Pathway to Recharge

I love Pathway to Glory. It became my primary game and took up all of my taco time for a month or two. I made excuses to play it. I told myself that I would get back to doing something productive after I restarted this level one more, okay two more times. It’s worth every penny of $34.99

After a lot of dedicated play (and a couple of really tough levels) I beat the game. I actually beat it twice, because the first time I lost two of my maxed out snipers in the process of winning. I couldn’t bare being without them so it took another few days of downtime play to beat the game to my satisfaction.

My snipers were good. I would commonly play 2 of them even when the game urged me not to. After awhile my two best guys could quite literally be counted on for 4 confirmed kills a piece per turn. They could hit just about anything on the map within their range using 6 time units per kill. They were monsters.

After I beat the game the only interesting thing to do is hop online for some N-Gage Arena play. Our apartment is a dead zone, so no Arena there. I tend to be too busy at work and usually spend part of my lunch break catching up on my feeds, so no Arena there either. Once it warms up a bit I can probably play outside before class, but right now I spend time before class inside. Of course the buildings are virtual faraday cages, so I’m lucky to get FM reception for Marketplace let alone enough signal for GPRS.

At this point keeping the Pathway to Glory MMC in my phone just doesn’t make sense (I’m back to picking up tapes and sucking less at Tony Hawk). There’s a better reason besides boredom: Pathway kills my battery life!

I’m a casual N-Gage gamer. I usually have a game paused in the background, sometimes for days at a time. When I’ve got a few minutes to spare, I Alt-Tab as it were by holding down the little swirly key and selecting my game. This usually happens a few times a day when I’ve got downtime. Every other game that I’ve played has been fine with this. As long as the game is in the background I can get the usual couple of days out of a full charge.

Pathway just doesn’t behave the same. At first I wasn’t sure that it was Pathway, but I noticed that the taco was powering off completely at odd times. Maybe it would be first thing in the morning after the charge. Other times it would be later the same day. I thought that maybe my battery was going bad, but as soon as I stopped idling Pathway in the background I popped back up to my usual coupe of days of use per charge.

Has anyone else experienced this? This behaviour doesn’t make me love Pathway any less, it just makes me less likely to keep it in my taco running in the background. I’m more likely to have another game running in the background rather than waiting for Pathway to start up, start/resume a game, choose my guys and loadout and then start playing. A lot of the time my casual gaming time would be up before I had a chance to make a move. I’m hoping to have some more downtime while I have GPRS coverage, as playing Pathway on N-Gage Arena is total killer. I’ve only done it a few times but it’s lots of fun to play against a real human on your mobile phone.