kroniq reviews

Extreme Indoor Karts

A friend of mine organised for a group of us to go karting the other weekend. He rang around a few places and tried to hustle a good plan to get us on the track for longer than any of their advertised rates. After negotiating with them all we decided upon going to Extreme Indoor Karts in East Tamaki. None of us had been there before.

We arrived at the track and were told that the guy we had negotiated a price with had gone home and so the offer originally agreed on was not going to be honered. We managed to get an extra 10 minutes track time for free but this wasn’t as good as we had originally planned for.

Not spending as much time on the track probably worked out for the best. The karts were in very poor condition. During my time there I swapped in and aout of no less than 5 karts. The first one had very stiff stearing, not allowing you to turn easily to the right. The kart after that was good… untill the break cable snapped! The following kart was an older generation and had a full steal frame which made it much slower than everyone else on the track. Each new kart presented another new problem, and before I knew it I was back at the first one. I think we calculated that they probably had 2 good karts.

Putting the actual karts aside and looking at the track it was well laid out. It had plenty of good passing opportunites. It included split option to either go quicker on the outside or cut inside with an extra turn, both ways had a similar time but it was nice to be able to out-manouver a slower driver. It also had a small upper level section of track with added a little bit of extra interest.

Overall the experience was let down by the lack of quality karts. The guys there were flat out trying to keep them up and running but were fighting a losing battle. I probably wouldn’t go back there again as there are lots of other options available in Auckland.

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Fruit Ninja

I find myself downloading and playing lots of games on my iPhone. I spend more time playing games on an iPhone than a computer, games console or even the old fashion take it out of a box and discover the dice are missing type of game. However with all this time spent playing, only the good games will hold me for any length of time and keep me coming back for more. Fruit Ninja by Halfbrick Studios almost had me.

We will start with the big one, gameplay. It’s a simple concept that anybody can understand, fruit gets thrown up into the air and you have to swipe it in half. They make it tricky by adding in a few bombs which kill you straight away, otherwise you are allowed to miss three pieces of fruit. That’s it – if you wanted more, you won’t find here. This makes for a quick game to play when you don’t have too much time. You might find yourself playing a couple of games but will tire after a few goes.

Replay value is also limited. Your primary objective is to beat your high score. There is a global leader board system using the OpenFeint platform, but nothing else. OK, there might be a few unlock-able achievements but don’t expect to be overwhelmed.

Quality-wise this game does have a bit of polish. The sounds are awesome – almost the best reason to buy the game. Both the effects and subtle background noise are enticing. Visually the game is good too. The fruit, splashes and swipes all look fine and not much improving can be done here.

The cost of the game is where you want it. At $1.29 you can justify the spend. It’s not worth much more because of the simplicity of the app and lack of replay value, but the developers definitely deserve something for putting together a fun polished application.

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