Monthly Archive: June 2011

Twirdie-0.99

Twitter is one of the fastest ways to tell the world that you are eating a bagel and also the fastest way you can see that your friends don’t care.  In the app market no one has dared to make a game that harness’ the power of Twitter except for the developers at Simple Machine. They decided to step out of the box and make a one-of-a-kind experience that combines two things, Golf and Twitter.  Twirdie is the result of this combination and is probably the only way to put those two things together successfully. 
The gameplay is simple and complex at the same time. At the bottom of the screen there is a text box where you type any word you can think of.  Once you do that the game checks Twitter for how many times that word has been used in a Tweet within the last 30 seconds.  Then your ball moves a certain distance according to how many times the word showed up in Tweets. To win a course you must get your ball to the end using the phrases and words you type in.  This brings a lot of strategy to the game because you are forced to think “Whats popular today?” or “People will probably be talking about lunch.” If you enter a extremely popular topic that has enough tweets to push you past the goal then you have to restart from where you where before you typed it in.  The downside of this game is the fact that you can never be sure whether or not a word is popular.  Now this isn’t all that bad but winning a game successfully under par depends a whole lot on luck.
There are only nine courses but its tough to beat a course under par so it will take you a while to beat all the courses.  After that there isn’t much to keep you playing as there are no other modes but its fun to go back and play them again to see what is popular and rack your brain for what would be a good word to choose. It is not necessary to have a Twitter account to play or have any knowledge of golf at all.
 
Overall this is a quirky game that successfully utilizes a new and unique mechanic in a fun way.  It is definitely worth checking out if you have a obsession with Twitter,Golf, or having fun.