In a bid to reach the massive, casual side of the mobile gaming audience--mostly characterized as moms and dads who don't care much about video games--Centerscore has created its own original franchise and mascot, based on an imaginary teenaged doodler named Amy. The first game starring Centerscore's new heroine, Amy's Hangman, is an exemplar of mobile games design. This version of the simple word game is plain vanilla when it comes to gameplay, but it contains enough thoughtful interface touches and downloadable content to keep you coming back for a long while.
Amy's Hangman is built to resemble one of your notebooks from high school lab science, complete with ruled notepaper and shaded-in pictures. As you play hangman and miss letters, an animated pencil comes in and draws in the unfortunate stick figure, just as you would in a real-life game. If you guess the correct phrase, name, or word before your avatar gets his neck stretched--it takes six wrong guesses to lose--you'll even get a little smiley face on your page. You select the 26 letters of the alphabet with an easy-to-maneuver cursor, and they disappear from the screen after you choose them. Each of your letter choices elicits a sound effect based upon its success, which is just the right amount of feedback for this type of game. The game also supplies you with a little icon to tell you which genre your phrase falls into (for instance, if you're guessing in the food genre, you'll get a knife and fork on your page), as well as the type of item, like "dessert" or "actor." If you get stuck, you can give up a couple of body parts for a hint, but you have to be careful to leave yourself with enough chances to win.
Amy's integrated content download system works like a charm. All you need to do to download a new question pack is access the "pack" menu from the item screen. The LG VX6000 can hold up to four packs at a time, and each pack seems to have enough phrases to last you several hours of play. Finally, the game keeps track of your play statistics, including your win/loss percentage and all-time and current streaks. You're also assigned a rank based on your aptitude. The more you play, the more elaborate the opening drawing of Amy gets, which is a very intuitive way of showing off your hangman skills.
In all, Amy's Hangman categorically disproves the notion that all casual mobile games are lazy, boring hatchet jobs. If you are at all interested in playing a word game on your phone, you should download this game.
