Gone Fishin’ is free today and tomorrow…just picked it up this morning. Yeah, it is fun.
Flick Fishing 4 EVAR
Time Crisis Strike
$6
I picked it up because I’m a big fan of the series, and my son loves Time Crisis 4 on the ps3.
Controls are about as good as you can expect. The tilting works pretty well for reload/cover (it dims the entire screen a bit when in cover so it’s pretty obvious). Tapping to shoot, well of course it’s not as good as having a light gun. Framerate is pretty low but doesn’t impact this style of rail shooter much.
++ really good free patch.
Pinball Dreams is available and getting good reviews from people. It’s the old Amiga pinball game and is apparently faithfully ported. $5.99 IIRC.
I’ve been enjoying pinball dreams but holding the iphone in portait mode for more than a few minutes while playing it causes my hand to hurt and in land scape you can’t see enough of the table.
Speaking of which, I keep wondering what that Call of Duty game is like, but don’t feel like forking over the bucks for it. The reviews make it seem like it’s fairly easy and pretty short.
— Alan
Pinball Dreams is fun so far. Portrait mode can cause a bit of slow-down, though. Have been using landscape instead (not that I like the scrolling), because the game becomes very smooth that way.
Call of Duty? Do you mean Brothers in Arms?
The company that made it, Gameloft, has slowly been reducing the prices on their older games so I’d wait for a drop.
Oh yeah, sorry, Brothers in Arms.
— Alan
ExZeus $6
Not a bad little shooter sort of like space harrier, galaxy force, etc. Pretty nice 3d graphics (yeah no scaling sprites) that actually runs at a pretty good framerate. Controls are pretty good with the motion (with calibration and option to invert) to move the mech around.
Slotz got an update. Scenery for the tracks and a bunch of new options and stuff. If you haven’t tried it yet, and have any interest in slot car racing, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Looks like iPhone gaming is all grown up…sadly. Steve Palley at Slide To Play writes:
Let me be absolutely clear. The vast majority of STP’s competitor sites are honest, and I have a lot of respect for them. They are working just as hard as we are to bring you the best possible coverage. If they beat me to a story, review more games than we do, or figure out a more effective way to drive traffic, that’s something to be admired and learned from. Plus, this isn’t really a zero-sum game; we are part of the same community, and there’s room for a diverse range of opinions.
But when I find out that certain sites are using gutter tactics like selling reviews on the sly, that’s where I draw the line. I recently lost an advertiser to a competitor that offered him a review along with his advertising package–“impartial,” of course–to better promote his game. He gets plenty of eyeballs to his ad, as well as some nice quotes for his App Store page, and the site in question gets a leg up on the competition (read: STP and other honest sites).
The readers and gamers who digest this garbage and take it at face value, without knowing it’s “advertorial”? They get screwed. In my last editorial, I explained why choosing which games to cover is one of the most important things we do. Coverage and publicity of any kind is a precious commodity on the App Store, which is why these so-called “journalists” are able to charge for it. Auctioning it off to the highest bidder is ethically bankrupt, especially when readers aren’t told about what’s going on behind the scenes. Plus, it’s a destructive strategy in the long run.
Yikes. I don’t blame you for being a little upset Steve.
Pretty much par for the course on all platforms with open/indie development options.
It is more or less impossible to release a shareware PC title that doesn’t win “major 5 star awards” (no matter how much it sucks) from every download.com wanna-be site just in the hopes that you’ll put the award on your app/game’s page and thus drive link traffic back to their “review” site.
I tend to trust AppVee’s reviews, although they’ve hit a period of sporadic updates. TouchArcade is good as well, although you have to be aware that developers tend to hang out in the forums and give away free game codes like candy.
Nascar is completely not my thing but I bought Freeverse’s Days of Thunder mostly because of the company behind it, and the 99 cent promotion (which ends later today). And I have to say it’s pretty fun! It might be the “purest” arcade racer on the appstore - cars that don’t control anything like reality, a focus on beating the utter shit out of the cars ahead of you (including some amusing dialogue bits during races), and a ridiculous drift into superspeed feature. Not sure I’d pay 5 bucks for it but for a just one it’s worth a look.
“Drop the HAMMER!” Yeah I picked it up for 99 cents too (man I’m an app addict now). Yeah I’d say it’s worth a buck. The framerate suffers a bit but still very playable.
Sneezies ($1):
http://www.apptism.com/apps/sneezies
Sneezies lite (free):
http://www.apptism.com/apps/sneezies-lite
It’s a very simple game which is just basically touch somewhere on the screen and watch the chain reaction happen. Challenge mode has a bit more too it but not much. I played the lite version first and for some reason I found it quite addictive in a relaxing sort of way. Presentation is pretty polished. Anyways, I liked enough to cough up the $1, and my kids love it too.
That actually looks really fucking awesome.
Actually that does sound pretty cool. I always wondered if someone was ever going to do a remake (not sure if this would technically be it or not but close enough). Historical strategy game for kids…
— Alan