The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

What have I always said is the surefire way of getting me to buy a game on iOS?
That’s right, Asynchronous Multiplayer.

Ascension has that, which is plenty of reason to buy it on its own. However, it’s also a pretty awesome deckbuilding game, in the way that Dominion is a “deckbuilding game.” I like it. I mean, it’s no Tanto Cuore, but then again, what is?

I described the game the other day as a combination of Dominion and Race for the Galaxy. It’s certainly more Dominion than Race, but hear me out. A game of Ascension ends when all the “honor points” are depleted. These work basically like VP chips from Race. Cards in your deck are worth honor points, and you pick up honor points from the pool when you defeat monsters (or when a card effect tells you to). The person with the most honor at the end of the game, counting cards in their deck and their pile of points, wins.

There are two currencies that are emptied at the end of the round that cards can give you. They can give you money (I think the game calls it Runes? But it’s money.) or they can give you attack power. With attack power, you can kill monsters, take their honor bonus from the pool, and get whatever extra effect the monster has. With money, you can buy more cards to put in your deck. Unlike Dominion, there’s a set of five cards dealt at random from the deck in front of all players. When one is bought or defeated, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace it. I really like that. It makes the game feel much, much more dynamic than Dominion’s “pick some decks and that’s what you get!” There are also, of course, three cards you can always buy: a Cultist that you can kill easily, a Mystic which gives you more money, and a Heavy Infantry which gives you more fight power.

The deck is broken up into cards of four factions: Enlightened, Lifebound, Mechana, and Void. Each type has it’s own path to victory, and you’ll probably want to specialize in at least one during the game. Enlightened is Money-based, but has cards that let you kill some monsters automatically to help out with it’s lack of attack power. Lifebound is extremely Money-based, but has cards that let you basically buy honor. Mechana is very flexible, having many cards that let you pick between money and attack, and also loves Constructs, cards that stay in play and have continuous effects. Void is extremely attack oriented, and focuses on letting you thin your deck as a side bonus to many of its cards.

Again, the game feels really dynamic. You get into points where, say, no players are focusing enough on attack, so the stuff you can buy or fight is all monsters, and you have to make that choice if you want to try to diversify into attack power, or just wait it out. Similarly, you have to decide whether you’re going to force a strategy or try to just play it by ear. This stuff feels very Race to me, where you’re trying to read the board and the cards you’re getting to see what the other players don’t want so you can find your own niche and path to victory points. You get that, but Ascension is much simpler and faster to play than Race. It’s a smart little game, and totally worth five bucks because, you know. Asynchronous multiplayer, motherfucker.

Ugh what do I write about ugggggggh… List of topics, save me!

Tested does all these Apps. Sometimes they are of a week? Anyway, they talked about this game called Continuity 2, which seemed pretty clever, and was a buck. As you know, that’s all it takes for me to buy an app. Thus, I bought the app.

Apparently this is a sequel to something? I haven’t played the first. But the game itself is pretty straightforward. You are a stick figure dude. You have to run and jump to collect coins, get a key, and use that key to unlock the exit to the level. But, of course, there’s a twist. The level is made up of sliding block panels. You can zoom out and rearrange them as you’d like in order to get around the level. You can also change the level’s gravity by rotating your iDevice about. Basically, it becomes kind of a puzzle in figuring out how you can slide and rotate things to get to all the coins before you leave. Since, in order to make a working path, the walls have to match up on both sides of a tile, you don’t have as many options as you think you have, and you have to think about when to use what.

The controls are fine. You double tap to zoom in or out, hold to the left or right of your stick dude to walk, and swipe up to jump. Since the game doesn’t require quick reflexes or pixel-perfect platforming, these controls work perfectly. You’re never accidentally jumping off a ledge or anything. The rotation sometimes takes a bit longer to kick in than I’d like, but that’s probably an issue with the hardware more than anything.

You never die. If you kill your stick guy, he just respawns. The objective is to complete the stage as fast as possible. Each level has goal times you can work for, or you can just work to make sure you get all the coins on every level, as many are options and are harder to do than just getting the key and leaving. That’s mostly what I did.

That’s seriously all there is to this game, though. It’s very much “What you see is what you get.” I’ve played a lot of levels, and while they got more complicated (more tiles and more rotation required) they never really mixed up the formula or gave it a twist. It could have used one! But for a dollar, I definitely got my money’s worth. I do kind of wonder what the first one was like. This game is really very simple, in both visuals and gameplay. How could this be an evolution of something else? Is this just a level pack? I have no idea.

I’m still playing Tiny Tower. Like, every single day.

Why?

1. I’m still seeing new things.
Tiny Tower has nice pixel-style visuals. I like it. It looks cool. They put a lot of time and effort into making all those floors look really neat. Plus, there are a TON of them. At the time of this writing, my tower is currently 76 stories tall. There has, of course, been no repeats in the types of floors. Even stuff like the various apartment floors, which could easily have been repeats, are all distinct and different looking. And I know, from looking at the list of desired jobs and at friends’ towers, that I have not seen a whole lot of stuff yet.

2. Progress is really well thought out.
I really like that, even though my tower is huge now, and I’m bringing in a ton of money, my progress is thought out enough that I can still proceed. In most free to play games, you eventually hit a point where proceeding without paying is a tedious mess. The game is basically screaming at you to give them money, and lots of it. Tiny Tower doesn’t do this. Progress is still about the same: I can make enough to build about one floor a day. I could certainly build a lot faster if I didn’t, but I don’t have to. Since the game is so casual, a floor or so a day feels like perfect progress to me. I like it.

3. Availability of “For Pay” Content.
Tiny Tower loves to give you Tower Bux, the thing you can pay money for. It gives them to you quite often. It’s extremely nice. As long as you keep your spending of them to a minimum, you don’t have to be shut out of key features just because you didn’t pay, like upgrading your shops. Personally, I use my Tower Bux to move tenants into apartments (because that takes FOREVER without it) and upgrade shops that require a lot of constant attention: I only really check the game twice to three times a day, and shops that require me to constantly be fiddling with them are less desirable. Thankfully, they put in that feature so I could upgrade them and have to worry about them less! And because they’re so nice about giving me Bux, I can use that feature sparingly to increase my enjoyment of the game.

4. Inability to Lose Progress/Low Time Commitment
If I forget to check Tiny Tower in a day, I don’t lose progress. Everything I’ve done is still effective. My tower doesn’t rot, my wares don’t spoil. I can not touch the game for days, and it won’t punish me for it. Sure, I’ll be making less money and progressing slower, but I won’t be kept back. I won’t have to climb back up to where I was.
Because of that, and my upgrading strategy, I can play the game when I wake up and when I go to bed, as I have been, and not feel like I’m fucking it up. I can play this game on my terms. Many of these games try to set the terms for you. Tiny Tower makes suggestions of terms, but doesn’t stop you from making them yourself. I appreciate that.

Tiny Tower really is great. Some people hate this kind of game on principal, and that’s cool. Don’t play it. But I easily would have dropped a few bucks on this game. It’s just fantastic, and even better that it’s free. If they offered something to buy that wasn’t just the ability to do what I am doing but more, such as, I don’t know, a pack of new shops or something, I would probably buy it to support them.

Twitter was all like “Oh man, Quarrel is like Boggle and Risk put together, oh man, Quarrel is so awesome you should play Quarrel!”
So, you know, I downloaded it.

First off, let me just say that the versions of the game are stupidly misleading for no reason. The game called “Quarrel” is just a demo. “Quarrel Deluxe” is the actual game. I just played the demo, though. It was fun, but I couldn’t see myself playing it enough to be worth five bucks because of issues.

Quarrel is a very good looking game. All the characters have lots of, well, character. They hop around and throw letters at each other. You also fight opponents with little animated expressions and reactions, which is nice. The gameplay really is exactly what it sounds like: Boggle + Risk. Each troop you have is one more letter you can put into the word. You spell words instead of rolling. The person who has the highest point total word wins the fight and takes out the other side. Point ties go to whoever entered the word the fastest. Winning gets you “treasure” which you can use at the beginning of a fight to call in an extra dude. You do troop movements like Risk, and you get one guy on each controlled territory at the end of every turn.

All that is fine, but it just didn’t catch me. When you can lose because you aren’t faster than an AI opponent, that takes a lot of fun out of playing against the AI, at least personally. The game doesn’t show me a countdown clock or anything, so I really don’t know how fast the computer is. The game even has a little mini game to play while the computer players are fighting each other. Why not just skip those fights? I don’t know. It’s a weird decision.

But the real problem is lack of multiplayer. I’m not talking about in the demo, that’s fine if it doesn’t have it there. But the full version doesn’t have any multiplayer either. This game would be fun as shit against actual opponents, but not being able to have any just makes the game a moot point. You can beat an AI that’s intentionally being stupid, and you will fail against an AI that always knows the highest value word because it’s an AI. It’s not a challenge. It’s just kind of a timewaster. Against real people, speed becomes a fun element. Against real people, strategy becomes more important. Against real people, this becomes and awesome game.

But it’s not there yet. Play the demo if you want. It’s free, and you’ll get some fun out of it. But goodness, I can just not see the full version being a purchase you can make without very, very robust multiplayer options.

Cut the Rope: Experiments is just more Cut the Rope, and that isn’t a bad thing.

Basically, the Cut the Rope people got tired of giving out awesome level packs for free and decided to make a sequel, to get more money. I’m okay with this: they really, really expanded Cut the Rope, and there is a lot of game there. It’s well worth a dollar. They’re surely going to do the same thing with the sequel here, and I can’t wait. I even splurged and gave them an extra buck for the HD version (which you don’t need to do, as it plays fine without even on an iPad) because I really liked Cut the Rope. Then I dug into this.

The “plot” of this game confuses me. The first game was that you got a mysterious box with a little dude who you needed to feed candy to by solving how the box worked. So you’re the owner of the house, and the Om Nom is just a little dude. Cool.
Now in Experiments, it’s like an alternate reality, where the Om Nom is delivered to a scientist’s house. He seems to be wanting to test the Om Nom’s intelligence. However, who are you in this scenario? You’re not the scientist, because he talks to you and encourages you. Are you the psychic force of the Om Nom, manipulating the contraptions? Are you still the homeowner from the first game? But if that’s the case, why is the scientist testing YOUR intelligence?
Of course, you’re not supposed to care about that. A cute guy wants candy, end of story. You’re supposed to play Cut the Rope.

The action in Experiments is much more fiddly, and I think that’s a good thing. The game has some tutorial levels, but it’s really clear that you should just play Cut the Rope first for the easier levels, and that these are for advanced players. It’s nice that they’re catering to people who bought the first game. The contraptions that each set of levels is based around are also quite fun. Introduced so far are tether guns and suction cups, and they all make for some interesting situations. I don’t remember, for example, anything having weight in the first game. Maybe some stuff did, and I forgot? But weight really plays a big role in these new puzzles. If you shoot the candy with a ton of tethers, it gets heavy. The force of the tether when it hits pulls the candy in its direction. Suction Cups have weight, and if you have enough of them on a bubble, the bubble won’t float up. You’re doing things like attaching and detatching suction cups to swing the candy across the level before shooting it with a tether to make it fall in the Om Nom’s mouth. You’ve also got all the toys from the previous games in play: you’re still cutting ropes, of course. It’s just Cut the Rope: Advanced, and that’s awesome.

Seriously, if you’re new to the game, get the original, or download Holiday Gift to try it. If you enjoyed the original, I think you know if you want to invest another dollar in fun action-puzzles. I did, and had a fun afternoon solving what they have in the game so far, with more to come. Good times.

They mentioned Godville on a podcast I listen to and so I downloaded it. Because I am a sheepfoxbunny who will buy any iOS game I’m told to. Of course, it was free. You can also play it on the website, I guess, but I’ve only really played in the iPad app.

Do you remember Progress Quest? This is basically just Progress Quest. But it’s like… bad. I remember when I first played Progress Quest. I found many of the items and shit funny. Then again, maybe that had something to do with how the game taught me awesome words like Vambrace. In any case, the mechanics within were kind of novel and a solid critique of the time, and I found the writing funny for the bit I played the game.

Godville just doesn’t have that. I mean, I appreciate they’re good enough to give credit where it’s due to Progress Quest on their website. I can dig that. But it’s just not funny. All the monsters and little comments my hero makes just don’t make me smile. They are like, the very worst jokes. They are like 4th grade jokes, and not even dirty ones. It’s really kind of a shame. I hear many of the items, enemies, and so on are made via a player submission system, which is probably why they just aren’t up to snuff. I just really expect more actual comedy from my comedy games.

Godville does attempt to mix up the formula. You’re a god or goddess, so you can send messages to your hero for minute amounts of control. You can Encourage or Punish them. You can revive them if they die. You can shout messages from the heavens at them. You really don’t get to do this enough for it to be engaging, though. The Encourage or Punish just… I don’t know! They probably only affect your hero’s motivations at specific points, but the game doesn’t make that very clear. Similarly, I looked up on the wiki what words made your hero do something, and it is a very small amount! What’s worse, often the hero will ignore them because she’s doing something else, or started an action as you sent the command. You can pay them for more power to give these commands, but eh. I don’t know why you would. They don’t do enough!

I dunno. It doesn’t need much interaction, I suppose, much like Progress Quest, so that’s nice. You can check on it every day or every week, and it works, I suppose. The reward would be looking in on your hero and going “Oh shit, that is one wacky item or skill you’ve learned, hero!” But they’re just not that well written, so it doesn’t give me that.

It’s free. You can try it. But I’m really not impressed with it. Oh well.

I think I’ll just continue clearing down my list of topics for awhile… let’s see here…
Okay, Super Stickman Golf. I can do that.

Super Stickman Golf is kind of neat. It basically has absolutely nothing to do with golf. It’s kind of a very strange platformer, and it’s clever, fun, and chock full of tons of content. If that’s your thing, this is a game you should pick up on iOS.

Basically, what you have are platformer levels, from a side view. Your little golfer is trying to put the ball in the hole, of course, but it’s all about traversing cliffs and platforms, instead of the normal “ball control onto the fairway” sort of thing that actual golf involves. There are sand traps, of course, but those are actually more useful than “trap” in this game, because it’s a safe place for the ball to stop without rolling, for example. Water Hazards and similar are as per normal. You try to shoot for the “par” score on each hole, like in golf, though many levels have floating icons that subtract strokes from your score for making difficult shots, so you can try for them, if you’d like, and make Par that way.

To help you, you can pack a number of special power balls with you for each course. The simplest is the mulligan, which just lets you take a shot over, but eventually you unlock things like the Sticky Ball, which will stick to whatever it hits, even a wall, and stop there, or the Ice Ball, which freezes water hazards into a platform. Eventually, it becomes a hard choice. Mulligans are so useful that you want to take a lot of them, but without the special shots, some holes become extremely hard or nearly impossible to do at or under par. The fact that you have to pick them before starting a round really adds a little bit of strategy to the game. I like that.

There are just a ton of levels in this game, too. From what I understand, this game basically has the entirety of the previous game (which is just Stickman Golf), and then two more sets of levels just as long. It was getting fairly hard near the end of the “beginner” courses, so I can’t even imagine how hard it would be once you get to the high-level courses. It requires skill and precision. It’s fun, and easy to pick up and play. The only thing that seems a waste is the multiplayer mode, which isn’t hotseat for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a fun game with plenty of shit. Ignore the microtransactions and just play. You’ll find plenty to entertain you without paying for early unlocks.

Let’s see, what’s like, the oldest thing on my to-write-about list…

Oh wow, Dungeon Raid. How have I not talked about that?

Dungeon Raid is an iOS game you should buy. If you liked Puzzle Quest, but wish the outcome of games would be more in your hands, Dungeon Raid is a game for you. While there is no “quest” with a storyline you will skip, Dungeon Raid keeps randomish matching gameplay, but never feels like the computer is purposely screwing you over. Sure, eventually it gets to be a war of attrition that you have trouble beating, but you never feel like “that’s bullshit that the computer just took four turns in a row!” or whatever.

Basically, there’s a grid. This grid is filled with Gold Coins, Shields, Swords, Health Potions, and Skulls, which represent enemies. You pick one piece, and trace your finger along similar pieces until you can’t go any farther, then release to clear all those pieces. Clear gold, and you get gold. Clear shields, and you repair your armor and get “gear EXP” for enchanting your equipment. Clear health potions, and you get healed. The only thing that’s different is skulls and swords. Each skull has HP, needed to defeat it. After you take a turn, each skull on the board attacks you, with damage mitigated a bit by your armor value. Each sword you trace through increases your attack power, so you trace through swords AND skulls, and kill them to get EXP. Sometimes there will be special skulls on the board, which do special things. One “breaks” swords so that the swords stay on the board, but don’t do anything if you collect them, for example. One teleports around. One can only be hurt if it’s not the last skull in your line that you’re tracing, and so on. These bosses give you more EXP, of course.

The only weird part is the level system. You have several equipment slots. Fill up your gold meter, and you’re given a selection of equipment to buy and replace your current gear, which will hopefully improve your character. Fill up your “gear EXP” and you can add an effect to an item you own, like Poison, or +HP, or something like that. Level up, and you can pick a new spell or ability. These do things like turn all skulls into swords, collect all gold on the board, and so on. They’re actually dictated by what class you are, and you unlock more classes as you play through the game. The thing is, what the game offers you is random. If your level up offered you a +Luck stat boost skill one time around, there’s no promise it’ll be there next time. Same with equipment. You can’t count on anything. It’s sometimes frustrating like that, when you want to buff a certain stat and the game just won’t give you the option to.

Still, this is a great little time-waster. It requires focus, but not TOO much focus. It’s not a huge commitment: you can play a round for a few minutes, and pick it up later, and not be lost on what you’re doing. It’s just really good game design, and totally worth the three bucks I paid for it. I’ve stopped playing it now, but I really played it solid for a few weeks when I got it. Do consider it! It’s good.

Apparently I didn’t write a blog about it, as my search for one is coming up short, but let me just make it clear that I really, really enjoyed Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for the 360. It was, by far, the best Mario Kart clone I’ve ever played. It’s better than, say, Mario Kart Wii. If you like that kart-racing, power-sliding kind of game, and have any affinity for the likes of characters like Ulala at all, it is a game worth playing. You could probably pick it up now on the cheap, too.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that because that’s part of what prompted me to pick up Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for iOS. The other part was that it was getting a ton of positive buzz as being basically the best racing game on iOS. The third element was that it was on sale. Isn’t that always the reason I buy something like that?

It’s really good on iOS, too.

Basically, the iOS version has all the features of the full console version. The races, powers, and so on basically work exactly the same. Of course, it smartly uses the auto-gas that many iOS racing games use, but you have a “drift” and “brake” button on one side of the screen, and your items on the other. You turn by tilting. It was well-calibrated for me right from the get-go, and felt quite good, even better than, say, Hot Pursuit. I was pulling off power slides like I do in the console version with little effort. The controls are fine. The courses, from what I’ve seen so far, are exactly the same as well. I am getting something extremely close to the full game experience for my two dollars. That’s really just kind of amazing.

It’s not the complete game, though. You’re missing several cups worth of courses, though you do have quite a few to play in the game. You’re also missing some of the racers. Ulala not making the cut hurts me deeply. There’s still a good variety, since they smartly decided to weed out a lot of Sonic characters like Amy and Shadow, and I have Beat from Jet Set Radio to fall back on as my go-to racer, so I suppose it’s okay. Maybe they’ll add more courses and racers in updates? I don’t know. There’s still tons of kart racing to be had here, though if you liked a specific course from the console version, you may be out of luck. You also will have trouble playing online matches. I tried to quick match a few times against online randoms, just to try, and it never found a game. iOS multiplayer just never quite works well enough like that. It does have local bluetooth stuff, though, so I suppose if you’re lucky enough to have friends around with the game, you can at least do that.

Seriously, though, if you like Kart racers, this is a fantastic fucking value at the sale price I bought it at. It’s probably worth more than two dollars if you like racing. Sega did a damn good job with this port, just like they did a shockingly good job with the original game. It’s worth a look, if it sounds like something you need in your iOS life.

Multipong!

The name kind of says it all.

Seriously, though, Multipong is kind of cool. It’s Pong Meets Warlords. You basically play Pong in a square, with four players. Using the power of MULTITOUCH, you can actually set your iPad down and have four people move their own individual paddles and play. This, and it being temporarily free, was what drew me to it in the first place. As you play, powerups appear that do things like lengthen your paddle or turn on “gravity” towards one player, so the ball “falls” towards their goal, making them have to be hyper-defensive for awhile. Sometimes the playfield also changes, adding pegs for the ball to bounce off of, or areas of “Fog of War” to keep you guessing. When you let a ball go past you, you lose a life. The last player with lives wins, of course.

It’s really simple, but it is really good at what it does. For example, the music in the game is actually pretty good chiptune-type stuff. I dig it. They also have many themes that you can skin the game with, but the default theme, which looks like old wood panel furniture meets pinball, is so classy and awesome I don’t know why you’d switch it to something else. Still, if you want it to look like actual Pong, you do have that option. There’s even a single player mode, and while I don’t know why you’d really invest much time into it, it does do it’s best to throw a variety of scenarios at you to keep you interested while you play. The developers really wanted to make a complete, polished package, and not just put a quick and dirty game onto the app store, and it shows.

With a name like “Multipong,” I wasn’t expecting much, but this is a really well-done little app. It’s never going to be something more than a silly thing you break out with your friends for like, one round while waiting for popcorn to pop before you movie or something, but for that sort of use case, it’s actually quite a lot of fun. I do recommend giving it a try.