Bowling

Bowling is the great social leveller. Whoever you happen to be when you walk through the door, once you exchange your shiny brogues for a pair of harlequinesque shoes from the wall behind the counter, you're the same as everybody else. There are no pretences, no hacking, snookering, or sneering one-upmanship. It's just you, a lane, ten skittles, and a ball to throw at them. Nothing could be more pure, more noble than that.

All nonsense, of course. The true appeal of bowling is that it allows men who sweat grease to call themselves 'athletes.'

There's no such incentive for us gamers, though. However many times we pump the air with our fists and encourage onlookers to applaud our achievements, we're never likely to convince the world at large that we are proper sportsmen. So, without this glint of athletic credibility, is there any point in playing a bowling game on a mobile phone?

Potentially, yes. Mobile gaming lends itself to simplicity, and few activities are simpler than bowling. There's very little to clutter the small screen, no necessity to use several buttons, and the playing time for a frame is typically no longer than five minutes. A well-executed bowling game could be just the thing to fill the cracks of your day.

However, Bowling is unlikely to be that game. Not because it's entirely devoid of appeal, but because it's so patchy and occasionally ill-conceived that you almost believe it wants you to dislike it.

For one thing, if you happen to own an N70, you'll need to play under a bright light because after a few seconds your screen's backlight blinks out. For another, the game occasionally decides to roll the ball for you before you've had a chance to decide the angle, making the afflicted shots go horribly awry and ruining your already volatile mood.

You could argue, at this point, that Bowling is simply 'broken'. However, we suspect these problems are not likely to occur on all handsets, and as such we'll put them aside for a moment in order to examine the gameplay.

The object, of course, is to knock down ten skittles with a ball. If you do it in your first roll, you've got yourself a strike. If you do it in your second, that's a spare. If you get a strike, the score for your next two rolls will be added to the ten you've just got in that round. If you get a spare, the score for the first of the two rolls in the next round will be added, but not the second. That's how bowling is scored.

When you start a frame of Bowling, you are presented with a ball that travels from side to side at the head of the lane. You press the action button once to stop its lateral movement, again to determine the power, and a third time to determine the angle of approach and release the ball.

Frustratingly, this mechanic doesn't allow you to impart spin, but since that remains a fairly tall order within the constraints of the platform we won't be overly critical. Less forgivable, however, is the fact that you can only angle the ball to the left, not the right. The resulting limitations are obvious: inevitably, there are occasions when you should be able to knock down a skittle and you simply can't.

Visually, the game is a curious blend of photorealism and scribble. While the lane looks more or less like a real lane, the skittles are white blurs. As the ball rolls from side to side at the top of the lane its graphic simply inverts repeatedly to indicate motion, and when it hits the skittles they waddle away like frightened geese.

Even taking into consideration the bizarre inability to bowl diagonally in both directions, Bowling would have had just enough to offer the average undiscriminating casual player had the production been sound. After all, it's simple, quick, boasts a pass-and-play mode for two, and isn't entirely ugly.

However, the game's significantly more serious 'quirks' slide it from the lane of mediocrity into the gutter of pointlessness. Avoid it until you hear of a fixed version.