pocketfun wrote:My latest game just hit the store. Yak might laugh to himself based on one of his blog posts recently about geometry war type effects in games
Introducing Bear Paw a simple and challenging, and beautiful game. Watch the gravity and stunning particle effects light up the iPhones screen as stars and comets collide.
Better than the videos you who I think as they actually don't show the full screen, so I thought the gameplay area looked a little restrictive, which it wasn't when played for real.
The touch controls work really well and I'm glad it's not tilt, which drives me nuts.
On my first game I died twice during the black and white bit when the game returned from the 'Air Rage' screen. Which was a little annoying as it's not obvious you are back in play or where your plane is...
Pangaea Software seem to be having some kind of sale on just now, which means both Enigmo and Enigmo 2 are a bargain-tastic 59p each. All the rest of their stuff is 59p too, but those two are the pick of the bunch.
Misfit wrote:
Well I don't normally impulse buy anything over 59p, but as these both look interesting and I like supporting Yak Yakers, I have just bought both.
Will give them a go soon.
Good luck guys!
I didn't actually have anything to do with MiniSquadron beyond selling the author my old MacBook and helping him get started on the iPhone. But I appreciate your support as Tak's a friend and deserves a bit of success with this as he's put a lot of effort into making what is a cracking game. I'll make sure he sees any feedback posted in here.
I'm really enjoying Mini Squadron.. love all the little touches like how it tells you the name of the pilot who shot you down, the crazy way powerups sometimes go flying around the screen, the different handling of all the planes, screen shake effect, the awesome kawaii voice samples. GAME OVER! I love the choice of music too.
Devil's Dustbowl, wave 12... hectic! Flying around with like 10 lasers training on you.
Sometimes it's hard to see what's going on, I lose track of my plane.. it's not a big deal though, even crashing and burning is fun. I got caught out by the checkpoint bits where it goes black & white a couple times too.. once you realise you're still controlling your plane it's cool. Might be good if you automatically levelled out during those bits, or something.
Another iPhone worm in the wild, in Holland. This time it's malicious, though it's just a variant of the Rick Astley worm seen in Oz recently, so only affects jailbroken phones with the SSH password unchanged.
So there's that game Soosiz, which is a platformer with onscreen controls and a 2D Mario Galaxy-ish gravity mechanic. It's alright.. fairly fun, though quite frustrating. To me the graphics and music feel rather bland though, it doesn't have much character, and the levels aren't very interesting.
Today I downloaded the demo version of this other game Gomi. It has a similar gravity mechanic. It has hand drawn MS Paint style graphics. I'd seen some screenshots of it ages ago and thought I wouldn't bother. But man, it's cool!
It's a lot slower than Soosiz, uses tilt controls for movement, and isn't really a platformer. As well as Mario Galaxy it's obviously heavily inspired by Katamari Damacy and Okami - The aim of the game is to roll around collecting everything, Katamari style. The stuff you grab doesn't stick to you like in Katamari, it just sort of gets rolled up into you, but it's still satisfying... and heaps of flowers spring up everywhere you collect things, like in Okami. Pretty!
I really like how the levels, rather than being like linear stages which you move through, are more like arenas.. as in Katamari you have to go and find enough small stuff to roll up so you can go back and grab the larger things.
It's got heaps of character and is a really chilled (because you don't seem to be able to fall off into space) and somewhat trippy experience - though probably not for everyone - moving around interesting worlds rolling up rubbish and cars and trees and people having picnics and cows and scouts on outings. Definitely gonna grab the full version when I get more credit. It also has waaaay better music than Soosiz.
It is a different style of game to Soosiz, I'm just comparing them because of the similar gravity stuff they share, and because I was quite disappointed by Soosiz's lack of atmosphere, and surprised by how much I like Gomi.
This is rather good for keeping an eye on your mates on Xbox Live
360 Live certainly isn't the first Xbox 360 app to hit the iPhone, but it's definitely one of the most full-featured, offering gamertag management, complete friends list access, messaging capability, games library browsing (with achievements and all), and even a CoverFlow-style friend browser just for good measure. It is pretty darn impressive -- if there's anything you need to do with your Xbox Live account (Gold account required for messaging) while away from your actual 360, this app will let you do it.
There is one issue: it's $1.99. Technically, that's not bad -- an app like this is probably worth the $2 especially if browsing your friends' games is something you do often. But the catch is that Microsoft recently stated that all apps that tag in to Xbox 360's online service must be sold for the low, low price of free. So one of two things will probably happen here -- either the app will drop down to free (in which case, you might as well save your $2), or Microsoft might end up blocking it, either on the App Store or in the actual Xbox Live connection. Hopefully, whatever happens, we'll end up with a solution
I do love a good roguelike and this one seems great. I never actually played it back on the C64 so I don't know what that was like... have only had a couple goes of this version so far but some interesting stuff has happened, it feels quite different to nethack or rogue. Realtime!
I love the graphics and atmosphere. Controls are good.
Last edited by nyarla on Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:44 pm 0, edited 1 time in total.
I played a remake on the PC last year and straight away bought it on the iPhone. It's the Roguelike experience but streamlined into a fun minamilist package. Really nice graphics on this new one too.
