While I was on vacation, I only played iPad games; I’ll write a post about each of them, but they were mostly short, so I don’t always have a lot to say.

Hundreds is a good example. (Though actually I really played it during GDC.) It’s a puzzle game; I’d heard good things about it when it came out, but it didn’t work for me. The game’s core mechanism just didn’t grab me: you wait until circles aren’t near other circles, then you touch them so they grow, and you stop when other circles get closer. You can try to arrange things so that you’re likely to have more time to grow the circles; but you don’t have much direct control, so you spend a fair amount of time waiting. Which leads to frustration, which leads to pushing boundaries, which leads to messing up and having to start the level over.

The game adds mechanisms as you go along, but they didn’t make the game feel richer; and, in fact, sometimes they made the game more annoying, because some of the mechanisms create active setbacks. And then there are these unrelated word puzzles to unlock; I did the first few, but when I hit a roadblock I didn’t feel like figuring more out.

I guess I went through a third of the puzzles? Certainly not half of them. It wasn’t as actively unpleasant as I may be making it seem here, but I’m definitely glad I stopped when I did, and the basic mechanism never clicked.

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