Games

Cat Juggling is one of those apps that was offered free for a day in the App Store from a special promotion.  I got it on the basis of its name alone, thinking of a sketch from Steve Martin in the movie 'The Jerk'.

The app itself is cute.  You are a juggler and the objective is to swipe the juggler's hands under the cats as they fall from the top of the screen.  When that is done, the cats will catapult (pun intended) back upwards.  The more cats you keep from falling to the ground, the higher your score.

The app is cute but doesn't quite reach its full potential.  For instance, I would have a cat sound playing at each hit.  The app simply has some annoying background music which I turned off.  I would also make a 'splat' sound whenever the juggler misses a cat.

You can change the look of the juggler or the items juggled (if you aren't into cruelty to virtual cats).  The app also has a button with the names of some cat-related charities, so obviously the cat torture aspect of the game is meant in jest.  As it says in the fine print, "no cats were harmed in the making of this game".

The app is mildly addictive once you start playing.  This is a good app to kill a few minutes with when your waiting for the bus or in the doctors office.  I would recommend picking it up if it's available for free.  If you're a cat hater, it might be worth the buck.

What do you get when you take your basic top down shooter arcade game, get rid of the entire level except the boss, and then multiply the bullets on the screen, and give your ship a giant laser? Well, you would then have cult classic rRootage. This action game, released by Kenta Cho of ABA games, charmed the hearts of gamers on the Mac and PC, and is now available for the iPhone from Fraglab.

To be honest, this game has been ported once to the iphone during the early days of the app store. This official re-release, aims to be a more faithful rendition of the computer version, as well as implementing online scores, and iOS 4 compatibility. In rRootage, you control a green rotating cylinder with a red dot in the middle . Your mission is to destroy the giant geometric boss at the top of the screen while he, in turn, fires the very definition of "barrage of bullets" at you. The term I think this game coined was "Bullet Hell", and that is a very accurate assessment of the game. The only saving grace is that your ship can only be destroyed by the solid dots in the middle of the bullets and only if they hit the dot in the middle of your ship. This advantage only gives you a fighting chance since the bullet barrages grow increasingly dense and the fire patterns become more complicated.

Each boss has two forms which gives you a short break in the action during a level. Each level has five waves, and ten levels per game type so you will have no shortage of gameplay.

The normal mode is as described above, while a PSY mode lets you scrape bullets to gain invisibility for a short period of time. IKA mode lets you collect bullets of the same color as you. Those can then be fired back at the boss from your laser, while the GW mode gives you a force field to deflect bullets back at the enemy. These game modes add a lot of depth and playability that will keep you coming back for more. rRootage is a classic shooter with a unique style and one that should not be missed on the iPhone.

Your race has been run, and your soul is finally ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. In the deviant minds at Kydos Studio, death is just the beginning with their indie game Soul. This game has made quite a splash in the xbox live realm and now is is poised to win the hearts of the iPhone gaming public. With hand drawn artwork and horrifiying style, this is one title you wont want to play in the dark.

The game takes place in a building that looks like it would fit as a scene in the movie Saw. You exit your body and from then on out, everything you see is hostile to your mission of escaping the building to reach heaven. Not only must you avoid all walls, elevators, and even stalagmites, but you must also be ever vigilant to avoid the evil creatures that will lunge from the walls to put an end to your journey.

Each level holds its own challenges, from dark caves where you can barely see in front of you, to air currents and rising water that chases you through the tunnels. Touching anything will cause you to die, but you can re-attempt each screen without any penalty. There are three levels of difficulty, and the only control is the accelerometer. The game offers an option to calibrate the accelerometer, but I found that any other position beside the default suffers from difficulty in moving either up or down. This bug does make playing the game more difficulty since the device must be held facing up. This one annoyance is not enough to detract from the wonderful artistic vision that the developers have created, and is certainly something that can be resolved in short order with an update. If you enjoy immersive atmosphere and great indie games, you will certainly enjoy everything Soul has to offer.

Zombies are still popular — the craze that everybody wants to be a part of. The latest example of this is Zombie Duck.

Zombie duck is a hunting game—using the accelerometer, you tilt your iPhone to put the cross hairs over a duck that’s flying across the screen. When the crosshairs are firmly over the duck, press the ‘gun’ button to fire and shoot. If you don’t kill him fast enough, he turns into a zombie (IE: a red duck). If you don’t kill the duck within 5 seconds of that, you lose a heart. Once you lose all your hearts, the game is over.

 As you progress through the levels you can select different guns—ones that fire faster or hold more amo at once.

The controls on the game were difficult to use—although using the accelerometer as a means to aim made sense, I thought that using “buttons” in the corner of the screen to load and shoot your gun were awkward. If you were going to use gestures/motion to aim the gun, I thought it would make more sense to continue this metaphor and tap the screen and shake the phone to shoot and reload?

Sure this one is free, but we think it isn’t worth the space on your phone.

If you know anything about me, you know I love me my gaming. Most of all, I love traditional tabletop roleplaying, including the genre's juggernaut representative, Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast. When I'm not dropping rocks on player characters for every insubordination in my own game, I moonlight as the wizard Archael Anaiis, a mage so powerful, his name is intentionally difficult to pronounce. Well, Archael is a first among my D&D characters, in that he's never been on a character sheet; not a paper one, anyways. He was born and raised in a character sheet replacement app called i4e, and he's only the first of many.

The fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons introduced us to characters with mounds upon mounds of information. A basic first-level fighter could expect to have four or five different exploits, all with different damage values, keywords, attack bonuses, and other special effects. Keeping track of all this information would require a lot of writing, or continually referring to the book. All of this besides your character's other stats, such as class features, ability scores, feats, defenses, resistances, saving throw bonuses, trained skills and associated bonuses, and so on.

Well, i4e handles ALL of that. It's a comprehensive character sheet replacement tool that not only records all of your character's vital stats, but also allows you to update those stats easily, and to track resources used over the course of an encounter or the adventuring day. Using up an encounter or daily power grays it out, so you know you can't use it again until it recharges. When you hit a milestone, i4e gives you an Action Point and increases your item daily power allotment by 1. When you take a short rest, i4e recharges all your encounter powers for you, and of course, when you take an extended rest, it resets everything.

But it doesn't just track stats, it also helps you calculate your bonuses to hit and damage based on keywords and ability scores. It automatically incorporates the half-level bonus to your attack rolls, skill checks, and ability checks, and it has a myriad of fields in which to enter all your miscellaneous bonuses for any given value. The level of automation is impressive, but it doesn't override manual input. Almost everything in the app can be manually set to any given value, to account for feats, class features, or house rules.

i4e can also import or export characters in .dnd4e format, allow you to build a character on WotC's Character Builder, and then track the character's condition, abilities and resources dynamically on your iPhone. I have yet to find any reason to go back to using paper character sheets, and my printer is thanking me for it.

Antimatter is a very pretty game; from the moment you start, the screen is covered in particularly appealing pixilated performances (say that ten times fast). What it boasts in appearances, though, it sadly lacks in substance, and from a company that has historically delivered solid gameplay and original designs, Antimatter is a surprising disappointment.
The goal of the game is to guide your little ball of antimatter such that it collides with several blue rods that float about the screen. The rods turn red when you hit them, and the object of each stage is to turn all the rods red. However, if you collide with a red rod, you'll turn it back to blue, so you need to be careful about not hitting rods needlessly. You've got a timer in the upper-left corner of the screen which slowly winds down, but you recharge it simply by hitting the rods, which is almost impossible not to do, as they take up most of the screen.
There are always a few "power-ups" floating around the screen, which can do any of several things, almost all of which makes the game more difficult. The most frustrating of these is the lengthener, which increases the size of all the rods on the screen. It only takes a couple of these, or just one in the later levels, to make the level unwinnable, as you cannot travel through the rods, and they can obstruct your path so that you essentially cannot move. In this way, you can neither win nor lose so long as you do not give up. This is not good game design.
Aside from the genuinely impressive particle physics, the game offers nothing of special interest. The game is mindlessly simple, requires mostly luck, rather than any strategy or skill, and has no end-point. It's fun for a few minutes, but it has no lasting entertainment value.

 In Jailbreaker , a 2D obstacle course of sorts,  you are “on the lamb” running as fast as you can. But along the way there are many obstacles in your path—saw blades,  wooden crates, plate glass, and any endless number of combinations of those three elements. If you run into any of the obstacles—the game’s over. But luckily you can do one of two things—slide under tall items, and jump under short ones.

In a nutshell, that’s Jailbreaker. In  essence, it’s a stripped down basic version of sonic the hedgehog—without the rings, powerups, levels, etc. The game is just running, jumping and sliding to avoid obstacles.

The pacing is fast (almost too fast) and using “Flight of the Bumblebees” as background soundtrack is a good choice as it builds the tension and need of urgency. But because the obstacles are often repeated, it isn’t very exciting or  graphically “stimulating”. Stark black and white and grey, with a little bit of red thrown in every now and then gives the game a noir sort of look. While the intention may have been to set the tone for the underlying scenario, because it doesn’t tie into any sort of story, or theme it just falls flat.

Overall I give the game a thumbs down--Jailbreaker is free and worth every penny.

Ninja—the ancient Asian assassin skilled in the way of using the sword

Fruit—A tasty and health food.

Put them together and what do you get? Fruit Ninja! The idea is incredibly simple—using your ninja skills slice fruit that is in the air.   You slice the fruit by swiping your finger accross the screen.  There are 2 modes of play—zen, and classic.

In zen mode, you play against a clock to see how much to see how much fruit you can slice in 90 seconds. In classic mode, there isn’t a timer, but need to watch out for bombs and prickly fruit. Missing 3 pieces of fruit ends the game as well.

From game play, to selecting items, and navigating menus; the metaphor of ‘slicing’ is used.   The ‘environment’ of the game ties together nicely—the music has a bit of an Asian bend with some relaxing ‘birds’ and chirping sounds in the background. There are a variety of blades and backgrounds that can be earned (and then selected) by accomplishing certain tasks. For example, slice 40 bananas and get the ‘disco’ blade.  At the end of each game is a cute little ‘fruit fact’ which does help to ‘enlighten’ your inner ninja.

The game will definitely not get your heart pounding nor will it make you scream “I need to play it now!”, but fruit Ninja is a light hearted fun filled game for the casual gamer.

It is an unwritten rule that when a game is successful in the App Store, then others try to copy it.  I just didn't think the Star Wars franchise needed to copy anybody.  However, Star Wars: Cantina is simply a science fiction version of the game Diner Dash.  Mind you, even SpongeBob has his own version of the game, so one cannot fault the Star Wars franchise of trying for a piece of the action.

The objective is to take orders from various Star Wars aliens, fulfill them at the bar and then deliver them to the table.  Things get moving fairly quickly around the Cantina, so speed is of the essence.  The characters are done in a cute, manga-ish style so the Cantina is no longer the wretched hive of scum and villainy it once was.  Even the Stormtroopers look cute.

Game play is fairly simple.  The app is obviously geared towards children.  You simply tap certain sides of the screen to take customers to their tables, get their orders, fulfill them and let them finish their drinks while leaving a decent tip (tip size depends on the speed at which all this is accomplished).  There is a good tutorial provided in the game for learning the basics.

The game is decent but underwhelming.  It also commits the cardinal sin of mucking with my memories of the legendary Star Wars movies before Lucas got a big head and ruined it starting with 'Return of the Jedi'.

It’s hard to make a really good sports game.  Without even playing the game for the first time, you already have expectations on how it should work, and what it should look like; and since you already know the rules, there isn’t that joy of learning and exploring a new game. So to make a tennis game that’s original and enjoyable is no easy task but Gamerizon makes a valiant attempt.

The characters in the game are very cartoony looking—reminding me more of a mii on a wii than a serious tennis game.  This helps though, especially on the iphone’s (relatively) small screen, because it’s easier to keep track of the 3 most important things in tennis--yourself, your opponent, and the ball.

The controls for Chop Chop Tennis are pretty easy—tap with the ball in the air to server, swipe just after the ball bounces to hit it back.  Using these two gestures, you can be an “ok” player.  To truly master the game though, you’ll need to master the more advanced hits such as slice and spin.  Because the gestures for each move are fairly intuitive, using the advanced gestures makes the game more interesting.

The various modes (practice, game, single, doubles, etc) also help keep the game fresh and exciting.

All in all, Chop Chop Tennis manages to be an entertaining and light hearted game.  Not well suited for the true tennis enthusiast, but great for causual gamers looking for some time on the (virtual) courts.