Colours of Magic: Aqua Teeter

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

[quote]Warning: Broken Game![/quote]This game has design/implementation defects that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game crashes immediately when you try to launch it. The developers are aware of this defect and choose not to fix the problem.

"Colours of Magic: Aqua Teeter" is a broken mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. The mobile app is just a simple physics puzzle game where you tilt your iPhone around to make fluid flow around a little board and collect. You can mix different colours to produce what is required to solve each puzzle level (on iPhone, as mentioned you can't do this on PC because the game is broken, but the developer still wants your money).

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the mobile app is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Colours of Magic: Aqua Teeter" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the tutorial, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this before it became unplayable. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time (when the peak occurred, the game is unplayable now). How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the mobile app? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Unethically, the developers have left this on the Steam store in an unplayable and broken state. This is harmful to Steam and to gamers, because it takes a share of the marketing space and visibility away from other games. It's polluting Steam and making it harder for gamers to find genuine games and for genuine indie developers who put months or years into making proper games find an audience.

The developer is deliberately and unethically trying to scam gamers into paying them the pathetically optimistic price of $1 USD for a mobile app they know is broken. Don't give it to them.

A great puzzle game that I spent a good couple of hours on. It's worth the price.

Recommended for game farming

Good to kill some time. It can be very hard in the end.

this game is fun.

A great puzzle game that I spent a good couple of hours on. It's worth the price.

Glitches and Lack of Physics

Pros:

Cons:

Fairly simple game that becomes frustrating on harder levels. Mechanic just isn't that fun to persist with.

Simplistic, yet Fluid. This game is quite challenging at times, though it is not that challenging. It took me roughly 2 hours to beat this game with ALL levels having three stars. I WOULD SUGGEST YOU give it a try. You will love it.

Super fun game. Some of the puzzles were challenging but overall it was straight forward and a fun way to divert focus from what was going on around me. Has quite a lot of levels

First impression: tilting labyrinth game

This game is a descendant of the wooden labyrinth where you have to guide a ball through by tilting the surface. Except that in this case, the ball is water, you can split it up into separate drops or combine them, and you must color them correctly before guiding them to their targets. It probably plays better with an analog stick than with the keyboard.

The game didn't motivate me enough to learn the skills required to master it. I believe it lacks feedback, both sound effects and scoring: there is no indicator in the level of the dealines for the score levels or for the sizes of color blobs required to complete it.

The game runs well on my old Windows XP computer.

Pro's:

- Fun
- Nice graphics
- Tutorial free, easy to pick up

Con's:
- Easy to 100% within 1 hour.

The good parts: Interesting and clever puzzle mechanics. Charming artwork (if you like the style, which I do).

Neither good nor bad: Using WASD/arrow keys to "tilt" a board to move droplets around goes from "simple fun" to "amazingly difficult" very quickly. If you like challenging physics-based puzzles, that part's great. If you like games with lots of easy puzzles so you can enjoy the sense of progress, you're not likely to enjoy this.

Tip: After the first few levels - GO SLOW. Tiny little taps move the droplets around; too many too fast will shatter them against walls or objects and you'll never get them to move where you need them. (There's a "reset level" button; you can keep trying. But it's going to be frustrating for many players. Action-reflex players will be frustrated at how slow it is; kids--the apparent target demographic--will be frustrated because it's unforgiving of mistakes.)

The bad parts: I can't get it to run windowed; I've tried several methods. (Lack of ability to run windowed really is what convinced me not to bother playing even when I was in the mood for it.) As others have mentioned, it seems incomplete. There's no story at all, no explanation of why you're doing this "alchemy" for the wizard. No sound at all. (Someone else said there's a single music track; apparently it doesn't play on my system.) After a few puzzles to get used to the setting, there's a strong sense of "why bother?"... the best thing about it is that ctrl+esc lets it sit in my taskbar and collect cards.

"No story" is fine for some physics puzzles... but this one sure looks like it was intended to have some context.

Conclusion: I paid 49 cents for this on sale, and don't feel I was cheated - but even at that price, I wouldn't recommend it unless the buyer loved physics-based puzzles AND had time to burn on a slow-paced game AND didn't care that it's just an endless set of tasks with no rewards attached AND doesn't mind the game being full-screen.

This game is fun for a casual game. It can get a bit difficult to separate the water without mixing the colors. Overall it is fun in small doses.

A nice little game! It's relaxing and challenging at the same time, and I really started having to think about the solution by level 12 or so. It goes quickly and is easy enough to figure out as far as gameplay is concerned.

I had to go into the launch parameters and add "FluidsW7.exe 1920 1080 false" to have it open in windowed mode, which was more work than I'm used to. But hey, it worked! Now if only the sound would turn back on...

Let me respond to two statements from the game's description:

[quote]- realistic fluid animation and physics; [/quote]

Not really, no. Too much viscosity for water, or most other liquids for that matter. The "elixirs" behave more like a gelatinous-blobby substance... thing.

[quote]This game was initially designed for devices with accelerometer but for PC we decided to add WASD and arrow controls, that made the game even more difficult and entertaining![/quote]

No, I'm quite sure that made the game easier. Which is good. I love easy games. And this game is pretty easy, although maps 2-5 and 5-5 did cause some despair. The time requirements for getting a 3-star rating in individual stages are well balanced - they cause just a little bit of frustration but are far from impossible. There's a good chance you might complete Aqua Teeter in one sitting and before cards finish dropping. There are 60 levels total but you only need to 3-star 50 of them for the most difficult achievement. I love seeing that kind of thing, it deserves praise. Good value for money, recommended.

PRO

Game has great music
Very unique

CONS

Fluids.W7.exe has crashed THIS HAPPENS CONSTANTLY!

The game's concept is interesting, but it becomes boring quickly. I'd had enough after the first few levels.

good game youa RE A BLOB THAT BLOBS AROUNDD xd

played with arrow keys, could use more "options" than that

(also I bet it's actually or originally a "tilt the screen" handheld game)

but the clock is very merciful, so you could still get 3 medals on each
(could make a scoreboard for the curious and the show offs :>)
and the controls are still good

despite the coulda or the woulda:

it's fun :)