Free iPhone Games!
It looks like the folks over at the Appvent Calendar hit it big with their promotion. This time they're not associated with any holiday, just making an app free for a day, each day.
This is the second day of the promotion and they've started out strong. The first day was Rope'n'Fly which was pretty popular for a while and today Zombie Pizza. Both are games I've wanted to try in the past but that didn't rank high up enough in my interest to warrant a purchase.
Go take a look at freeappaday.com every day to see what gift is waiting for you!
Crunchyroll – Anime on Your iPhone
Crunchyroll
Wow. Thankfully I was checking out Anime 3000 while listening to my friends over at Reverse Thieves. A3K happens to be hosting their new podcast. Go give it a listen!
Anyway, this is an amazing development and I can't believe I hadn't heard about it till now. For those who don't know, Crunchyroll is a a legal streaming site for anime and live action drama from Asia(Japan and I think Korea). Before Netflix had their streaming, I used Crunchyroll a lot.
Another Free iPhone Games Review
The New Years Blowout
Another batch of iPhone Appsters has gotten together for a combined iPhone App Store promotion. Unlike the Appvent Calendar, most of these are discounted instead of free. Let's take a quick look at the games that have been discounted for this New Year's sale:
The iPhone Appvent Calendar Review – Are the Free Games Worth it?
Blacksmith Games' Appvent Calendar
You might be thinking to yourself that a free game is totally worth it. I argue that isn't always the case. My iPhone's screens are pretty full, and although I'm fine with storage space, I can imagine there are plenty of 8GB or original iPhone owners who are running a little low on bits. Then there's the time you spend downloading and trying a game to see if it's fun for you.
As I'm writing this introduction, we're on day 8 of blacksmithgames' Appvent Calendar 09. As an advertising promotion in conjunction with other developers, they are dropping the price of a game each day till December 22 to $0, FREE for one day only. There also appears to be a random Featured Free Game in the upper left hand corner.
Continue reading for quick rundowns on the free games. I'll update this post when subsequent titles are released for free. This has to set some sort of record for number of iPhone game reviews in a single post.
Removed from my iPhone Today
With all these holiday promotions and sales for iPhone games going on, I've run in to the problem of maxing out my iPhone at a full 11 screens of icons. Deleting some of my web page shortcuts has helped a little, but I need to clean house.
Below are some of the games that I deleted today to help clear up some screen space. They were all free to me but probably cost $0.99 now that their sales are over.
Mevo & the Grooveriders: Galactic Tour
mevo
Thanks to the recent successes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, rhythm games have risen in popularity. Of course there was a slew of games that made at some sort of success in the US market: Parapa the Rappa, Dance Dance Revolution, Amplitude/Frequency, etc. but none of them have reached the heights of popularity like the ones with plastic instruments.
Can the rhythm game genre make it on the iPhone platform? The Tap Tap series started with Revolution not only was one of the first batch of iPhone applications, but it was also the first rhythm game on the platform. However it really is just a clone of the Guitar Hero game mechanic with notes flying down the screen on in this case 3 lines instead of 4.
Score Pad
Score Pad
This app is more of a tool to help you have fun as opposed to being fun itself. Score Pad (Score Keeper / Counter) by Andre Khromov sells for $0.99 on the US iTunes Store.
Read on for my impressions.
Leaf Trombone: World Stage
Leaf Trombone
Here's the first game and entertainment app on my iPhone to be featured in my new Fun From My iPhone feature. It just happens to be Leaf Trombone World Stage from smule. It's currently selling for $0.99 on the American iTunes Store. I think I might have paid more for it though. It's important to note here that every app I'm covering is either free or paid for with my own hard earned cash. It looks like there is also now a Lite version of the app on the store which is free. The Lite version is lacking online performance and has a smaller song library.
Read on for my impressions.
Fun From My iPhone
As a good little consumer and an iPhone owner, I've purchased my share of iPhone apps. A good number of them are games or entertainment related. As a cathartic exercise, I've decided to go through my iPhone screen by screen and talk about the different apps I've installed.
Hopefully I'll get some sort of idea about what I find fun about them. Then that will inform my future app and game designs that I will turn in to apps on the iTunes App Store!
Toki Tori
Toki Tori Title Screen
Let's talk iPhone games. The iPhone has come in to it's own as a gaming platform. Having no buttons though, game designers have to rely on multi-touch and inertial controls.
Toki Tori is a port of what was originally a GameBoy Color cartridge. The controls have been simply matched to touching on the screen to tell the chicken where to go and it's extremely well implemented. The special abilities that your little chicken gets per level reside in a simple side palette and then you can touch on the screen to activate them. Toki Tori is an example of a game originally not intended for the iPhone that has made the transition very smoothly.
Then again, it's perhaps an example of a game that was originally clumsy on the GameBoy Color and would have been more comfortable with mouse controls. Games like Lemmings comes to mind that fit that bill. Lemmings is quite easy to play with a mouse and made pretty clumsy with a directional pad control setup.
Back to task though, the colors are vibrant and the animation smooth. The music is very bright and the sound effects nice. I've only played a little through the first set of levels and the difficulty is ramping up.
In the game, you're given what amounts to a platformer style sideview board. You can tap somewhere on the screen and your chicken pathfinds his way to the spot. He can fall down and climb up ladders and small steps. The idea is to get all the eggs on any given map by walking in to them. It's definitely possible to get stuck and have to retry the board. To aid you on some levels are limited quantities of special equipment or abilities. So far I've encountered the ability to build a little platform and a teleporter.
It ends up being a fun order of operations puzzler.
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