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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: the wild west.
For this writer, absolutely THE most exciting aspect of the rise of the iOS machines as a gaming platform has been the fact that they’re becoming the go-to format for “bullet hell” shooting games like Espgaluda 2 (£5.49/$8.99) and Dodonpachi Resurrection (also £5.49/$8.99). The downside is that Cave’s brace of classics are restricted to 3GS hardware and above, leaving millions of iGamers unable to enjoy them. But it’s not all bad news – there are alternatives available for more primitively-equipped death-blossom lovers, so let’s take a look at a couple.
Techno Trancer and Shoot The Magic take radically different approaches to the genre, but they’ve both got their merits and drawbacks and you can currently try them both out for free (Techno Trancer via its Lite version and Shoot The Magic via a limited-time promo giveaway.) Which makes the idea of reviewing them slightly redundant, of course. Bugger. Oh well, we’ve started now.
I’ve never liked these match-three games because they’re so rigid and random; unlike the fun, jostly fluidity of the Puyo Puyo approach where you’re strictly in control, know which pieces are coming next and can plan miles ahead while clearing yourself breathing space in an emergency, in match-three games you’re always slogging away in the present. Connecting three, or a line, or a huge chunk of screen is no reward because another pile of random blocks crashes down to exactly fill the space and your tactics reset. It’s a genre I always feel the host machine would be happier playing by itself, slightly resenting the bothersome human getting in the way quite slowly.
Puzzle Quest, a match-three game lavishly disguised as an action RPG, adds the exciting twist of terrible controls. By chance it was one of the first iThing games I tried, and I’m still acclimatising to the fact these things can be shoddily written (probably because the iThing looks to me like a console, where games tend at least to function), so naturally I blamed all the crazy interface problems on the hardware. (Obviously it couldn’t be my fault because I have the pretty fingers of a strangling pianist, specially imported in a handsome valise.)
Puzzle Quest. Zalgo’s Refreshers, more like.
The punchily-titled You Cruise by Mazda MX-5 is a great little racing game that reminds me a lot of the early Colin McRae Rally titles on the first Playstation.
It’s pretty limited (no other cars, just time trials on eight tracks with online leaderboards), but that’s okay because it’s free, and what it does it does really well. The odd thing, though, is the fact that despite being free, in at least one incredibly important way it’s had more care and thought and love put into it than any other traditional-style racing game in the App Store.
As someone occasionally mystified by the rubbish that people buy on “grown-up” consoles, I find the App Store a much more rational place. I can account logically for the success of almost every big hit in the Top 50 – Fruit Ninja and Flight Control and Flick Kick Football are brilliant games, FIFA and Tiger Woods enormous franchises with 20-year histories, Peggle and The Secret Of Monkey Island are excellent conversions of classic titles sold for a tiny fraction of what they cost on other platforms, and so on.
Even Doodle Jump can be explained away (despite the presence of numerous near-identical but superior games) by a combination of fortuitous timing and commendably-frequent and substantial updates bolstering an unspectacular but still pretty enjoyable game.
But as for the 10-month chokehold exerted on the top of the charts by Angry Birds, I just don’t get it.
Sadly, while Apple have fixed many of the traditional irritating failings of the videogames industry, they still perpetuate the idiocy of region-locking. For no acceptable reason, a significant number of apps are still restricted to certain territories, even when they’re free.
The most annoying aspect of the policy is that users of the US App Store alone can take advantage of the Apple promo codes that many developers issue to give away some free copies of their games to alert users via forums and websites and such. Fortunately, it turns out that it’s really easy to get round it.
The result of watching Downfall and reading Rev Stu of this parish’s review of a game in the same afternoon.
(I don’t speak German, okay?)
Especially alert viewers not currently suffering from degenerative mental illnesses may recall a recent piece in which I lavished praise on the rather lovely free time-trial racer You Cruise By Mazda MX-5. Man, those were the days, eh? But imagine my surprise when not long afterwards I stumbled into what appeared to be exactly the same game again.
And as it turned out, that was only the start.
Followers of the App Store can’t have failed to notice a game that’s been in residence in the upper reaches of the charts since the day it was released, and sits alongside Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Flight Control as one of the games that pretty much everyone who ever buys an iOS device downloads on day one.
Fruit Ninja thoroughly deserves its success. It’s a beautiful game, absurdly simple but lovingly executed, frequently updated and endlessly compulsive. Judging by its OpenFeint leaderboards, it sold well over half a million copies in its first six weeks, generating almost a quarter of a million pounds for its creators after Apple’s cut of the proceeds.
(Man, there has to be an apple-cutting joke in there somewhere.)
What fewer people know about is the near-identical game that preceded it and completely flopped.
When you’re selling your app at a premium price, it’s the little touches of extra care and attention to the last tiny detail that reassure customers they’re getting a product worth the money.
Someone tell Capcom that, eh?
