After playing Zombie Drive only a few times, it’s easy to see the potential that exists, but it’s hard to understand why it wasn’t fully realized. I wish I could review the game based on the fact that it brings back grand memories of my hours spent running people over in Carmageddon, but I can’t. Zombie Drive feels more like an entertaining tech demo than a fully playable game.
Everyone loves to destroy zombies, I have heard it’s actually a national past time. Zombie Drive has the simple concept of you as the wheelman of a hot rod running over zombies. The story goes a little something like this. A city has been infested with zombies and the army has barricaded the entire city with you in it. The objective is to take out as many zombies as possible within the allotted time. The gameplay is very easy to grasp. The camera is stationary in the standard behind the vehicle view and the player steers by tilting the iPhone/iPod touch. Tilt it forward to go, back to reverse and side to side to steer. It takes a little getting used to especially if you haven’t used the accelerometer before in a driving game, but it’s much more entertaining than buttons.
Trace is one of those free games at the App Store that at first glance a lot of people might just pass on because of the simplistic art style. The game is completely free-handed and the animations are extremely simple but the gameplay is what makes Trace a joy to play. Think Line Rider with a controllable character.
Developer Bovinedragon Software’s first foray into App Store gaming is a solid effort. The game controls are straightforward. The iPhone/iPod touch is put into a landscape mode at all times to create more screen real estate for the platforming portion of the game. All of the controls are located at the bottom of the screen with the left and right character control arrows on the left side of the screen and the jump button all the way to the right. This small area doesn’t take up much of the screen plus the controls are mapped just like a basic gaming controller. A retry, back and draw/erase button are all located in this area as well.
Most mobile games are built around the idea that the player has a somewhat limited amount of time to play. Due to this concept Apple’s App Store is loaded with simple puzzle games. Sometimes these are intriguing enough for a quick play once in a while throughout the day to fill your down time and sometimes they aren’t even worth your time to download. Cosmic One by oeFun, Inc. falls into the latter category.
The funny thing about Cosmic One is that its simplicity and ease of use is its biggest up-side and its biggest pitfall. The game is so simple that you can play it for a few minutes and have it mastered but it gets quite boring after a lengthy playtime. Here’s how it works, you have a catcher on the bottom left or right of your screen with three different shapes on it and a randomly selected shape falls in from the opposite side where you must match your catcher’s shape to the shape that is falling by spinning your catcher with your thumb. Remember as a child when you had wooden shapes of squares, circles and triangles and a board to hammer the pieces into so you could learn shapes? Cosmic One is exactly like that and about as entertaining too. The pieces can be sped up by tapping them as they are falling to earn more points, which is required in the earlier levels because the gameplay is so slow. As the pace picks up you are spinning your catcher quite rapidly to keep up but it doesn’t really create any more of an entertaining game. This is all you do for the entire game. The developer never deviates from this simple formula. Cosmic One has no twists, power-ups or basically anything to reward you for getting further in the game.
Swipe Interactive recently had a beta sign up for their new game Quick Draw and I was able to pounce on the opportunity in time and snag a copy. Before we get into this, I would like to remind everyone that this is a beta copy. Only 100 people are participating in the program, so play is somewhat limited. The beta version of Quick Draw only has four categories of about 40 words, but the finished version will have many more than that to keep things interesting.
Quick Draw is a Pictionary-style multiplayer drawing game that uses the iPhone/iPod Touch’s wireless internet capabilities beautifully. There has been a lack of games in the App Store that use the wireless capabilities of the iPhone/iPod Touch for anything other than scores and leaderboards. If you are in the market for a multiplayer game, this is shaping up to be a good one.
Continuing my obsession with mobile gaming, I decided to give another game from developer/publisher ngmoco a play through. Maze Finger is a free download from the App Store, so there is no risk at all in giving it a try, right? When I think of free games, they are usually deserving of their title. These games usually include advertisements to annoy you so much that you want to pay for the game or the game is so basic that it isn’t even worth your time. None of these things apply to Maze Finger.
Just as the title suggests, Maze Finger consists of you tracing your finger through some simple, to somewhat complex mazes. You have a “sand like” timer on each side, when the timer runs out, you fail. The player must complete five stages of mazes per level in the allotted amount of time. The game includes 200 levels and 1000 unique mazes, so there is quite a lot to master here. The player has a total of 2 lives to try to go as deep into the game as possible.
Topple is not just another stacking or puzzle game ported to the iPhone/iPod touch. I just want to make sure this is clear so folks don’t just look at the screenshots and pass this title up. Topple is way more than what meets the eye. Publisher and developer ngmoco has opened its doors solely to create unique games for the iPhone/iPod touch. This is one of their first titles and coming in at the low price of $0.99, I just had to give it a try.
Topple seems fairly straight forward when it comes to gameplay. The idea is to stack the randomly generated pieces as high as you can, as fast as you possibly can. Lines are located at the top of the level indicating how high you have to get without the whole thing toppling over, hence the name. The first stages of the game give you large, flat surfaces to start stacking your pieces on. As long as you keep your surface level, everything goes fairly smooth. In the later stages of the game, the base that you begin with is uneven so you must create a flat surface for yourself just to get started, thankfully the gameplay has more variables to assist you in reaching the top.
Steve Jobs could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. Apple fanboyism is at an all time high these days but you don’t have to be a fanboy to appreciate the amazing sales numbers from the iPhone and iPod. The iPhone 3G has outsold its original counterpart in a single quarter and Apple has already beaten its self-imposed goal of 10 million units with the Holidays still ahead. The iPod has also had it’s highest sales numbers in a non holiday quarter. Why am I dropping all these sales figures you ask? Well, it’s not just about the iPhone and iPod anymore, for me it’s also about Apple’s iTunes App Store.
The App Store has been a huge success in terms of creating revenue for third party developers that never would have had a chance in a regular market. Simple applications that cost as little as $0.99 are making it easy on developers to generate extra revenue to make bigger and better applications. As we speak, the App store has had over 200 million downloads of various applications and over 5,500 different applications to choose from. That number should exceed 10,000 in less than two months. Many questions still remain to be answered as to how many of these applications are free and how many are games.
Mobile games are a very tricky genre in gaming. You have to know what to expect when you play them. A mobile game has to have a few simple qualities. It has to be playable, fun, and worth the money. Eagle Eye is definitely playable but falls into that gray area of the other two. The game has the same premise as the movie. You play as Jerry Shaw and Rachel Holloman who are the two civilians targeted by the Eagle Eye. I am not going to spoil the movie for you, but they are trying to do the bidding of the mysterious organization.
In the game, you have to jump, crawl, and make your way across the city and you will be able to play as Zoe, the government agent who is also trying to uncover what the hell is going on. There are various mini games such as hacking and lock picking. The controls are very simple. You use the Pearl button for jumping , running, and when a combat situation arises, punching and kicking.
All in all, its a decent game for the mobile genre. It will kill a few hours if you are really interested in the story. This game, like many mobile games, falls into the void between buy and don’t buy. If you are enthralled by the movie, then go for it. Otherwise, there are some better games out there. This would be a rental if you could rent games for mobile phones, but once you buy it, you own it.
I don’t who buys these things, yet they keep pumping out these titles. Dark Knight, amazing film. The mobile game, not that excited about it. The trailer is awesome. They show movie clips that have no chance of being in the game. It looks like a NES title. Mobile phones are not known for their controls and I expect this to be a horror show. Nothing like cashing in on the craze right away.
Some pretty adventurous developers have gotten Quake III to run on the iPod Touch and iPhone. We won’t be seeing this as a full fledged release, but maybe it’ll make the rounds of Installer.app. From the looks of things, you tap the screen to shoot. The controls with tilting look be pretty fun as well. We’ll be keeping tabs on this project. I’m very interested in gaming on my iPhone.
We're like Spaceballs... we're making Loot Ninja everything. Coming soon we'll have hats, shirts, hoodies, possibly banana hammocks if one Editor has his way...
Check out the shirt prototypes here and the hats here
