2961

Damnit, you bastards got me to try Warblade. That sucker is crazy addictive.

Annoyingly, I discovered a bug as I was heading towards my first 1,000,000,000-point game: I tried switching control modes in a gem storm and ended up stuck in an empty level with no way out. Endless “hurry up” ships, but nothing to kill to finish the level. D’oh!

2962

One of us! One of us! I’m working on a game now that can finally grant me supremacy over the evil krayzkrok:) Of course, I still have work to do to catch up to a couple other QT3ers. I forgot who, but someone around here managed over 3 billion.

2963

We’ve pretty much tapped out Angry Birds. What’s the next best thing in the throwing stuff at other stuff with physics genre?

2964

I can’t get past level 4 of Angry Birds LITE. Really annoying.

2965

Crush the Castle is good, iBlastMoki is also good but a bit different.

2966

I found Angry Birds amazingly difficult as well. Do the successful players all have perfect muscle memory for just the right angle?

2967

Perfect muscle memory for the retry button.

Eventually you get the hang of things, most of the time you get lucky. Usually there’s at least one solution that will let you end the level in 1-2 birds.

2968

Lost another promising game last night, this time to a crash. I’m starting to think that the main obstacle to success is whether the game crashes or glitches before you get bored and suicide.

2969

Have we talked about Doodle God? Not Doodle Jump, or Pocket God. Let’s talk about Doodle God. (iTunes link)

First off, you can play most of it online for free anyway. Here it is on armorgames, I think it’s on newgrounds and all those flash game sites too. So yeah, big incentive right off to not bother paying a dollar for it.

Next up, it shouldn’t be that fun. You start with icons for four elements, earth, fire, air, water. Then you just combine them to make things. Fire + Earth = Lava. Then combine the results to make things. That’s it, that’s the game. Trial and error and logic that often only applies in retrospect. Lava + Water = Steam and Stone. Stone + Fire = Metal. So far so good, but it gets more abstract as your options expand. It keeps them in categories, occasionally introducing new categories for your discoveries, and so on.

There’s a hint system that will either show you a result you don’t have yet (leaving you to try to figure out what available elements would combine for it) or showing you two categories, indicating that you’ve still got some undiscovered combination among the given elements. It’s got a cooldown timer so you can’t just spam the hints though. You can quit and relaunch the game to get a new hint right away, but that’s just enough work that you won’t feel like abusing it too often.

But you will want the hints. Otherwise (and even with them), there is a lot of trial and error. Lots of brute force combining, looking for results. Lots of “Come on, why doesn’t that work?!”

So why do I keep playing it? I don’t know. Couldn’t really tell you, but I kept coming back to it throughout the day a few minutes after every “ragequit” when I couldn’t figure anything out. Certainly there is some satisfaction in some clever results. You’ll probably crack a smile when Ship + Alcoholic = Pirate. It just doesn’t seem like the occasional grin would be worth the trial and error and error and error, but here I am recommending it.

There are “Extras” that I haven’t unlocked, so I don’t know what’s involved, but barring those being amazing, I don’t know why I’d ever play through this more than once. But again, somehow it all works, and my dollar is totally justified. Certainly better than that dollar I spent on Vanitas!

Try the Flash version and see what you think, nothing to lose there. As far as I can tell, the difference is that the iPhone version has 196 elements to unlock compared to the Flash version’s 115, and the iPhone version has some extra/annoying commentary (that you can turn off).

2970

Fragger is another one.

2971

I think having cracked a smile reading it in your post precludes the same from happening when trying it in the game.

2972

I think I enjoy the 10,000,000 point games better than trying to go into the billions. I hit one of those meteor storm jackpots and bought everything. I’m still on maybe 25 million, and it is hard to imagine that trying to get to a billion will be anything but tedious.

2973

Civilization Revolution for iPhone is free.

2974

Yeah, the addictiveness has waned now that I see how you get arbitrarily large scores. (Assuming the game doesn’t crash on you. Bah!)

Basically, get good at meteor storms, buy super autofire, lasers, armor, and max stats, and just keep playing forever. A few of the secrets require skill, but most of them just require doggedness.

Oh, and the one secret you really do want to get: 90% or better accuracy at level 25 unlocks super autofire in the shop. You want this. If you manage to get lasers early in, this secret is easy–my best is 170% at level 25–but I first got it with nothing better than triple fire.

2975

Snagged it. I hadn’t bothered since I had the 360 and DS versions already.

It’s surprising this one got added to Free App of the Day. My understanding is it’s an advertising technique, and I’d think that Civ Rev was well enough known already.

  • Gus
2976

Civ Rev going free is AWESOME, because it’s never made it to the New Zealand app store and while creating a US account is trivial, adding funds isn’t so easy. So thanks for the pro tip!

2977

I’m assuming it’s a promotion (and maybe will contain an ad) for Civ5, no?

2978

It’s part of the Free App a Day program. That and OpenFeint’s similar program offer an app each day (or so) for free, with the intent of increasing its community awareness and download numbers so the game ranks higher in the app store.

The idea is that you only do this well past peak, so you’re not really likely to displace sales that would otherwise happen. And it turns out that you generally spark way more sales by doing this (because of awareness and app store position) than you lost/displaced. It’s unintuitive as hell, but it actually seems to work out for everyone.

Sometimes the games have ads. But this really should be a no-strings-attached full free version of the game. It’ll go back to being charged in a day or two.

2979

God damn it, I paid $7 for CivRev last week.

Obviously I should’ve bought SimCity instead.

2980

Sim City Deluxe is underwhelming for its price, I have to say. You made the right decision, given the information available at that time. Just downloaded Civ Rev, and it does appear to be the genuine article, with no ads or anything like that shoved in. That’s awesome. Makes me glad I regularly check this thread.