28 July 2008

The Severe Downside of Being Addicted to Sinta

Ninja Kiwi, the people who made Bloons (the latest rendition of which is Pop Three), have a new game out called Sinta. Basically you run around as a little white cat, armed with bow and arrows, in a trap-filled dungeon. It's very addicting. Unfortunately, there are some serious flaws with the game.

1. Unless you have extremely well-coordinated and dexterous left fingers (which I don't), it requires three hands to play - two on the keyboard to run and jump, and one on the mouse to shoot. It would work a lot better if shooting was also a keyboard button, such as the spacebar.

2. After you acquire your fire arrows, the game gets extremely lagged. It is impossible to get through the entire game without fire arrows - and because of the lag, it's also very difficult to get through the game with fire arrows.

3. Layout of the page it loads on is unspeakably bad. The game itself ignores scrolling, which is bad because the bottom part is cut off in every browser I have (Firefox, Safari). So, no idea how many lives I have, what my health is, how many arrows I have, how many stars I've collected, etc. Opera's true zoom function can zoom it down enough so that the entire game is within the window - but the game is unplayable in Opera because the keyboard buttons don't work the way they're supposed to.

Some of the browsers will also load advertisements over the top of the game - and although they can be scrolled out of the way, it's tricky to find a free spot where enough of the game is unblocked.

This is a problem with all of Ninja Kiwi's games. They recently did a revamp of their site's layout, and now it's a lot worse than what they had before. Also, every game has developed a slight lag that wasn't there before, and which gets increasingly bad the longer the game runs.

Even so. I like the cat, so I keep going back to play the early part of the game - before the lag sets in. I just wish I could continue on in the Wizard's Tower to find out what happens. :(

2 comments:

John the Scientist said...

"1. Unless you have extremely well-coordinated and dexterous left fingers (which I don't), it requires three hands to play - two on the keyboard to run and jump, and one on the mouse to shoot. It would work a lot better if shooting was also a keyboard button, such as the spacebar."

That means the game was designed for a laptop - when I'm not typing, my right thumb is constantly on the left mouse button and my right forefinger is on the little mini-joystick button thingy between the "g" and "h" keys. (I have an IBM).

MWT said...

No, the trouble is that you're often expected to hit two buttons at once, but not exactly at the same time. Running and jumping at the same time is two buttons that are near each other, but if you don't do them just right you fall through the hole. I find it easier to do the run button with one hand and the jump button with the other.