Two old classic games have been released on iOS this week; Dizzy: Prince of the Yokfolk from Codemasters and Theme Park from Electronic Arts. The Dizzy games were 8-bit platformers, I collected the whole series on cassette to play on my Amstrad CPC. Theme Park was a game I originally played on my Amiga 1200 and loved so much I bought it for Windows when I switched over.
It’s great to see classic games ported over to iOS – and now I have an iPad, I’m pleased both come in iPhone and iPad flavours. Unfortunately they’re not universal, meaning you have to download two versions if you want them on both devices. Sadly only one of the games has made the successful leap to iOS, and the other feels like a massive failure.
D:POTY is a paid-for game, costing £1.49 for the iPhone or £2.49 for the iPad. It feels the most like a straight port, in that the level layout, controls and storyline feel identical to the original (or at least as far as my memory allows me to compare). There are some very minor changes – instead of picking up a radio, there’s an iPod, but as far as I can tell, that’s it. It’s a lot of fun, very playable – still utterly frustrating trying to jump and missing platforms – and you’d have no worries about sitting a kid down with this for hours and letting them work their way through Dizzy’s world.
Theme Park is a different story. They’ve rewritten the whole thing from the very basics up. No longer can you arrange your paths and queues to optimise them – you have pre-defined spaces in either small, medium or large. In these you can put shops or rides. By tapping on them, you can increase their entertainment factor – for example, you can tap on the bouncy castle to give the people on it more enjoyment and then make more money out of them. You can spin a ferris wheel and cash pops out of it more quickly. The more you entertain your guests, the more flags you collect, and once you hit set number you move up a level, gaining access to more rides and shops.
Sadly, the game pretty much demands you spend money on in-game purchases to actually build any of these. You need to trade Super Tickets to build most of them, and you only get these very rarely – however, there’s a big ‘buy more’ button visible at all times on your screen right next to your Super Tickets counter. Santa’s Sleigh Coaster costs 100 Super Tickets, for which you’d need to buy a set of 300 at £13.99. The most expensive in-game purchases are a set of 1,6000 Super Tickets at £69.99 – that’s more than the cost of a day out at a real theme park!
There is nothing engaging about the game as it is, you can’t just pick it up and play and build up a massive park like you could previously, the only options you have are to tap on bins to empty them, tap on shops to restock them, tap on rides to speed them up and increase the enjoyment of your patrons and, for some reason, tapping on rides after a set counter has run out to collect the money they’ve made. I don’t even know why you need to do this – do they stop accepting new guests on them if you’ve not taken the money? There is no explanation during the tutorial at all about the reasons for doing what it tells you to do. How does speeding up a maze or tree house make any sense?
I’m really sad that this is how the game has turned out. Why not charge us a couple of quid to buy a game in which we can do what we want, play it the old fashioned way and have the option of spending a few pound to speed things up a little?
If you’re looking for a retro gaming experience on iOS this weekend, you definitely want to attempt to become Prince of the Yolkfolk.
Filed under: Personal
