July 13, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Like many other people, I've been trying out many of the new iPhone apps. Here's my thoughts on some of them. You can click on the app names to go to their pages in the App Store.
Cubes come flying towards you, and you tilt the iPhone side to side in order to dodge them. Very simple, but well done. It's free, so what more could you ask for?
This game has become sort of the poster child of games on the iPhone. And why shouldn't it? It looks quite good, and its fit and finish is almost unmatched by anything else available right now. I've easily invested more time in this game than anything else I've gotten thus far.
That said, I do have one complaint: it's hard. Really hard. The controls take awhile to get used to, and the developers very quickly throw levels at you composed of narrow pathways with no rails. You get better at the game as time goes on, so you'll find that going back to past levels will be easier than when you played them before, but the developers keep the difficulty a few notches above where you often wish it were. If you like a challenge, this will deliver.
Now this one's interesting. It allows you to use the iPhone's iPod interface to remotely control iTunes on your computer or Apple TV. A remote control whose interface is cognizant of the content it's controlling: surprisingly novel.
There are, right now, about 17 different Sudoku games available on the store. I picked this one mostly out of an attempt to strike a balance between the reviews and the price. This one is probably not the best of the 17 available. The difference between pencil marking and actually filling in the box is ostensibly a single-tap versus a double-tap, but it doesn't seem to always quite work that way. More important, the game generates puzzles with more than one solution, which is strangely annoying.
It's not a bad kart racing game, except for one major issue: its framerate. When there's no other racers near you, it's great. When there's one, it's still pretty good. When there's two or more (like, say, when the race first begins), the game really starts to chug, and it becomes really hard to control. If they can improve the performance, I can see myself keeping it around for awhile. If not, it probably won't be on my phone much longer.
For the Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero fans out there, this is not a bad download at all. It would nice, though, if it had a visual indicator showing progress along the multiplier ranks and streak length.
This game is free? It's up there with Super Monkey Ball in terms of polish. It's also rather unique. It's a basic block-matching matching puzzle game, but with the added twist of being able to level up and gain new abilities like an RPG. Scrolling through menus can be pretty choppy, though, and there are a few bugs that make it appear that the game was rushed out in order to be in the store on the first day. The developers appear to be moving quickly, though, and many of the issues are fixed in the first update that should be arriving in the next few days.
Here's a fun one: a virtual keyboard. It comes with basic recording and playback functionality. It's great just to mess around in, and it'll really help me for times when I get a little melody in my head and want to jot it down without going through all the overhead of launching GarageBand.
So, that's just a bit of what I've been playing with over the past few days. Kind of hard to believe that in addition to all that I've been making significant progress with my own iPhone projects.
July 14, 2008 at 12:08 am
Hehe, i found cube runner to be one of the more strangely entertaining games on the store.
I agree with you on super monkey ball being really hard -- for me it was too hard (i'm not good at games at the best of times) so i basically don't play it :-/
At the moment i actually find the most addictive game is Motion-X poker, which isn't really a skill game :D
July 14, 2008 at 7:51 am
I tried out Motion-X Poker. You're right, it is addictive.
Apple made numerous improvements to Javascript performance, which is always nice. One thing they did was allow developers access to touch events directly from Javascript. Try going to http://iphone.donaldhays.com/sunset/game_dev/ on an iPhone or iPod touch running 2.0, I've changed the interface's click events to occur ontouchstart instead of onclick. Going that route improves responsiveness pretty significantly.