Archives For iPhone

The moral problems of Tiny Tower

July 29, 2011 — 15 Comments

As the iPhone and iPod Touch continue to sell like hotcakes, more and more simple games are being viewed as portable crack. Angry Birds still manages to find millions of people in caves somewhere that haven’t played it yet, while Tiny Wings dive bombs other unsuspecting victims.

 

One of the newer addictions is Tiny Tower – a “freemium” app, that’s free to download and play, with the option of paying money to advance in the game quicker. The game seems innocent enough. Pixel art styled “bitizens” inhabit a 2D tower that you, the player, are building higher and higher. You want to earn enough money from different types of floors (such as Retail, Service, Food, etc.) in order to build more floors, ad infinitum, in an effort to make a monolith that rivals the Tower of Babel.

 

The game is becoming an epidemic. Several of my peers in the game industry have confessed to a Tiny Tower addiction. When I tried to warn my sister of the game’s danger, I learned that she already had a 20 floor high tower of her own. When my fiancee is on her iPod Touch, she’s not checking Twitter like a normal person – she’s playing freakin’ Tiny Tower.

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The 3DS vs. Vita war… may be won by cell phones

June 10, 2011 — Leave a comment

Photo from CrunchGear.com

Sony stunned a lot of people when, at their E3 media briefing on Monday, they announced that the wi-fi-only model of their new portable system – now officially named the PlayStation Vita – would retail for $250 USD. This price is a big deal for two reasons: One, it’s far lower than most analyst predictions (I personally predicted a price of around $400. Some were even higher) and two, it brings the system in line with Nintendo’s 3DS.

 

When the 3DS launched, it had a strong start. But sales quickly dipped and the hardware currently isn’t meeting Nintendo’s expectations. That’s not to say the system is failing by any means, but it’s obviously not what Nintendo wanted. Sony, who did respectfully with their first foray into portable gaming with the PlayStation Portable, probably sees this as a golden opportunity to jump in.

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Review – The Blocks Cometh

February 18, 2011 — 1 Comment

Grabbing screenshots for The Blocks Cometh was not an easy task.

The iPhone game from HalfBot, a port of their popular flash game, moves fast. Not as fast as the original, mind, but still at a pace where I didn’t want to take my fingers off the screen in order to take a quick screen grab by hitting the top and home buttons on my iPhone. In fact, doing so killed me on at least one occasion.

I sacrificed a high score for you, Internet. FOR YOU.

The concept of the game is simple enough. Blocks of varying shapes and size are falling from the sky, and you want to climb as high as you can on the resulting tower of junk, making sure never to be underneath a block when it falls. In that way, it’s like a metaphor for life. Are we not all trying to ascend to the top of the blockades that get in our way? Are we not all threatened to be crushed under their weight?

Anyway, you can run and jump in order to accomplish this goal, as you’d expect. You can usually double jump as well, and can slide on the side of blocks in a sort of wall grind, Mega Man X or Super Meat Boy style. You also have the option of destroying any blocks that get in your way, but true ninjas don’t need such petty abilities and will climb higher and higher without the need to remove any obstacles.

The only real problem with the iPhone port of The Blocks Cometh is in the controls, and this is sort of a tricky situation. All told, the controls are probably as good as they could be on the iOS. They function just fine, and the buttons are properly placed so you neither cover the screen with your hands nor accidentally hit buttons you didn’t mean to push. But if you’re gunning for the highest of scores, you’ll find yourself really wanting a keyboard or gamepad. It’s just too easy to lose your fingers’ place on the iDevice touch screen, and you might find yourself cursing as you tried to jump out of the way of a block, only to realize that you weren’t hitting the right arrow like you thought you were.

Again, this is really a fault of the hardware, not the software, and HalfBot seems to acknowledge the limitations of iDevices. As I mentioned previously, the iPhone version of the game seems to start off slower than the Flash game, and the playing space is smaller. So good on them for at least doing what they could to properly adapt the experience to the mobile device.

So why would you pay $0.99 for this iPhone version when you can play it free on your browser? A few reasons. One is, of course, portability. The Blocks Cometh is a really great game to pick up and play for just a few minutes, similar to something like Canabalt in that regard. This makes it a great choice for an iPhone app. HalfBot also added some content for paying customers, namely in unlockable characters that all play differently and change the experience just enough to make them worthwhile. There’s also GameCenter and OpenFeint support for leaderboards and achievements, which is much appreciated.

There’s another reason to buy it, too. And that’s the fact that the game was originally stolen from them outright. Some thieving scoundrels stole their gameplay, art assets (except one, stolen from another iOS game, League of Evil) and even the name, then managed to make money off selling it without Apple having any clue what was going on. I tend to be against theft as a rule, so feeling bad for the damages HalfBot may suffer from the counterfeit product (a lot of people probably won’t buy the app again, since they already got the fake), I decided to throw them a dollar.

Thankfully, I think the game is good enough to justify that small price. It’s a solid iOS experience that should appeal to gamers who want a bit of a challenge in their mobile games.

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Mini Mobile Review – Shibuya

October 2, 2010 — 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to say something about Shibuya for awhile, and since it’s free on the App Store this weekend, I figured this would be the perfect time.

The challenge, though, is that Shibuya is really something that should be played, not just talked about or even seen. So I guess it’s a good thing it’s free this weekend, huh?

The game is a surprisingly refreshing take on the puzzle genre, which I’m sure is what led to it being named part of this year’s PAX 10 at the Penny Arcade Expo. Yes, there are falling blocks, which is likely something you’ve seen in puzzle games past, but the point this time around is to color the falling blocks in just the right order to create a stack of two or more, after which you can remove them from the playing field.

Again, kind of hard to describe.

The trick, as you might expect, is to create chains, combos and/or massive uni-colored stacks in order to rack up as many points as possible.

There are two modes, Quickplay and Endless. Quickplay is simply a two-minute game in which you try to get as many point as you can before time runs out. You just select the speed you want to start on and you’re off. Perfect for an iPhone game, as you might only have two minutes before classes, before your bus route ends, or before the traffic light turns green. You know, whenever. Endless is what you would expect. Again, you pick a speed to start off on, and the game get progressively faster/harder as you play. No time limit. It’s just you against the multicolored lights.

There’s also a progressive achievement system that’s integrated pretty well into the experience, which helps challenge you to improve at a pretty steady pace. OpenFeint is also supported for leaderboards. There’s no GameCenter support (at least not yet), but as I’m still rocking a dated iPhone 3G, that wouldn’t matter to me anyway right now.

Oh, and the music is pretty good, too.

Shibuya is a fast, fresh and very addictive puzzler, and it’s pretty easy to recommend to iPhone owners. I would say you could check out a video over at the developer’s website, but seriously, the game is free right now. You should probably just download it.

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Column – 11 best iPhone apps for students

August 24, 2009 — Leave a comment

Originally published in The Daily Toreador.

Something I noticed last Spring semester as I carted around the new iPhone 3G that I received for Christmas: Everybody was carting around the new iPhone 3G that they got for Christmas.

Over the summer, I know many of my friends and acquaintances were lighting up their Twitter feeds to inform the world that they just received an iPhone 3GS. I’m starting to wonder if we can start organizing students into groups. People who have iPhones (or at least iPod touches) and people who don’t.

Since Apple’s little black box is becoming such a dominant force on campuses across the nation, I felt it apt to provide a list of essential apps that you may not want to go into class without.

I’m of the mentality that most college students are poor and would rather save money whenever possible, so all of the following apps are free. However, if you’re willing to shell out a few bucks here and there, you can find plenty of good tools, such as RSS readers, homework organizers, and flashcard makers.

But since “a few bucks here and there” means wasting perfectly good beer and Ramen money, these apps cost nothing:

Wikipanion: Never cite Wikipedia as a source. That said, Wikipedia can be a great resource for finding information on necessary topics, or just reading about random crap you find interesting. This app is clean, easy to use, and free.

Dictionary: How many of you actually carry a physical dictionary around? Probably quite a few of you these days, considering how easy it is to use dictionaries online when need-be. But what if you need to look up a word when you’re away from the computer? The Dictionary app is perfect for such occasions.

AP Mobile: You need to keep up with the news. Since The Daily Toreador doesn’t have an app of its own, you unfortunately need to turn to other sources. There are plenty of options from the biggest names in publication, such as the New York Times, but AP Mobile may boast the most news content.

Facebook: This is something of a no-brainer, considering we’re college students, but since I notice so many of you checking your Facebook profiles every five minutes in the library anyway, why not check it every two and a half minutes on your phone?

Twitterific / Tweetdeck: There are a variety of fully capable Twitter apps available for your iDevice, but these are two of the best that come at the ever appealing cost of free. If you’re not sold on the Twitter phenomenon yet, you may be once you can check feeds on the fly.

Stanza: A free eBook reader, Stanza is more amazing than I initially expected it to be. You can do expected things, like transfer books from your computer or purchase books from a built-in store so you can read “Twilight” more discretely. But one thing that makes Stanza special is a large library of free material readily available for download. Old “Sherlock Holmes” and “Conan the Barbarian” stories, “Art of War,” “Dracula” … There’s tons of reading material to keep you busy. Now you can read the “Kama Sutra” between classes!

Pandora Radio: Internet radio at its finest, Pandora has become a best friend for many of us. This app takes everything you love about the Pandora website and puts it on a mobile device. You can even access all of your favorite stations just by logging in.

FML: While you can access “F*** My Life”s mobile Web site on the iPhone just fine, there’s also an app that makes it possible for you to be even more lazy about laughing over others’ misfortunes. Good for killing a few minutes here and there.

AIM and Skype: You need to stay in touch with your friends and classmates, right? What better ways than these programs that most of us probably already use on our PCs?

Mafia Wars: Since you’re all playing it on Facebook anyway (stop requesting that I join your mob, please) why not play “Mafia Wars” while eating lunch in the Student Union Building as well? Relieve some stress by completing some shady jobs.

Aurora Feint: One of the best free games for the iPhone, “Aurora Feint: The Beginning” is more than just a “Lite” version of a good puzzle game. It’s a fully featured (and quite addictive) puzzle game that might be good to have for downtime.

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