by Eric March on August 16, 2009 at 1:39 am
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This is a non-review post you wouldn’t normally see on Frapstr, because I feel it is important enough that it needs to be posted here instead of on Flog, where most people will probably miss it. It’s going to be long, so if you’re of a mind to read some, grab a beer, sit back, and get comfy.
You’ll have noticed that Frapstr has been eerily quiet over the last few days. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking during that time. It’s been pretty hard thinking, too. Frapstr is my baby. From its inception as a regular column on Touch Podium to its emergence as its own review site, I’ve nursed and grown this site into something I can be pretty proud of. I’ve written many hundreds of reviews, taken thousands of screenshots, spent hours making videos, and I met a lot of awesome people and developers through Frapstr. It has largely been its own reward. I’m glad for its existence, and I’m proud of what I have accomplished with it, even though there’s still a lot I like to do with it.
But there are two things that have contributed to the continual, growing levels of stress that have become associated with Frapstr. The lesser of the two has been the readership. As much as I have tried to write comprehensive, in-depth reviews peppered with bits of my own particular brand of humour and occasional bits of snark, not to mention loads of screenshots and the occasional video, it’s a very time consuming thing to do. On the whole, the average review takes me at least an hour or two to write depending on the complexity of the game I’m writing, the depth I go into, the number of screenshots, and especially if there’s video involved — that’s another couple of hours at least. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved every minute of it.
But the problem is that throughout Frapstr’s ten and a half months of life as its own site, readership has barely grown. It started small and grew to maybe an average of 200-300 visitors on a daily basis. Most of those simply found a review from Google; some found my site from a developer’s web link to a review I did for their app. There are maybe 15-20% of readers who are returning visitors who read on some sort of regular basis. I appreciate every visit and you folks who have come back time and again are awesome. I’ve had a few readers even go so far as to take the time to shoot me an E-Mail to tell me they liked the site and appreciated the work I do. Few though they may be, each of those E-Mails has been something that kept me going. Those of you who have supported my efforts, you have my sincere gratitude. But the readership has stagnated for months on end, always hovering around the same average, sometimes dipping, sometimes spiking, but never really going anywhere. The return on the investment of my time has gradually become an issue that has now reached the point where I’ve had to seriously re-evaluate my priorities about where I invest my time.
The developers, too, have been awesome to a soul. I’ve met some really great people and gained some tremendously helpful advice and offers of help in my future development efforts as I turn to jumping back into the development pool on the iPhone. Those kind of unsolicited and sincere offers of assistance when I need it have given me a great deal of confidence and assurance that I’m not alone in forging a path through the SDK wilderness and figuring out how everything works. You folks — y’all know who you are — are just plain good people that the world needs more of.
But that brings me straight to the much larger problem: Time. Specifically, time to actually dive into that development pool head first. I’ve barely had the time to even dip my toes in the shallow end, let alone make my way over to the diving board. Frapstr is an enormous sinkhole of time, and while I have been glad to give my time to it, it has been at the expense of the larger development plans I have wanted to execute. When I first got my Macbook back in February, it was with the hastily crafted self-delusion that I could divide my time between Frapstr and learning development. But then I started taking on even more projects. Writing music for Movile’s Theme Park Madness, writing music for my very own AmbiScience app, setting up and in part maintaining Cowboy Rodeo’s blog and message forums, beta testing a variety of games — all sorts of great opportunities to contribute to a wonderful community in some meaningful fashion that fell into my lap and I couldn’t pass up. What little time I had left outside of working on Frapstr’s increasingly sporadic posts was almost entirely sunk into everything else I had going on at the time, plus little driblets here and there to maintain some sort of personal life. I’m a guy who loves to keep busy, but it had reached a critical point where something had to give.
That something is Frapstr.
It has been an incredibly tough decision. I have invested an insane amount of time and effort in Frapstr, and it hasn’t been for nothing. I don’t count Frapstr a failure by any means — if anything, I consider it its own success just by virtue of having maintained it for so long. But it also represents how I have spent the vast majority of what little free time I have. Time that increasingly should have been spent learning iPhone development and trying to eke out a career for myself in that field. Frapstr has been a hobby, something I’ve liked doing. I’ve paid to keep it in robust hosting, and while Frapstr had ads until a while ago, the amount of money I made from those banners didn’t come close to even paying for a year’s worth of hosting. That’s actually why I removed them (other than my banner for Galactic Chill, of course): They weren’t worth the space they took up versus the annoyance and uglification of seeing them plastered along the sidebars and in the header. So really, this has been all out-of-pocket because I wanted to do it.
But I want to develop iPhone games more, and development — as any developer will tell you in spades — is an even bigger time sink than running a blog by a country mile, to say nothing of how much focus and dedication has to be put into it, which is something Frapstr doesn’t require nearly as much of. The two cannot coexist in my life, not without sacrificing bits of each other to a degree that is detrimental to both endeavours. Far better to devote as much energy and attention to one big thing and turn out something good than split my focus among two big things and have them both turn out mediocre. I don’t — I can’t — do anything in half measures. I need to focus on one thing and do it almost to the exclusion of all else. It’s how I work best, and when it comes to iPhone development, you must give it your best or your efforts will sink into the obscurity 98% of the rest of the apps in the App Store do because they weren’t given their designer’s best. When it comes to my own works, there is no “good enough.” I don’t believe in a “just ship it” mentality. In the good ol’ days of cartridge-based games, they had to be perfect because they were committed to non-upgradeable silicon. I feel that games should still be like that, and the only way I can do that well enough is if I focus the majority of my attention on that and that alone. (Generally; I can still work on small side projects, but Frapstr, being the massive time investment that it is, can’t be one of them. I just can’t afford to shift that much focus away.) I’ve done the development thing before. I know how demanding it is, especially considering my past development projects have all been totally solo — graphics, sound, music, and code — and, at least at the start, that’s how it’s going to be again.
It has been a hard thing to think about, and I’ve waffled about it for days — in fact, it’s something I’ve been slowly acclimating myself to thinking about for a while now. It has only been in the past week that I’ve solidified my decision. I hate giving it up — I hate giving up on anything — but I have had to be brutally practical and honest with myself before I came to the realization that there really was ever only one pair of options: I either keep going with Frapstr, or I get into development. I just can’t make them work together; they demand too much time and attention individually to be able to share the same space, and I just can’t deal with the stress of two massive, competing passions. I’d love to be able to, but there just aren’t enough hours in a day, never mind how few of those hours I have to use on my own projects.
So it is with a melancholy heart that I write this as due notice of Frapstr’s demise. The site will remain up and available — the domain is still good ’til the end of September of 2010, and the hosting is for multiple sites that will remain paid, so there’s no point in me yanking it offline — so all content will remain and you can browse to your heart’s content, but there will be no new content available. I apologize to those developers who have submitted apps to be reviewed that I have not been able to get to, but if I don’t do this right now I may have a change of heart, and it has reached a point where that would be an unwise thing to do. Accordingly, the link to the review submission page has been removed so that developers don’t waste codes on apps that won’t get reviewed.
Ideally, what I’d really love to have happen is for someone to take Frapstr over and keep it going. Should anyone be interested in doing so, I am open to offers. Otherwise Frapstr will remain here in its present state for the forseeable future, or until and if I allow the domain to expire.
Frapstr has been a lot of fun and a great passion of mine while it lasted, but unfortunately, the time has come to set it aside and get serious in a field that could pay dividends and gives me the opportunity to forge a career out of something I’ve always liked doing but just haven’t gotten back into since I left the 16-bit scene back on the 90s. It’s all about priorities, and I have to put the practical things at the top, and unfortunately, Frapstr just isn’t practical by comparison.
It’s been great, folks. You’ve been a wonderful audience, and I’ve forged some great working relationships through Frapstr, but all good things must come to and end, particularly if they are to make way for better things, even if the better things are different. So this is goodnight. It isn’t the last you’ll see of me, though, and if Frapstr gets taken over as I hope, I hope to be able to post reviews from time to time. I will also be posting to Flog! periodically too, in case anyone is interested in reading up on my post-Frapstr exploits, though I will eventually set up a site and blog for the games company I will be developing and publishing under.
In the mean time, this will be the last post to Frapstr. I had originally expected to finish off what reviews I had left in the queue, but this decision has been hard enough to make. Even though I want to, it would just be perpetuating the fiction that there was still some semblance of use in me posting more reviews when I’ve already committed to swinging the axe. I have to do this here and now or I may end up putting it off repeatedly and never get anywhere with my development plans.
It’s been a slice folks, and I’ve loved every minute of it, but now, it’s on to bigger and better things.
Goodnight everyone.
Eric.
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by Eric March on August 10, 2009 at 10:36 am
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Hidden item games started becoming popular earlier this year when someone finally got up the energy to draw up a bunch of artwork for it, and there have been quite a few of them over the past number of months, so it’s safe to say that while it’s a genre that can always survive new entries due to having limited replay value, there hasn’t really been anything new under the sun with the fried egg hidden in it.
Anicombo have evidently felt the same way and worked out what the next logical step for the genre should be: Throw some 3D at it. Or some of it, anyway, as the end result of their labours, Itemania, ended up a curious mix of both 2D and 3D hidden item levels.
I say curious because it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect to see either one or the other in, but not both. Not that it’s a bad thing, but it ends up giving one of two impressions: Either they didn’t have enough time to make them all 3D, or they felt like maybe people wouldn’t be ready for an all-3D hidden item game, and so threw in some 2D levels to ease the transition.
Anyway, the 2D levels are pretty standard fare and give you the ability to pinch or double-tap to zoom in and out; we’ve all seen these so there’s not much point in going over any further 2D-specific functionality here. The 3D levels — which are roughly every other level — also give you the same ability, but of course also let you rotate the scene around a fixed X axis point (left and right), and to a limited degree, you can slide up and down to see the whole scene from every relevant perspective. Putting the whole hidden item genre into a 3D perspective really changes it up more than you might expect; items can be hidden behind, under, or on top of things as well as in (relatively) plain view, so there’s a lot more searching involved. For those who enjoy and play a lot of the 2D hidden item games, it actually takes a bit of mental reorganziation to understand that difference on a fundamental level so you’re watching foreground items as they move past to reveal what’s behind them.
In certain cases, some of the flat 3D items have been given a front texture, but no back, which means they completely disappear from view when looked at from behind. I asked the developer about this because I didn’t know if this was an oversight or deliberate artistic decision, but apparently it’s the latter. They didn’t want to make the scenes too crowded-looking if it wasn’t necessary so they made certain items disappear from behind so you could focus on what was in front of you without any other distractions. It doesn’t happen on all levels or with all objects, just certain ones. It’s not terribly noticeable, though, and plays no practical role in the gameplay, it might just look odd to the few who understand a little something about texture mapping and think it a mistake.
Aside from the 3D aspect the gameplay is more or less the same: You are timed on how long it takes you to solve each screen. Each level has a whole slew of things hidden in it, and you’re given a randomized subset of those things to find. In some cases there a multiples of one thing you need to find. Tap on the object when you find it and it will be counted and removed from your inventory. Tap on the wrong spot and you get a time penalty added. Find all of the items to move on to the next level. The game play works as expected, except I keep feeling that the diameter of the hot spots for each item is a little too small, as it’s too easy to tap on where you think the items are only to have the game register a miss. Much of this can be alleviated by zooming in as far as possible, though even then, particularly on the 3D levels, sometimes the objects are too small or far away to have a sufficiently large target zone. Again, not a huge deal, but this one might warrant a bit of tweaking.
Overall the game is quite well done, with decent sound and visuals; the graphics and sounds do tend to be oriented toward the younger crowd, but then the younger crowd likes this genre probably more than the average adult does (though it appeals to both), so it only stands to reason. Itemania’s real selling point though is, of course, the 3D levels, and it’s a pretty big selling point too, one which adds a new dimension (literally and figuratively) to the genre’s gameplay, and which alone makes this game’s dollar price tag more than worthwhile. For its next iteration (or even as an upate to this one) what it really needs to do though is focus on new 3D levels, as that’s really where it’s at now; The 2D levels just seem so … flat now.
In fact, about the only thing I could think of that would make this genre even better would be if you could roam freely about the 3D “world” in the style of an FPS so you have to really go physically looking for things throughout the levels opening doors, lockers, looking under things, on top of things, behind wall paintings, under floor hatches covered by bearskin rugs, etc. Now that Anicombo is exploring this genre in 3D, why not? But for now, hidden item fans should find a lot to love about this game, even with the limited levels; the 3D aspect isn’t just a novelty, it adds practical value to the gameplay and feels like the genre’s next logical progression that renders everything that came before it rather old school.
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by Eric March on August 7, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Rate it: (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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That there poor possum done got hisself runned over. Dang shame to just leave him lyin’ there. We need ta give that critter a proper burial. In batter, chicken-fried and served with taters ‘n gravy.
Welcome to the Roadkill Cafe, flattest grub this side of the I-540.
Roadkill Cafe puts you in the role of Slim LaChance, the owner of a little shack off the side of a dirt road in a little out-of-the-way spot on the outskirts of the middle of nowhere, and you aim to make a name for yourself and your fine, vulcanized cuisine. However, for such an obscure spot, there sure is a lot of traffic, and that’s good for business. Not because it brings the customers, but because it brings the food. In addition to plenty of traffic, there’s even more wildlife — all kinds of it. Possum, rabbit, chicken, squirrel, skunk — damn things are everywhere, and cars are constantly running ‘em over. So why let such a great opportunity go to waste? Get out your shovel and wheelbarrow and start loadin’ up. Take your bloody bounty back to the shack and your cook will skin ‘em, pick out the gravel, fry ‘em up and serve ‘em to happy customers — but don’t keep ‘em waiting or they’ll get angry and leave, and that’s not good for business.
As you collect your corpses and deliver them, your stockpile of meat grows — and as customers order up, it shrinks, so you have to keep collecting more to keep the cooler stocked and serving the customers in a timely fashion. Keep your customers happy, and you’ll earn stars. Get five stars and you’ll get a favourable review in the local rag, which in turn will allow you to upgrade your digs to a new location and a new building, where you’ll have to keep on scrapin’ ‘em off and servin’ ‘em up to ever more hungry patrons.
Of course, new locations mean busier locations, and not just with the customers. The roads grow larger and the traffic becomes denser, and soon you’ll be weaving around oncoming vehicles to get at the carcasses and bring ‘em on home before they spoil or get picked clean by scavengers. And as if that’s not enough, your quarry starts getting larger. Soon you’ll be encountering bears — big suckers, they are. They’ll throw you for a look if they get to you, and cars will stop to let it pass if they have time — but they can still get run over good, especially by the truckers, and when that happens you’ll be stocking up on ground ursine chuck. The rule of thumb is, don’t get hit and don’t get mauled. You only get three lives (but can earn more), so make ‘em count.
Roadkill Cafe features some excellent (and slightly disturbing) graphics throughout, and the sound effects are great — you’ll hear the noises the animals make as you approach them (while they’re still alive, of course), and they all have different sounds, which was a nice touch. The game has a good sense of humour, too, parroting some of the common (though less offensive) stereotypes of Deliverance-esque Ozark yokels. The control schemes are great, too; there are three to choose from: Stick, lure, and tilt. Stick works like a virutal full-screen joystick; Just slide your digit in the direction you want to move. You don’t even have to lift; it knows where your appendage is and where it’s moving to and will orient your player accordingly. Lure works the opposite way; you tap where you want your character to go and he’s lured to your finger. Tilt is what it sounds like; tilt to move. I found stick works best, too, and its implimentation is spot on. The fact that you can use any part of the screen instead of a fixed D-pad area really makes all the difference. In fact, choosing your control method is kind of a mini-game itself: You have to catch the chicken to confirm your selection, which gives you the opportunity to try out the control scheme before starting a game. It’s a little thing, but a cool thing.
There are two main modes of play here: Cafe, and arcade. Cafe mode is what I just described; arcade mode has no level progression, you just keep at it for as long as you can.
Now, you might think this is where I wrap things up. Instead, this is the part where I get to say, “But wait! There’s more!” No, the fun and carnage doesn’t stop with servin’ up roadkill stew. This is the part where we move on to the bonus mini-games that are selectable from the main menu:
- Survivor. You’re stuck on the road; dodge the cars for as long as you can.
- Vengeance. Now it’s the chickens who want to make roadkill out of you. Try and stay away from the growing throng of chickens for as long as possible. A rhino periodically rampages through the scene and tramples any chickens that get in his way. Try and lead the chickens in front of him to thin the herd and buy you more time — but don’t get caught on his horns yourself.
- Rampage. In this mini-game, you are driving in the traffic now, and you have to dodge traffic for as long as you can, optionally grinding up some roadkill along the way for bonus points.
Every game mode and bonus game has online global leaderboards attached to it, so you can vie for supremacy with everyone else around the world.
Roadkill Cafe was a pleasant surprise. It’s well made, well presented, has a good sense of humour, and is overall just a thoroughly enjoyable game from all angles. The main game would have been plenty enough, but the addition of three bonus mini-games really tossed in the kitchen sink here — and the price point of just a dollar makes this a must get. But if my review hasn’t convinced you — and why the hell hasn’t it? — then go and grab the lite version and give it a try for yourself.
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by Eric March on August 7, 2009 at 10:45 am
Rate it: (3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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I’ve never been a breakfast person. The only things I want when I get up in the morning are an enormous coffee and my teenage metabolism back. Candywriter seems to want to remind me about that meal which is allegedly the most important one of the day though vis a vis their light-hearted and whimsical take on those Vegas money munchers with the introduction of Breakfast Slots — and I’m a man who can’t say no to bacon.
Breakfast Slots looks like your average 5-reel slot machine on the surface, excepting of course that the reels are plastered with images of coffee, milk, OJ, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit, and other morning comestibles. Also like a variety of slot machines, you can play more than one coin at a time to add more paylines to the game and increase your chances of winning. Unlike most slot machines however, those paylines are numerous (there are 20 of them at a quarter a pop, or $5 to play max), they don’t all follow straight lines, and winning lines can consist of more than one combination of items, which is shown on the payout chart that is accessed by swiping down on the screen.
Not that the combinations really matter as it’s all just blind luck anyway; there are no special bonuses like gaining the ability to freeze or nudge reels, so you don’t have to memorize or repeatedly consult the payout chart to line up the best combos. (That may change in future versions, but as of this version those features are not present.) The one combination that you’ll want to be on the lookout for though is three or more cups of coffee. Get those, and we step into the one area where Breakfast Slots tears away from the pack: Bonus rounds.
There are three bonus rounds, and they each take the form of a little mini-game, and the outcome of the mini game will score you more money depending either on how well you perform in the mini-game, or on simple luck. For example, in one mini-game you’re given the task of choosing from one of three oranges, and then dropping that orange into a juicer to make a tall glass of OJ. There doesn’t seem to be any timing or skill involved here, and the money youy get seems simply to depend on which orange you picked.
In another bonus round, you are tasked with picking one of three soft-boiled eggs, and then tapping around the top of your chosen egg to crack it open, presumably because somewhere off-screen you’ve got a row of buttered soldiers to dip. (I’m sure they could have made that into a mini-game) I can’t tell though if it’s your egg-cracking skills that score you cash or if it’s just the luck of the egg you chose.
The third and final bonus round is about timing though. Here you’re tasked with making the perfect pancake. Batter is poured into the pan, and you have to flip it over before the one side burns, and then serve it before the other side burns. A perfect golden pancake scores you the most points, so of course progressively darker flapjacks earn you less.
After each bonus round you get whatever cash you scored plus whatever payout lines contain winning combinations, and you move on. Generally speaking slot machines are fairly boring affairs, with the only user interaction typically involving inserting coins and pulling the lever — or often just pressing a “play max” button, which is what I end up doing. It’s all about dumb luck for the most part, and while you get a cheap thrill out of making a big win, there’s just not a lot to do. Breakfast Slots adds some actual gameplay, even if it’s simplistic stuff, and gives you a particular combination to look forward to scoring for more than just the money.
In fact, I’d really like to see Candywriter expand on the mini-game concept and add a few more of them for extra variety and fun, and maybe add the ability to earn nudges or freezes. The game already has some great graphics and the sound effects are good (though they don’t utilize application volume control, instead using the default which becomes ringer volume on the iPhone — a pet peeve of mine that regular readers may remember), plus there are some decent settings including the ability to customize the win ratio, but that’s kind of cheating.
All in all though I quite enjoyed Breakfast Slots. It steps outside the usual one-armed bandit box to offer some variety and added interaction with the game, which is exactly what this genre needs to become interesting again. There’s only so much you can do with fancy themes to dress up the same old thing, so I can appreciate a nice plate of fresh thinking. And bacon. Mmmmmmmm, bacon.
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by Eric March on August 5, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Rate it: (4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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Back around a decade ago, popular RPG franchise
Might and Magic saw the release of its seventh installment,
For Blood and Honor. Two of its side quests revolved around a new mini-game New World Computing had devised called
Arcomage. It was a card game not entirely unlike real-world fantasy card games like
Magic: The Gathering, though not nearly as complex.
In Arcomage, each player had a structure that consisted of an inner tower and an outer wall. The basic object was to use your cards either to take down your opponent’s wall and tower while preventing him from doing the same to you, or build your own tower to the top before your opponent does. This was accomplished with a variety of attack, defense, construction, and power cards that variously brought your opponent’s wall and/or tower down, built your wall and/or tower up, or provided the power gems necessary to play the cards.
Oddly, it could probably be more closely tied to a much older card battle game, Mille Bournes, in which the object was to reach 700 miles before your opponent by playing distance cards to get ahead coupled with obstacle cards to slow your opponent down, and repair cards to remove any obstacles he’s played against you. Nevertheless, Arcomage turned out to be so popular they ended up releasing it as its own stand-alone game. Since then there have been numerous appearances of Arcomage-inspired games turn up as both games unto themselves, and as their own mini-games within larger RPGs — including Redshift’s Legacy, and its sequel The Quest, the latter of which has made it to the App Store.
All of this is by way of taking the scenic route to telling you about Towerland, a game that takes its cues directly from Arcomage. The objective is the same: Either tear your opponent’s tower to the ground, or build yours up to the sky, while preventing your opponent from doing the same. Both you and your opponent start off with 5 cards, though only yours are shown. Cards all have a wide variety of abilities, from building your wall and/or tower higher, tearing your opponent’s wall and/or tower down, earning extra resources, and so on. Along each side of the screen are your resources in blue, green and red. Playing cards costs resources, as indicated by the cost values at the top of each card. Resources are earned at the end of each round according to the number of sources you have managed to acquire — the more sources, the more resource points you get each round. Sources are gained by playing source cards. If you have no moves, you can always discard a card into the swirling vortex.
The game does feature some in-game help to get you started, but they aren’t very robust and players who aren’t familiar with Arcomage or its brethren may have some difficulty learning the system. Fortunately, the cards do make a certain amount of sense; as mentioned, the required resources and the cost of each resource is listed along the top of the card; the action(s) of the card are listed as coloured icons down the center and have arrows indicating whom each action will effect, and the colour represents what the effect is. Furthermore, you can tap on a card and bring down a slide-out tray that shows the effects of that particular card. Specific instructions are pretty well beyond the scope if this review, but suffice it to say it doesn’t actually take too long to get the hang of it if you already have a passing familiarity with Arcomage or one of its clones. If you don’t, you may find it a bit tough to get into.
That said though, Towerland features some nicely stylized graphics and plays pretty well. It takes the form of a kind of adventure where you’re travelling from place to place battling wizard after more skillful wizard in attempt to defeat them all. The game features an achievements and medals system, which helps to set this apart from its peers and provides additional incentive to keep playing and gives the story mode a bit more depth. I rather enjoyed playing this particular variant and I think it’s pretty well done. The cards are nicely balanced, and it takes a while to work out the nuances of play and get a feel for how your opponents play that help make you a better player, just as a game that has some measure of strategy and skill should, which it turn makes it more enjoyable.
Currently, it’s enjoying a “77% discount” sale, though at any standard price point that works out to an odd number, so I’m assuming Jury meant 75%, which would make its regular price $3.99 based on its current price of a buck. All things considered I could probably see myself shelling out four bucks for this, but at $0.99 you can’t go wrong, so I’d go out and snap this up before it goes back up.
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by Eric March on August 3, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Rate it: (31 votes, average: 4.61 out of 5)
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I was actually looking into secure ID storage on my iPhone recently when I had this dropped into my lap, and from SplashData no less, so I knew it was just what I’d want in sensitive information storage and retrieval.
SplashID represents what is probably the best application for keep track of all sorts of sensitive data you don’t want prying eyes peeping: Your birth certificate, SIN card, driver’s license, credit cards, lock combinations, web logins and passwords, and pretty well everything else. It features templates for the most common types of things you’d want to store, but is also completely extensible allowing you to add your own types and categories. Even with the preset templates, you can fully customize each entry’s fields, icon, and so on. Each field can be masked (hidden with stars) so that it’s only viewable when you tap on it — great for credit card numbers, debid cards, PINs, passwords, and the like. Each entry can also have a photo attached to it, so you can take a picture of that piece of ID, credit card, or whathaveyou to store along with its information.
SplashID is also WebKit enabled to allow you to set up website URLs with logins and passwords, and then let you log into and surf those sites securely while it displays an overlay containing your login and password for that website, all without leaving the app. If you’re creating a new login to a website from within the app, you can even have it generate a random secure password for you. Hit a Phishing link? Fuggeddabout it. SplashID is hip to that nonsense and will deliver you to the real website automatically. There are a number of configuration options available, including the ability to toggle the home display between alphabetical and category views, change the header and footer colours, create alternating colours for each line, choose preset colour themes, activate dynamic search, and more. Plus, there’s a whole user guide and FAQ if you need help getting up to speed.
SplashID is also extremely secure, featuring front- and side-door password locks that require a password when you load the app, as well as if the device is woken from sleep mode while still in the app, so nobody can access your information even if you forget to quit after turning your device off or letting it go to sleep. You can set the number of minutes before it asks for a password again, so it won’t constantly bother you if you’re just turning it off for a few minutes and don’t plan on leaving it unattended. If you are though and you have it set for a certain number of minutes, there’s a convenient lock button that lets you lock the app immediately. You can also set a hint for the password in case you’ve forgotten it; the hint can be called up from the lock screen.
Beyond that, it features extra-strong 256-bit BlowFish encryption for unhackable security. This is particularly important when used in conjunction with SplashID Desktop, which is sold separately for $19.95. This companion app for Mac and Windows allows you to sync your data between your iPhone/Touch and the desktop, retaining all of the same security features and front-door password protection, and additionally giving you all of the same features of the mobile app, so you can add and edit data on either platform and keep it all in sync.
SplashData has a long history of creating some of the best mobile utilities around, and SplashID is no exception to their stable. I’ve been using it to keep all of my credit card and personal ID information in it. SplashData is one of the few companies I’d trust with my most sensitive information, and SplashID fits the bill perfectly for everything I need it to do. It’s pricier than its competition, especially if you factor in the desktop app, but on the other hand it’s a highly trusted name with a well-established history and a ton of awards under its belt. Besides, no other data minder on the App Store offers a solution as complete, secure, and configurable as SplashID, so it’s a price I think is worth paying if you value your data and want to keep it safe yet close to hand, and the company’s history coupled with the app’s security brings a comforting peace of mind knowing that it’s perfectly safe even if your device gets into the wrong hands — always presuming, of course, that you don’t make your password 1234 like you have on your luggage.
Related Posts:
- Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 -- SplashTravel has your jet-setting back
- Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 -- SplashPhoto
- Friday, May 15th, 2009 -- SplashNotes Outliner
- Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 -- File Magic
- Saturday, November 8th, 2008 -- Converters
Posted in Paid Apps, Utilities No Comments »
by Eric March on August 3, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Rate it: (5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)
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I can say that because Bobby Fischer is a fictional character, even if he’s based on a
real person. So there are quite a few games of chess on the App Store to go with the thousands that exist for other platforms throughout computing history, to say nothing of history’s most fabled dedicated chess machines like IBM’s Big Blue or Sirius Cybernetics’ Garry Kasparov. Chess Elite goes a little bit beyond your average single-player chess game though.
To start with the basics, Chess Elite features a strong single-player chess engine with adjustable difficulty to allow you to customize the game to your skill and/or patience level; the stronger the engine, the more deeply it thinks of its next moves and the longer it takes to make its move. Of course, if you’re a chess fan, patience is your virtue of choice. Furthermore, for those who like to customize their aesthetics, Chess Elite also features 3 distinct chess board themes to choose from, each with 3 different colour variations, so you can play chess and look cool doing it.
But while the strong chess engine is a good draw, the standout feature in Chess Elite is the ability to do a digital version of “chess by mail.” This calls back to the days when certain turn-based games were played by regular snail mail. Yes, yes, I know. It’s almost unfathomable in this day and age of digital delivery and instant gratification, but yes, people actually used to play turn-by-turn through the mail. They also used to walk ten miles to school through three feet of snow every day. Uphill. Both ways. Barefoot. But I digress. Chess Elite allows you to view who’s playing online and challenge them to a game. So challenged, you can exchange moves with the other person back and forth at your leisure; you’re notified when the other person has made a move so you can go into the game and play yours. You can even have multiple games with multiple people going at once, and the next version of the game will feature push notifications for OS 3 users with push notifications enabled who want to be notified of new moves without having to load the game.
The chess genre in the App Store is pretty competitive, and there are some really strong alternatives to choose from, each with a variety of options — in fact, even 99Games have Chess Pro, which has its own distinct features. However, very few feature asynchronous in-app online play (Caissa Chess only plays by E-Mail, Chess With Friends is online only with no single-player option, and Chess Wars only works with Facebook), so for now at least, Chess Elite stands as one of the best online chess players with a strong single-player engine.
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Posted in Games: Strategy, Paid Apps 1 Comment »
by Eric March on August 2, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Rate it: (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Interactive digital toys have been a staple of pretty well every operating system since the days when computers were capable of presenting something compelling enough to make people want to play it. Heck, even before that the demo scene effectively presented largely non-interactive toys that showed pretty and technically impressive visuals and sound. That’s why there are
a lot of them around these days. Fluid Motion Painter could probably fall into a similar category as
Spawn Illuminati, in that it’s artistic in an abstract sort of way, in the realm of fluid dynamics instead of particles.
It may be a little bit unfair to compare the two though because they’re actually rather different, even if they share a similar concept. Fluid Motion Painter could best be described as using your fingers to drop virtual coloured ink into swirling liquid to create fluid, dynamic imagery. In its basic form it gives you the ability to drag one or two fingers around the screen to create inky swirls in the water that constantly shift and change. What’s interesting about this one though is that it records your actions and plays them back on perpetual loop, even giving you the ability to continuously add to them, making the loop longer and longer.
A toy/art application like this though wouldn’t be much fun without the ability to customize and configure it, and Fluid Motion Painter has a lot to offer on that front. You can customize the colour palette, both the number of colours used and cycled through (virtually unlimited) and the individual colours used. You can also customize the swirl patterns using a line grid that shows the directionality and speed of the water’s motion. Drag your finger over the grid and watch the pattern change. Finally, there’s the full settings menu, which allows you to really configure things like speed, flow, randomness, and … a bunch of other … things. Yeah, um … admittedly, I don’t actually know what most of the options do because they’re all titled with icons only, and the functions those icons represent are sort of inscrutable. Ordinarily I’d set one single control to an extreme one way or the other just to see how it changes things, but in this case, because of the rapid flow and its randomness, it’s rather hard to tell what if anything did change. You’ll see me changing some things in this menu in the video below like I know what the hell I’m doing, but really I don’t. Not a clue. The two options I did figure out was the rate of colour cycle (lower right option) and whether drawing produces smooth ink lines or blotchy drops (lower left).
Fortunately, David knows the menu isn’t the most self-explanatory and will be working on some documentation, either externally or within the app (preferably the latter). For now you can always experiment with it, which is often part of the fun, but the difficulty in seeing for certain what effect those changes have doesn’t really help matters. One other absent option that some people might miss is the ability to save loops for later playback. Right now, it remembers your last actions, but as soon as you clear them with the X on the menu, they’re gone forever.
One final interesting option here is the ability to not only freeze the screen and send a snapshot of it to your camera roll, but it even allows you to step through the dynamic animation frame-by-frame so you can capture the perfect screenshot. This option is accessible either from the pop-up menu, or by tapping the top left or right corners of the screen for quick access. Overall Fluid Motion Painter is quite a col and engaging little abstract, dynamic art application with which you can create some fascinating fluid designs. It could use the ability to save sequences, and it would be nice to see few other effects or different brushes (even animated brushes), but as it stands Fluid Motion Painter is a fascinating app that can create some trippy, colourful, and beautiful abstract imagery in motion. There aren’t a lot of screenshots below because this is really all about the motion, so check out the nice HD video below to get a real idea of what this is about.
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Posted in Entertainment, Paid Apps No Comments »
by Eric March on August 2, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Rate it: (23 votes, average: 4.26 out of 5)
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iBright has some interesting timing. Just last week my wife downloaded a game called
Sky Wire [
lite] (iTunes links) which I thought was a pretty unique little tightrope walking game, though the graphics and sounds left a lot to be desired; it was quite plain overall, and not really worth a review. It wasn’t bad enough to be full of FAIL, but it wasn’t really good enough to say very many good things about.
But then along comes Bryce Katz of iBright Studios to submit a very similar concept called TightWire, developed by Wasted Pixel, and one look at it told me that this is how you do a tightrope walking game. It adopts a very whimsical, amusing theme, featuring an overweight bloke in suspenders as the star of the highwire act trying to pull it off over a variety of cityscapes, making the walk from building to biulding with no nets and no airbags, just cold, hard concrete. You can probably already see where this is going, can’t you?
The game tasks you with using the accelerometer to keep your pudgy player balanced and walking across the tightrope. Tilting left and right is used to maintain balance, while forward and backward controls your speed. The faster you walk, the more points you get and the better time you get at the end of the level. However, if he loses his balance, down, down, down he goes, screaming all the way until he blows a crater in the pavement — and yes, you get to see and hear it in all its glory, unlike Sky Wire, which just ends the level the second you reach an unrecoverable angle.
The graphics and animations in TightWire are spot on with an incredibly shiny coat of polish. The animations of your character seem to be motion captured (or else incredibly well animated), so they’re extremely fluid and natural and bring to mind the sort of thing you’d expect to see from Pixar. There are a variety of animations and sounds to go along with it; falling to the ground can trigger one of several camera angles from which you can witness the plummet, and your character features several different scream sounds in addition to periodic sounds of worry and relief as you walk the wire, which adds a good deal of variety just to keep you engaged and wanting to try again. There isn’t a lot of music to the game — mostly just ambient city noise so you can concentrate on walking, but there are some great acoustic and electric guitar licks when you fail or pass a level, along with a brief (and admittedly somewhat poorly looped) acoustic guitar melody for the main menu. Options exist to adjust sound and music volume, as well as full calibration for the accelerometer, complete with bubble level. The controls are quite responsive and work very well. It’s actually quite challenging — you don’t have the inclinometers that Sky Wire has so gauging balance is done by a combination of watching which way your character leans and a warning meter at the bottom center of the screen that ramps up the more off-balance you are, though it’s about as accurate as gauging the exact signal strength of your cell phone based solely on the number of bars you see. But that’s part of the challenge and makes it a lot more realistic.
The concept and game itself is pretty entertaining and addictive in that “just one more go” sort of way. You get unlimited lives with which to do so, but let’s be hones here: While completing a level to move on to the next higher stage is of course your goal, what you end up really being interested in is the schadenfreude of listening to your dude scream all the way down and watching him destroy the pavement, which is a good indication of how much attention to detail went into the game as a whole, but particularly that aspect of it. The game’s primary downfall is that it only has 5 levels, ranging from 3 storey buildings all the way up to 50. It really needs more levels, and as some have requested, an “endless” mode. Fortunately, both Wasted Pixel and iBright Studios are keen to keep updating the game and adding new features, so more levels (among other things) are a distinct possibility down the road.
Even as it is though, TightWire goes for a mere dollar, which is an excellent price for a game of such high quality even taking the limited number of levels into account; it’s clear Wasted Pixel know what they’re doing and they do it very well. TightWire is one of those games that you’ll want to whip out and show people just for the impressive graphics, animations, and hearty lulz on top of the entertaining gameplay. Given that it’s the same price as that other tightrope game, it’s crystal clear which is the one to get. Check out the screenshots and watch the video below. Be sure to watch it in all its HD glory for maximum impact. Yeah, I went there.
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Posted in Games: Casual, Paid Apps 3 Comments »
by Eric March on July 29, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Rate it: (4 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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There are plenty of copter/cave flyer games out there, including on the App Store. I never really saw the attraction to the original game. It boiled user interaction down to such a basic level (one button) that it just didn’t engage me. It was okay for the first few minutes, and then it just got boring. Lots of people have tried to improve on the formula, and some have done fairly well, but it wasn’t really my cuppa.
So along comes a fellow named Konstantin from CyanSoft (no relation to the Myst people) submitting iHawky for review. I took a look and at the time I checked it out it had black & white graphics, and I thought, “Well, that’s kind of cute.” I thought the monochromatic visuals were nicely done, like stylish pencil drawings, so I decided to review it. However, this latest version suddenly went all colour on me and was now just like all the other cave flyer games. Still, I gave it a shot to see if it was much different than the others.
As it turns out, it’s a lot like Nimblebit’s Bluebird [iTunes link], only with mountains as extra obstacles instead of other birds, and no bird seed to boost your energy. Instead, you have an energy bar at the bottom and you have to flap judiciously to conserve energy. Run out and you fall to the ground. Like Bluebird, hitting a cloud reduces your energy by a set amount, but doesn’t completely exhaust your supply unless you’re already low. Mountains however are an instakill. You can slowly recover from hitting a cloud if you’re conservative in your flapping though, so it’s not always fatal. Also unlike Bluebird, the game starts off slowly but continues to accelerate the pace as you continue.
After playing a number of games however I’ve decided that while it’s cute and features nice graphics and decent (though limited) sound, there’s a fundamental flaw in the gameplay. The clouds are placed randomly — which would seem okay if it weren’t for two problems. First of all, while the clouds all move at their own random pace, those random clouds can gather in very inconvenient places — like stacked up over a tall mountain peak, leaving you no other option but to smack into one or the other. Even more egregiously however, clouds can exist almost entirely above the screen area. I smacked into a cloud I didn’t even know was there because only the bottom few pixels of its shadow were visible at the top of the screen.
Randomness is good. It makes each play through different. But randomness without checks and balances against no-win situations and unfair moves, even unintentional ones, is not. Clouds should not be allowed to be more than 50% above the top of the screen, and they shouldn’t be able to arrange into a pattern that will block your entire path ahead unless you have at your disposal a way to avoid that, such as being able to move forward to head off the oncoming wall-o-cloud, or creating a routine in the code that checks to make there there is always enough room to manoeuvre through a cloud bank/mountain combo based on the bird’s current position, speed, and projected positions of the oncoming cloud banks by the time they reach your bird. Absent those, you are at the mercy of the random number generator, which means you may experience an unexpected and unavoidable death at any moment. That’s frustrating, and frustration is not fun. Also, viewing the high score table dumps you into Safari instead of handling it internally, which is kind of annoying.
That said, iHawky does have the potential to be a decent (though relatively average) cave flyer style game if those issues could be fixed, and while it does vary enough from the standard formula to avoid the dull gameplay, and is a pretty cute game besides, it doesn’t really step far enough outside the box to stand out in any significant way.
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Posted in Games: Casual, Paid Apps No Comments »
by Eric March on July 28, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Rate it: (3 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
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This is the part where I insert the “Aw, geez, not this s–t again!” image macro. Or I would if I didn’t willingly elect to do this review.
But never let it be said that I never someone a fair shake. I can be mean and snarky and rip crap apps to shreds, but I’m always willing to give their developers a second — or third, or fourth — chance. Technicat is one of those developers that I keep giving chances to. Frapstr readers from the earlier days may recall that I’ve reviewed Technicat’s earliest endeavours, FuguTilt, FuguBowl (which is almost the spiritual predecessor to this) and the well-deserved Hall of FAIL inductee, FuguMaze. None of them earned more than two stars, though in the interest of fairness, FuguMaze has been updated, and I checked it out just to see how it’s progressed in the last several versions, and also because I apparently enjoy mental anguish, and surprisingly the frame rate is much smoother, it actually controlls well now, and there are two different wall/ceiling textures, neither of which are a puffer fish. It still has those random dramatic musical stabs for no reason whatsoever, and it’s still utterly pointless, but at least it works better now. And it costs a buck now, too.
But this isn’t a review of FuguMaze. This is about Technicat’s latest endeavour — amazingly, a licensed product, something you wouldn’t think Technicat would even dream about trying to pull off on his own given his track record so far. But he’s trying to pull it off, and as it happens, it wasn’t just a random choice either. Turns out our friend Technicat used to work for HyperEntertainment, the folks behind this game. He didn’t work on the PC version, but worked on an arcade port and a French version for Quebec, Canada. Now he’s working on the iPhone version under Unity, his weapon of choice. Yes, this worries me, too — but, fair shake, fourth chances, etc. After all, it’s been nearly three quarters of a year since his first efforts appeared on the App Store. That’s a long time to step up your game.
For those that don’t recall, HyperBowl 3D was a fantasy bowling game originally released at the tag end of last century that was pretty much like your traditional bowling game except that it featured wacky themes and different types of lanes with obstacles and paths to follow and such. Think of it like the concept of minigolf as applied to bowling with the added bonus of being able to control the speed and direction of your ball as it rolls. Yes, it was pretty cool, actually — I first played it back in ‘01 in the Microsoft Plus! Pack for Windows XP, which contained a scaled-down “Plus! Edition” of the game, and quite liked it, so you can imagine my excitement when I first saw that someone was bringing into the iPhone, followed by the fear and trepidation when I discovered that the someone was Technicat, whom could be the iPhone gaming equivalent of Michael Bay when it comes to bringing the classics into a modern setting. No … no, that’s not really fair. Michael Bay is way worse.
So, HyperBowl 3D Classic on iPhone. On the surface, after first seeing the screenshots, I thought, “Hey, y’know, this is remarkably similar.” Indeed, the graphics are more or less the same, scaled down to a mobile device’s specifications, so maybe Technicat has finally found his A game and I could stop ribbing him for releasing pointless crapware. Fortunately, he was giving away some promo codes on a forum and I managed to snag one — which is good, because I was really hesitant of spending even a buck when, despite the promising visuals, I would still be gambling on someone with a poor track record. So I downloaded and I played.
Once again, on the surface it was remarkably similar. All of the original concepts were there, albeit limited to just the one lane and lacking any form of menu system, high score system, or really anything but the core game itself. That was sort of worrisome since that immediately made it feel like a beta. As I took my first shot, the frame rate — even on the iPhone 3GS — was rather low, the first indication that this may end up a signature Technicat joint after all. I knocked down my first set of pins, which made a clean hole right down the center. Yes, that’s right. Only the three pins in the very center got knocked down. They didn’t so much as breathe on the neighbouring pins.
Okay. Next to impossible to do in real bowling, but maybe I jut happened to hit that sweet spot dead center and some slightly dodgy collision detection and/or physics routines caused a bit of an oops. Fine, okay. So I take another shot. And another. And another. In fact, I played quite a few games of this just to nail it down, and while I was eventually able to knock down some strikes by coming at the head pin from a curved angle, I was also still able to make clean holes down various parts of the pins, and even make some pins hover there on an angle in mid air, like they were about to be knocked over and suddenly decided the weren’t having any of it, so they just hunt there at a 75° angle and didn’t get counted as a downed pin. Once, I took a shot, knocked down some pins, and the game just sat there, apparently having gotten lost in its own navel, as it never moved on to the next frame.
There was just no escaping it, even as I hoped I was mistaken this time: The physics stink. Since the physics are really the meat and potatoes of any bowling game, that means the game stinks by default. Any bowling game must of absolute necessity feature tight physics that just work. You have to be able to aim your shot, shoot, and know intuitively how that shot generally went before the pins go down. Like anything in the physical world, we just inherently understand physics, and if we can’t mentally predict the precise results of complex physical interactions, we can usually get an inuitive general sense of how something’s going to go down. So when we encounter physics in a video game we expect it to behave more or less the way we intuitively understand that it should, and when it doesn’t, the whole thing feels off — so off that you can’t even predict how it’s going to react, so you can’t even come up with some play style that can compensate to any significant degree.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not unplayable to the degree that you’ll never get anywhere with it. Under certain circumstances the physics do work — or rather, the angle and speed of the shot you’ve taken are such that even when the physics stuffs up, it’s still in a manner that knocks down the pins you’d expect it to. If you can work out a speed and angle that works for you, you can get a decent score in the game. But that’s not the point, is it? You shouldn’t have to fight with the game’s own mechanics in order to get anywhere.
Sure, it’s got pretty decent graphics, and the sounds are there, too — but these are just assets from the original, so you kind of expect that. In all it just feels like an early beta: The basics are there, but everything still needs considerable work and tweaking before it’s ready for prime time. Unfortunately this has already aired, and the result is that it just isn’t worth even the dollar being charged. Furthermore, Technicat is considering releasing other lanes in an episodic fashion as separate $0.99 apps, or possibly introducing new lanes as paid updates or downloadable content for OS3 users. To be frank though, Technicat needs to focus on perfecting this one before he even considers bringing the others around.
To be fair, I’d have to say that this is Technicat’s best work so far, and it actually shows some promise, so it’s a good deal away from the Hall of FAIL, but that’s still like saying Denny’s roast beef entrees are better than fried SteakUms. It’s true, but neither are very appetizing when sitting beside a nicely aged New York striploin. (That may not be an entirely fair comparison as I’m quite certain SteakUms were never intended to be food.) But best work or not, there’s still a long road ahead before I can start doling out the compliments. I may revisit this after a few updates if it somehow becomes good, but until then, take a pass.
Related Posts:
- Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 -- FuguBowl
- Thursday, March 19th, 2009 -- PDAMill’s Free Spree: 26 Games in 9 Titles
- Sunday, February 8th, 2009 -- Downhill Bowling Free
- Monday, November 10th, 2008 -- FuguMaze
- Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 -- FuguTilt
Posted in Games: Sports, Paid Apps No Comments »
by Eric March on July 27, 2009 at 10:46 am
Rate it: (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Ever play a game and you
know you’ve played it before in a Web-based Flash version but you can’t for the life of you remember what its name was? iCollider is like that. I don’t suppose it’s important though because anyone who recognizes it will probably remember themselves, and the rest who don’t will have something new to try.
In any event, Rashid Nasibulin (whose games I have reviewed before) is back in action with iCollider, a a fast-paced action game that starts off deceptively easy but starts getting pretty frenetic in short order. The idea here is that a variety of types of atoms are constantly turning up and floating around, and for whatever reason, that’s a bad thing. It’s fine if there are as many of 9 of them in the same area, but as soon as you start getting 10 or more, you head into critical mass territory, as depicted by a meter that says as much in the lower right. If you reach full critical mass, you’re done for.
Your task, then, is to stave off reaching critical mass for as long as possible. Obviously, this being an abstract game with no end, critical mass is inevitable, so you’re just playing for time, presumably so everyone can safely get to da choppah. To do this, you need to tap atoms to make them do whatever it is a given atom is designed to do, which usually entails exploding in some form. There are five primary types of atoms that you start off with: One that send off two neutrons to the left and right, one that sends off two neutrons up and down, one that sends off four neutrons in the four main directions, one that sends off four neutrons on diagonals, and one that sends off eight neutrons in all directions. If an neutron hits another atom, it will set that atom off the same as if you tapped it, and if the castoff from that neutron hits another, you start a chain rection going which can score you big points. (I’m not sure why neutrons were the specific particles chosen here, as eletrons are the things that commonly fly off and travel from atom to atom without the pesky requirement of nuclear fission — but whatever; this isn’t supposed to be realistic, is it, so I can just shut my pedantic cake hole.)
But this isn’t a simple matter of keeping the atom count low by furiously tapping everything that turns up. Look what that did to Tom Sizemore’s career. In iCollider, there are more than just the five primary atoms I mentioned. There are some you just can’t tap on, so they must be destroyed either by the castoff neutron from another atom, or by other means. As you progress, you’ll discover new atoms, classified rather curiously under “achievements” — even though many of the new atoms are hinderances and as such are not things you actually want to achieve. Not that you have a choice, as you’ll achieve those achievements eventually anyway, it’s just a matter of playing long enough, so they’re really not achievements at all. They’re more like new levels.
Among the new atoms you’ll discover are targets, which can only be destroyed by castoff neutrons; mutli-hit atoms, which can only be destroyed by multiple hits from castoff neutrons; smaller atoms that can’t be destroyed by normal means and merely bounce around colliding into other atoms; bombs which must be detonated before their timer reaches zero or else it’s game over; black holes (Higgs bosuns?) which suck neutrons into oblivion and must be destroyed by other means; directional nukes, which can eliminate anything and everything above and below, or to either side of it depending on its directionality; and more. The further you progress the more new atoms you discover, some of which are beneficial, others just get in the way or present an active danger.
The graphics in iCollider are quite slick and well-done. The rippling of the grid background and the particle-style explosions add considerable spice to what eventually becomes a ridiculously fast-paced game as you try and stay ahead of the curve and stave off the inevitable. The sound effects are quite good, though there’s no music in the game (which may change in future updates as Rashid is looking toward getting a soundtrack done). My complaints are twofold however. The first is semantics with regard to the classification of “achievements” that I already mentioned. The other is a bit more serious and that is that once you’ve discovered new atoms, they stay discovered and in play even when you start a new game from scratch. While generally speaking you’d think that the newly discovered beneficial atoms would be offset by the hindering atoms, the fact is that of the first half of the atoms you discover, only one — the nuke — could be considered beneficial. The others are just obstacles that make the game harder, so starting a new game at this point starts you off at a disadvantageously higher difficulty level, and there’s no way to reset the discovered atoms, so you can’t start a new game with a completely blank slate like the first time you played. You can reset the high score, but that’s it.
While the lack of reset ability is a bit of a serious oversight, the game is still quite enjoyable, and if that little issue gets addressed I could say that this game is about as good as it could get. It would be nice if some real achievements could be implemented and the wording of discovered atoms changed to … discovered atoms or something, but that would be gravy and not a requirement. It’s certainly worth checking out at any rate, as long as you’re okay with the lack of reset ability for now, and is certainly among some of the best pure tap games on hte App Store.
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Posted in Games: Action, Paid Apps 1 Comment »
