UK developer IOMO has hovered in the Java download chart for the last few months with its simple but extremely playable Pub titles - and now the company is extending its range. Joining best-sellers Pub Pool and Pub Darts will be Pub Pinball, Pub Fruity, Pub Football and, best of all (if only because I suggested it to the company and they went and made it), Pub Fight.
Due out over the next month, Pub Football allows players to take part in a virtual sunday morning pub league. As with previous titles in the series, the designers are keen to accurately capture the full pub atmos (Pub Darts memorably had seventies flock wallpaper behind the board), so games will take place on municipal pitches covered in litter and dog mess. We're also expecting a generous selection of crops, badly timed tackles and fat blokes having to take a rest five minutes after kick off.
Pub Pinball takes you back indoors as you compete on a traditional pinball table - covered in fag burns obviously. Pub Fruit provides a classic 'bandit' fruit machine with nudge, hold, reel spins and minigames. Then there's Pub Fight in which you must protect your bar from a series of drunken opponents ranging from goths to skinheads and crusties. I'm hoping that each class of bar fighter will have their own signature moves, and that perhaps each fight will be occasionally interrupted by girls in short skirts screaming, 'Don't Kev, it's not worth it!'.
I quite like the way that mobile games can get away with taking the mick like this, messing about with themes you could never explore in a full console or PC release. Not sure where the Pub series can go next though. There's always Pub Meal in which you attempt to fend off botchulism after consuming a dodgy chicken curry at the local Ravenous Rat(tm) family pub. Or maybe just Pub Closing Time, where you have to fight your way home through pools of puke, dropped kebab hazards and gangs of sub-human males looking to end their delightful evening of sparkling conversation by putting someone in hospital.
No wonder the Pub games are so successful - the idealised image of traditional pub life that they portray is now starkly at odds with the reality of a friday night on the town. Maybe IOMO should just release Pub, a game that allows you to sit and enjoy a pint of well kept beer in a traditional English public house, where decent music plays softly in the background, where there are no vodka-based fizzy pop drinks, or themed interiors, where you can smoke if you like without upsetting the family diners eating from a franchised, centrally-prepared menu dispatched to 300 other identical pubs in the vicinity.
Forget it, these might be games, but they have to have some basis in reality.
