape game and perhaps the best single example of the incompetent controls: all you have to do is flick from left to right and you will not manage to accomplish this repeatably even if you wanted to, which you won’t, because Shurikens sure… is… kens. SHUT UP I AM WEARY.

Lights Out

Break LEDs with curling stones; the earlier the crash, the higher the score.

Skill or Luck? Ballast.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The first really obvious filler, in that you can win in about five seconds by rubbing the stones any old way. Includes a nod to fans in that roughly half the time your swipe will fail to be “powerful” enough and the stones will lurch 90 degrees to bounce left to right forever.

Hammer Toss

Throwing the hammer.

Skill or Luck? Friction burns.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Another exciting new component of the multi-layered intricacy that is 101 Games as you have to swirl and swirl and swirl far longer than appeals and your finger feels really q unpleasant because it is not a radially tiny stick. Then you let go and the hammer flies off the side again. FUME (S FROM FINGERTIP).

Shuffle Stones

Shuffleboard? That thing on cruise ships anyway that might as well have been invented by Carry On Cruising for the likelihood anyone’s played it who didn’t die mid-voyage.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: In fact pretty decent. Instead of the target I was expecting (which’d be Curlers again, come to think of it), you have to land four stones as neatly as possible within four separate goals. In the screenshot I went on to strike the blocking stone so precisely that both skidded to a top-marks halt. (Lie.)

Fifteen

Plastic Christmas cracker puzzle.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: I hate these, but by chance my first move was correct and I received 1,000 points. A couple of further curious pushings and I scored 950. What happens is that (reduced over time) you score for every tile in the correct position, regardless of where the others are. I meant to finish the puzzle to check there was a completion bonus (because otherwise all you’d have to do is cycle every square around and ignore the picture WHICH WOULD SURELY BE TOO STUPID TO EXIST) but then I remembered I hate these so switched off instead.

Cloud Jumper

“Jump(er)” up some static “cloud”s.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: A sudden return of horrible controls in that your bunny won’t reliably jump where you say; supposedly you tap close for a horizontal lope, and far above for that height of spring all while attempting to nab the randomly distributed prizes, but in fact what happens is anything the bunny feels like then death.

Land and Sky

Place rain on the ground and stars in the sky.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Mystifyingly simple until I jiggered a star by chance and saw everything’s supposed to glide around with physics. No idea why it doesn’t (COULD IT BE THE TERRIBLE CONTROLS???) but to be fair you still have to contend with the challenging wrinkle of the game putting one or more icons behind the pause button.

Baskets

Flick coloured eggs into the appropriate baskets, ie nests. (I suspect some kind of censorship panic way back in the Nintendo days; see also Cowboy Paintball.) (Except you’re still flicking eggs, not balls or something. Um.)

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: I don’t understand this one. Essentially it’s four-basket Basketball except you can only flick each ball once; but the two higher nests are double the points. The thing is, the egg colours appear randomly and the swipe delicacy to land a lower shot is no pickier than the others (if your egg lofts off the top of the screen, for example, it eventually comes back down). At this point I began to suspect q strongly that playtesting of 101 Games was, to be charitable, somewhat focused.

Submarine

Drive your submarine through the shipping lanes; you can briefly submerge.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Here’s all you have to know about Submarine: you blow up if a ship hits your wake.

COST: 60,000

YOU’RE PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS NOW. AND THEY JUST PUSHED YOU OVER.

Metal Roller

Drop down the ledges of a vertical shaft.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: There’s a veneer of genius here: someone spots the touchscreen controls are, charitably, mutilated, so rewrites the instructions to say you’re dragging a listless and uncoöperative cannonball. Except this would have been before the port and the cannonball is proportionally even worse to steer.

Winter Fishing

Hook fish; avoid rubbish.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Slightly enlivened by the magic fishing line (which can be dragged to any position at any angle and will lock there) and magic reel (which retracts so fast the rod should explode in the bloke’s hand); so wispy that when the artist drew a bunch of tropical fish by mistake, everyone said, “Welp.”

Rocket Fuel

Catch televisions in space plus fuel to keep going.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Oh no! The fuel’s randomly appeared too far away from your careening ship. The end. (Two-fifths of a point for the way you gradually lose momentum as your fuel stock is exhausted WHICH IS NOT HOW SPACE WORKS and you scroll backwards for a bit as you fall, and just as you think there’s a second half of increasingly wild acceleration capers to grab the things you missed on the way up, there isn’t.)

Force Field

Swirl the handles to keep the shields up.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Friction burns.
Cue J Nash: Hammer Toss x 3.

Dragon Jigsaw

A jigsaw of a dragon.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Simple but effective jigsaw totally ruined by the fact you can’t drag the jumble of pieces off the board into, say, the huge dead picture area at the top in order to make room for the amazing precision required to place the bit you have. (Again, of course, explained by the DS port.)

Shape Shifting

Reconstitute board.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Much the same as Dragon Jigsaw except the whole screen’s used here so you can at least whip the pile aside to find the bit you’re after; except tight deadline means you have to go with the nerve-wracking technique of finding a place for whatever you’ve grasped. Unusual helpfulness: the pieces snap into place as long as you’re on the tile; you don’t have to fit them exactly. (Except the drag joypad means you can’t tell until you get there that the game’s looked “through” and handed you something underneath instead.)

Sea Monsters

Shoot cannon at monsters.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag and tap.
Cue J Nash: Violently awful; instead of just having to blast three delay-fire cannon against three columns of monsters, some idiot’s decided to make it better by letting you angle the cannon against flanking beasties. You don’t want to angle the cannon, of course; you tapped it to light the fuse, but the game thinks you dragged it too. WHOOSH BOOM TAKE THAT THE SEA.

Turtle Marathon

Traverse a river of moving turtles to the top of the screen.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Not-bad reaction hopper as you nudge sideways to cover the fatally long gaps caused by the speedier waddling shellblokes.

Hyperspace

Invasion rewrite.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Ships whizz in to random points rather than beginning in formation, then weave as before. Altogether zippier than Invasion but with a spoiling undercurrent of helplessness (you’re inevitably moving your slow bloke when a ship warps in above you and fires undodgeably).

Space Memory

Terrible Simon.

Skill or Luck? Skill (dismayed).
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Here’s how Simon works — the robot plays a rhythm, which you then repeat. Here’s how Space Memory works — the robot moves its hands into position first unless it presses the same button twice. This means that instead of watching the button patterns, your concentration’s interrupted by the purposeless and arrythmic graphical effect. A loud disruptive whirring accompanies the robot’s moving hands. If you switch off the sound, you now have no idea if your button press was accepted or not. Altogether less fair and desirable than those rip-off keyring versions that accidentally poison you with battery acid.

COST: 80,000

Just over halfway there now.

Bumpy Road

Provide turfed ride for incautious farmer.

Skill or Luck? Skill (confounded).
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: See those divot icons? You have to drag the correct one exactly over the approaching hole and let it go. You can guess the rest.

Tooth Decay

Brush your teeth.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Discounting the drag joypad, a fun and rapid little game where you have to scrub each tooth in the correct direction. BUT YOU CANNOT DISCOUNT THE DRAG JOYPAD.

Picture Perfect

Draw with pixels.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Queerly undernourished, as if it were meant to be Picross or something. (Is it Picross? The one where every block affects its neighbours, anyway.) Here, you just duplicate the three pictures in the space beneath. That’s nice dear.

Flying Fruit

Throw rock at fruit.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: See? It CAN be done. You tap where you want the rock to go (the higher your tap, the stronger the throw) and IT GOES THERE. No need for haphazard dragging. TAP: THERE IT IS. This probably means the original DS version was controlled by your spraying arterial blood into the microphone or something.

Shuffler

Match-three EXCEPT…

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: … you scroll rows and columns and the game rapidly fires through dozens of combos by itself as new squares drop in, the target is met and you never have to play it again. Like having a match-three-playing butler. (Whom you then have to set alight to remove the taint of match-three.)

Safecracker

Sums.

Skill or Luck? Sums.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Swirl the dial to fill in the missing digit and GET OUT.

Notepad Destroyer

Battleship against a robot.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The instructions don’t mention that no ship can touch another, which fooled me for ages. Beyond that, about as sophisticated as you imagine, ie it doesn’t matter where you put anything because the robot bombs a random square and, if it hits something, scrolls through the compass until it hits something else then continues in that direction; or torpedoes another random square. OH NO TRADE SECRETS ETC.

Mosaic Madness

Shuffle tiles to restore a picture EXCEPT…

Skill or Luck? Ostensibly skill.
Idiot controls: Drag and tap.
Cue J Nash: … you can only move within the consecutive blocks you select. Say you pick a pair adjacent in a row; if you tap Left-Right they’ll now swap places. Pick three and they’ll cycle; and so on. This is highly confusing and stupid (I ended up selecting advancing pairs to shuttle the single piece around that I wanted) and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even notice when you win. (See picture. Is that finished? It looks finished to me. The bottom right square is dark because my cursor’s there. At this point the game’s been counting down from 2m 15s, when I finished, and will shortly run out and tell me I’ve lost) (by 17,500 points).

Puzzle Presents

Samegame.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The 50 words of instructions do not include, “It is Samegame,” so I was baffled for ages why my clearly correct matches weren’t counting. (See pic.) Of course, the block of tiles must be contiguous. Anyway, it’s Samegame except because you’re matching the robot’s choice you can always clear the board. Hurrah!

Cupid

Shoot birds in pairs.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Shoot a red (or blue) bird to stun it; shoot a blue (or red) bird to make a pair. Tellingly, I spent the first game matching colours and wondering why that didn’t score. PERPETUATE THE HETEROCENTRIC OPPRESSION WHY DON’T YOU. Disaster-free controls but (once again) you’re hoping for the randomly correct bird to appear against the clock.

COST: 100,000

Now you’re cooking with gas. GAS THAT COSTS 100,000 POINTS PER THERM.

Penalty Kicker

Kick penalties.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The goalie randomly saves so, y’know, just kick at the same spot each time. Phrrrrw.

Crazy Burger

Mini-Tapper.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: My rubbish screenshot underplays this acceptably frantic, super-condensed Tapper where the patrons demanding multiple drinks (burgers) burst in right from the start. Well done all round LIKE THE BURGERS OR DRINKS.

Inflation

Shoot coins to increase their value, then catch them.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap or drag.
Cue J Nash: Neato idea — as long as a coin’s descending you can tap it to bounce it back as a higher currency (to 4, at which point it flips), then catch it in your bag for the points. You can even tap or drag to move your satchel as you like (which I think is unique for the compilation). Not bad at all.

Mr Rocket

Set your jump angle to scale ledges.

Skill or Luck? Super-skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Simplified controls (you tap within a static grid of angles then jump at always the same rocket-burst velocity; no trying to match a sliding bar, phew) offset by incredibly harsh collision detection on landing which appears not to have heard of the universally accepted “can hang entire weight off ledge as long as heel or toe makes it.” This aggravated me past caring within 30 seconds and 10 goes. (Erk.)

Bridge Operator

Close auto-reopening drawbridges to preserve runaway traffic.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Stellar example of why DS shovelware doesn’t work. Look at those buttons. LOOK AT THEM. The same game intended for the iThing would have a large, friendly map of bridges and you tap the bridges to close them. Disaster complete when you realise the cars instantly die if they touch the first pixel of an open bridge.

Fireflighters

Trampoline fireblokes from one side of the road into the burning house opposite EXCEPT…

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: … you have to angle them into the correct window too. See the road? That’s as much manoeuvring room as you have. I can’t work out how to punt a firebloke into the bottom window; I’ve tried bouncing them back up and around for a bit first, plus letting them drop straight from the firehouse on to my right-hand corner, but they still whip off the screen. GOOD JOB THERE ARE OVER 99 OTHER GAMES TO TRY INSTEAD.

Claw Grabber

End of the pier thing.

Skill or Luck? Mostly luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The balls ricochet around; tap to bite anything directly beneath. Bonus points for the lower the ball when you catch it, but not enough that it isn’t better nabbing the easy high ones instead. At least you don’t have to drag the claw around. (Ha, I’ve discovered by accident that you can drag the claw around, despite my comfortably winning the game without moving.)

Lazy Workers

Bounce dropped objects to keep everything in the air as long as possible.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Beardy-weirdily, the drag on this one is exactly right — you flash straight to where you want to be and can rebounce an entire row of items dropped microseconds apart. I didn’t last long enough to work out if the items are fairly timed so it’s possible to keep going until the clock expires (rather than inevitably crashing but with a suitable score) but for this one I’d give it the benefit of the doubt.

Grasshopper

Jump a grasshopper across randomly spaced rocks by tapping a sliding power bar.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Vile.

Fighting Gravity

Fly a spaceship past gravitational fields by tapping the direction and power.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Vile, except vertical. BONUS VILENESS: the game scrolls, ie hides at least one planet off the screen. This means you’re trying to navigate blind. Also, the random solar systems mean there’s a 50%-odd chance you CAN’T WIN AT ALL.

COST: 120,000

Wow! People are scuffling now to light your cigar. BUT YOUR CIGAR HAS EXPLODED OH NO.

Log Runners

Stay on a log.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: I think the bar on the left is your balance. (The bar on the right is a grizzly bar, hobely ho de ho.) Tap to keep within the centre space. No probs with this one (provided you keep the sound on so you know your clicks are registering) except that, obv, the entire game is staring at the slim brown capsule instead of the large funny pictures.

Treasure Diver

Scan and dig.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Tap to move. Are there many green bars? Dig. You did not dig accurately. Repeat. You have found the gold. Score increases.

River Cleaning

Drag passing flowers to the top bin and passing rubbish to the bottom.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Landscape again; drag antics again; atypically you can drag anything for points instead of half of the items, so there’s that. Oh look, the scores are in portrait. So’s the status bar. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN AMBASSADOR FOR GAMES YOU KNOW LIKE TIM LANGDELL.

Hurdles

Hurdle.

Skill or Luck? Technically, skill.
Idiot controls: Incredibly, drag.
Cue J Nash: Swipe right to run faster, swipe up to jump. No feeling of speed at all (your hurdlebloke is always flailing like he’s the £3,735,326.59 Man; you only know you’re running faster when you miss a swipe and continue to flail at a dawdle) and look at that perspective. (To be fair, the diagonal marks could be deliberate stroke-inducing illusions, like pitch advertisements.) Actually, let’s return to the speed. A flawless run takes 45 seconds. You leap 10 hurdles. According to the official sporting body of chief hurdlers that makes it a 110 metre race. Currently the 110m world record is slightly under 13 seconds, but obviously we’re not going to be matching that with swiping — pffft — so let’s go back a bit. According to the official sporting etc list of records, the first recognised medal-holder ran 15 seconds, in 1908, so probably had a huge beard and a big hat and was eating a catered pie at the time. So what’s happening here? 110 metres in 45 seconds is 2.44 m/s. That’s walking. (There’s no indication you’re a woman — even the icon has you with a bushy moustache, though to be fair in the icon you’re also white — but if you were that’d be a 100 metre race so even worse.) ARREST THE GAMBLING SYNDICATES THE FIX IS IN. I like the way you can recover from a crash because your opponents also trip over the hurdles. Hic haec hoc hurdle hurdles hurdling. Well, anyway.

Tightrope Walker

Walk along a tightrope.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: As your character rocks off balance, vigorously tap the flashing globes on the ends of your big stick to shuffle back upright. Obviously you can’t see the flashing because you’re tapping, but the rhythm doesn’t seem to be important; just that you tap fast. (And to be fair the clearly lurching sprite provides valuable clues.) One of those mapped games where you progressively become more side-heavy so end up with vibratory whitefinger. This is an illustration of me not presenting interest.

Food Fight

Fling some kind of stewy gristle at flies to protect an apple. (Stewy Gristle! I thought you were dead. Etc.)

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The flies hover at two set positions. Your spoon fires at one. (The instructions say drag, but you tap instead.) Sometimes it fires at the other. I can perceive no mechanical method of reproducing the narrower trajectory. Also, that’s either a magnificent apple or you have the world’s tiniest fist.

Speeding Roach

Insect race.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: You’re commanded to “gently swipe at your cockroach’s back” to enspeed it. I’ve tried every colour of swipe to no effect. The cockroach has a minimum speed (and pulls to the left) and your score increases over distance, so I left the game to it and ate an apple (SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING).

Cowboy Paintball

Fast draw gunfighter.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Solid standard — wait for the outlaw to draw, then tap before they fire — entertainingly censored at the Nintendo end so you’re firing “paintballs” (despite the fact the outlaw fires those paintballs directly in your face NINTENDO KILLED MY SON ETC). See also Baskets above.

Pattern Riddle

Mastermind.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: It’s Mastermind. Did you know the bloke on the original cover still gets recognised for that? It is true. I expect they shout his catchphrase in the street, “Red green green hang on is it red or green if you use the same colour twice and one’s in the wrong posOH FOR RAB’S SAKE GET THE CLUEDO OUT.”

Tree Climber

Gradually scale moving platforms.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Okay idea — you’re supposed to take your slow jump into account when timing the tap — ruined by the excessive sloth; it’s seven seconds for the jump to play out if you miss both nests. Coffin nail: your character’s splayed feet don’t count on landing.

COST: 140,000

You died 37 games ago and are imagining this.

Penguin Ferry

Provide icy purchase for a leaping emperor, foxing drownings.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Analogue Game & Watch knacked by ropey collision detection. Also PENGUIN SURVIVAL INAUTHENTICITY.

Bomber Pigeon

Destroy pigeons, protect statue.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Forgettable flock-tapper brightened by imaginative presentation; your statue becomes tarnished as unsavaged avians desecrate the gold leaf. It’s a bit like that O Wilde story except with pigeons and someone’s on top of the statue killing them with a maniacally swung broom HA HA CHRISTIANS.

Missile Defence

Tiny Missile Command.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: No bases (all missiles fire from the centre); no death clouds (ie, one obstacle requires one direct hit). You’ll like it for approximately oh right you’ve stopped liking it.

Bubble Round-up

Tiny Puzzle Bobble.

Skill or Luck? Skill
Idiot controls: Drag and tap.
Cue J Nash: Really q good Puz Bob knock-off with accurate controls (slide to aim, tap to fire) and the tiny graphics providing an interestingly huge playfield. (Too big, to be honest, but it’s a change.) Except the blob rows descend every 20 seconds and start at nought, ie for the first 20 seconds you’re looking at a blank screen and wasting your shots. Pf.

Battle of the Sexes

Scroll a gate to sort bouncing icons into their respective half of the screen.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The working version of Land and Sky.

Shepherd

Flick sheep through a door.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Lifeless non-puzzle where the static sheep jerk briefly away from your taps. You’ll do it in one go, but that go’ll take ages. Might actually have come off if the sheep continued in a straight line until they hit something.

Mad Chef

Construct dinners from flung ingredients.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Simple and playable; you have to catch one sausage, one clutch of chips and a knob of broccoli per plate, and anything else makes you drop the lot. Except once again you’re at the mercy of random objects versus the clock. (A perfect round based on what you’re given still leaves you 14,000 points short of the goal.) Rare backstage glimpse: you can take any of the plates, powerfully suggesting you originally had to serve six dinners before some idiot switched to time attack. (A full dinner vanishes from the plate, so it’s not as if you can replace it on the table.)

Flowers

Tap bouncing flowers in numerical order.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Hurrah! A good one. There’s a minimum score per flower, but the faster you string your taps the better the bonus. The trick is to sacrifice one (ie, 1) while fixing the rest in your mind.

Balancing Act

Sums.

Skill or Luck? Sums.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Drag the weights to balance the scale and GET OUT.

Skateboarder

Jump obstacles.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Incredibly, drag.
Cue J Nash: Barely acceptable with tap, but you have to swipe upwards instead. Blargh.

COST: 1,200,000

If you’ve been following the list, you’ll have noticed there’s no qualitative difference between the price bands — a 120,000-point game is just as likely to be terrible as a free one. By this stage it feels to me like there’s more creative thought going into the point tables and bonus allocations than the games. This raises a couple of academically interesting questions: for example, if you were designing an unlock compilation, where would you put your best games? I’m slightly curious as to whether 101 Games is in any kind of intentional order; it’s almost certainly not chronological, but there are CERTAIN SIGNS of someone having half a think, eg the clump of water-related games.

Anyway, THIS IS THE LAST SET. I no longer know if it’s day or night.

Noisy Neighbour

Tap buttons to play your guitar.

Skill or Luck? Skill-ish.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Another squandering courtesy of the DS shovel: all you have to do is tap five randomly lit buttons to boost the bar (it’s not Simon or a rhythm game) but the tiny globes rob the fun, especially when you realise that a tap anywhere except exactly on the current flasher counts as a fail. (You need the volume up here to listen for a press-y click or miss-y buzz, because a miss resets the counter.) So, all the fun bits like the resigned bloke upstairs’ ornaments shaking free are lost as you squint and peck.

Cosmos (“999″ — Ed)

Rescue astronauts; avoid asteroids.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The last gasp of (a) the drag joypad and (b) prize vs clock. GOOD. DEAD. GET OUT.

Bomb Squad

Cut the correct wire.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Agreeably simple line-follower to match bulb to socket; the clock’s never severe enough that you have to guess.

Climber

Climb.

Skill or Luck? Resilience.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Astonishingly brutal simulation of what appears to be a physically impossible event; swipe feverishly down to make your athlete curl through agonising degrees into position, then swipe feverishly up to make them lift themselves and the pole to the next notch. As previously mentioned, wrecked by the secret swipe rules that mostly ignore you unless you rub the height of the screen. As an epilogue of idiocy, the nearer you reach the top the likelier you are to hit the pause button EVERY TIME. The equivalent of the 1500m in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon except 27% buggier if such a thing is possible.

Frankenfry

Toggle bolts for spark ingress.

Skill or Luck? Skill, probably.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Another nearly good one; you flip the polarity so red and blue sparks hit the matching bolt, but the strangely terrible spark graphics (q literally blocky pixels jerking down the screen) accidentally disguise the path taken at junctions so you can’t queue your prods. To be fair, you can just ignore everything except the last inch of cable. Extra points for accepting a tap anywhere as a reverse rather than insisting on button compliance.

Sumo

Barging.

Skill or Luck? Fatigue.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: For no reason at all, your wrestler moves in the opposite direction when you tap. (This is deliberate; it’s in the instructions.) As all you can do is push, this leads every time to the critical sidestep going wrong. Thanks.

Pest Swatting

Hit flies.

Skill or Luck? Resignation.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Your fly-swatter flaps slowly, so aim ahead of the randomly alighting blue fly. (The black flies at the top are a ruse.) Then you frantically whale on the stunned bottle as it wanders off-screen. THERE IS NOTHING HERE, NOTHING.

Monuments

Hoopla.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: Authentically emulating the funfair experience, the game’s eccentric perspective denies about 98% of clearly successful encirclings.

Volleyball

Keepy-uppy.

Skill or Luck? Skill.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: The final landscape game. With all the grace and invention of a 1973 Pong rip-off sequel, this time you have to tap the ball to alternating sides of (and without hitting) the net.

Voodoo Dance

Harass underling.

Skill or Luck? Euphoria.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Prod the doll area matching the flashed symbol. Keep a run going and your victim breaks into a stupid dance. Pretty funny in a palate-cleansing way, or I’m now thinking, “Well, this plane’s going to crash any moment now, whee hee,” I forget which.

Dressing Room

Clothe the gregarious.

Skill or Luck? Tests ability to distinguish tailoring.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: The FINAL GAME is effectively following a shopping list; there are no decoy pieces and the time limit’s generous enough that you could still win comfortably if you tried everything on everywhere (which you have to do a couple of times because of generic shoes and shirts). Rubbish, but q a sweet-natured ending; you’re helping someone escape, ESCAPE.

Thus 101 Games

So, w

COST: NOUGHT PART 2

A-haaaaaaa, yes, the recent update added another five games (and a witty icon, so the official name’s now 101 Games Plus 5). RIGHT OKAY WE MAY AS WELL.

Underwater War

Invasion Rewrite 2.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: 1. You also die if a bullet hits your shell. 2. The “weaving” aliens rush to the left or right edge then drop straight to the bottom row and cross the screen back again, randomly firing at this impossible-to-avoid range. 3. A round begins with the fish landing individually in formation, but you can’t fire until they’ve all arrived. 4. The fish squad moves laterally, like Space Invaders, but only to double the column width (ie, if you shoot away the flanks the others don’t move across proportionally further). 5. This means you end up with one fish that swings back and forth above the full width of your double-hitbox firing at an unavoidable frequency (ie, if you miss the final shot, you insta-die). 6. You have one life. 7. You have to clear two rounds to win. 8. Rearrange the following letters to make a well-known phrase or saying: GET OUT.

Super Breaker

That screen in Arkanoid where every single brick requires multiple hits.

Skill or Luck? Pursy lips.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: I hate Arkanoid and this is worse.

45 Towers

Tower defence.

Skill or Luck? No.
Idiot controls: Drag.
Cue J Nash: You can’t earn enough coins from kills to buy anything except the basic towers, which aren’t powerful enough to kill anything after about the second wave.

Rain of the Meteors

Missile Defence with different graphics.

Skill or Luck? See Missile Defence.
Idiot controls: See Missile Defence.
Cue J Nash: I liked games once.

Tomato King

Punch tomatoes.

Skill or Luck? Luck.
Idiot controls: Tap.
Cue J Nash: Can I go now? I CAN GO NOW.

Thus 101 Games

I have seldom been so persecuted by a review FOR YOU and wonder again what the Official Apple Curators do, because this DS shovelware is shockingly un-iThing-ish. It’s almost as if they said, “Ooo, that’s pretty and it loads. NEXT.”

Compilations are not a bad thing. The idea though is to compile existing, actual games in a valuable pack, not make up your own rubbish solely in order to boast the longest ruler in school.

(Except even genuine compilations are enthusiastically hammering themselves in the face — the only crime the all-new Capcom Arcade fails to commit is hijacking your phone in-game to order commemorative painted dishes.)

Perhaps it’s the very success of the hideous iTunes Shop that prevents true compilations appearing — why should the publisher bother to bundle, say, their old shooters when they’re still selling? The bills were paid long ago, after all; it costs nothing to keep even the dustiest games listed for someone to trip over and put extra cash in your pocket.

(And, in fact, you could argue persuasively that the spirit of compilations has transmuted into devs’ regular sales and freebie weekends.)

Beardy-weirdily, it looks like the first compilation I played, Gamebox 35, is nearest to the original definition. I think this somehow makes Silhouette Bloke a champion of wholesome family values and rubbish.

Traditionally I tot up here the games in the compilation I liked, but I hate 101 Games so, so much that I’ll burn those too. (There are plenty of alternatives around — Flowers, for instance, is the pretender to the majesty of Alphabetic.)

I never want to see another compilation again. They’re all wrong for the iThing, where you want to be able to keep and bin exactly the games you like. If you’re working on a compilation, say for 200 games to top the list anew and preen, abandon the project now and jump on a different bandwagon. You are completely wasting my time and I will track you by your spoor and I will murder you with a gibbous-hewn adze. Fleeing will not help you. Fleeing will not help you.

Goodnight everybody!

Judge this

Posted by J Nash on November 21st, 2010 at 10:01 am

in Reviews, iPod Touch and iPhone

» 7 comments

Podgamer Postscript J Nash adds

Have you, yes YOU, bought 101 Games? Benefit from Podgamer’s HOURS OF MISERY-FILLED WASTED EFFORT and jump the unlocking queue.

How to unlock the 101 games in at most 21 minutes

First of all, don’t bother hacking the save file in a hex editor. Even though it’s plainly unprotected and the score bytes obvious, everything I tried resulted in the game booting with the error, “Save file is corrupted and will be deleted,” meaning I had to start from scratch. WELL PLAYED, NORDCURRENT. WE SHALL MEET AGAIN.

The key to unlocking the games is finding those that reliably and, vitally importantly, quickly boost your points. (You really don’t want to be playing any game for any longer than necessary.) What you do is this:

1. Run Tornado Hockey (initially unlocked)

Place your paddle as in the screenshot (way, way above). Ach, I’ll just repeat it here. You’re at the bottom, obv.

You can inch up the table a couple of background squares, but must be kissing the centre line with your left edge.

(Ignore what the puck’s doing while you line things up. This can be a bit tricky at first, but you can soon slide directly into place.)

When the puck’s next served, it bounces off you, off the top left corner, off the moving robot and straight into the goal. (If it knocks around a bit before scoring, you’re not q aligned correctly.)

Leave the game to play itself; at 500 points a goal you’ll net about 20,000 in the 90 seconds allotted. Your first win also gathers a 16,000 bonus.

Repeat until you score 100,000 (five minutes tops).

2. Unlock Penalty Kicker (menu 4, bottom left game)

Aim all 10 balls at the far left corner (or right as you prefer). The goalie saves at random, but you beat the house advantage by playing the tightest angle because you only lose if he names that spot; if you shot generally left, you’d lose if he sprang there or hard left (because to reach the corner post he jumps across the whole half of the line).

YES I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS A LOT.

You score 4,000 per goal, plus a 95,000 bonus for your first win. (This requires 25,000 goal points, but you’d have to be unlucky not to nab those straight away.)

Repeat until you score 120,000 (another five minutes tops).

3. Unlock Treasure Diver (menu 5, last game in second row)

Success here is purely random; you’re meant to tap around until the scanner bar is full, then dig. But you can find the treasure when the bar’s about 60% and above and every move you make reduces your score by 1,000 points. (It starts at 35,000.)

So: every time you start, dig once immediately. Otherwise follow the bars and philosophically accept going in the wrong direction. Remember, the trick is fewest moves not fastest. (In fact, nothing happens when the clock runs out.)

You’ll gain an average 30,000 points per game, plus a 110,000 bonus for your first win. (You need 30,000 treasure points for the bonus.)

Play until you score 1,200,000.

I know — this is the gruelling bit. (You can still do it easily in ten minutes though.) You could of course gamble on the bonuses in other, cheaper games, but those will almost certainly involve dragging and swiping and timed things and blargh. You can play Treasure Diver with a half-attentive thumb and you never lose.

4. Unlock Dressing Room (menu 7, final game)

Win Dressing Room in under a minute; collect your 200,000 points and 10,000,000 bonus.

Congratulations. You have now broken the back of 101 Games. If you ever get stuck again, replay Dressing Room for a peasy 200,000 points each time.