Review: Cell&Love The Fun of Fusion
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
Puzzle games have been wildly popular in the casual gaming market, a fact that has inevitably, for better or worse, resulted in a saturation of the genre on the AppStore. Because of this, it’s a wonder that Cell & Love can still inject a great deal of life and charm into the genre.
Cell & Love is a new kind of puzzle game that asks you to merge cells of different size and colors to clean the screen. By solving levels, you evolve a kind of monster, they are very nice and have very funny names. That alone was enough of a reason to take a closer look at Mutant Games Cell & Love, an attractive and clever puzzle game that looks perfect for the iPhone/iPod platform.
About the duration, it contains 100 puzzle levels, so there is no shortage of game in here. Unless a level has an obvious solution, there’s a real “trial and error” vibe to the gameplay. The game is simple at first, but as you clear screens the difficulty really ramps up. Each level is presented with a proverb, which makes the game more depth. You’ll find yourself playing for hours, it’s difficult to stop!
In conclusion, this is a good puzzle game. I really like the concept and the visual style, the game has an aura around it, thanks in no small part to its brilliant graphics. It’s like play looking at a microscope.
Cell & Love is a good idea well executed and presents a lot of challenge to a puzzle player. The $1.99 price is just right.
Developer: Mutant Games
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1
Price: $1.99
Rating: 4/5
Tags: apple, application, apps, cell&love, iPhone, iPod Touch, mutant games, video game
Review: Earth Dragon
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
- Rating:
- Price: $2.99 (Get it)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: Earth Dragon
Short and sweet. That’s what I’d call Earth Dragon. Players take control of a dragon, but instead of direct control, you have to use the accelerometer and some finger swipes to direct the scaly character. Flapping the iPhone up and down causes the dragon to fly upwards, while tilting left or right causes it to glide down in that direction. Add in a finger tap to unleash fiery destruction, and that’s the gist of the game.
Each normal stage has a goal which amounts to destroying everything while still staying alive. It’s an easy goal to attain, because the dragon can simply stomp apart castles and burn humans before they even get a chance to attack.
Scattered between every few stages are bonus coin collection levels where players must direct the dragon towards coins as he flies through the sky. The game boasts 15 stages in total, but other than the last boss stage, most of them can be completed in less than a minute.
While I wasn’t thrilled to learn about the accelerometer controls, it’s not difficult to get used to. If the controls were more conventional, the stages would have been easier than they are now, taking away from the challenge.
The graphics in Earth Dragon are charmingly simple and what drew me to the game. The dragon is incredibly cute and rotund. The archers and wizards are tiny enough that I feel sorry for burning them.
Earth Dragon was enjoyable, but lasted about 20 minutes before I beat the entire game on my first try. For $3, that’s not a whole lot of game time. I wish I could recommend this to a wider audience, but given the shortness of the game compared to its price, you’d be better off waiting for a sale or price drop instead.
Browser Game Pick: Captain Forever
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
In Captain Forever, you’re the captain of a ship named Nemesis, stranded in space without a single clue about your current whereabouts. Fortunately an info buoy is around to help, providing you with some information about the sector you are in and supplying repair modules to rebuild your ship.
By destroying enemy ships with your default laser weapon, you can cause them to drop ship parts that can be attached to your own ship. Additional ship plating, extra weapons and increased thruster power are just some of the benefits to be gained from salvaging intact modules.
Captain Forever is a series of episodes to be launched by Farbs in the coming months, with the first game now available to play for free. Supporters who donate $20 for the project not only get to play the sequel Captain Successor right away, but will also have access to all future episodes in the series.
Free Machinarium Bonus EP
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
The Amanita Design team had posted up five tracks that were excluded from the official soundtrack for Machinarium, originally available to buy separately or as a free download if you purchase the full game. This new set of songs also include The Robot Band Tune, a short musical interlude played by the group of musically-inclined robots huddled just outside the bar. Get the EP here.
Review: Golvellius – The Valley of Doom
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
- Rating:
I have mixed feelings about emulating classic games on the iPhone. On the plus side, some of my favorite games from the past are finding a new audience in the App Store. On the other hand, the emulation quality of many retro releases has been less than impressive. The lack of a physical controller often makes the classics less fun, and and worst, renders them unplayable.
The bad news is that DotEmu’s iPhone version of the Sega Master System action-RPG Golvellius: The Valley of Doom suffers from many of the problems that plagued other App Store retro revivals. In all, though, I was surprised at how much of the original experience still shines on the platform.
Golvellius is, at its core, a stripped-down take on The Legend of Zelda’s exploration-based gameplay. Players will spend much of the game wandering around an overhead-view world map, which consists of a series of single-screen areas.
Almost every screen has a secret room that can be uncovered by performing a certain task — pushing rocks, defeating enemies, or using certain items, in most cases. These hidden caves contain helper characters, who will sell you life-extending potions and other quest items.
(They’re also quick to curse your name if you’re unable to pay.)
Unlike Zelda, though, many of Golvellius’s puzzles are simple and easily solved. Most hidden overworld areas are easy to discover on your own, and dialog sequences hint at the solutions to the more complex puzzles. This results in a more action-packed and better-paced game than Zelda was, even though Golvellius’s clumsy controls ultimately make Zelda more fun to play.
The awkward controls are more pronounced in the iPhone version. Your character’s sword has a short reach, and you’ll often find yourself stabbing the air right next to an enemy rather than the enemy itself. The controls are a bit better in the occasional side-view action segments, but the auto-scrolling stages leading up to boss battles never controlled all that well to begin with, and they’re much harder to play with a virtual control pad.
Control issues aside, the biggest problem with the iPhone port of Golvellius is that it only runs at about three-quarters of the speed of the original Sega Master System version. The speed has improved in the most recent update, but it still performs far slower than it should.
Oddly, though, I felt that the slower speed actually made the game more playable. Golvellius is a difficult game — overworld enemies swarm you when you enter each screen, and death can come quickly if you’re slow to react. The reduced speed evens the odds in your favor when you’re fighting against enemy hordes and the problematic control pad. It’s disappointing from a purist’s standpoint, sure, but from a gameplay perspective, the slower speed is a welcome break.
It’s not all bad news, either, as many gameplay aspects have been updated for the better. The iPhone version of Golvellius includes multiple save slots, and the game can be saved and loaded at any time — a vast improvement over the original version, which only allowed saving via passwords. DotEmu has even implemented the enhanced FM synth soundtrack previously exclusive to the Japanese version of Golvellius, as a bonus.
Despite its many problems, Golvellius turned out better than I thought it would. It remains a fun and inventive game throughout, and the reduced emulation speed actually works to its advantage. It’s just unfortunate that the iPhone’s control limitations make the experience less fun than it would be otherwise. With some patience and practice, though, action-RPG fans could find a lot to like here.
(And at only 99 cents, there’s little room for complaint.)
Review: Arkanoid
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
- Rating:
I like Arkanoid. It’s simple fun in short bursts, and the addition of power-ups and enemy characters keeps the formula fresh and appealing for long-term play.
The last few entries in Taito’s Arkanoid franchise have been underwhelming, though. The series never received the drastic reinvention that Space Invaders did with titles like Space Invaders Extreme and Space Invaders Infinity Gene, and the most recent sequels, Arkanoid DS and Arkanoid Live, were each disappointing in their own ways.
Arkanoid for the iPhone, however, might just be my favorite Arkanoid title since 1997’s Arkanoid Returns. It totally nails the core gameplay, and brings the series back to its roots while introducing just enough modern complexity to improve the experience.
It’s great to finally be able to play Arkanoid in its native vertical format, for one thing. Arkanoid DS tried to simulate a tall playfield by splitting the action between two screens, but the result only created greater distance between the ball and the bricks, making for a slower game. Other ports have tried to adapt the gameplay to a horizontal format, with mixed results. Here, it’s simply a matter of flipping your iPhone sideways to get an arcade-accurate experience.
Arkanoid’s control scheme also works much better here than in previous ports. Nothing can fully duplicate the original arcade version’s dial controller, but iPhone Arkanoid’s slide-based input comes very close. Tracking the ball’s movements comes naturally, and moving the Vaus paddle to any point on the screen quickly becomes an intuitive process.
iPhone Arkanoid’s best feature is its smooth difficulty curve. It’s remarkable that a difficulty curve exists at all — Arkanoid DS was an easy game from start to finish, while Arkanoid Live became extremely difficult, very quickly. Arkanoid for iPhone includes a branching level progression, allowing players to choose their own difficulty. It works marvelously, and I’m glad to see that Taito managed to create a balanced difficulty curve in an Arkanoid game after its recent missteps.
The iPhone version of Arkanoid only has a few small problems. Control issues are rare, but they’re frustrating when they pop up. Arkanoid’s slide-based control scheme allows players to move the Vaus left and right by touching and sliding across any point on a control bar at the bottom of the screen. The problem is that the slider mechanism doesn’t recenter the paddle when you lift your thumb and touch another part of the bar.
Press your thumb a little bit too far to the right of the slider, for instance, and you’ll run out of slide space before you can move the Vaus to the far right of the screen. It’s frustrating to lose a ball in the lower corners simply because your thumb ran out of available movement space.
iPhone Arkanoid’s presentation is also a little weak. The music is strangely subdued, especially in comparison to Arkanoid DS’s maybe-too-hyper soundtrack, and the animated backgrounds are often distracting. Thankfully, Taito included the option to disable the animated backdrops and replace them with still images.
Aside from these minor issues, the iPhone version of Arkanoid avoids many of the problems that sucked the fun out its less-successful sequels, and manages to duplicate the original arcade experience better than any port in recent memory. Arkanoid for iPhone remains a solid, fun experience throughout, and with more than 100 levels included, it’s very much worth a purchase.
Tags: apple, Applications, arkanoid, iPhone, ipod, taito, video game
Review: Earthworm Jim
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
- Rating:
Earthworm Jim was the brilliant but troubled brainchild of several very talented, very weird people at Shiny Entertainment, during the days of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It was a platformer at its core, but it was also a shooter, a racing game, and a competitive bungee jumping sim, depending on the level.
It seems as though everyone who worked on Earthworm Jim had an idea that they wanted to put into the game, and no matter how incongruous it was, the team at Shiny did its best to put it into the final product. That’s the way I picture it happening, anyway.
The result was a game that was much greater than the sum of its parts. For all of its weaknesses, Earthworm Jim offered solid platforming action bridged by bizarre non-sequiturs. A cow is launched with a refrigerator. Hell (or “heck”) is ruled by a demonic cat with nine lives. The boss at the end of one of the game’s most difficult levels is revealed to be a goldfish, who is anticlimactically killed when Jim rushes into the room and knocks over his bowl. At times, the game seemed like one big inside joke.
Gameloft’s remake botches the punchline.
The flawed virtual control pad setup is here in full force, and it does its best to ruin as much of the experience as possible. Fortunately, in an attempt to minimize the inevitible d-pad frustration, the game has been made much easier. Jim starts with ten lives. His gun auto-aims. If you pick the easiest difficulty level, you’ll take dozens of hits before losing a life, and you’ll get hints and tips throughout each level to ensure that you’ll never get lost or stuck.
I was even able to beat that damned bathosphere level on my first try. That says something.
The reworked gameplay introduces a new set of game-breaking issues, though. At many points in the game, you’ll need to jump and then trigger the whip at the top of your leap, to swing off of a hook. Performing this action with one thumb is impossible. You’ll never reach the full height of your jump before swinging the whip. The only solution is to move your left thumb over to the right side of the screen, so that you can trigger both buttons at once. In earlier levels, it’s a minor frustration. Later on, it makes the game almost unplayable.
Other segments, meanwhile, have been watered down so much that they no longer serve any purpose. Take the Andy Asteroids bonus levels, for instance. In the iPhone version of Earthworm Jim, you can no longer die after hitting too many asteroids, and there’s no need to collect 50 orbs to earn a continue, because the game supplies infinite continues. What was once an lightweight but involving break from the action is now completely pointless and no fun at all to play, thanks to a twitchy tilt-based control scheme.
I might be able to overlook Earthworm Jim’s many issues if its sense of humor had arrived intact. After all, the original game was certainly no masterpiece in terms of gameplay, but its humor and personality made it a personal favorite. Unfortunately, much of this humor didn’t survive the trip to the iPhone. The rerecorded sound effects and music lack the comedic punch they once had. Jim’s new voice is terrible. And there’s just something off-putting about the smoothed-over graphics.
Without its trademark humor or a sense of purpose to its gameplay, Earthworm Jim is nothing more than a disjointed, occasionally frustrating platformer. And now, it also has bad controls.
Tags: earthworm jim, gameloft, iPhone, iPod Touch, review, video game
1st Post
Posted by smirnane | Filed under Uncategorized
Welcome to this blog dedicated to video games, iPhone technologies and other interesting stuff.
You will find here the latest news about your favorite games and the new one which you don’t know yet.
Just take a look, leave a comment, and enjoy!
Tags: Applications, game, iPhone, iPod Touch, technology, video game
