Air Soccer is a Metro style app for Windows 8 and it is exactly what it sounds like – a simulation of the air hockey arcade table game. However, instead of one disc to hit the puck with (ball in this case), each side has 3 discs. This game is clearly meant for tablets, even though it can be played with a keyboard and mouse (mostly the mouse actually). So if you are planning to try it out, you must keep this in mind. Now let’s get started right from the top.
There are multiple things to pick and choose from before you start the game. On the top you will find options for choosing your team. Almost every playing country is represented in the app, which is nice, and they are divided geographically by their continent. So if you want to choose France, you will have to click through Europe and scroll through to find France. Once you have clicked through to the continent, you will be presented with a group of country flag icons for that continent. You can easily switch to other continents from here by scrolling/swiping sideways just like on your Start Screen.
Then you have your field selection. You can choose from green, grassy fields to abstract, galactic fields. Right below you get to select your ball. You have options from several different types of balls and they are all very nicely designed. You can choose to play against the computer or you can pick a two player game where you and a buddy can play together.
There’s also a tournament option at the bottom of the screen but when clicked it comes up with the following message:
“Tournaments, Leaderboards and Multiplayer are not available yet. Stay tuned for updates”.
This basically means they are still working on the app and will probably finalize it after Windows 8 is officially launched.
To start the game, click either ‘1 player’ or ‘2 player’ according to what you want. If you are playing against the computer and have chosen ‘1 player’ — you will have to choose an opponent as well. This will lead you through the same process that you went through for selecting your own team. It bears mentioning here that selecting different teams doesn’t really make all that much of a difference right now.
As you start the game, you will realize that scoring a goal is much harder that it seems. You have no control over how the six discs bounce around and you cannot reposition any of them at any time. This is a turn by turn game, so you cannot make real time decisions. If you have ever played ‘Carrom’, this will seem familiar.
Pros:
One detail I like about the game is the background sound effect. For each team you choose, you will hear chants taken from stadium full of supporters for that team. The most obvious is when you choose ‘USA’, you can actually hear the crowd going ‘USA! USA!’ and also singing along to ‘na na na na, hey hey hey, Goodbye”! Other nice touches include real football rules that will get you yellow cards (and may be even red but that didn’t happen to us) and whistles down.
Cons:
The Artwork of individual discs is good and sharp, but the fields don’t really match up. May be the developer should work on backgrounds a bit more and make them match the foreground game pieces.
for the sake of upselling.
The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 has been great. It has given us all a chance to get to know the operating system a little better. While this has resulted in the expected crop of doomsday predictions for Microsoft among people unhappy with the Metro interface and its emphasis on touch-based interface, it has also seemed to create an even greater increase in the number of people coming to accept the new OS as an improvement.
It is hard to imagine anybody developing tablet apps for a living who has not managed to get their hands on an iPad yet. Let’s face it, that’s the only way to tap into the market at this point given that developers are reported to make almost five times as much on their iPad offerings compared to Android equivalents. It was only a matter of time before somebody took advantage of this fact, and Splashtop is doing exactly that. It is now possible to run Windows 8 right on your iPad, albeit through remote desktop streaming.
