Toki Tori « Super Amazing Number One

4Jun/090

Toki Tori

Toki Tori Title Screen

Let's talk iPhone games. The iPhone has come in to it's own as a gaming platform. Having no buttons though, game designers have to rely on multi-touch and inertial controls.

Toki Tori is a port of what was originally a GameBoy Color cartridge. The controls have been simply matched to touching on the screen to tell the chicken where to go and it's extremely well implemented. The special abilities that your little chicken gets per level reside in a simple side palette and then you can touch on the screen to activate them. Toki Tori is an example of a game originally not intended for the iPhone that has made the transition very smoothly.

Then again, it's perhaps an example of a game that was originally clumsy on the GameBoy Color and would have been more comfortable with mouse controls. Games like Lemmings comes to mind that fit that bill. Lemmings is quite easy to play with a mouse and made pretty clumsy with a directional pad control setup.

Back to task though, the colors are vibrant and the animation smooth. The music is very bright and the sound effects nice. I've only played a little through the first set of levels and the difficulty is ramping up.

In the game, you're given what amounts to a platformer style sideview board. You can tap somewhere on the screen and your chicken pathfinds his way to the spot. He can fall down and climb up ladders and small steps. The idea is to get all the eggs on any given map by walking in to them. It's definitely possible to get stuck and have to retry the board. To aid you on some levels are limited quantities of special equipment or abilities. So far I've encountered the ability to build a little platform and a teleporter.

It ends up being a fun order of operations puzzler.