Super Stick Man Golf

Super Stick Man Golf: Noodlecake Studios makes computer games.  In particular they make games for cell phones.  In even more particularness they make Super Stick Man Golf.

I came upon this game while searching through the free games section of the app store on my iPhone.  The game evidently wasn't always free, but I guess having made enough money on it the folks at Noodlecake decided to start giving it away.

Whatever the actual reason, I thank them heartily because I love this game.

No seriously, I love it.

Okay, not actually love love it, but I love it as much as you can love any collection of 1's and 0's being used to represent a small stick man whacking a tiny white circle around an increasingly bizarre set of courses.

The game itself is simple enough.  You are a stick man.  You play golf.  You try to get the ball into the hole in as few shots as possible.

There are approximately 37 or so courses in the game.  Each is nine holes.  They are supposedly grouped according to difficulty, but I suspect they are more grouped according to some other characteristic.  [1]

Like all good games there are achievements to earn.[2]  Things like getting a hole-in-one or ending a course at ten under par or better.  There are also some goofy achievements related to some of the enhancements you can unlock. [3]

The enhancements are mostly special balls.  The ice ball will freeze a water hazard and thus allow you to avoid losing two strokes to a bad shot.  The sticky ball will adhere to any surface (besides water) and allows you to take your next shot hanging from the ceiling if that's what thrills you.  The super ball flies ten times farther and is consequently on fire.  etc.  etc. You get the idea.  There are also a couple of enhancements that change the course instead of the ball.  Like the hazard swap that makes all the water traps on a hole into sand traps and vice versa.

You can put up to seven special enhancements into your "golf bag" for any course.  Thus, you have to choose wisely.  Though a perfectly good way to play is just to take seven mulligans.  They let you undo your last shot and try again.

Anyway, back to my undying love for this game.

How much do I love it you ask?  Well let me tell you how much I've played so far.

The first time through I just played all of the courses and unlocked all of the enhancements and earned all of the achievements.[4]  Some of which are not easy.  Of course, I did all of this without using any of the enhancements save the mulligan.

Having done that I played all of the courses again until I had scored a gold star on all of them. [5]  Again, I naturally did this without using any enhancement except the mulligan.

Now I'm going through course by course and determining what is the lowest score you could get using the enhancements and then I am attempting to get that score. [6]  For instance, I've gotten a -36 on the Purple Haze course.

If you are dying to know how I'm playing each course.  Don't worry, I've got a chart I'm working on that will tell you which enhancement to use for each hole and what is the best score you can achieve.  I'll publish it once I've finished.

You might think I have a problem.  It's not a problem.  It's love. [7]

Super Stick Man Golf: A+


[1] - There are a couple of pretty tough courses in the 'beginner' set and some of the 'advanced' set are downright easy.  I'm willing to bet that they are actually pretty much grouped according to when they were made.
[2] - Okay like all games lately, good or bad.
[3] - Like sinking the flaming super ball into a water hazard.  More on that later.
[4] - Except for the multi-player ones.  Our relationship is a private one.
[5] - A gold star means you scored ten under par or better.
[6] - I'm calling it a success if I get within four strokes.
[7] - A love that will never end.  Or anyway, won't end until Super Stick Man Golf 2 comes out later this year.  Color me excited.

Words With Friends

Words With Friends: WWF is just Scrabble on your phone, iPad or other electronic device.  And when I say "just Scrabble" what I mean is that it's all of the awesomeness of Scrabble but with the added bonus of being: portable; you can play multiple games at a time and you can play against people all over the world (or just against the same four people you see every day).  It is slightly different from Scrabble in that the bonus squares are arranged differently and I assume (though I haven't checked) that the letter distribution is different as well.  Also the list of two letter words is slightly expanded (or one might argue updated).  The different arrangement of bonus squares seems to increase the amount of points you earn on average, but once you realize that the scores are just going to be higher in general, that's no issue.  Perhaps the biggest issue I have with it is that there's nothing to stop you from trying out words until you hit on something good.  If you put down a bad word the game says "Sorry _______ is not an acceptable word" and then you get to try again.  No loss of turn.  No loss of points.  This means that you do tend to have games where you see pretty obscure words.  Which means either the person you're playing against is a much better wordsmith that you gave them credit for or they were just putting down letters that seemed good until they struck gold.*  Like most apps there's a free version with ads or a pay version without.  I paid $1 for the download and it was money well spent.

Words With Friends: A

* - Technically I guess there are two other options.  They could be flat out cheating.  I mean the Internet is also available on the machine they are playing on.  Or they could be really bad spellers and they got lucky.  (Paw: Hey Maw, how you spell 'faker'?  Maw: Wha's that?  Paw: Yunno, Johnboy says he's too sick to do chores an' I says, quit bein' such a faker.  Maw: It's spelt just like it sound, "F  A  K  I  R"  Paw: Yep, that's it.  I got 28 points fer that 'un".)

Draw Something

Draw Something: This is a game you can get on your cell phone and possibly other platforms.  It's basically a version of Pictionary in which you pick a word from three choices (supposedly one easy choice, one medium and one hard).  You then draw something on your phone and your teammate then attempts to guess what you've drawn.  Sounds like fun and is mildly entertaining but it has several problems.  First of all, it isn't much of  a game as far as games go.  It's too easy.  There really isn't anyone you are competing against and there don't seem to be any rules.  When you guess a word, it gives you a selection of letter tiles to choose from and it tells you how many letters are in the answer.  You can then guess as many times as you'd like with those letters.  I find that often I can guess the word before my co-player even begins drawing.  There's no penalty for guessing wrong and there's no time limit.  There is a 'hint' button that will remove some of the extra letter tiles to narrow down your choices, but I've never had to use it.  (Though I've accidentally used it several times as the button for it is right next to the letters and it's easy to mishit it.) Getting correct answers earns you coins (1 coin for an easy word, 2 for medium, 3 for hard), but there isn't much you can do with the coins.  You start out with a limited number of color choices to draw with and you can buy new colors with your coins.  However, once you've bought two of the packs of colors you now have every color you'd ever need.  So gaining further coins doesn't help or gain you anything.  Because there is nobody you are competing against, there's also nobody to keep you from cheating.  You can draw pictures, but you can also write words.  (Which would seem to be against the spirit of "drawing something" but there's nobody to stop you.) I've seen others playing rounds in which they've all but written out the word to be guessed.  To give an example (which I'm making up on the spot but is pretty accurate to what I've seen), if the word was "Santa" I've seen people write, "Chris Kringle".  The words you get to pick from are pretty decent, though often the hard word isn't hard at all and the medium words are often laughably easy.  Sometimes the hard words are people's names and unless you are really up on current pop culture you may find you don't even know who some of them are.  But no worries you can just pick one of the other two words.  If you want to play for free you can download a version with ads in between turns.  The pay version is only a dollar and gives you 400 coins for free.  Which serves the purpose of making the collection of coins pointless that much quicker.  The pay version is also supposed to give you 1000+ more words than the free version, but either that's a lie or the game's algorithm for choosing words is very poor.  I've had the same word appear in multiple games and I've even had the same words appear in the same game. Finally the game also has issues with updating.  My phone will alert me that it's my turn in a game but then when you open the game or click on the notice to that it opens the game, nothing happens.  So, you know that it's your turn, but the game won't let you take it and there is no button you can push to force it to update.  If the game sounds like something you might like, I would suggest playing the free version for as long as it takes for you to get tired of it.  Also, I would suggest you avoid writing words and actually draw something.

Draw Something: C-

Addendum: Talking today with some friends I was reminded of a thought I'd had previously.  Draw Something is like hangman with pictures.  But instead of just six wrong guesses you get 26.

Second Addendum: In Draw Something's defense, there have been several updates and the game now seems to run and update smoothly.  The general problems with game play still exist.