All posts by reverendstu
Review
by RevStu (November 8th, 2010 at 3:16 pm)
The chances are that you’ll know whether you’re going to like this game or not simply from looking at the screenshot below and reading the words Nodes Of Yesod. So we’ll be fairly brief.
This is a 25-year commemorative edition (£1.19/€1,59/$1.99) of a game from the glory days of the Spectrum and the Commodore 64. It contains a faithful port of the 8-bit original (specifically the Spectrum 128 version) and an 2010 remake with some new gameplay features and objectives, but they both play very similarly. If you loved Nodes back in the day, you’re probably going to be very happy with this polished release. If you’re of a more modern era, you’re probably going to go “Huh?” and roll your eyes at what your grandad used to consider a top-notch game.
If you’re pushed for time, you can pretty much stop reading there.
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Review
by RevStu (November 8th, 2010 at 9:12 am)
Namco have already had a stab at a colour-matching action-puzzler, in the shape of Pac-Match Party. It came out five months ago and some people are still playing their first game, so the company’s gone back to the drawing board and tried to come up with something that would offer at least a modicum of challenge to a sleepy toddler. This new iPhone/iPod version is a shrunk-to-fit remake of the original iPad release, which explains why it’s called Pac-Chain Compact.
While screenshots make it look a bit like veteran flop Pac-Panic/Pac-Attack, the truth is that Pac-Chain (£1.79/€2,39/$2.99 for either version) is a variant on the ubiquitous Same Game – you know, that one where you tap on any group of adjacent coloured things and they disappear, of which at the last count there were 22,741 varieties on the App Store. Namco have given Pac-Chain its own unique twist, though, which is to say they’ve somehow managed to make it almost incomprehensible.
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Review
by RevStu (November 7th, 2010 at 3:52 pm)
Because it’s temporarily free, of course. Do you see what we did there?
The game that Linez is a variant on exists in several guises on the App Store, but this is as good as any of them and it’s currently the free-est. The instructions are about as helpful as giving a man on fire a hammer, so we’ll have a quick run-through below, but the short version is that it’s well worth a download. I mean, obviously. Would we waste your time?
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Review
by RevStu (November 7th, 2010 at 12:07 pm)
This one’s a game of two halves and no mistake. For the first 45 minutes, You Are The Ref (£1.19/€1,59/$1.99) is everything you hope it’s going to be – funny, interesting, thought-provoking and challenging. Unfortunately, it concedes a goal just before half-time, its confidence collapses, the manager’s pep-talk is ruined and the second half turns into a rout.
(FOOTBALL HATERS! The rest of this review isn’t going to get any more fun for you. Move along.)
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News 
Podgamer Recommended
by RevStu (November 6th, 2010 at 10:07 pm)
This is a real favourite of mine. I used to play chess when I was a wee laddie back home in Scotchland, but in this fast-moving modern world I don’t know anyone who has the attention span/mental discipline for it any more. Speed Chess (or Chess – The Speedgame, as it appears to have clumsily renamed itself), currently selling for the bargain price of 0p ($0.00/€0,00) is the perfect solution.
The picture tells the story, really. The rules are the same as normal chess, but you only have five pawns and one of everything else. You can play against another human or three levels of CPU opponent, and it took me about 40 games to beat it even at “Student” (the lowest). The move clock can be set to 20 seconds (the default), 60 seconds or off, which somewhat defeats the point. Apart from the fact that it says “Times up” if you let the clock run out, it’s excellently presented and generally lovely.
I can think of literally nothing else to tell you about Speed Chess. Bye!
Universal Feature
by RevStu (November 6th, 2010 at 3:28 pm)
It’s generally accepted by most sane people that if you want to make money out of something – particularly if it’s something that costs almost nothing to physically produce - you sell it cheap. The mainstream videogames industry is almost alone in continuing to resist this reality.
Despite comparable businesses like music and film having slashed the unit price of their products by something like 50% over the last decade (I still remember when new-release music CDs fetched £13.99 or more, and new movies on DVD went for £20-25), the price of games has edged steadily upwards since the advent of disc-based media, with £45 the normal RRP for new Xbox 360 or PS3 games. Some premium titles push that already-horrendous sum up by as much as another £10, plus there are numerous comedy “Special Editions” aimed at the super-gullible, charging as much as £30 or £40 more for discs or books full of screenshots, or little plastic toys.
Now, of course, there’s another way.
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Review Podgamer Essential
by RevStu (November 6th, 2010 at 10:45 am)
Here’s one for those of you joining us late, and because this game still hasn’t sold enough copies.
Anyone who’s been reading anything I’ve written for any amount of time will probably already have noticed that I have very little time for videogames that want to tell stories. There are plenty of fields of culture available already for people who want to be told stories. Books, films, comics, TV, theatre and even music are all ideally suited to story-telling, and frequently do a brilliant job of it. You wouldn’t hire a footballer to come round and do your plumbing, so why would you look to videogames for storytelling?
What I’d like to draw your attention to instead is a glorious example of the art (dang!) of a videogame being a videogame. The unwieldily-titled Pix’n Love Rush (59p/€0,79/99¢), in fact, goes beyond being a videogame – it’s a metagame. That is to say, it’s a videogame that’s about being a videogame.
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News
by RevStu (November 5th, 2010 at 6:02 pm)
…About Properly If Their Developers Hadn’t Provided Such Piss-Poor Excuses For Screenshots, But Which Are Very Good And You Should Download Anyway While They’re Free (ie Now) So The Stupid Idiots Don’t Make Any Money, Alongside A Picture Of Something Completely Unrelated That’s Less Likely To Hideously Disfigure Our Nice Website Than Their Crap-Ugly Marketing Shots.
#4: Fare City
Woah! Those funky little taxis look like Pac-Man crying!
Review
by RevStu (November 5th, 2010 at 11:23 am)
…is the minimum number of friends you’ll need to get the absolute most out of this brilliant little nanogame, but even if everyone hates you it’s still a lot of fun. The inexplicably-named Tree Connect is currently zipping up the Top Free Apps chart, and justifiably so. It’s a simple reaction-tester distinguished by faultless presentation, and it’s a lot easier to just play than it is to explain, but we’ll have a stab.
A line of coloured blocks appears in the middle of the screen. The line can be made up of two, three, four or five different colours (you choose which). A clock starts (you can set it to 15, 30, 60 or 180 seconds) and you tap whichever of the coloured buttons at the bottom of the screen corresponds to the block highlighted by the two white arrows. Get it right and the line moves one block to the left (scoring you a point), get it wrong and it doesn’t. That’s it.
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News Podgamer Recommended
by RevStu (November 5th, 2010 at 3:03 am)
This is a public-information message to our more sensitive readers: if you find Podgamer a little shoutier than your usual iGaming sites, it’s only because we want to make the world a better place, and sometimes you can’t achieve that goal with hugs alone. A case in point is World War 2, and another, perhaps slightly more pertinent, one is Time Geeks (59p/€0,79/99¢).
When this cute little scrolly object-spotting game with lovely eBoy-style graphics came out around a month ago, all the other websites showered kisses and puppies and lollipops on its pretty head. We, on the other hand, took a slightly different view, issuing barely-veiled threats of actual physical violence at the developer on account of the way almost all of the game was hatefully locked, and thereby ruined.
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