iPhone Appvent Calendar in Review
It looks like Blacksmith Games is done with their free iPhone game a day promotion. Today, December 23, and tomorrow are reserved for their own promotions and contests. Today is a character design contest for their new game Plushed.
So how did we fare? I definitely came away with a few games that I'm going to keep on my phone. The two big winners that I really enjoy are Green Thumbs and MiniSquadron. They're a lot of fun and fit my gaming preferences. iBlast Moki I already owned and that is a blast! There are a few that I'm going to keep to play once in a while but I may not have actually spent money on. iPharaoh, Blimp, Totemo, Samurai, and polyhedra all fit the bill there.
Be sure to check out the post for my impressions on the full list of games offered during the appvent calendar event!
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.
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.
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.
Textropolis is Just My Speed
There are a lot of word games on the iTunes App Store. As a long time player of board games like Scrabble and Boggle, this makes me happy. A lot of these games though focus on mimicing the free flash and online games that are similar to Boggle. These focus on spelling words from a random set of letters within a certain time frame.
What's nice about Textropolis is that it has no timer. The base mechanic is finding words from sets of letters, but it effectively has levels for you to challeng and beat. Each of these challenges is in the guise of a city. You then have to find all the words for that city, though the names are cropped down to a max word length common for all the city names. You know how many word combinations there are for each. The game also tells you the definition for each word you enter, which I find very nice.
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