game posts

I'm actually writing this post very, very, very late on Sunday night. I was up far too late working and playing video games, so a game like Leap Sheep! HD turns out to be perfect for this time of day. Leap Sheep is the first iPhone game from Turtle Rock Studios, a company that's worked with Valve in the past on titles like Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead, and their past experience shows up here; this one is polished and dripping with charm and atmosphere. The actual gameplay is very simple -- you have a set of sheep leaping over a fence, and you tap once to help them jump and tap again to make them do tricks. It quickly gets chaotic, though, as the three lanes fill out and the sheep start piling up.

The graphics are colorful and bright, and the game runs well. It's also Plus+ enabled, and half the fun is getting achievements for jumping three sheep at a time or using a ram to clear out a stuck flock. It's a Canabalt-sized thrill rather than an epic title, but for just 99 cents in a universal iPhone and iPad package, the price is more than right. If you find yourself up late and trying to sneak a little more gaming into your day, try counting these guys for a while.

This one comes on the recommendation of a friend here at E3 -- Tomena Sanner was released for the iPhone last year by Konami, and it's a fun, crazy little game that's probably lots more entertainment than it deserves to be. Like Canabalt, it's a one-button title, but unlike Canabalt, it doesn't take itself seriously at all. Instead, as a busy businessman, you have to run to work, and you simply tap on the screen to get whatever's in your way out of it.

The game is just plain silly, but it works quite well, and as your score and speed climb, so will your excitement. At US$1.99, you might have to get yourself in the right mood to enjoy it, but once you do, it's a heck of an App Store experience.

Shifters is a fun little match-3 game with a "twist" -- instead of switching colored blocks to match three of a kind, you rotate them in sets of four. That changes up the strategy a bit, as the patterns look a little different from the standard Bejeweled-type game (the shifting mechanic is obviously more similar to Bejeweled Twist) but the gameplay is still simple and fun.

Shifters is presented in levels, too, with each level providing a separate goal to meet, from matching a certain number of shifters to meeting a score within a certain time.

Is it simple? Yes -- if you want anything more than some empty tapping and silly faces, you won't find it in Shifters. But the mechanic is entertaining enough to while away a few minutes of waiting in line or for the bus, and the 99 cent price is worth it as long as your expectations are low.

Zynga showed up on the stage at the WWDC keynote this morning to show off one of the most-awaited (and most hated) apps coming to the iPhone: Farmville. The popular Flash-based social networking game is finally making its way to the iPhone by the end of June, and it'll be bringing at least one new feature along in the form of push notifications for when your crops are done. Players will also be able to make in-app purchases for the Farmville marketplace, all of the game's information will sync with their Facebook version, and the game will come with an exclusive pet: a Snow Leopard. Cute.

The assembled press in San Francisco were humdrum about the announcement, as most of them aren't Farmville players (and lots of you probably aren't either). But there are millions and millions of players of this game around the world, and when one of the biggest games in the world comes to Apple's platform, that's a big deal. We'll keep an eye out for the game on the App Store, and let you know when it's out.

SCVNGR looks like an interesting idea for an iPhone app: It's sort of a virtual scavenger hunt, composed of a series of "challenges" at certain real-life places that are found via the GPS on your iPhone. When the iPhone first released with GPS, the idea of a real-life MMO was something I wanted to see, and while SCVNGR (on the App Store for free) seems targeted more towards exploration than actual gaming, it's definitely something that should get you to exploring your world a little differently.

Lots of organizations have already jumped in to make up some challenges, and this note, about how a few LA museums got their challenges, caught my eye. If you're looking for something fun to do with the family this holiday weekend and want a new iPhone-based twist on the usual museum tour, SCVNGR might be just the thing.

Theseus isn't for everyone -- it's a little slower-paced and more thoughtful than a lot of apps in the store, and the puzzles included get hard fast. But if you're looking for a challenge and a little bit of brain-teasing on your iPhone, Theseus will provide just that. It's a puzzle game based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. You control Theseus, represented by blue dot on a series of mazes. Your job is to try and get away from the Minotaur, the red dot, and make it to the exit on each screen.

The catch? You only get to move one square each turn, while the Minotaur gets to move two. But he will always try to move toward you, so with a little clever planning, there's always a way to evade him and escape the Labyrinth. That can be fiendishly tough, but the game is solidly built, with a whole slew of ways to undo and reset the game if you run into problems. Trial and error can get you far, and if you get too frustrated, there's a hint button that will help you get through the game's over 80 levels. There's a free version to try out, and if you enjoy figuring out ways to get around the Minotaur, Theseus is on the App Store for US$1.99.

We've been spotlighting a lot of quick and easy action games in our Daily App feature lately, so here's something a little more cerebral. Quaso is a new kind of Crossword-style puzzle game, except that instead of guessing words, you're trying to figure out numbers in math equations. The game was created by an English mathematics teacher named John Enock, and has been brought to the iPhone by a developer as John Enock's Quaso, now available on the App Store for free.

Here's how it works. For every crossword line on the board, you're given a set of math equations with the numbers missing. There's one total number for every puzzle (say, 6), and then for each equation, you need to figure out how another set of numbers fits in to complete the clue and make the equation equal to the total number. In other words, given the clue (*+*) x (*-*), and the answer of 6, you'd eventually work out that the numbers should be (1+2) x (5-3), and then put 1, 2, 5, and 3 in each spot on the answer. But that answer line has to match up to any that it intersects with, so you may need to switch the numbers around -- (2+1) instead of (1+2) -- for it all to work.

It's fiendishly clever, and it really puts your brain to work, especially if (like me) you're not that great at casual math. But there are a ton of puzzles to work through, and then you can even buy a puzzle pack via in-app purchase for more. Especially at the current price of free, Quaso is a mathematical brain teaser that you shouldn't miss.

Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckynova are the husband-and-wife team that make up iPhone developer Imangi Studios, creators of the popular Harbor Master iPhone game and its iPad cousin. I got to meet them both at the 360iDev conference a few weeks ago, and they kindly showed me an as-yet-unnamed game that was still in the early stages of development. They said it would be a little while until they unveiled a trailer for it, and then this week they sent out the trailer above. The game has been named Max Adventure, and Imangi Studios tells us they hope to release it a few more months from now.

The version I played at 360iDev was very early -- the menus were still in bits and pieces, and there were no real missions or text yet implemented. But the story was told to me: the protagonist (Max, apparently) is a kid who lives in the suburbs, and when all of the parents get ported off of the planet, it's up to him to save his friends (and eventually, you'd assume, the world).

Gameloft has done a Q&A over on Marvel's official blog about their iPhone and iPad versions of the upcoming Iron Man 2 game, and there are some interesting tidbits in there. Gameloft is traditionally a mobile company, and as they say, they've worked on "small to very small" devices, so the iPad is a new trick for them. They say that developing for the iPad allowed them to ramp up the graphics, and helped to make the new game that much more immersive. In my few experiences with the iPad, I've found that very true -- the bigger screen definitely makes a difference in terms of focusing on the game.

Gameloft also promotes the game's multiple suits (including a stealth suit, that sounds interesting), and some big bosses to fight against. They say the release is scheduled for next week, so we'll look for it then.

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust is a terrific game for the iPhone -- it's an arcade game that's basically a one-stick shooter, where you move a ship around a 2D field (rendered in colorful 3D), collecting asteroid ore and taking down alien robots. But though the basic premise of the game is quite simple, there's actually a lot of depth that builds up over time, as you navigate around various zones, and upgrade your ship, your ore collector, and all of the other various parts of your space ore business.

And while the gameplay is tight and fun, the best part of Space Miner (in my humble opinion) is the brilliant and hilarious script. Not only does the story of the game give you great reasons to keep going out there and blasting ore, but it's legitimately creative and funny. Chicago poet and performer Robbie Q. Telfer is listed in the credits as story editor, and that really paid off for the game -- some of the dialogue is just perfect.

So yes, the game is worth a buy even at the normal $4.99 price -- but wait, there's more. Starting tomorrow, Space Miner: Space Ore Bust is going on sale for just 99 cents for a limited time to help promote the Venan Arcade's upcoming second game, the strangely titled Ninjatown: Trees of Doom. At that price, it's worth a purchase just to play through the tutorial. Definitely be sure to grab it.

App of the Day is TUAW's new App Store spotlight. One great app, every single day.

Subatomic is a game that's available for the iPhone and the iPad. The premise is that you push molecules of different colors around a field with gravity. Portals sit on the gamefield full of molecules, and as they slowly fade away, it's your job to pull more in and match them up. By touching near a molecule, you can push it in a certain direction with a gravity vortex (the game has a cool blurred graphical feature whenever you touch the screen). The game ramps up pretty quickly; eventually you're trying to push molecules toward multiple portals while trying to keep different-colored molecules from reaching the wrong portals.

Unfortunately, the difficulty curve can be a little high. It's sometimes hard to control the incoming molecules, and when you accidentally touch a little too close, you'll find yourself flinging molecules off into the distance instead of getting them where they want to go. At a basic level, though, it's an interesting control scheme that I haven't seen before. The game contains a full tutorial as part of its 31 levels, and the music and backgrounds (some of which contain actual electron microscope imagery from real-life scientists) add to the experience. The social features of the game are managed by OpenFeint.

Subatomic is US$1.99 on the App Store, and a free version (with seven levels to try) is available as well.

Multiball Pinball (US$2.99 for devices using iPhone OS 2.2 or better), is billed by Matmi, publisher of three other pinball games, as their most extreme pinball yet. If extreme, means busy, chaotic and possibly headache inducing, I'd agree with them.

Let's try a test. Look at the graphic on the right for a few seconds and try to figure out what's going on. This is a one table pinball game with no close-ups or camera movements to direct your eyes such as found in Wild West Pinball, a cheaper, and more nicely designed app. You can see that the screen is very busy, and seems to use every pinball component possible. But being the most feature laden pinball game out there is not necessarily a good thing. There are four flippers controlled by tapping on the left or right side of the screen, but one flipper is often obscured by overlay text, like the one under the big X BALL display.

The app does come with a few pages of instructions, in type a bit too small to easily read, and any direction is quite useful, but what isn't welcome is the total chaos of gameplay. As I played, I found the right flippers have a hard time bouncing a ball to the top of the table since the path is obscured by objects. There is always a lot going on, like ramps, cannons and smoke, but their design leaves a lot to be desired. It's not very clear when a ball enters a ramp, exactly where it will come out. When a smoke effect appears, it often obscures your view of the ball.