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The exciting mystery match where a plucky contestant chooses a theme and tries to pick six consecutive decent games in that vein without landing on something fatally unendurable. Today's theme: snipers.
Our Iron Cross-winning playing guide section returns.
Today: Galaxy On Fire 2.
This weekend, in the absence of anything very exciting new to play, I’ve spent a lot of time with one of my very first iPod favourites. Pole Position Remix (£1.79/€2,39/$2.99) is a game riddled with flaws, and in the light of some of the stuff we’re about to discuss its current price point is extremely optimistic.
It does get frequently discounted down to 59p/€0,79/99¢, though, and IF you’re prepared to put in a couple of hours of gruelling unlocking work – which we’re by no means saying you should – you’ll find something rather splendid hidden away idiotically at the end of it.
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.
Although buying games in the App Store represents the best value for money in the entire history of the commercial videogames industry, it’s a bit like drinking in Glasgow on a Saturday night – there’s a lot of fun to be had, but you still better keep your wits about you if you don’t want to get mugged.
There are several ways in which unscrupulous (“Business entrepreneurs” – The Government) will try to rip off the unwary iOS gamer, so let’s take a cautionary look at a few of them.
Continue reading this post…
Free candy. Free reign to dress up like a total jackass and act like even more of one. Enough free booze to ensure you’ll have forgotten it all by the next morning. And best of all: not a single awkward/annoying family get-together in sight.
Yep, Halloween’s pretty hard to screw up. It’s the island of carefree holiday fun in the center of an ocean of obligation, guilt, stress, and more obligation. So, what’s the catch? Surely there’s a catch.
These horrible, horrible, horrible (did I mention horrible?) games are the catch. See, here’s how it works: the iTunes App Store is allegedly a bountiful land of riches and opportunity, but that’s an outright lie. It’s really a bombed-out crater of chaos, desolation, and desperation.
Good EEKvening, KILLEDies! It’s your old chum Uncle Podghouler here with another collection of SPOOOKY HALLOWE’EN TALES.
It’s All Hallows’ Eve and the staff of Podgamer are heading home after a hard day of slightly rewriting press releases and copying reviews out of old issues of N-Gage Magazine.
Will something horrible befall them?
Of CORPSE it will. Hargle har har!
Nestle down in front of your crackling fireplace and read…
PODGHOULER’S SPOOOKY HALLOWE’EN TALES.
If you dARGHre! Continue reading this post…
An odd phenomenon of the App Store is when sometimes the Lite version of a game will contain modes or levels not found in the full version. The magnificent Drop7, for example, used to have a Lite version – since deleted – which contained a rather fun short mode limited to 100 drops, ideal for when you didn’t have time for a longer session (as a good game of Drop7 can go on for quite a while).
Weirdly, though, anyone coughing up the £1.79/€2,39/$2.99 to upgrade to the full game would find Countdown mode inexplicably removed (sticking to playing it in the Lite version was unsatisfying due to the absence of leaderboards), an irritating downgrade that’s never been corrected.
I stumbled across something similar this week while playing Dawn Of The Dead – a Lite version that not only contains things not found in the full game, but which is arguably just a better game full stop.
We've ignored the warning from history and started a playing guide section.
Today: Envirobear.
It’s occurred to me that we’ve written nothing about current App Store God-Emperor Cut The Rope on this adorable, cooing baby slice of the Internet we’ve carved a bloody hole in the center of and called home.
(If any readers are affected by issues relating to Comrade Nathan’s quirky across-the-pond spelling conventions, contact Podgamer Trauma Support at the usual address – Ed)
And that’s a damn shame, because it’s an absolutely fantastic game. Also, we’re missing out on so much Google search traffic. Like, you don’t even know. Make no mistake, however; that’s not the reason I’m writing this article. On a totally unrelated note: Cut The Rope, Cut The Rope tips, Cut The Rope Justin Bieber, Cut The Rope XXX underage porn sluts.
So, what’s the deal with all this “magic” nonsense? Well, you might remember an incident starring our very own Comrade Fuhrer Stuart and some particularly peeved birds. See, Herr Stu saw a flock of people fawning over that flock of avian sensations, and he just didn’t get what all the fuss was about. So, of course, he went to developer Rovio for a precise, scientific answer. “Magic,” they replied. Er, right.
However, after kneeling before the alter of the tiny god that is Cut The Rope and offering a rather generous sacrifice of my time and social life, I think I’ve found the answer. Cut The Rope, as it turns out, is Angry Birds’ formula perfected. It’s an Angry Birds clone not in form, but in philosophy. But what is that formula? Why can normal, semi-rational human beings derive all of their happiness from helping a tiny green monster gorge himself on candy? Well, in explaining why Cut The Rope is worlds better than Angry Birds’ cluttered, bird feces-ridden mess, I’m going to lay it all out for you.
COMPARE-O-VISION, ENGAGE!
