gaming - page 25

I mentioned high-concept games with evocative titles earlier this week when I reviewed Tilt to Live 2, and here’s another one.

Don’t Shoot Yourself! is a quick, often frustrating little game in which the name says it all. You control a little ship (I guess) trapped inside of a series of shapes. Your main goal is to keep moving for until a number on the right side of the screen counts down to zero, and all the while your little guy is firing bullets all hither and thither. Your secondary goal is not to fly into any of those bullets.

If it sounds daunting, that’s because it is. But it’s still a game worth trying if only to see if you’re up to the challenge.

The best puzzle games either have a single rule (Tetris: “Make lines.”) or a few basic rules based on things we know innately or intuitively (Where’s My Water?: “Dig holes, water goes down, steam goes up, poison is bad.”).

Flux Free is a new iOS title which falls into the latter category. It’s a shape-matching game built on a few basic concepts like color theory that keep it from becoming obtuse even when all of its mechanics are in play.

That’s not to say that it’s incredibly easy, but you’ll never spend any time trying to remember how anything works. And it’s smart and fun, so that’s good, too.

Tilt to Live is one of those high-concept games with a name that says it all. Kind of like Press X to Jason, but not quite as flippant or mocking.

And it was popular, so a sequel was inevitable. And so we have Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous, which came out last week for iOS devices and delivers on its name almost immediately.

It’s kind of hard to explain until you’ve played it, though, and you should definitely play it.

Tiny Death Star may in fact destroy my free time if I keep playing it like I have over the last week. It’s a collaboration between Disney Mobile, Lucasarts, and Nimblebit–and the quality shines through as a result.

Built your Death Star, level by level, with residential, service, retail, and Imperial levels where you can interrogate those nasty Rebel scum. The game is packed with Star Wars references and a great sense of humor; the interaction between the Emperor and Darth Vader is particularly funny.

It’s a free-to-play app, it’s in the App Store right now, and it’s got 8-bit Princess Leia and Boba Fett. What more do you need? Go check it out now.

Source: App Store

Nothing can touch the Fallout series of role-playing games for post-apocalyptic immersion; the ’50s, atomic-era nostalgia and post-nuclear holocaust loneliness and horror that the games simulate have gained the series a huge and devoted following. But none of it would have been possible without a breakout 1988 computer RPG called Wasteland.

Its title may sound like a Star Wars-based mockbuster by The Asylum (the studio that brought us Sharknado and Atlantic Rim), but Stellar Wars, a new iOS title out now from developer Liv Games, is actually the followup to 2011’s megapopular Legendary Wars. Only this one takes place in space and stars a bunch of cute robots.

So it’s off to a promising start from that alone.

Once you get over the cute overload from those little guys, though, Stellar Wars reveals itself to be a complex, surprisingly deep melange of a bunch of different game styles that shouldn’t work together, but then they totally do.

Just expect to have to work for it.

I’m a big fan of Iron Man. I’ll play virtually any game with Iron Man in it, on it, or around it, so naturally I took a swing at Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 tie-in game earlier this year. And it was a bland infinite runner to sit alongside all the other bland infinite runners released for popular film franchises. I wept.

So when I saw that Thor: The Dark World was not an infinite runner, I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, Thor: The Dark World is a top-down dungeon crawler hybrid that allows you to summon Einherjar, or heroes, to help fight alongside you. So you’ll charge through levels tapping every shiny thing and enemy in your path and can strategically call more fighters to the battle to deal with bosses and ranged attacks.

First-person shooters are tough to pull off in mobile. You have to manage two virtual joysticks if you want the flexibility of their console and PC cousins, and you also have to figure out how to make shooting work on a platform with no buttons. And thirdly, you have to compensate for the fact that the player’s thumbs must, by necessity, cover up part of the screen.

Neon Shadow is a new first-person shooter for iOS devices from developer Tasty Poison Games that aims to capture the bare-bones, “You are trapped in a cramped space with things that will kill you unless you kill them first” experience of classic FPSes, and it succeeds. It even does a callback to the original Doom games by having a picture of your character’s face that gets more bloodied and beat-up as you take damage.

Plus, you start with the shotgun, and the game gets an extra star just for that.

I’ve always loved the Lego suite of licensed games more than most people do. They’ve always been the perfect storm for me: a unique combination of geekiness, humor, and obsessive collection and completion. Every time I pick one up, I don’t stop playing it until I’ve unlocked every character, found every collectible, and beat every secret level.

Needless to say, I am a fan.

The iOS version of developer Traveler’s Tales sweded version of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy is out now; the epic 1.3-gig game contains Lego recaps of all three Lord of the Rings films, over 90 characters, and all the soon-to-be-dead orcs, goblins, and Uruk-Hai you can tap. And while the game is every bit as cute and collectastic as the other ones I’ve played, its easily confused controls bog it down a little.

That’s not to say that it’s unplayable, but you’ll have to muster all of your fandom and patience to really enjoy it.

Disney’s mobile gaming efforts are surprisingly good! Stack Rabbit joins Where’s My Mickey and Where’s My Water as another easy-to-use app designed for children, but with enough appeal that adults can find plenty to enjoy. In Stack Rabbit, you play as a kindly rabbit trying to take care of his sister’s children while she’s on vacation. To do this, you have to hastily stack veggies on your head and hop away before the snoozing guard dog wakes up.

Each round you’re limited to a certain number of stacks and have to gather matching sets of vegetables to clear the level. The poor overworked rabbit can only carry so many vegetables at once so planning out your matches is a must unless you want to sacrifice time by dropping all the food you’ve collected.

Blocky Roads is kind of a weird game. It has block-based voxel graphics like Minecraft or the lesser-known Zelda clone 3D Dot Game Heroes, but rather than being an open-world construction title or a sword-and-shield adventure, it’s a game about driving cars in a 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests.

And once you’ve picked up enough coins, you can upgrade your cars to get better at driving around the 2.5D environment and picking up coins and treasure chests. Or you can use those same coins to unlock a new level full of even more coins and treasure chests. And so on.

And all of this is to save your character’s farm.

No, really. It’s a weird game.

I don’t need a game to constantly encourage me and tell me how well I’m doing or how good I am at playing it. I don’t need a game to take me by the hand and lead me along through its twists and turns. And I definitely don’t need a game to take pity on me if I’m not good at it right away.

And that’s a good thing because Octagon, a new twitchy arcade title by (mean) developer Lukas Korba, isn’t interested in doing any of that. Octagon wants to hurt you. It wants you to feel terrible and incompetent, and I have reason to believe that it’s actively trying to get me to break my phone.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still fun. But holy crap, is it difficult.

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The Retro Nintendo Gamer Bundle combines the RetroN console, 3 controllers, Zapp Gun and 2 NES games for just $59. And this offer also includes free shipping!

If you’ve ever wanted to make viruses fight, Pathogen will help you realize your dreams. Pathogen is a board game that has you infecting tiles to eventually take over the entire playing field. You can play versus the computer in an increasingly difficult campaign mode or challenge your friends.

Perhaps I’m not quite as good at “Go” as I thought I was, but Pathogen’s difficulty is undoubtedly the first thing you’ll notice. The computer in the campaign is prepared to take advantage of your mistakes at every turn.

I’ve frequently been so close to winning a match only to have the computer claim victory because I forgot to take over one of its pieces butting up against my wall of viruses.

It’s been a little while since I reviewed a fantasy game with a branching plot, so I picked up Sorcery! 2, a new title from developer Inkle Studios and designer Steve Jackson, co-founder of Lionhead Studios (maker of the Fable series of role-playing games for Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles) and writer of the gamebooks on which this franchise is based. Not the Steve Jackson who created the GURPS tabletop RPG platform, but that’s an amazing coincidence.

Sorcery! 2 is the second (duh) in what will be a four-part adventure series, and it’s equal parts visual novel, RPG, and gamebook. And it all takes place in a beautiful, hand-drawn world with multiple paths and interesting old men to talk to. I mean, I don’t think you only talk to old men, but I spent about an hour with the game, and I did talk to some old men of varying crotchetiness. And a restauranteur who may or may not have been a star-spawn of Cthulhu.

Why haven’t you downloaded this yet?

Your school experience might have differed from mine, but I remember one day in Industrial Arts (read: Shop class) when the teacher announced we would all be designing and building bridges. And at the end of the week, we would see whose construct could hold the most weight.

Now, I’m not a trained bridge-maker — in fact, none of us were because we were ninth-graders — so I knew that the next week would be among the longest of my young life because all I knew about structural engineering was something vague about triangles. Triangles are good, I think. Anyway, my bridge sucked. If I remember correctly, it snapped in half and then somehow caught fire.

And I’ve never felt that same sense of personal failure again … until I played Project Peon, an iPad game hitting the App Store today.

The genre of tower defense has been fairly represented on iOS over the past several years, with notable entries like Fieldrunners and Kingdom Rush turning in fantastic examples of fixed and variable path classic tower defense gameplay.

iPad-only RoboMouse HD, then, is a new, well-balanced entry to the genre, and while it brings nothing innovative to the table, it’s adorable and provides a solid set of features that make it an essential entry to any tower defense fan’s gaming library.

Getting kids to read 19th century literature is virtually impossible unless you attach a grade to it these days. While I was content with thick tomes of Brönte(s) and Austen in high school, my classmates were quick to avoid most books not written by popular authors within the last 20 years. If only someone made an infinite runner with book passages as the levels so children would have to look at words when playing games!

Stride & Prejudice by No Crusts Interactive is a surprisingly simple yet elegant way to read Pride & Prejudice without abandoning your love of repeatedly tapping your phone. You control the novel’s heroine Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennet as she leaps daringly from sentence to sentence. Depending on which gameplay mode selected, you can actually read all of Pride & Prejudice at a leisurely pace.

The Commodore Amiga has become a classic target for nostalgic gamers to relive their early gaming experiences. iOS has seen its fair share of releases from the retro computing platform, including Battle Squadron One, Alien Breed, Babylonian Twins, and Defender of the Crown, just to name a few. There are several more in the works, as well.

Today, however, developer Cope-Com announced the release of classic two-player shoot-em-up, Battle Squadron, for OS X and PC. It follows up a successful iOS release in 2011 as well as one for Android in 2012.

I’m sad to say that if you clicked on this review hoping that Girl Washing was a soon-to-be-removed “sexy” game for iOS that you’re in for some hot…laundry washing action. Yep. Girl Washing is all about a cute girl doing chores instead of you washing some totally objectified anime chick (thankfully).

Anyway, Girl Washing is a weird take on a matching game. Rather than swiping to move clothes into lines, you’re actually assembling the game pieces on a grid, trying to match five items together. When you do, the clothes end up in a washing queue that you then have to drag into the washing machine. Soon, all the laundry starts piling up and matching five pairs gets incredibly difficult. I’ve spent a few hours beating my head against the seemingly automatic fail state Girl Washing pushed on you if you put even a sock out of place.

I’ve played and reviewed my share of endless runners, but Ooga Jump, a new game from Bolt Creative, takes endlessness to that other axis.

If you thought I was going to say “to new heights,” shame on you.

Ooga Jump is an “endless jumper” that was originally a minigame in Bolt’s earlier title, Pocket God. You control a Pygmy who for some reason or another is taking an infinite voyage upward via a series of platforms and collectible goodies. On his way, he encounters deadly statues, spiders, meteors, and wind, all of which want to cut his trip short by making him really, really dead.

Finnish developer and all-around success story Rovio Entertainment announced Monday a new cross-over collaboration with Korean-based GungHo Entertainment, the makers of the almost as highly successful match-three mobile game, Puzzles and Dragons.

The pissed-off avians will show up in the popular role-playing/color matching mashup as an Angry Birds-themed dungeon from November 18 through December 1 of this year. You’ll get to challenge the Angry Birds as enemies in the dungeon, in contrast to their hero role in the Rovio-produced titles.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for a dramatic Blade Runner-style soundtrack, but this new shooter from publisher Crescent Moon Studios and developer Tasty Poison Games (Pocket RPG) looks pretty darn exciting.

First person shooters are hard to do well on iOS, especially with a lack of physical buttons, but if anyone can do it right, these folks can. Of course, with the possibility of a physical controller due to Apple’s new controller code in iOS 7, things can only get better.

Check out the trailer to see the game in action.

I’m a big fan of physics-based puzzles, but the trouble is most of them relate to altering an object’s trajectory as it falls rather than manipulating things.

Drei by Etter Studio GmbH does away with falling oranges and rolling balls and offers instead increasingly difficult building block puzzles that require you to balance objects, shapes, and negotiate with other players.

Developer Gaijin Games’ Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien quickly became one of my favorite games this year when it launched for consoles and PC back in February. It had a lot of personality, precise gameplay, and was just challenging enough to keep you on your toes but not enough to be frustrating.

The iOS port, Bit.Trip Run!, keeps the original’s levels, fantastic graphics, and entertaining narration from voice actor Charles Martinet (the voice of Nintendo’s Mario). So it’s mostly the same game. But it drops the necessarily accurate button controls in favor of taps and swipes for the mobile platform, and that really cuts the game down a few notches. I’d almost say that it makes it unplayable, but that’s not quite the case.

But it does take a great deal of patience to play well.