Perhaps it’s a stereotype, perhaps it’s a fact. Regardless of how you look at it, some of use like cute things. Cute things have the ability to bring us a big smile on our faces and it also is suitable for people of all ages. Whether it is a cute little gecko or a cute tiger, cute always brings a positive feeling to us.
Cute Avatar
The developer behind BatchUninstaller and AutoSisInstaller surprises us with his Cute Avatar. This application displays an avatar that walks around on your Symbian-powered handset to keep you entertained. Almost like a digital version of the fishbowl you can choose a variety of avatars. These are gecko, tiger, monkey, rhinoceros, fortuna, butterfly, dog and xmas. On startup you are taken right to the settings that allows you to do the following. Switch the application on or off, set if the avatar is displayed only on the homescreen or throughout the entire menu, refresh frequency of the avatar ranging from 1/5 to 5 seconds, the size of the avatar ranging from 50 to 200 pixels and finally the type of avatar to display.
Once set up, your avatar of choice will be displayed running around aimlessly doing their own things just to entertain you. It’s not the most useful application but does brings out the cuteness and keeps you company should you get bored. The application can be bought from the OVI store and supported handsets are those equipped with S60 5th or Symbian^1. The installation file is around 2 Mb whereas 3 Mb is required for the application to install. Further installing the application to the memory card works just fine.
Next up on the cute list is BlockGo from Frienzplay. This is a puzzle game with nice big buttons and simple gameplay. The objective here is to move the red block with the constantly changing mood from the left to the exit on the right. To be able to do that you have to move the blocks that stands in his way. The blocks can only be moved accordingly to their position meaning that you can’t move a vertical block horizontally and vice versa. Once you’ve completed a level you can play it again by choosing the select level in the main menu. What’s neat here is that you don’t have to play the different levels sequentially and can pop in to play a level anytime you want. In total the game have 99 levels, enough to keep you brain occupied. Once you’ve completed a particular level you are shown the solution for this level, something that can be helpful should you strive to achieve gold medal in each level. There is no multiplayer mode in this game so it’s a one man show, neither are there any way to upload your highscore for the world to see. The game can be bought from the OVI Store whereas there is a ‘lite’ version should you want to try before buying.
Onion Tasty Dream
The same folks also have made onions look cute. Originating from ‘smileys’ I believe Onion is an avatar that have the classic big head and big shiny eyes commonly seen in anime from Asia.The main screen consist of four options, starting a new game, see rankings, help and exiting the game. Here again you get acquainted with nice big buttons that is essentially hard to miss. Help brings up a transparent black screen with the help text written in white, very readable. Rankings opens up your built in webbrowser taking you online to see the global rankings.
The game is easily controlled by using the accelerometer on your Symbian-powered handset and you control onion by tilting the handset left or right while holding it in portrait mode. The game unfortunately doesn’t support landscape mode, something that is a bit understandable since it would be difficult to get the overview of the game.
In Onion Tasty Dreams you guide ‘Onion’ to get delicous food. From a ramp, you just tilt your handset to the left or right and ‘Onion’ will jump off the ramp to catch the food, gaining you a higher score. Cakes, burgers or chicken is his favorite and by eating these things the vertical bar will increase. This bar also functions as the timer in this game. Should you however eat mushrooms this bar goes down and it will all be game over. When the game ends you can choose to play again or submit your score. The built in webbrowser will launch and your score will be submitted. The game made by Frienzplay is available for free on OVI Store
Onion Trickshow
Another game featuring the same character is Onion Trickshow. In this game you balance a stick for as long as you can. Again this is done by utilizing the built in accelerometer on your Symbian-powered handset. Like Onion Tasty Dreams this game also neither supports landscape mode or multiplayer. The music in this game is also very simple and plays for a couple of minutes before going into a loop. The music is not very irritating, however you will get bored of the music should you play the game for extended periods of time. When I first saw Onion I thought it was a cat. Anyway, the game is available for free from the OVI Store.
Miluegg Jump
The cuteness doesn’t stop with just onions. When Frienzplay made this game they must have seen ‘The Egg Song’ and thought that making a game featuring an egg as the main character was a great idea. Following the same gameplay concept as with onions, Miluegg is controlled by tilting the phone left or right. Along the way you can find powerups such as cakes and donuts that will enhance your score and jumping on what they call a ‘jet pudding’ that will send egg flying quickly upwards. Some challenges occur in this game taking the form of platforms that will break apart and obstacles on the platforms such as dogs. A neat detail here is the background that despite being static goes in loop giving the game an extra touch of dynamic. Also free from the OVI Store.
Miluegg Paratrooper
Last but least is another game featuring Miluegg, this time it’s not jumping that matters but how good you can control your parachute. Along the way are aliens and flying saucers that will crash into you should you be carelesss. By collecting feathers you gain better air time and higher scores. This game unlike the other abovementioned games offers a mulitplayermode in terms of playing against each other via bluetooth. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test this but this could prove to be very fun. There is a minor bug in this game and that is the counter for the score. Once you pass 9999 it counts down to 0 again. This doesn’t affect the gameplay as such but was rather confusing at first. What really surprised me is that you can use the volume buttons on your handset to control the volume in the game, this is rather uncommon for games written in java. With the exception of BlockGO all the other games from Frienzplay are in java. As you can see my score was successfully uploaded and I went straight to third place. Available for free on OVI Store do you think you can beat my score?
For more information and screenshots of the Frienzplay games you can head over to their official website. For applications from Thinkchange go to Thinkchange.cn, where you can find more useful and fun applications. Which of the applications did you like best and why?
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