Pong and Beyond

501st played so far

Genre: Puzzle/Strategy
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: RedLynx
Publisher: Nokia

Now here’s a catch. I’ve mentioned before that Reset Generation is the impossible game for any sane person. Available as online and N-Gage game only, the online version was pulled within a year of us starting the blog, while the N-Gage has always been dead, its second generation included in phones that might have sold okay at the time, but never made for a compelling platform. Even then, the N-Gage store is not functional anymore either

It took a while, then, to set up our way of dealing with it. That sounds more complex than it is – I bought a properly N-Gage 2 compatible phone, and managed to load the game on with some technical trickery. Perhaps not the proper way, but at the same time there’s no real other solution at the moment. So here we go then, at long last, and as our halfway treat – Reset Generation!

Our Thoughts

One of the risks of a game like this is that you start building it up in your mind. We’ve focused a bit more on how Reset Generation plays than many other games, simply because we didn’t know whether we ever would, and Youtube would have provided with an alternative. Even without that, however, Reset Generation, as a puzzle/strategy game, is the sort of thing we like.

Add to that the setting, characters or whatever you want to describe it, and it gains a dimension. For a video game aficionado, a game using and parodying its characters is a bit of a treat on its own, although I can’t say it always worked for me.

Your objective is to catch another hero’s princess while protecting your own, using items and your own powers to move around the board and stealing parts to speed up your travel and slowing down others.

It’s a fun concept with a lot of promise – a lot of elements are available to increase strategy, between heroes, items and puzzling. The only downside is that the difficulty was a bit too high for me, relying on some randomness but also, it felt, a strategy the developer wants you to take (especially in earlier training levels) that aren’t always clear. There were some levels that I bashed my heads against a bit much. Even so, the main annoyance from that was that I couldn’t play more, not that it was so difficult (oh, and some conversations repeating slightly too often, making it hard to just jump back in).

Final Thoughts

Was this game worth the wait? Yeah, it was. It wasn’t excellent, still seeming a bit flawed, but something that was nice to get into. I’ll keep the phone around to play more often anyway, even if we can’t play it multiplayer anymore.