Podgamer -- game reviews and features for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, except not rubbish

News

Free balls awarded, Part 2

by RevStu (October 21st, 2010 at 11:30 am)

Oh yeah. I said I’d round up the rest of those freebie sports games, didn’t I? Let’s do that, then.

I was going to put Hotshot Pool in the prestigious top-of-the-list before-the-jump position, but since its developers are idiots it can wait its turn and instead we’ll start with the lovely Crazy Basketball.

One of numerous App Store versions of the popular trajectory-judging Flash game of last year, this is a slick and fast interpretation distinguished by cute cartoon graphics and swinging samba music. You get OpenFeint leaderboards and there are two extra modes available as in-app purchases for a very reasonable 59p, but the game doesn’t nag you about them. (I coughed up the cash and they’re good fun, though Sniper Mode really needs some plate-smashing sound effects.)

Second, then, would have been Hotshot Pool (a game loosely based on the coolest new sport of the last 50 years, the awesome Artistic Billiards), but literally in the time between me starting to write this post and getting to this paragraph it’s gone back up to 59p, so we’ll have to talk about Grand Par Golf instead.

If you can forgive the terrible pun in the title (you start off playing as a wizened old man, y’see) and put up with an annoying tutorial, this is a very decent 3D golf game in the classic old three-tap style, rather than these awful modern things where you have to swing your iPod around like a chimpanzee. Its most original element is the littering of parts of the course with powerups, forcing you to decide whether it’s worth going off the optimum line in return for the benefits you might get, but you can just ignore them and play it like a normal golf game if you like.

And since we now have a spare slot where Hotshot Pool would have gone if its developers hadn’t been such cretins, let’s give a shout out to NFL Rush Zone, because it’s a bit weird.

NFLRZ comprises two very different minigames. Lateral Collateral is the best, in which you have to pass your way to the endzone by tapping one of  your team-mates to hoik the ball out to them before you get tackled. The other (Detentionator Dash) more bizarrely appears to be set in some sort of NFL school, where you have to avoid the deadly laser gaze of some sort of terrifying-looking teacher robot in order to sneak out of class, ostensibly to get to a “football” game but presumably also to go and file a complaint with the Board Of Education about having a laser-toting robot teacher.

And that’s sports!

Judge this