When playing a game, you can choose between three difficulty levels. You can control your bat by tapping the screen or tilting your wrist. Stench keeps track of your best scores.
When in time mode:
To serve in a game, touch the screen anywhere except the button at the bottom right. To abandon the game, touch the button.
Stench has an Always On Display mode, two colour themes, and optional vibration effects.
Cost: $1USD + tax.
Tags: ping pong, tennis, game.
Unfortunately, there are issues with each of the bat control modes.
When using tap control, holding your finger on the screen for too long will result in the watch displaying the Clocks app. This can’t be avoided. If this happens to you, try using multiple shorter taps instead of one long touch. Be careful not to swipe sideways on the screen, which can cause other apps or tiles to be displayed.
When using tilt control on a Versa 4 or Sense 2, the bat may fail to move after a while. This is due to a bug in those watches. The bug has been reported to Fitbit. Until it is fixed, the only way to get tilt control working again is to switch to a different clockface and then back to Stench. Alternatively, use tap control.
In ‘time’ mode, the difficulty and control settings for the last-played game will be used. These affect ball speed, bat size and bat motion. To change the ‘time’ mode behaviour, start a game and select the settings you want for ‘time’ mode. After you finish or abandon the game, the same settings will be used for the ‘time’ mode gameplay emulation.
In Always On Display mode, the display enters a low-power state to extend battery life. When that happens, the on-screen image can only be updated once every minute.
The game, and especially the AI, depends on a lot of timers, and the state of the timers (ie, how long they’ve been running for) can’t be ascertained. This makes it impossible for Stench to save the state of the game while the ball and bats are moving.
Fitbit watches use a single-core CPU. As a result, any background processing can cause the clockface to slow down or freeze. Background processes include collecting activity and health data, syncing, memory management, etc.
The watch detects the vibrations and misinterprets them as orientation changes. If this is disconcerting, turn vibrations off in Settings or use touch input.
Stench's physics are modelled closely on an early video game, in which the ball always moved horizontally at the same speed regardless of how fast it was moving vertically. The Stink clockface will provide more realistic physics.
Stench's physics are modelled closely on an early video game, which behaved like this. The Stink clockface will provide more realistic physics.
The AI is programmed to be imperfect, otherwise you could never beat it. Sometimes it misjudges where the ball is, and sometimes it reacts too late. The AI makes fewer mistakes when playing at higher difficulty levels.
Rally games get gradually harder so that you can’t play forever, which would get boring!
Rally games get gradually harder so that you can’t play forever, which would get boring!
The AI is infallible in rally mode because the idea is for you to play as long as possible. You don’t want to penalised for the AI’s mistakes! Think of rally games as a single-player game of squash in which you hit the ball against a wall.
Stench keeps track of the best score separately for each game type (vs. AI and rally) and difficulty level.
Settings may take a few seconds to be sent from the phone to the watch. Therefore, after changing settings, you may want to wait for a few seconds before starting a game. In addition, settings changed on the phone won’t take effect while you’re playing a game on the watch, but they should take effect within a few seconds of the end of the game.
