Elements of the legendary puzzle-game,
WHAT’S
HOT
Sokoban, are combined in Mazera with a wide variety of other puzzles,
cute RPG-style graphics and storyline, catchy music, and a screen-by-screen
structure well-suited to the pick-up-and-play-a-bit gaming patterns
of the typical Pocket PC user.
Setting up the game is as easy as
SETUP
cradling your Pocket PC and running the typical ActiveSync installer.
(A CAB file is also available from Astraware’s site if you want to
download and install it directly using only your Pocket PC.) I tried
installing the
game to both main-memory on my brand-new Dell x50v and to a storage
card on my five-year-old son’s now-venerable (hand-me-down) iPAQ 3650.
Both installations worked equally well: performance running the game
from the old iPAQ’s storage card was just as good as the main-memory
installation on my brand-new x50v.
A good game-demo is
something
like a good review: it tells you just enough about the game to let you
know whether or not you really want it, without giving away so much
that you feel like you don’t need to get it. The Mazera demo, as in
many Pocket PC games and programs, is simply the unregistered version
of the program, and Mazera’s demo is a good one: a bit short, perhaps,
but it lets you play just enough levels to get a feel for the game,
introduces you to the game’s basic storyline, and incorporates the need
for registration right into the game itself. After getting past the
first few puzzles and learning what the game is about, you run into a
locked door which you need a key – and a registration key! – to get
past… But I’m getting ahead of myself here…
An attractive splash-screen with
PROGRAM
FEATURES
theme-music introduces you to the game.
alt="Mazera splash screen" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture3.gif">
The opening splash screen
The game’s graphics
are QVGA (so a bit blocky on the larger VGA screens due to pixel-doubling),
which is fair enough, in my opinion, given the newness of VGA technology.
(Screenshots have all been taken from my Dell x50v and then resized
to QVGA.) The music, while a little repetitive, is actually quite
catchy, and, once in the game itself, changes to match the mood/style
of the location you find yourself in. I enjoyed it enough that I never
bothered to turn it off.
at the bottom brings up the game’s main menu.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Mazera main menu"
title="Mazera main menu" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture4.gif">
The main menu
straightforward enough. Play
brings up a submenu which lets you choose to resume any one of a maximum
of four savegames – or a New Game,
from any unused slot.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Mazera: Play submenu"
title="Mazera: Play submenu" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture5.gif">
The
of four savegames – or start a new one in any empty slot
Given that there is a maximum
of four savegames, the second main menu item,
Preferences allows you to turn the music and sound effects up, down, or off (nice that you can
control each one separately), select
whether you want a scrolling or an immediate transition from one screen
to the next, change the buttons that you use to control your character,
and turn on/off the ability to control your character by tapping on the
screen.
title="Preferences submenu" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture33.gif">
The Preferences
submenu
Note that
I immediately turned it on, as I’ve always loved being able to control
things by simply tapping on my screen. You can also change the buttons
you use to control your character, but, given that your character
can only move in four directions and open/select options from a menu,
I didn’t see much point in changing them – until I thought of my new
Bluetooth keyboard! As soon as I thought of this, I immediately turned
on Bluetooth, remapped the buttons to the arrow keys, and tried playing
with them – and discovered that it worked quite well, except for the
slight delay before key-repeat set in. In the end, I found it most
comfortable just to use my x50v’s directional keypad – but I appreciated
the ability to choose from a variety of input options.
Game!
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Let's start!"
title="Let's start!" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture9.gif">
Let’s start!
As we start the game,
we are
introduced to our cute litle caped character, standing trapped and
bored in a garden-like enclosure that we learn is essentially an alien
zoo…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Introductory text..."
title="Introductory text..." src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture6.gif">
alt="Introductory text, continued..."
title="Introductory text, continued..." src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture7.gif">
Introductory text sets up the storyline
for us, page by page…
When the game or
the characters have something to tell you, your standard RPG dialog
boxes pop up, and tapping on the screen or pressing the menu button
moves on to the next “page” of text or dismisses the box if the text
is finished. Pretty standard and convenient. After being introduced
to our character, Ix, and his plight, we learn that, one day, something
happens…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
alt="Introduction: One day, something happens..."
title="Introduction: One day, something happens..."
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture8.gif">
One day, something happens…
…and our story
begins. What happens, when you start looking around your little cage,
is, of course, that you discover a way out, and your grand escape
begins. Once out of your cage, the beginning portion of the game is
set up to introduce you to the basic tools, obstacles, and gameplay
concepts that you will encounter and need to use/overcome as you make
your escape.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Hey, blocks!"
title="Hey, blocks!" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture21.gif">
Hey, blocks! They could come in useful…
Here we are introduced to the Sokoban concept: pushing
blocks around is a big part of the puzzle-solving in this game. One
nice touch is that you can “flip” the blocks by pushing them against
the wall…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="A nice touch"
title="A nice touch" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture22.gif">
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="A nice touch (2)"
title="A nice touch (2)" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture23.gif">
A nice touch: the blocks are “flippable”
…which essentially
means that you can swap places with them (I’m
not sure whether this means you flip them over yourself or you flip
over them): a nice touch because this greatly reduces the possibility
that you will get yourself into a situation that you can’t get out
of. (A particularly nice touch, in my books, because getting stuck
and having to restart the level was one of the things I hate about
Sokoban!)
The puzzles in these
first few
screens are also nicely structured: they are challenging, but not too
difficult, and effectively introduce you to the blocks, buttons,
force-fields…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
alt="Push the red button, and the force-field disappears..."
title="Push the red button, and the force-field disappears..."
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture25.gif">
Push the red button,
and the force-field disappears!
…stationary laser turrets
(which are easily blocked with blocks)…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Blocking the lasers (1)"
title="Blocking the lasers (1)" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture26.gif">
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Blocking the lasers (2)"
title="Blocking the lasers (2)" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture27.gif">
Blocking the lasers with blocks…
…and other mobile nasties
that you will need to manouever around…
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
alt="Don't touch the force-fields!"
title="Don't touch the force-fields!" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture29.gif">
Don’t touch the force-fields! And watch
out when you let out the crabs!
…which include
fairly slow and stupid crabs, robotic, laser-toting Mazerans, mobile
man-eating bushes (!), and probably a number other enemies I haven’t
run into yet. You will also meet a race of cute pink blobs who are
being oppresed by the Mazerans and will help you out (mostly by opening
doors) whenever you run into them – which is exactly what you need
to do to talk to them. Here, the first nice pink blob, whom I have
just rescued, is telling Ix that he will need to find four access
spheres to convince the city’s main computer to open the door and
let him out:
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="The first pink blob"
title="The first pink blob" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/blob4sphers.gif">
The first pink blob, Fred, telling Ix
he needs to obtain four access spheres
Gameplay proceeds
screen-by-screen, with puzzle-obstacles on about 50% of the screens,
the puzzles gradually getting harder and harder. There is an arcade
element to the game as well, which consists mostly of evading the nasty
Mazerans and other aggressive creatures, oscillating force-fields,
and other such obstacles. The screen-by-screen structure of the game is
particularly well-suited to play on the Pocket PC, as it makes the game
easy to pick up and put down again, at your convenience. Your
game-state is automatically saved on exit, even if you soft-reset your
Pocket PC. And if you die, nothing worse happens to you than
re-starting the room you are working on, so the focus stays on the
intellectual challenge of the puzzle, rather than on staying alive at
all costs.
And, as Astraware’s
advertising
for Mazera implies, Mazera provides a spacious and varied world -
perhaps not as spacious and varied as Ultima VII (the blocks get a
little repetitive after a while), but I did find myself running into
enough new creatures, features (the exploding block was a nasty
surprise!), challenges, and settings to keep the explorer in me
interested in what I might find around the next corner. Given the
spaciousness of the world, it is nice that Mazera includes a
feature, available at all
times, which helps to keep track of where you are and where you need to
go next.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Map view" title="Map view"
src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/mapspherescomp.gif">
A typical map view, showing the location
of the four access spheres in white, my location in red, and a map-piece
I found of the central computer
Occasionally you will find boxes that contain map pieces,
which provides a little more detail about where you have been and
where you might want to go. The first one was a bit hard to find -
or, rather, hard to figure out how to get to, as it was there in plain
view in my cage, but tucked away inside some bushes. You have to find
the secret entrance to the tunnel that leads through the bushes to
the map-box – something which took me rather a while. (OK, OK, so
I’m pretty slow…)
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Found a map piece!"
title="Found a map piece!" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture14.gif">
I finally found a map piece!
When I finally did
find the
map-piece, the discovery was a bit underwhelming. The overall map of
your world shows the rooms where you have been in grey, with locations
that you have not visited yet in dark-grey, and your character and
other points of interest (like the access spheres) marked with flashing
dots. Not much detail, but it works, letting you know where you have
been, where you have yet to go, and where you are relative to
everything else.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Starting map"
title="Starting map" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/mapstart.gif">
This is all the map
shows you at the beginning…
Discovery of the map-pieces fills in the parts of the
world that you have visted (i.e., the light-grey areas) with a little
more colour and detail. Nice touch, but, in practice, I didn’t find
the map-pieces all that helpful – or all that realistic, for that
matter. Normally a map helps show you where you want to go and what
you will encounter
the map-pieces, the bits of the map-piece that show the areas you
have not yet visted (i.e., the dark-grey areas) remain greyed out
until you have reached (and seen) that location! Not a big problem,
but it does make the discovery of map-pieces pretty much useless,
except to show in more detail the places you have been to and explored
already…
Mazera doesn’t come with any online help
HELP
SUPPORT
or documentation that I noticed, either on the desktop or on the Pocket
PC. Not that I really felt any help was necessary: the way the game
is set up, the descriptions and discussions with the characters in-game
provide pretty much all the help that is really needed. What I did
notice, once I got stuck, was the total absence of any hints and/or
walkthroughs for the game either in the download or on Astraware’s
site. There may be some available out there on the net, but I didn’t
run across any – not that I necessarily want to follow a whole walk-through,
but it is sometimes nice in these adventure-/puzzle-style games to
have a little help available when you get stuck.
Astraware runs on pretty much any
SYSTEM
REQUIREMENTS
Pocket PC currently available. As I mentioned before, I had no problems
running it on my old iPAQ 3650 (admittedly upgraded to Pocket PC 2002),
and it also worked just fine on my brand-new Dell Axim x50v Windows
Mobile 2003SE VGA Pocket PC (with the exception of a minor taskbar
bug mentioned below), so I imagine it should work just fine on pretty
much any other Pocket PC device. The requirements listed on the Astraware
site are an “ARM or XScale based 16bit Colour Pocket PC handheld”
(though it ran fine on my old 12-bit colour iPAQ 3650) with “Pocket
PC 2002 or 2003″. It is also avaliable for the Palm
OS, if you happen to own one of those things…
Mazera
takes up about
1.5Mb of RAM when running and the program folder is about 3.4Mb in
size, so you’ll need a total of about 5Mb of storage space for the
program – though you’ll be able to get away with less RAM than that if
you install the program files to a storage card.
On the whole, Astraware seemed quite stable and a very well-designed
BUGS
AND WISHES
little game. I did run into a couple of minor bugs (details coming up),
and I do have two minor quibbles with the overall game design.
The
first quibble I have
is really a more general rant against the whole “solve this puzzle,
then this puzzle, then this puzzle…” sort of game that really is a
standard feature of the whole puzzle/RPG genre that Mazera is a part of
(so if you’re a die-hard fan of this genre and/or this approach to
gaming, you might want to skip this paragraph and go on to the next
one). If you like the challenge posed by a puzzle you just can’t get
around, this is not a problem, but if you’re like me, and like
exploring worlds just as much, if not more than puzzling, and if you
get frustated with a puzzle that’s in-your-face until you solve it,
Mazera might get a little frustrating at times.
way too much time staring at this:
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Annoying puzzle"
title="Annoying puzzle" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture1.gif">
This screen had me stumped for way
too long…
Of course, I was
kicking myself when I finally did figure it out (hint: the solution
had to do with similar patterns in neighbouring rooms), but Mazera’s
completely linear plot had me incredibly frustrated here for a while,
which actually forced me to put the game aside for a while. Had I
not enjoyed the game enough to pick it up again, keep at it, and finally
figure it out, that might have been the end of Mazera on my device…
And, admittedly, it felt really
good when I finally did solve the puzzle, but that sort of enjoyment
is, to me, a little like banging your head against a brick wall because
it feels so good when you stop!
My other quibble with
the game
is that it doesn’t let you decide, “OK, I’d like to save the game here
and keep this particular savegame so that I can come back to this point
in case I do something majorly wrong in the next section.” You can play
whatever savegame you want, but whatever you do is automatically added
to that savegame, so you can’t go back unless you start a whole new
game and play that one up to that point. This can get frustrating if
you do what I did, and open the wrong door by mistake:
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Not this way!"
title="Not this way!" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/notthisway.gif">
Do
open this
left-hand door until you know
you are ready to…
Since there are
no extra keys, and each key can only be used once in a lock and then
cannot be retrieved, when I discovered (the hard way!) that the place
to put the first access sphere is not
through this door, I was forced to go back and re-play to this position
from the beginning.
There is a
way around this, but it lies
outside the program, and you need to know a little bit about where
files are stored and how to rename them. If you go to the Mazera
installation folder (the default is Program FilesAstrawareMazera),
you can rename one of the savegame files to something like
Mazera-savegame4 (which puts it in slot 4) or even Mazera-savegame5
(which takes it off the savegame screen entirely until you give it one
of the four savegame slot names again), and thus save that position to
return to and play again later.
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
title="Savegame hack">
Hack to copy a savegame position you
want to be able to return to (like the two doors!): just rename the
savegame file…
But it seems to
me that the ordinary Mazera gamer shouldn’t have to figure out/resort
to a hack like this: saving a position that you can return to and
play from later should be a feature built into the game itself. Either
that or don’t make the game so unforgivingly linear that you have
to return to the beginning if you do something wrong!
The two bugs I
encountered were
both relatively minor… The Pocket PC’s standard taskbar, as you will
have noticed by now, is visible at all times, which is, in fact a
useful design feature, if you want to know the time or change the
volume, for example. On my x50v, however, the clock and
volume icons were unexpectedly non-functional: while the clock worked
to tell time, tapping on it did not reveal appointments or dates, nor
did tapping on the volume icon bring up the volume control – the
minimize X, however, worked fine. Not a big problem (after all, you can
change the volume using the program’s Preferencs screen) other
than it being unexpected behaviour, and this particular bug did not
show up on my son’s old iPAQ.
The other bug was also
annoying,
but minor, and, in fact, is a Pocket PC operating system bug that has
been around since the Pocket PC first came out:
if you have extra fonts stored in the WindowsFonts directory, some
programs will default to one of those fonts instead of the system
default font. It’s an unpredictable bug – the offending font, in my
case turned out to be Palatino Linotype Bold – but it initially made
the text in Mazera a good deal less legible:
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;" alt="Mazera: wrong fonts"
title="Mazera: wrong fonts" src="http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/reviews/0000000560/review/pc_capture31.gif">
The wrong-font bug in Mazera
Fortunately, the fix is as easy as removing the offending
font from your WindowsFonts folder – once you figure out which one
it is! – although that can be a bit annoying if you actually want
to use it! Just to prove that this is a Pocket PC OS problem, compare
the two screenshots below: the first is taken without any fonts in
the WindowsFonts folder, the second with Palatino Linotype Bold
installed there. (Note the change in the font used in the Turn Off
and Setting buttons.)
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
title="WLAN - right font"> 
style="width: 240px; height: 320px;"
title="WLAN - wrong font">
Left:
No fonts in WindowsFonts – Right:
Palatino Linotype Bold in WindowsFonts messing things up
Given the antiquity of the bug (dating all the way back
to Pocket PC 2000), I would expect a well-established company like
Astraware to have figured out a way to steer clear of it by now!(Although,
to be fair, it shows up rather rarely, since only a very few fonts
seem to produce this bug.) Anyhow, once I removed the extra fonts
from my WindowsFonts folder, the program worked just fine: seemed
very stable in fact, which is impressive considering how astonishingly
unstable my new Axim x50v has been! (But that’s another story…)
Much as I liked Mazera (despite my frustrations with its linear plot)
PURCHASING
and appreciate what a huge and fascinating world it gives you explore,
the game seemed to me a bit overpriced at $29.99 (available direct
from
href="http://www.astraware.com/all/default/mazera/">Astraware’s site,
href="http://www.handango.com/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?productType=2&optionId=1_2_2&jid=5B57B8653CXBEFBXCDA6A2X54A4X21FX&platformId=2&siteId=1&productId=143328§ionId=0&catalog=30&txtSearch=mazera">Handango,
or
href="http://pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=15766">PocketGear) – a
better price-point for a good Pocket PC game (in my opinion) is more
around the $20 mark. That being said, Mazera is a quality game, so
if you’re willing to pay more for quality… A locked, trial version
of the full game is directly downloadable from all of the above sites,
so if you decide you want to purchase the game after installing and
playing the game’s excellent demo, unlocking the full game is as easy
as clicking Register on the
main menu and entering your purchased registration key.
PROS
Huge world to explore!
Lots
of puzzles to
solve
pick up and play
Cute
graphics and
storyline
CONS
Linear plot can make difficult
puzzles very frustrating
No opportunity to save a particular
position to return to
Price
If
OVERALL
IMPRESSION
you’re looking for things to
blow away,
Mazera is sure to disappoint, as your cute-little-boy character can’t
do
much except talk and push blocks around, but
if you’re looking for
a (largely) non-violent adventure which will challenge your brain and,
to a more limited extent, your reflexes, Mazera is bound to please. As
an immersive science-fiction adventure puzzle, Mazera draws on the
strengths of its most popular offering, Bejeweled, and while not as
infinitely replayable as CandyTrain, it does offer a vast world to
explore and cute graphics that are not quite so saccharine-sweet. Will
it be a classic? A hit? That depends, I suppose, on how many people are
willing to shell out $30 for the experience. At any rate, it will
certainly be staying on my and my son’s Pocket PCs for some time to
come!
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