Monthly Archive: December 2011

Since the turn-based RPG, Squids, by The Game Bakers, was released, gamers have been begging for a HD iPad version of the beautiful game. Now, instead of releasing a separate build for the iPad, The Game Bakers decided to update the iPhone version, and make it UNIVERSAL. That’s right, now, you can install that original iPhone copy that you bought onto your iPad, and view the game in all of it’s amazing graphical glory, and it’s not going to cost you one penny extra! Adding to this already HUGE update, a new mission for the Halloween map has been added, Localization in Japanese, Chinese and Russian, Pearls are now won wether you win or loose a stage, you can now listen to your own music while playing, the screen rotation has been fixed, and a couple of bugs have been squashed! Now THAT, my friends, is what you can call a MASSIVE update! If you haven’t picked this one up yet, we HIGHLY recommend that you do. It’s an awesome gameplay experience that you won’t soon forget.

Quarter Circle Punch’s recent shoot-em-up, Wonton 51, had quite a few mixed reviews. On one hand, simply put, the game is friggin awesome. On the other hand, the controls didn’t really let you experience the game how you’d want to experience it. A new game type with Auto-fire has been added, with rebalanced gameplay, and a totally separate leaderboard! Also added to the game; a new boss type with a new attack, showing up in both modes, and some fixes for iOS5 and Twitter compatibility, along with some bug fixes. So if you ended up throwing your iPod against a wall while playing Wonton 51 the first time around, now would be a great time to take a crack at it again. With the Auto-Fire mode, the game feels a lot more like a shmup, and a lot less like a game that’s being hidden under your fingers.

Uppercut Games amazing Unreal powered cover-based arcade shooter, EPOCH. has just received a great update. This time around, Uppercut has fixed a bunch of crashing issues, optimized performance on lower memory devices, fixed an intercept that wasn’t unlocking, and fixed a third tier health regen armor item that wasn’t working properly. This update allows for smoother performance on all devices, with all iOS versions. So those of you who were experiencing crashes on iOS 5.0.1, or just couldn’t play because of some bad lag or jitters, now you can fully experience this amazing game. If you haven’t bought EPOCH. yet, check out our review and see if it’s something you’d enjoy!

Blue Libra, the Sci-Fi/RTS title from Orator Games just got an update today as well. Sadly, this one isn’t something to be too happy about. Orator Games has added the ‘reward’ service, Kiip to this great game. Now you’ll be bombarded with Kiip banners while you play telling you that you could win a special ‘REAL LIFE PRIZE!’… if you go to their site and register and are picked to win a special prize. These Kiip ‘rewards’, that are more like ads, are starting to pick up ground in the indie-development department. Blue Libra is the third title to implement these ads to their games, and hopefully, games with the Kiip ‘rewards’ will go straight downhill so that developers are not temped to throw the ads into their games. Oh yeah, Mission 9 had some difficulty tweaks, and the selecting a ship while zoomed out was also tweaked… yay.

To end our updates update on a good note, the Box Shaped Games title, Fearless Ninja, has gotten it’s first update, and it’s a fairly nice one. More levels have been added, and the gameplay has been improved. The gameplay feels tighter, and more fluid. So if you haven’t checked out this great arcade title, there’s no time like the present.

CB Labs awesome exploritory platformer, The Adventures of Timmy: Run Kitty Run, has recently gone free for a limited time. This is easily one of the best platformers I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing on the iOS, and with the recent addition of virtual buttons instead of a floating joystick, the game is now a lot easier to play. If you’re a fan of platform games, DO NOT miss this one. It’s a game that’ll stick with you for some time to come.

Triniti Interactive’s latest release, Call Of Mini: Double Shot, is our last freebie mention of the day. In this dual-stick shoot-em-up, you’ll run around arena type levels killing as many zombies as you can. However, it’s a lot like Glu’s Gun Bros in that there’s another character helping you out. Though he’s not generally too smart, and will usually stand there while zombies attack him, he is good for taking the heat off of you for a second. If you’re a fan of dual-stick shooters, Call of Mini: Double Shot doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but in typical Triniti Interactive fashion, it is polished, and full of IAPs, so the only way to really enjoy it is to get it while it’s free, play it for a little bit, reminisce about the games they’ve ripped off with this latest title, and then delete it. Fun-fun!

The game does take a little bit of getting use to. You’re able to fly all around the tunnel you’ll be racing through by using the iDevice’s accelerometer controls, along with a button on the bottom left to tilt your aircraft sideways, and a button on the bottom right to use whatever power-up you might have stored. This wouldn’t normally be too hard to get acclimated to, but Corridor Fly’s collision detection seems to be more than just a tad off, and with the doors closing in on you as you try and make it through them. But usually, you’ll end up crashing without touching anything. It’s the worst when you’re basically right in the center of the tunnel, and the doors are just starting to move towards you from the sides, and your ship blows up with just the edges of the doors showing. This is even more upsetting because the trailer doesn’t really show the collision detection as being this bad.

There’s also the issue with the IAPs. ITunes does not list them all, but here they are; 5,000 coins for $0.99, 10,000 coins for $1.99, 20,000 coins for $2.99, 30,000 coins for $3.99, Aircraft 2 is $0.99, Aircraft 3 is $1.99, and unlocking all the Aircrafts will cost you $3.99. So far, I’ve got about 20-30 coins per game. Even better? I have no idea what the coins can be used for. In the shop, there’s only options for IAPs. There’s no upgrade areas, and you can’t buy the extra ships with coins, you’ll buy them with stars that are fairly difficult to earn in-game. Another little issue, once you do finally get a star, a pop-up telling you that you earned a star comes up, and you have to hit okay. 4 times. It keeps popping up.

Now, I guess all of this isn’t so bad. If you play the game enough, you should eventually learn how to get your ship through doors, and deal with the poor collision detection, as well as get good enough to earn enough stars to maybe unlock the ship that costs 2. But you might not even get that far. The loading screen takes, literally, a minute and a half to load on a 4th gen device. With the graphics far from being amazing, and the gameplay usually lasting about 20 seconds, most people will not sit and wait over a minute for the game to load.

December is a great time for deals in the AppStore, and to start it off right, loads of companies have thrown some awesome titles our way for free. That’s right, free. So get ready to clear up some space on your device, and check out some incredibly fun games;

Ayopa Games, publisher of the hit word game, W.E.L.D.E.R., the kids game, Chicken Rescue, and the newly released BigBot Smash, have just released a new trailer for the iPad exclusive, Mailmen, coming to the AppStore in February of 2012. Mailmen, developed by Sandstorm Interactive (Blood & Honor and Steampunk Underwater Battles [S.U.B.]), is a stealthy puzzle game set in a cartoony world that’s heavily inspired by The Simpsons. Here’s the description we got from Ayopa;

“A mailman’s task is meant to be simple – pick up and deliver the mail, then return to base. In the leafy suburbs of Greenville though, that seemingly simple job is tougher than expected. Greenville has a seemingly endless array of pesky guard dogs, mind-bending puzzles and ingenious villains trying to stop heroic mailmen Johnny, Charlie, and Dave from completing their objectives. They’ll need to use strategy, teamwork and unique special abilities to stay safe from the subjects of numerous “Beware of the Dog” signs. There must be an evil mastermind behind all of these nefarious obstacles – but who could that be? …“

Judging from the trailer and the little bit of info we’ve received, it looks like it could turn out to be one hell of a game. iPad gamers, be sure and keep your eyes and ears open for more news about Mailmen as February crawls closer and closer. It looks like this could be Ayopa’s next huge hit.

For more information, check out;

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You’ll guide a robot who has crash landed on a distant planet through 35 levels, collecting items that you can use to put your ship back together. The fun part? You can manipulate gravity, and use a ton of interesting objects to get you through hazards and around difficult corners of the levels.

Now, we’ll get to the physics in a second, let’s go ahead and get everything else out of the way first. Graphics; The graphics in Inertia are top notch. On retina display, the game looks absolutely beautiful. The character model is done perfectly, and the animations for movement, jumping, even landing, and landing after moving in the air fairly quickly, which is an awesome looking animation, with the robot skidding on the ground in a great pose, are all perfect. The backgrounds you’ll be playing against are eerie, and immensely add to the great atmosphere of the game. As for the foregrounds that you’ll be running around on, they are put together in incredible ways. The actual level designs, and paths that you’ll need to take in order to progress through the game are, to say the least, very well thought out, but the actual objects used to put these levels together are fantastic. Utilizing rocks, and what looks like the landscape around the planet, every piece of the level, every platform, and wire hanging down fits perfectly together, and adds to the aesthetic feel of the whole game. In short; The whole graphical design and layout of the levels, backgrounds, environments, objects, items, everything within the game, is sheer genius.

The one bad thing about it all? On an iPod screen, your character is a little under a centimeter. The game does automatically zoom in for some sections, but not often. This does allow for large portions of the levels to be shown to the player, but can take a little getting use to, and really, you might never get use to it. The game feels like it’s not meant to be played on the small screen, and will most likely have you wishing you owned an iPad, or that your iPod could hook up to your TV for video.

Now to the core of the game; physics and controls. Control-wise, you’re given the standard platformer layout of left and right buttons, along with a jump and secondary use button. This secondary use button brings us to the physics, and is your inertia button. Pushing it creates a small gravity field around your character, allowing him to use his momentum to keep moving in whatever direction he’s going until you let go of the inertia button, or he hits an object, sending him in another direction depending on what way the object is facing. If you can’t already imagine, a development team that uses these controls and core mechanics to their full advantage would be able to come up with some extremely interesting situations for gamers to play through, and Red Fly Studio just so happens to be a development team that has done this. Throughout the levels, you’ll be able to interact with walls that slow you down, speed you up, or make you stick to them, while using the inertia button. There’s also gravity fields that push or pull you towards them, fan-like objects that throw you in the direction they’re facing, walls that you’ll need to be going a certain speed to break through, areas that look like moving particles that are generally used on the floors and ceilings, pushing you up and down, angled platforms, and electric fields that you’ll need to avoid all mixed in with these interactive objects.

To start it off, the controls in BigBot Smash will take quite a bit of getting use to, but once you do, even more problems show their face. There are two different control schemes included in the game. The first control method uses the iDevice’s accelerometer, tilting to turn the world that you’ll be destroying. This can be extremely difficult to use, as you’ll need to turn your device completely around to turn your robot around, and tilt it in pretty uncomfortable ways to turn. Tapping on the screen controls your robots projectiles, and tapping on the robot will make it jump. If you tap on a building that is close to the robot, it will smash it with it’s fists. Here’s where it gets even more difficult. If the building is just a little bit too far away, you’ll shoot at it instead of smashing it, which takes up quite a bit of time, which can be pretty frustrating in the Speedrun Mode, but outside of the Speedrun Mode, it’s just bothersome. Tapping on your robot also does not always make it jump, sometimes it will jump, and other times it will destroy the building right in front of it. There are touch controls as well, which have the same sort of issues as the tilt controls, except you won’t be tilting your device in uncomfortable ways, instead, you’ll be dragging your finger on the screen to change the robot’s direction. However, this also has it’s own issues, as more than half of the time, dragging your finger across the screen is registered as a tap, and will result in the robot shooting it’s projectiles. It’s not so bad that you won’t be able to play the game, but once you hit stage 4 in the campaign mode, and the game gets a little more hectic, you’ll be constantly wanting to turn the game off out of frustration. The same goes for the speed demolition and survival challenge modes, once the game reaches that point where the action picks up, the controls become a real issue.

The graphics are decent enough, and the draw distance is great, especially considering how many objects are on the screen at one time. Even after you destroy a couple buildings, and the debris is laying all over the ground, the draw distance hardly suffers at all, which is very surprising.

If you can look past these, especially the control issues, which could be fixed in an update, BigBot Smash does have quite a bit of fun gameplay at it’s core. Using three different robots, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, you’ll smash buildings, blow up buses, police cars, squish people by walking on them or jumping onto them, and shoot them with your lasers, which will give you a nice little laugh when the sound effects for this go off, and you can hear the people scream when they die. In the campaign mode, you’ll need to destroy buildings, looking for pieces of your robot girlfriend. Within most of the buildings are parts that you can use to upgrade parts on your robot, along with some power-ups, and recharging items. In the speed demolition, you’ll need to destroy a set amount of buildings before the clock runs out, and in survival mode, you guessed it, you stay alive as long as you can. Both of these extra modes will have you collecting bits and pieces to upgrade your robots as well, but are not saved or transferred over to the campaign robot, so you’ll start from scratch every time you start to play in these modes.