Universal Review
by Craig Grannell (October 13th, 2010 at 11:00 am)
If first impressions were everything, this review would read OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS NOW *HEADEXPLOSION*. Luckily for you, Podgamer prides itself on playing games for more than thirty seconds. Stay tuned, then, for a salutory example of how quickly love at first sight can turn to PUNCHREPEATEDLYINTHEFACE hate when it comes to iOS gaming.
At this point, I loved The Incident about as much as a cute puppy doing cute puppy things.
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Universal Review 
Podgamer Recommended
by Craig Grannell (October 4th, 2010 at 6:24 pm) WITH SPECIAL GUEST STARS
Space Invaders was the first arcade game I remember playing. Due to my tender age, my dad had to lift me up to see the screen properly, something he instantly regretted, not least because I rapidly became hooked and I weighed quite a bit more than he realised.
These days, I find Space Invaders about as much fun as being sandpapered, and so I’m not a big fan of Taito’s serviceable ports for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. The original Blue Defense was a different matter, its glorious twisty neon destruction rekindling the spark that had ignited when I was a kid. And the amusingly short instructions also helped: “Tilt to aim. Bullets shoot straight up”.
Now Blue Defense has got its ‘second wave’—and I’m hooked again.
Die, alien slime!
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Universal Feature
by Craig Grannell (October 1st, 2010 at 3:14 pm)
Due to reviewing a lot of iOS games of late, I now have an RSS feed that spits an overview of every new iOS game into Google Reader. And, my word, there’s an awful lot of utter crap out there. While I remain of the opinion that iOS is the greatest gaming system to date, it probably also has the worst ratio of good to bad games.
Ironically, much of the problem stems from Apple’s openness. Yes, you read that right. People bitch about the App Store approvals process, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a game on to the App Store than, say, make it for the Nintendo DS and get it on to store shelves. Apple recently in its review guidelines made a plea for quality, saying professional developers didn’t want their apps surrounded by ‘amateur hour’; from what I can tell, they already are.
So, if you’re planning on releasing an iOS game, I’ve provided some helpful tips.
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Universal Feature
by Craig Grannell (September 30th, 2010 at 11:39 am)
I receive an early preview of a game on the App Store. It has a great concept, but is insanely difficult, to the level that it makes Squareball seem forgiving. (And if you’ve played Squareball, you’ll know it’s forgiving in the same way that iOS games are expensive—i.e. not at all.)
I email the developer, outlining my gripes in full and making suggestions. I get an email back, thanking me, and after a brief to-and-fro about some specific points, I don’t hear anything else. About a week later, I get a polite thank-you and am told some of my ideas have already been integrated into an update. Today, that update went live and the dev name-checked me in the update notes. It remains to be seen whether they improve things (I’ll review the game during the next fortnight at some point), but it looks promising.
With the exception of the name-check, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. And while it’s not the kind of thing that happens with major publishers (otherwise Scrabble would have an online turn-by-turn mode—c’mon, EA!), it’s relatively commonplace with indies. This kind of feedback—in terms of something actually happening and something happening quickly—is almost unheard of on other platforms and certainly on other mobile platforms. However, it’s something that hugely improves both the user experience and the games themselves.
Universal News
by Craig Grannell (September 30th, 2010 at 10:54 am)
As we all know, iOS doesn’t have any games with depth. All of the games are fart apps, and only provide six seconds of entertainment before you go off and play with a real console instead.
No, hang on. That’s absolute bollocks. There are titles like the beautiful and engaging Osmos, innovative arcade adventure Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, conquer ’em up Civilization Revolution, top shooter Geometry Wars, and two Monkey Island games.
I'll take you all on! Mr Blue Dot gets all aggro in the wonderful Osmos.
If those games don’t spark some excitement in you, you’re clearly dead inside and should crawl back to Gran Turismo Meets Generic Grey FPS With Orcs XIII. And even if you hate all but one of them, those six games will today set you back all of £3.54 ($5.94). Try getting that sort of value on the DS or PSP.
