Consolation Prize

Finishing off my latest look at free iPhone slash iTouch games available to download from the Apple App store, in this post I take a look at Seat Ibiza Cupra Race and Micro Kart.

You can find the other parts in the guide by following these links:

iPhone Free Games Guide - Part 1

iPhone Free Games Guide - Part 2

iPhone Free Games Guide - Part 3

Seat Ibiza Cupra Race

One thing that can certainly be said about games, such as this, which have the impression they’ve primarily developed as a subliminal form of advertising, is that they at least have decent production values - even if the underlying game isn’t always of the highest standard.

It must be said that Seat Ibiza Cupra Race is a good attempt. Upon commencement the player is able to pick from a variety of colours and decals for their Ibiza, and then choose to either race against five other competitors, just the clock, or simply take the car for a test drive around the track without time restrictions. Unfortunately there’s only the one track, but it is at least well presented with some pretty scenery to view on the way round.

I’m actually quite impressed by the graphics engine, it does the job well and reminds me of similar engines we would witness on the Playstation - one not two. The controls work quite proficiently but the track design with its various hairpin and S-bends isn’t the best match for the device which is frequently required to be rotated to some extreme degrees. And speaking of the track, it is perhaps far too long for mobile gaming with three laps feeling like a chore rather than an exhilarating race to the finish. However, I’ve certainly played far worse free games on the iPhone.

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It has been quite a while since I last took the time and effort to investigate the flood of free games that appear with startling regularity on the Apple app store. Perhaps it was the recent OS 3.0. presentation that reawakened my interest in the iPhone slash iTouch as a serious gaming platform that jerked me into action, but I hereby present you with my humble opinion on some free games available for you to download.

In this post I look at Time Crisis Strike Lite, Brick Breaker Revolution Free, and Zombieville USA Lite. You can find the other parts in the guide by following these links:

iPhone Free Games Guide - Part 1

iPhone Free Games Guide - Part 2

Time Crisis Strike Lite

In theory an on-rails-shooter is a good match for the iPhone slash iTouch. There’s no need to worry about the need to map complex controls to the limited functions of the device; the very nature of the genre imposes its own set of constraints and therefore the player only needs to concern themselves with the ability to shoot and reload – that should be easy, right?

Unfortunately Time Crisis Strike has a fundamental flaw with one aspect of the controls that has a profoundly negative impact on the game. The culprit is the “reload” action, which unsurprisingly is a critical part of playing Time Crisis. To reload, or in fact in order to take cover as they are one and the same action, you must tilt the device. Although this may seem like a positive use of the accelerometers, the net result is that for a few critical moments the screen is obscured. The situation is worse if you actually want to remain in cover and you’re forced to hunch over the screen to view what’s happening. It beats me why Namco Bandai didn’t just decide to use a virtual button for this purpose, after all there’s an icon at the bottom of the screen to indicate this anyway.

This “Lite” version offers one full level whilst the premium version offers just three, but given that this first stage could be completed in a couple of minutes, and the aforementioned critique, I really can’t see myself being tempted to splash the cash for another five or ten minutes of action.

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I can quite easily lose myself in Fallout 3. Happily immersing myself for hours at a time concerned only with the adventures of the lone wanderer and not worrying about real world stimulus - like the need to eat and drink. However, there always comes a point where you have to decide that enough is enough, it’s time to move onto other games, and this was the case a few weeks ago as I left my companions Dogmeat and Fawkes to fend for themselves. I knew I would be back at some point, and Operation Anchorage provides the perfect excuse to journey back into the Capitol Wasteland.

Operation Anchorage is the first of a trio of planned downloadable content from Bethesda to be sequentially followed up by the forthcoming The Pitt and Broken Steel. The new content fits in seamlessly with the existing lore of the game, and is best viewed as a side quest – albeit a fairly large one. It does however at least provide some welcome relief from the irradiated wasteland, swapping the desolate nuclear blasted landscape for the barren and frozen vistas of Alaska via the wonders of virtual reality simulator that has been unearthed by a group of Brotherhood of Steel outcasts.

The simulator is where you, the lone wanderer, fit into the equation. The outcasts have been unable to complete the simulator missions in order to gain access to the technology locked behind the associated vault. As the envious owner of a PIP Boy 3000, you’re able to interface with the simulator and enter the virtual world, complete the tasks therein, and as a reward get a percentage of the loot found behind the reinforced vault doors.

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Continuing a series of posts looking at free games for the iPhone, this second part focuses on Tap Defense, Maze Finger, Topple, and Space Deadbeef. If you’re interested in reading the first part of the guide then you can find that
here.

Tap Defense

As it is only the second Tower Defence game I’ve played on the iPhone, Tap Defense has a lot to live up to considering my last journey with the genre was with the sublime Fieldrunners, however, this game can more or less hold its own comparatively speaking.

In Tap Defense your role is to defend the gates of heaven from hordes of demons, all intent upon gaining entry into the Promised Land. As is the norm with the genre there are a variety of towers to choose from ranging from the basic Arrow, Bomb and Water towers; to more specialist varieties such as Storm, Ice, Magic and Earthquake, but unlike the basic towers these more powerful variants must first be researched – using awarded halos – before they can be picked from the build menu. All of them can, as you may expect, be upgraded for a price to increase both there power and effective range.

Tap Defense features a number of hellish creatures like Gremlins, Succubae, Hell Hounds, and of course the Devil, but it’s a shame they’re all quite hard to differentiate between and sometimes merge together like a muddy mess when swarming because of there minuscule size and lack of detail. Visually, Tap Defense is passable, and in no way does the average appearance detract from the overall playability, but it does compare unfavourably with Fieldrunners which is in an altogether different graphical class.

The levels in Tap Defense use one of three different maps depending upon the difficulty chosen. The path to the gates of heaven is predefined and knowing the route the demons will traverse leaves you free to concentrate on the strategic placement of towers, but personally I miss the freedom and flexibility of being able to design “rat runs” for the hordes to wander through. Speaking of the level design it must be mentioned that Tap Defense not only features a Classic mode, but it also offers five Challenges that alter the game rules dramatically like “Sudden Death” which gives you just the one life, and “Ten Towers” that limits you to ten towers - unsurprisingly.

In addition to the normal tower defence game mechanics Tap Defense also incorporates an interest rate - awarding you additional gold per round based upon the amount saved in the coffers. It’s a great little feature which promotes money management and strategic depth as you to balance spending versus saving – the more you save, the more you will have available during the latter rounds when the difficulty curve really spikes.

Although Tap Defense may not have the presentation and the overall spit and polish that Fieldrunners has to offer, it’s still a very playable and enjoyable tower defence game and is well worth investigating.

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Although my iPhone will always play second fiddle to the Xbox 360 as a gaming platform, the sexy mobile device does however provide a convenient distraction that whittles away the time when I’m not in the comfort of my own home. The majority of games available are undeniably still in there infancy, but there are certainly signs of improvement with games such as Rolando that wouldn’t seem too out of place if it appeared on the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. I am however still holding my breath, waiting for that standout title that blows me away and convinces me that the iPhone really could be a serious gaming platform.

There are an obscene number of so-called-games on the application store. Quantity rather than quality seems to be the driving marketing strategy as developers fall over themselves in a rush to get a piece of the gaming pie, and there are certainly plenty of free games to try out. The question is, even through they’re free, are any of them worth downloading?

Well to help you decide I’ve been trying out quite a few free games recently. Most of which have been picked from the “Top 25 Free” application list, but a few of the others I’ve heard about on the grapevine. In the first part of the guide I’ll be checking out Crazy Penguin Catapult Lite, PAC-MAN Lite, Touch Hockey, and Labyrinth Lite Edition.

Crazy Penguin Catapult Lite

You can probably guess, just from the title, what this game is about. But just to avoid ambiguity this game involves firing penguins from a catapult so that they can dive bomb polar bears – which for the record are naturally evil and have resorted to capturing penguins rather than eating them, but for what ever reason nobody knows.

The main campaign game finds you wandering from stage to stage on an overhead map, with each stage generally consisting of two elements. The first part is to launch your squad of penguins into the air using said catapult – usually through a narrow gap – so they can proceed to the next part, hopefully without suffering too many casualties if you timed things correctly. The second part sees the now flying penguins zooming across the screen whereby you have to time where and when to dive bomb the polar bears below. A successful strike will knock the bear from the screen and a set number of bears are required to be removed to be victorious. That is more or less the entire game, although each stage does get progressively more difficult by placing bears behind ice fortifications that need to be destroyed first.

So the game looks fine; with cute penguins and gleefully evil looking polar bears, and it has an annoyingly jovial music track. However, no matter how good the presentation is the game is severely let down by the one dimensional gameplay and I just didn’t find it remotely enjoyable. This is the “Lite” version of the game, and perhaps there’s more to see in the retail version that costs £2.99, but on the evidence I doubt I’ll ever find out.

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Rounding off looking at a couple of iPhone games that I recently purchased, today for your perusal we have Galcon by Phil Hassey; an incredibly fast paced real time strategy game of galactic domination. Imagine playing something similar to Risk, which has been given a dose of amphetamines, and is based upon the conquest of planets rather than countries - then in a nutshell you have Galcon.

The primary aim in Galcon, for the majority of the game modes at least, is to obliterate the other player by conquering their planets. Starting with just the one planet you can attack another simply by selecting your world, and then selecting the target. An invasion fleet comprising of a definable percentage (in 25% increments) of the planet’s forces will then blast across the stars on an attack vector. If your force is large enough then the opposing planet’s defences will be annihilated and it will then become a part of your expanding galactic empire.

Each galaxy map in Galcon comprises of a number of planets, some of which are grey neutral worlds, and all of varying sizes which indicates the production rate. The larger the planet the faster it will expand and thus strategically speaking it’s wise to look for neutral planets with a low defence to conquer before tackling your opponent.

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Whilst not immersing myself completely in Fallout 3 for the last few days, I’ve been sampling a bit of mobile gaming for the iPhone – primarily Fieldrunners from Subatomic Studios.

Fieldrunners is a great little Tower-Defence game that’s perfect for the iPhone. Not only does it look and sound great, have a decent touch screen interface which apart from the odd hiccup works rather quite well, but importantly it’s easy to play for either extended periods of time, or in short bite sized chunks as the game’s state will be instantly saved whenever you leave the application. Thus, a game can be stopped in an instant and resumed at a later time whenever convenient - a must for mobile gaming.

A tower defence game has a simple aim – to stop swarms of enemies, which can enter from multiple points on a map, from exiting the screen on the opposite side from which they entered for as long as possible. So that it’s not a stroll-in-the-park for all these enemies, you have at your disposal a selection of weapon towers which can be purchased and placed anywhere on the map so long as they don’t block an exit.

It all starts off easy enough, but each successive wave of enemies will be tougher than the last, and some creative defences will need to be constructed if you’ve any hope of defeating the 100th wave and being declared the victor. It’s completely up-to the player how they go about their defence and what towers to use, but personally I prefer to construct some sort of maze come “rat-run” that will force the hostile swarm to traverse the map for as long as possible whilst under a constant crossfire.

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Over the years we’ve learnt many things courtesy of the film industry; chief among them is the fact that space is certainly not a safe place for humanity to explore. And we’ve also learnt that when contact, be it with a colony, vessel, or even a town has suddenly and inexplicably been lost it’s not because of something simple like a communications malfunction, or due to static interference, it’s usually because the crew/colonists/residents have all been horribly slaughtered.

Alarm bells should be ringing loudly in the ears of whichever bright spark has decided to lead an expeditionary mission to determine the cause of the silence, but instead they will wander unconcerned (mostly) into danger like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter. This blasé attitude, although not good for promoting a long and prosperous life, does however provide the perfect setup for horror films, or alternatively in our case a Sci-Fi survival horror game.

The reason I’m making such a tenuous link to the film industry is that in some respects Dead Space feels like it’s borrowing aspects from some of the great Sci-Fi flicks of the last 30 years. However, instead of just being a carbon copy of something like Aliens, Event Horizon, or even Solaris there’s enough originality here, and delivered with such panache and polish that makes it a game that is worthy of your attention.

Playing as Isaac Clarke, an engineer aboard the USG Kellion, you and your crewmates are dispatched to the USG Ishimura – a “planet cracker” class mining vessel that rips planets apart in search of valuable minerals and ores. As you may have surmised contact with the Ishimura has been lost after an initial distress signal was received, and on rendezvousing with the stricken vessel above the planet Aegis 7 a decision is made to dock with the ship and provide any help required. It is however, only a matter of time before things go completely pear shaped leaving you to repair various systems on the Ishimura so that you can escape the nightmare.

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