PAIR LOGIC

Main review

When I was a wee tacker, we would play various stupid games at school. None of these was even remotely as fun as Pitstop II or Impossible Mission but try as I might I could never convince my teachers of this fact. Anyway, one of the games that was more or less forced onto me was called Memory, which I hated, mainly because I kept losing. Thankfully though, I’m older now and more willing to play it since someone’s nicely put it in on a computer and called it Pair Logic.

I’m sure you know the drill, a few cards are placed face down on the playing area. You get to pick two cards and turn them over and if they match they stay turned over, if not they go back to being face down. Keep going until either your time runs out or you’ve revealed all of the cards. The clever ones among you will have noticed that there are in fact 35 cards in the screenshot, one of these is a Joker which will reveal the pair to the other card you have chosen. If you haven’t played a game like this at all, well you’re either a compulsive liar or extremely unlucky. Fortunately for you, this is a rather nice adaptation, so go ahead and play it, and then come back and read in wonder.

Right then children, now that everyone has played something like this game, what has Pair Logic got to offer? Well, for starters it’s got one of the nicest designed pictures on the cards of any version I’ve played. None of the pictures are too similar in appearance, so remembering where things are is a bit fairer on your poor brain. It is a game of memory and you do some stupid things trying to remember where everything is, in my case I made sentences out of the pictures as they appeared and there is something to be said for any game that can make me splurt out amusing phrases such as “MSX Joystick”, “PG Female”, “Up and down Note” and “Male Heart”, because most games only ever make me say very rude words indeed!

I really wish I could stop writing just there, because really I’d love to say that the whole package is wonderful but it’s got a few things wrong here and there. The controls are badly broken and very jerky, often the sound will bleep to herald your movement to a new card and nothing will happen and the rest of the time it feels like wrestling with the computer. The time limit is set far too high to be of threat and doesn’t get any lower as you complete more and more boards, plus the score seems to have been added as an afterthought, you don’t get bonus for finishing with more time or in less moves and there’s a virtually unbeatable default high-score.

It’s strange that, with so much love applied to the pictures, everything else seems a bit rushed and I truly hope that the author takes the time to fix these little problems, because it’s a lovely bit of fun if you can pretend the issues aren’t there and if you’re after a bit of relaxation and memory training, give it a go.

Second opinion

Ever had those days after a heavy night out and you can remember what happened? Well, this is what Pair Logic reminds me of, my memory is blanked and I gotta fill in the gaps. Actually to test my memory I skulled several beers before playing!

Pairs is a logic game that has been around for probably centuries and is so easy to pick up and play so it is great to kill a few spare minutes with. The game is simple, pick two tiles and see what is under them, the tiles will only show themselves for a few seconds so you’ve got to remember them fast before the disappear again. The object? Find matching tiles, reveal these and they stay revealed making the playing grid smaller and easier to find the other tiles. Easy, you say? Well, yes, it does start off easy but with a grid of 35 and a clock that counts down to game over it can get a bit furious, especially in the later levels where, although you get the same amount of time, the clock counts down faster and faster.

Graphically, sonically and presentation-wise, everything is little more than functional. Actually the sound is very weak and although the graphics aren’t up to much the tiles themselves are thankfully clear, something which could have caused a problem in this type of game.

The main gripe is that it plays a little sluggish, the tiles after appearing stay on the screen a bit too long and the movement of the “cursor” is very slow, which can be annoying in the later levels when the clock gets faster. As I said though, it’s a great game to while a way a few minutes, but nothing more.