Consolation Prize

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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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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Since the “Summer of Arcade” extravaganza came to a close I’ve not really been paying that much attention to the latest Xbox Live Arcade releases. But it’s about time that changed, so I downloaded both Shadow Assault Tenchu and War World yesterday in the hope of finding a lost gem. Did I find a diamond in the rough? Or were they both just plain old lumps of coal? Well today I present my impressions of Shadow Assault Tenchu, to be followed shortly by War World.

Shadow Assault Tenchu is a puzzle action hybrid viewed from a top down perspective. Upon selecting a character - of which only the one: Rikimaru, is available in the trial game - the player is tasked with negotiating a series of levels and completing a simple objective per level such as “defeat all enemies” or “kill the Samurai general”.

However, instead of having equipped weapons at the ready with which to deal out death and destruction you are required to pick up “one shot items” that lie dotted around the map, laying them as traps in strategic positions to eliminate the opposition. Luckily choosing the best place for a trap is a fairly simple affair as the enemy path finding is purposefully rudimentary and it shouldn’t take too long before a set pattern can be identified. To make it even easier to sneak up on your foes the enemy line-of-sight is heavily restricted and is actually shown as a number of surrounding yellow squares giving you a clear indication of how close you can get without detection.

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Braid is a stunningly beautiful game to behold. A fact evident from the moment it starts when you realise the first screen you see - a gorgeous backdrop with vibrant reds and oranges casting other objects into shadow - is actually not a menu screen at all but part of the game itself.

Best described as a a puzzle-platformer this adventure revolves around a character called Tim. Slowly the story unfolds via little snippets of text displayed as our hero passes past books placed upon pedestals at the beginning of each game world and it gives us the impression he’s looking for redemption. You see our hero is on a quest to make up for past misdemeanors as he tries to locate a princess with whom, as the story alludes to, he once shared a relationship but has now been snatched away by an evil monster.

The game starts out straightforward enough as the main character jumps and wanders around the levels collecting jigsaw pieces in order to complete a picture puzzle depicting an event that occurred at some point during Tim’s life. It soon becomes clear however that some lateral thinking needs to be employed to retrieve some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, which appear just out of reach, and this requires the player to start manipulating the creatures and the environment around them.

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Sudoku was a bit of a craze a few years ago. At one stage it seemed like I couldn’t even turn on the TV without some minor celebrity promoting their Sudoku book or harping on about how good it was. Thankfully the celebs have been and gone (and probably made a pretty penny or two out of it in the process) and the craze has subsided. Buku Sudoku, for the Xbox 360, is a little bit late to the party but it does a decent job of wrapping up the logic based number puzzler into an interesting package with great presentation and configurable difficulty levels that should appeal to fans old and new alike.

For those not in the know Sudoku is pretty straight forward to play once you’ve learned the fundamentals. The player is presented with a grid, most typically 9 x 9, which is partially filled with numbers from 1 to 9. The aim is to ensure that each column and row contains the digits 1 to 9, in addition the grid is split into regions (nine 3 x 3 regions in this example) which must also contain the digits 1 to 9. However the numerics in each row, column and region must be unique i.e. appear just the once in that row, column or region. It’s a simple principle but guaranteed to give your brain cells a bit of a workout.

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Since the success of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training on the Nintendo DS there has been a noticeable increase both in the number of games dedicated to training the grey matter and the publishers / developers jumping on the proverbial bandwagon in an effort to cash in on its success.

This effort comes courtesy of
GameLoft and according to the game blurb should:

Boost brain activity, help you develop stress management skills and develop your own creativity

This all sounds good in principle and the full game features 20 mini-games based around one of five different categories designed to enhance that squishy stuff inside your noggin (logic, math, memory, visual and focus).

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PomPom what have you done? I really enjoyed Mutant Storm Reloaded but I’m afraid I can’t really give Bliss Island too much love on the evidence of the trial game.

Lounging around on an island all day, creatures known as Zwoophs have nothing better to do with their time then blow into the air, making clouds. Surprisingly the lead character Hoshi has got bored of the task but luckily his peers have taken pity on him and decided to give him Fridays off so he can play around.

This is an excuse for lots of mini-games but in the trial you’re given the chance to try out just three. Fruit Smoothie has you blasting falling fruit into the waiting mouth of a hungry Jogoka whilst avoiding static or moving obstacles. Gem Grotto finds you controlling a flying character, via directed bursts of air, through a side scrolling course collecting gems and air replenishment whilst keeping ahead of a flaming rotating roller hot on your heals. And finally Bronze Table, which is like a game of pool but you’ve only got three shots to knock together two matching coloured balls before losing a life.

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