10 Summer Sleeper iPhone Apps and Online Games
Like net neutrality, summer’s going fast. Before we know it, it’s back to school, or the office, or raking leaves… so here is a list of 10 games that will help pass the summer while it lasts.
10. iPhone – Tilt to Live with new Frostbite update: Now with a new weapon available at 240 points, and Frostbite mode, which drops frozen red dots into warm water, the game offers more achievements and icy fun.
9. iPhone – Highborn: If Powdered Toast Man got his own turn-based medieval combat game, this would be it. It offers a few twists on the same old same old, but the zany writing is its main draw. The 3-D combat sequences look like something out of a Crave Playstation 1 game, but at least they’re there. Oddly, the total result helps pass the time with a minimum of distraction.
8. iPhone – Gun Range: Cost of ammunition got you down this year? Gun Range takes you through multiple shooting ranges with authentically handling weapons including the M60, the M4, AK-47, Famas, and my favorite, the insanely fast MP7. It’s not the deepest game out there, but it’s a great fallback when you want to blow off some steam and blow up your earphones.
7. iPhone – Words With Friends: Though the rules are a little fast and loose (how the hell did Mrs. Cruz play “Marge” as a word?), this networked game is very easygoing and long-lasting.
6. Online – Cursed Treasure: Don’t Touch My Gems: I like tower defense games that truly capture a siege mentality. Cursed Treasure has wave after wave of pesky humans coming to steal your precious gems, and with fire, ice and arrow towers, you’re able to char, freeze, scare and otherwise deter them. The game’s subtitle captures the clever but ultimately annoying essence of the ranking system, which only gives you the best rating if your gems remain completely untouched after all waves have been dispatched and destroyed. Still, this is a great excuse for devoting a day of your life to playing through it.
5. Online – Bloons Tower Defense 4. Ever since the first Bloons came out, I’ve been busting balloons in increasingly creative and wild ways.
4. Online – Little Wheel. If you ever have 15 minutes free, Little Wheel is ideal. While short, its style and graphic quality are unforgettable.
3. iPhone – Angry Birds. Completing most levels is easy. Getting 3-star rankings on most levels takes a combination of Zen patience and hundreds if not thousands of do-overs. Yet the game’s
2. iPhone – Civilization Revolution. “I invented writing, and Abraham Lincoln is my friend”. If you like building a civilization through the years, snowballing your tech level, and rubbing elbows with famous rulers as you go, this game, recently free, may be for you. While the lower-level difficulty levels have brain-dead AI and it’s not uncommon to crush archers with tanks, the wide variety of scenarios and tougher difficulty levels let brainiacs and game lawyers have their fun too.
1. Online – Epic War 4. If you’re going to work up a sweat, you may as well do it slicing through hordes of goblins, flying colossi, and doomsday bombs. Start out with just a few heroes and units, and acquire tried-and-true upgradeable powerups like invincibility, berserk, time stop, healing and AOE. Three levels of play keep gameplay fresh and as the title suggests, the battles do become epic.
Honorable Mention: Nelson Tethers, Puzzle Agent. If it weren’t for TellTale Games’s completely nonexistent customer support in helping me obtain an unlock code for my game purchased July 27th, the game would be in the top 5. From what I have been able to play, the game does its job immersing me in a Gricklesque backdrop filled with lots of creatively placed and designed puzzles. However, the infuriating lack of response, even with a PayPal complaint pending, leaves it at the bottom of the list. Look for it on iPhone (someday), but don’t expect any support.
Super Knockout Boxing 2: Get Ready For A Beating
iPhone App Review: Every so often a super-polished app comes to the App Store, one that makes me forget games like SpringFling and the otherwise thoughtfully designed “Give me whatever skill points I want” Sword of Fargoal. That killer app is enough to make me forget I’m fussy about genres I avoid like Julian Assange avoids the U.S.
Courtesy of Glu Games.
I avoid sports because they’re so reality-constricted. When you get down to it, it’s increasingly faster, stronger and overpaid people doing more and more outrageous things against similar people. Yawn. I’d rather play original Metroid and get all sorts of wack power-ups than Madden NFL 11.
But SKOB 2 brings me back to the good old days of Nintendo’s Punch Out!, a game that yanked RPG players, shooter fans, horror fans and others away from their gaming pursuits to beat on Glass Joe and many more.
This is no skimpy boxing game to breeze through. Amid dazzling title and option screens reminiscent of recent screen-scorching Super Street Fighter specials, the aggro music will guide you through the ample options pages. Achievements, a generous number of control schemes, and more await.
Every boxer gets its own intro music and animations. Unlike Punch-Out, they take up a lot more of the screen, towering over Mac – uhh, the hero. Animation is lavish, and each boxer has his own special move in addition to basic lefts and rights. One imaginative character, with light bulbs for boxing gloves and a socket on his chin, lights up the screen most of the time he’s on it, with electricity effects everywhere.
Like PunchOut!, there are certain times when throwing a punch will get you into varying degrees of hurt. Once you get the patterns down, it’s usually rote, but the fights are larger than life, and often throwing an unblocked special punch (earned by careful taunting) will end the round in a burst of red and yellow light. Fighting the first boxer is cake, much like Glass Joe, but from there you really do feel a sense of accomplishment fighting most characters.
The recovery mechanic is fantastic as well. The count numbers spiral toward each other in merging pairs, and if you touch them as they hit the center, favorable things happen. If you’re the one struggling to get up, each time you successfully tap your numbers, one bird or star above your head will disappear in a puff of smoke. Get rid of everything spinning around your head, and you’re back in the fight. The first knockdown of the fight will bring you back with most of your health, but further recoveries involve more birds, faster-spinning numbers, and less energy returned.
Playing this game for three hours has been wild. The three free roids have been instrumental in getting me through the first circuit, but the second circuit is for pro players only. Thought Big Gip was easy? Big Gipper will step up to you and clean your clock.
SKOB 2 is, purely by coincidence, the second Glu game I’ve reviewed in as many weeks; the only reason I went from Build-A-Lot to this is that SKOB 2 was on the top apps list. This company is on a roll!
Graphics & Sound: 10. Smoothly animated, screen-filling lifelike pugilistic joy.
A rich variety of sound effects complements the intros, fighting and interscreens. A wild array of music with styles from around the world. The bullfighter’s hip-hop track is truly inspired.
Gameplay: 9.0. Wild, all-out brawls. Things get tough! SKOB 2 gets points for making the app free and then charging only for doses of steroids that can buff your player for one match, but I don’t like that system for two reasons.
First of all, roidless gameplay is fierce. It is possible to beat out the computer, mercifully, sometimes with one or two well-placed hits at a time. However, in higher levels, the cash-deprived programmers will finally wreak their revenge on you.
Second, some younger players out there are probably being taken advantage of as they spend dozens of dollars on the app. I’d gladly pay $1.99 for the app with 3 doses of roids, or $5.99 for a game that hands out roids after each victory.
Game mechanics are an heir to Punch-Out! strategy.
Control: 9.5. Companies, PLEASE stop putting apps so that the headphone cord gets in the way of our hands. It may be a small thing, but SKOB 2 is a guilty accomplice in this too. Actual fighting is responsive enough to get you through most fights, but chaotic enough to feel lifelike. Sometimes hammy 150-pound arms to the teeth are a fact of life.
Replay value: 8.0. Occasionally wanting to blow off stress fast rarely goes out of style, so I’ll be playing this for some time, though at lower difficulties.
Intangibles: 10. Slickly produced in all aspects. I just feel bad that I got the app for free, used up all the Roid Rage, and won’t be paying 99 cents for 3 more pills at a time.
Overall: 46.5/50
2-Sided Review #1: Tilt To Live
Courtesy of One Man Left Studios - Click for The TTL Blog
Give Chess A Rest: Try Arimaa!
If you like chess, Arimaa may be just for you! It was even designed to thwart brute-force AI like Deep Blue that can resolve seemingly intuitive chess gameplay into a series of mechanical choices.
In Arimaa, you have a set of animals ranging in strength from elephants to rabbits. The full tutorial is here, but here are the basics:
1. All your pieces are placed in any configuration in the traditional 2 chess rows closest to you.
2. Each side moves any combination of pieces one to four squares, or uses pushing or pulling to move pieces weaker than the moving piece. A push or pull counts as 2 moves, one to move the friendly animal one square and one to move the enemy piece.
3. To win all you need to do is move one of your weakest pieces to the enemy’s home row at the top of the board.
4. Aside from rabbits, which can’t move backwards, pieces may move in any orthagonal direction.
5. Pieces can’t push and pull at the same time.
6. A weaker piece becomes frozen (immobile) next to enemy pieces unless there is a friendly piece touching it. It can still be moved by enemy pieces.
7. Trap squares: there are 4 trap squares on the board. Unless another friendly piece is next to it, any creature pushed or pulled onto a trap square dies immediately and is removed from the game.
Arimaa has its own website, complete with tutorial, online bots to play against, and official rules. This looks like a very fun game to play and if I get a chance I will try it out.
Build-A-Lot For iPhone: High-Pressure House Flipping
If you're squinting at this, you're not alone.
Build-A-Lot iPhone Review: I can’t help but buy often when it comes to buying apps for 99 cents. So many almost awesome things in life can still be bought for 99 cents… a large convenience store coffee, a dollop of fast food, and a large variety of “why are they really 99 cents?” iPhone apps. Some of these apps are slashed over 80%, while others are just halved… or, um, thirded.
Build-A-Lot is this week’s 99-cent app review.
As you start the app, you get a load bar with 10 portraits of various community movers and shakers. I really suspect that the game was designed outside of the country, since all 10 people seem pretty vanilla. The game swarms you with smarmy “airport sim” music that relaxes you enough to sprinkle potpourri through your house and, well, bake a pumpkin pie. Apocalyptica this is not. Anyone used to drumbeats may want to look elsewhere, as the only ones you hear come when an abbreviated parade piece plays and confetti litters the screen at the end of a stage.
The main part of this game is a cyclical series of home, material, worker, blueprint and repairs purchases, with a little bit of property flipping and a crucial bit of brutal clock-racing thrown in for good measure. Levels are grouped in small numbers around eight neighborhoods.
Learning how to run the game is pretty easy, even though a few mysterious icons look like candy-coated rat droppings on a compact iPod screen. Despite the crowdedness of all these options, the designers have put things into several color-coded pages, each of which are well labeled. I’ve never had a case of fat or clumsy fingers ruining the game.
Once you get the hang of things, you’ll be able to juggle a real estate moneymaking cycle pretty realistically. As properties upgrade and gain value, you have to decide between selling, upgrading further, or demolishing to make way for new home types you can unlock in the Blueprints page. Home problems, cash-laden mails and occasional opportunities to buy more lots in the one-screen neighborhood add some much-needed randomness to the game. One option found later in the game lets you invest a few workers in home inspections, which protect the house from damage until you find a buyer.
Complete the game in about half the time you need, or better, and you get a special ranking for your level. Despite the inherent dorkiness of the reward system (“Yay! Now all our money can grow interest!”), the designers have done a good job paring down the time you have so that every move counts. Sometimes, while you’re playing a level the first time, and just barely making the goals within the harrowing special time limit, Build-A-Lot will add a few last-minute “gotcha” goals you’ll likely have all of 8 remaining seconds to fix.
The game’s interface is pretty good, but even though all the active parts of the game are a little bigger than the elements of, say, Angry Birds, the game gives me some pretty severe eyestrain on the iPod. After a while I got used to the claustrophobic layout and started flipping houses, but the blase home graphics didn’t contribute much (everything you own has a tinge of blue and looks the same in your peripheral vision). Build-A-Lot is based on an online series, where the trees and roads were originally there to help fill up the rest of a PC’s screen. As it’s now a small-screen port, I couldn’t care less about having 30% of the screen filled with non-interactive cute. After the eyestrain that I’ve gotten from playing this, I would be perfectly happy if Build-A-Lot 2 just featured a bunch of big squares with floating text suggesting house names.
In all this is a decent way to pass an extra half hour or two, and the casual mode is a nice way to take off the nerve-wracking “beat the clock” thumb-busting you’ll need to complete the extra goals in Career mode. In short: I like it.
Graphics: 4.0 Agh, my eyes… graphics seem like a barely touched port from the PC. Homes for sale need to be shown in white, not the antagonistic shade of red they’ve picked.
Gameplay: 8.5 Patiently built, no crashes in a few hours of play, with excellent event timing. Being a strategic genius will go a long way, but you’ll still have to be a genius with fast fingers. Visual cues, like fireworks, and sound effects, like ringing cell phones and doorbells, will help you organize your activities in time. Each time a level is completed, you’ve accomplished multiple goals. It’s kind of a shame you can’t play previous levels with buildings you’ve already acquired. The gameplay becomes richer as more building types become available, standing out from the pack toward the end of the second level.
Control: 8.5. No lag at all in execution of commands, but things feel a little cramped overall and sometimes in the panic you’ll be rushing out of one page to get to another. The only poor positioning in the interface involves the red repair button and the red bulldoze button, which are next to each other.
Sound: 7.5. Much too Harvest Moony, but there are no issues with the sound quality.
Replay value: 5.5. You don’t seem to get any kind of power-ups or stat-ups for completing levels. It would be nice to get some sort of cost savings for completing each 3 levels within the special time limit. Casual mode, where you just play freestyle until you make a certain dollar amount, does add some value in a game where jumping through hoops for special rankings gets old fast. Still, this game is a great time-killer that keeps players engaged from moment one of a stage. This is the best app I own besides Angry Birds and White Lines for rounding out my free time in short sessions.
Intangibles: 3. An earnest effort.
Overall: 37/50 A solid core gaming experience is found in this app, but the graphics really cramp its upper-class slumlord cred. I’d try a sequel if it differed enough. This game is still a green light for Glu Games to keep adapting later versions of Build-A-Lot; I’d love to give the Elizabethan version a try.
Hector: Badge of Carnage: Surly Point-And-Click Fun For iPhone
Courtesy of Straandlooper. Click to visit the official site.
75% of the time, when I find an app page that’s smothered in LOLOMG 5-star reviews, there’s usually a solid basis for it. Hector: Badge of Carnage is such a title, and has its five-star moments, but the game probably won’t be seen as a worldwide hit.
Before I get a hue and cry from fish-and-chipping footballer types across the sea, I’d like to say there’s a lot that I found worthy of the $3.99 price tag. What is it these days, £1 or so?
First, the app has enough creative substance to override Apple’s occasionally puzzling content policy, which caused racy but basic shooters like Daisy Mae Alien Buffet to get pulled. When you pull up the title screen and see Hector’s scowling mug, followed by a noirish silhouette of him shadowed in a doorway, you know you’re going to be getting a little grit in your game.
At the intro, you get a dramatic yet darkly humorous view of a hostage standoff. An over-wired rooftop sniper waits it out poorly, cops goof around with a searchlight, and the police superintendent has his desk wheeled in so he can slam it with his fist and shout “GET ME HECTOR!”
Cut to our hard-drinking slob of a hero, Hector the Inspector, passed out in a filthy cell — uh, Hector’s office — and gameplay begins. Hector rattles off a few charming lines in decidedly un-BBC English — the game is loaded with them – and then you’ve got to do a couple of disgusting things in order to get out. Part of the fun is discovering just what those things are.
Tap Hector to move him around, tap an object once to highlight and look at it, tap another object to combine it, tap a location to use with the highlighted object, tap the object twice to use it by itself. Control is pretty easy, though at least on the iPod the Heck sometimes totters off, apparently still a bit hung over.
For the first half of the game, despite the PR mocking H:BoC’s predecessors, the game is a tried-and-true point-and-click adventure.
But at least the interface, which often prevents me from completing point-and-click games, hasn’t been an issue in this game. I never had to use a finicky touch to select a necessary object, and after the average-difficulty, somewhat traditional opening puzzles, the game turned into a hybrid of conversation choices and point-and-click. Conversations seem to be divided into two or three straight paths, with no real tricky changeups from one path to another (so far, at least).
One thing that makes Hector stand out from other p&c games is the exhaustive number of dialog lines (over 2421) and interactive objects (394). Hector’s voice actor is superb, dripping surly one- and two-liners like a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit drips burning grease. However, the rest of the cast is a little off by comparison, and the female roles are all done in campy falsettos by male voice actors. Hopefully favorable buzz for this game will bring in some budgeting for more voice actors who are as memorable as Hector.
Be warned: if you don’t like paying someone to call you stupid, Hector is not for you; he won’t hesitate to dump on you for trying outlandish object combinations. As America’s the land of physical violence, Britain is the home of the verbal. 
The sound effects and original crime thriller soundtrack are all on track, both being movie-worthy. By the time Hector finally gets his pants on and makes it to the hostage negotiation scene, the plot ratchets up and the 4-path negotiation process fits the suspense like a glove. Once this scene closes, the game opens up into three locations that can be explored in any order. The best part of the interface is the map, which lets you jump from one location to another, no matter how far inside a location you are.
By the time Hector goes out into Clappers Wreake, the game’s humor, pace, and plot are fully involved, and it’s here that I experience what the developers were trying to convey, an absurd romp through a seamy, nasty and eccentric English town that’s probably just a disclaimer or two from the real thing. I can really relate to the late 30-something perspective, where Hector deals with his corrupt town, paranoid old ladies, and lolcatting teenagers who speak their own vowel-free language.
As for why this game may not have universal appeal:
It’s very clever and cerebral, with a sour slob as an anti-hero. Gen X game players who were raised on point-and-click adventures will probably react best to this game, and it will likely be bypassed by a lot of younger shooter fans and people who can’t understand British accents or big words (sadly, these do exist in large pockets across the world).
The only technical flaws are the little pops at the end of most dialogue lines, and the occasional crashes after a few minutes of exploration, at least on iPod. Fortunately the game saves very well and as long as you’re not in a hurry it doesn’t crash often.
Hector’s an often engaging game, with raunchy dialogue, absurd situations and a hard-boiled take on Great Britain’s seamy side. Puzzles require just the right mix of logic and trial and error, so dead spaces in game play are largely determined by the player’s wits, or lack thereof. The intermissions are smoothly animated, though the writing sometimes out-shines the delivery. Hopefully developers will be able to lower the price a la Angry Birds in time, but for now they deserve a few extra bucks for their effort and I have no regrets paying $3.99 for this game.
I’ve give it to Hector: he’s a clever clogs.
Graphics: 9.5 Sharp in its intrinsic flabbiness and seediness.
Gameplay: 8.5 Very smooth, with hints from your trusty sidekick should you ever need them.
Control: 7.0 A little dodgy, at least on iPod. Would be neat to have two arrows that scroll over objects already discovered. Also it’s all too easy to accidentally skip over a well written line of dialog.
Sound: 9.0. A 10 for music and Hector’s voice, a point off for weaker accompanying voices and the pops that come at the end of many lines.
Replay value: 6.0. I’ll be giving the game another go through for missed dialog paths, but I’ll probably be moving on to Hector’s 2nd episode. You really get all of what the game has to offer on the first run through, and the Easter egg at the end is website based.
Intangibles: 5 extra points. Fun as ____, and some really wicked humor. Not quite perfectly polished as claimed in the App Store review, but an awesome independent effort. I’m sure Hector 2 will be even more twisty, snotty, surly and all around entertaining.
Overall: 45/50
Product disclosure: This app was purchased at full price on iTunes. No other relationship exists between reviewer and Straandlooper, the creator of the game.
Old-Fashioned Entertainment: RelicRadio.com
Old-time radio podcasts: One of the greatest things about getting an iPod was the ability to listen to free podcasts from iTunes. There’s rarely been a podcasting niche I looked for that wasn’t on there.
In looking for some good classic horror radio shows, I discovered an archive called The Horror!. I was very grateful to be able to sample broadcasts from the late 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. While not every replay is completely perfect by modern standards — some recording quality is a little fuzzy and some writing is a little laughable — The Horror! is still a treasure trove of radio and horror history. And some real gems can still be found.
My favorite horror series is Beyond Midnight, a South African series that ran in the late 1960s and early 70s. Because the show adapted written stories, even this had its clunkers, like “The Janissaries” — but “The Man Who Sold His Soul” features outstanding voice acting and a clever narrative about dealing with the devil.
Even if you don’t like old horror shows, but crime drama, suspense, comedy, or science fiction instead, The Horror! is just one wing of an immense archive of vintage radio. The site also offers Case Closed!, Strange Tales, Thrillers, Science Fiction, A Legacy of Laughs, and Radio At War. RR also offers three pages to long-running series: Orson Welles, Great Gildersleeve Replay (humor), and Suspense Replay.
I’ll be supporting the site when their app comes out, but if you’re the PayPal type and you appreciate Relic Radio, the owner would be very happy for your donation.
Free80sArcade.com How Games Were In The 1980s
One of the first things I spent my money on (shame, shame!) was a Xonox Double-Ender cartridge for my Atari 2600. Eventually, about a hundred games joined that pile of silicon and plastic. In 2010 dollars… I don’t even want to think about the cost per kilobyte of game.
But now, for all you gamers who grew up on Alien gaming systems and games so real you need a coroner after each deathmatch, Free80sArcade offers a chance to see what games were like when they had to be soldered together and sold in their own plastic cases. It’s all here: Super Mario Brothers, Q*Bert, Tapper, Ultima, Zaxxon … plus emulators for the SNES and Colecovision!
Game-Oldies.com: It’s Never Game Over
Many old game sites are dedicated to the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System. But there is one site that welcomes fans of the Sega Genesis, TurboGraphx, Sega Master System and arcade classics: Game-Oldies.com.
With a small quality selection of games, this site doesn’t offer as many as EveryVideoGame or Abandonia, but it does offer many titles I’ve never seen or gotten to play.
Arcade titles include the 1945 K III shooter, the quarter-munching Aero Fighters, Bomberman, and Bubble Bobble 2. Flash games include Burger Time, Donkey Kong, and Centipede. For Sega Genesis, there’s Elemental Master and Gaiares, and Zero Tolerance. Flash ports also feature Kung Fu Master, Metroid, and the first 3 Metal Slug games. Sweet! Best of all you don’t need to download Java for your system, just click and play. Have fun!
EveryVideoGame.com: Old-gaming Fun, Forums, Contests and More
It’s often very tough to find obscure NES games, either for search reasons or because the truly awesome sites up and disappear on you. EveryVideoGame.com seems to avoid both of those problems. Even though it was last updated in late 2009, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it has an awesome amount of tournaments and old video games. Even better is that many are playable as Java versions online — no need to download games with Nesticle or other emulators.
So if you miss playing Battletoads, Bionic Commando, River City Ransom, Guardian Legend or Vindicators, and want to join an active community full of old-school game aficionados, give EveryVideoGame.com a try.