The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Now, if you want a free app worth shit, you should probably look at Textropolis. Parish reviewed it back when 1up was a site worth looking at and I enjoyed their iPhone coverage. I remembered it when I randomly saw it on the free app list, and picked it up. It’s nothing particularly fancy, but it’s a solid way to waste some time, certainly.

The game is really simple. It’s basically a variant of Boggle, where you have a pool of letters and have to spell as many words as you can with them. The twist, however, is that these pools of letters are the names of cities. As you find more words out of the name of a city, the city increases in population, and starts building itself up. You only have to build up to a two-star city to unlock the next, but there is a running count of how many words, total, one can spell, and you can keep working towards that and try to get full stars on each city, if you’d like.

The interface is nothing crazy, but it works. You tap the letters to spell words. As you spell, it gives you a readout on top of what words you’ve already spelled that include the letters in the order you’ve hit them so far, so you don’t repeat. It also has a “Last Word” button after you enter a new word, which is handy to quickly input the plural forms of words after you get the word itself. It’s not going to make you say “WHAT A GREAT INTERFACE” but it’s nicely done.

That’s… basically it? But seriously, while simple, it is a fun game to pass the time with, if you’re a word person. It also works great as a multiplayer experience. Cara and I played for awhile, with both of us tossing out word ideas. It was fun. It’s free. It’s quality. What more to you want?

Whenever I’m bored, I sometimes boot up the ol’ appshopper and see if there’s anything free out there that looks interesting. A recent thing I grabbed was something called Doodle Fit. Now, for no good reason, I really fell in love with LetsTans, a simple, free Tangram game. It didn’t require much thought, but was just enough to not be completely boring: a great thing to do while listening to a podcast. This game, in its description, reminded me of it. I’d need to fit blocks of different set shapes that I couldn’t rotate into a bigger picture. Fair enough. Sure, it was one of those stupid games trying to cash in on the popularity of Doodle Jump, but it was free, so why not?

Of course, you get what you pay for: it’s not that great.

For one, the interface is kind of awful. Instead of dragging the pieces into place, like a sane game would do on a touch screen, you instead tap to highlight a piece, and then drag your finger around like an analog stick to move a shadow of it into place. Then you let go and it places itself. I really have no idea why the designers would waste the touch screen like that. They have great one-to-one interaction with blocks like this. The iPhone and such is MADE for this shit. It baffles me that they could get it wrong.

I also found that the puzzles themselves did not have a lot of variety. They were just different boxes with some spaces pre-filled in. With Tangrams, it’s fun trying to see what ridiculous thing they are claiming what you’re making is a picture of. In this, they kind of give up on that like 8 puzzles in, where they have a puzzle named “We have no idea” for what it is supposed to be. Good job on that one, developers of Doodle Fit.

Finally, I don’t know what it is about tangrams in general, but they have just the perfect amount of difficulty. You don’t always know the solution immediately, but once you start trying things, you figure it out fast enough. I didn’t find the puzzles in Doodle Fit to have this quality. Either I knew the solution immediately, or it took me FOREVER to solve it. I’d keep trying different organizations, and nothing would even get close. I couldn’t get any clues. I’d just kind of fall flat on my face and get frustrated.

Yeah, I can’t really recommend it. I guess it’s trying to sell puzzle packs, like LetsTans. Granted, I never bought one for LetsTans, because they were really good about putting out little free puzzle updates on a regular basis, but I might see me buying a dollar puzzle pack for LetsTans if I was really bored. I got tired of Doodle Fit before I completed the beginner stages. Not worth your time.

I bought the Carcassonne iPhone app right when it came out. I love the game, and it supposedly had asynchronous multiplayer, something that way, way more iOS games should have. Unfortunately, when I booted it up, I learned that to play online with your friends, you have to use the e-mail account set up on your iDevice. Because having my e-mail on my iPod seemed stupid, I balked at the idea, and I never really got too much use out of it, even though it had hotseat. A few half-started games while waiting for movies to start, perhaps, but that’s about it.

Then, at Jonathan’s birthday party, Spaeth was playing the game. Apparently he got his sister and her husband hooked, and was now playing online matches with them. This made me say, “okay, fine, fuck it.” I hooked up my Gmail, which was as stupid and pain in the ass as I expected. Then I started games with Spaeth, and some people on Talking Time.

I was quickly reminded how fantastic of an implementation of Carcassonne this is. I mean, asynchronous multiplayer does automagically put it above other versions in my book, but it’s not just that. The interface is fucking fantastic. It’s classy and stylized, but at the same time, completely unobtrusive. You never have any problems doing the actions in the game, and all relevant information is instantly available. It does nice little bonuses like showing you positions on the board where it is impossible to put a tile, based on the distribution left in the draw pile. It even has a special little sound for when you get a Push notification of your turn coming up, of a polite gentleman going “It is your turn now.” It’s just a classy app, and Carcassonne is a great game anyway. It really makes me wish that more board games would come out with multiplayer versions like this. Imagine, say, Ticket to Ride played this way! That would be fantastic.

Yeah, keep being awesome, Carcassonne app people. And if you haven’t bought it, do it! It’s excellent.

I am very late to the party cause, you know, I just played Fruit Ninja.

I kinda get it, and I kind of don’t.

Half the time when I play these super popular app store games, I just fail to get it. There’s just not enough there for me, since I’m used to more intense gaming experiences. Cut the Rope is really the exception to that, but I was hoping for another one. I had heard people like Jeff Green saying fantastic things about Fruit Ninja, so in a moment of weakness I paid my dollar.

Basically, Fruit Ninja is an arcade score attack sort of game. Fruits and bombs flip up from the bottom of the screen, and you have to slash across them with your finger to cut the fruits. Miss 3 fruits, and you fail. Cut a bomb, and you fail.

And that’s it, really.

Granted, there are plenty of modes in the game, including a bombless timed score attack and an online multiplayer, which is pretty neat. There are lots of silly unlockables you get from cutting many of different types of fruit. But in the end, this is just not a game I could see myself getting addicted to unless I really had friends constantly competing with me for high scores. The game does its best to enable that, using Game Center and OpenFient to put friend leaderboards right into the game, but since I only had one or two people who had played the game, and weeks ago, it wasn’t really much of an appeal to me.

However, you do have to give the game credit. It is only a buck. I don’t feel cheated or anything, though perhaps the amount of variety is a bit low compared to something like, say, Hook Worlds. However, the game controls flawlessly. It is designed, from the ground up, for the touch screen. You feel in control and powerful as you play. The fruits cut apart in realistic ways based on how you slash. It does feel really good. They nailed that part. That’s probably why the game is so popular, and hey, it earned it. This is a game that anyone can get into. It just doesn’t go any deeper, like Cut the Rope does.

But everything can’t be Cut the Rope, I suppose. I’m glad I tried it, but yeah, I don’t know if I’m jumping for joy to suggest it or anything.

MUST! STOP!

Instead of sleeping on Christmas Eve, I instead finished playing through Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. This is one of those iPhone games I had heard a lot about, but never picked up. Then it went on sale, and I did that picking up. I then felt stupid for waiting.

Spider is clearly one of the best games on the platform right now. The game does so many things right, I couldn’t imagine anyone not having a good time.

First and foremost, the game controls perfectly. There are so many good games that don’t know how to do the controls on the touchscreen of an iOS device, but Spider completely and utterly knows the score. Never are you making a move you don’t mean. You are constantly in control. You swipe to jump in a direction, hold to walk towards where you’re holding, and tap the Spider to anchor your silk. It simply works. It’s great. Plus, the jump is incredibly satisfying. You feel like a total badass, leaping around the levels.

Basically, you have a limited amount of silk, that’s recharged from eating bugs. Making any polygon out of web strands creates web that traps most bugs. Some just hover in a place, some move around in a pattern, and some can be manipulated by jumping around or interacting with the environment. For example, there are several levels where you can activate light bulbs to attract moths. It’s really simple gameplay, but the game uses it so well. You’re always in places that make you have to rethink your strategies, and they slowly dole out the more complex bugs as you go along, so you’re always learning how to deal with new ones. It works really well.

Other than the gameplay, the game does a fantastic job of making itself atmospheric. You’re just a Spider, sure, but you, as the player, are using this spider to search Bryce Manor. There’s all kinds of photographs and secrets you can find in order to help you kind of sleuth out who lived in this place and what happened to them. While the ultimate fate of such was not surprising to me in the least, the feel of the space I was in still won me over, overall. The art was very distinctive, and felt like a real place, for the most part. (Sometimes, the game will put things in the background to make you have more web-slinging challenge, which is a bit game-y, but that didn’t really detract for me.)

I got it on sale for a dollar, but I totally would have been happy with the $2.99 it normally goes for. If you play games on your iDevice at all, you really should pick it up and play it. The story mode won’t take you all that long, though it is broken up into easily-digestible levels to make it perfect to pick up and play for a minute or two. Still, those levels are fantastic, and there are many challenge modes I haven’t tried, if you want to go in and attempt to get every bit of value out of your purchase. It’s a great game, and probably the most wonderful surprise I’ve gotten in my iPod gaming since Hook Champ. Go get it.

Having been to a bar recently, for some reason, I can promise you that I know what they’re all about. The thing that they are all about is “spot the difference” picture games on little touch screen machines on the bar, right? Now, what would you do if I told you that you could get this experience, on your iDevice, and not have to go to a bar?

You’d be excited, of course. Potentially. Heh.

Every so often, I look at the “newly free” tab in my Appshopper app to see if something pops out at me. Awhile back, something called Battle Spot made me decide to download it. I don’t know if it was the extremely cute panda or what, but hey, I gave it a try.

It’s really not bad! If it’s still free when you see this, go grab it. It’s just a spot the difference game, but it’s a solid implementation.

There’s two different modes, a multiplayer and a single player. The single player just sets you up with a time limit to find the five differences in each picture before throwing you to the next one. You want to finish as many pictures as possible to rack up a high score. Simple stuff, really.

The multiplayer, though, is weird and kind of crazy. You can do local multiplayer with people close to you, or do random or set up matches online. You’re both given the same picture at the same time, and whoever spots the most differences first, wins that picture. It’s pretty frantic, especially with someone not there, because you are in such a rush to find the easy ones before they can key them in. It actually works pretty well!

Granted, I’m not a huge fan of this sort of game, but from what I understand, hidden object games and the like are really, really popular, and this would be a great game for someone who likes such things. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. It has some really weird music, though. You’ll probably want to turn that off. Heh.

I think it’s no surprise that I love Rocketcat games. I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve put out so far, and that trend hasn’t stopped with Hook Worlds. (I realize now I never wrote a review of Super Quick Hook. It’s fantastic. Buy that too.)

Basically, Hook Worlds, for a cheap cost, takes the gameplay of the more robust and adventure-like Hook Champ and Super Quick Hook, and dilutes it down to a really solid arcade experience. It’s an expanded version of the “Avalanche” and “Eruption” modes in Quick Hook. You will always die at the end, but you have to go through randomly-generated landscapes, hooking and swinging and attempting to stay ahead of danger. It’s a fantastic introduction to their games and it’s only a buck. If you never knew if you’d enjoy their grapple-hookin’ stuff, this is a great intro. If you want a more robust, more hand-crafted challenge afterwards, pick up one or both of their other games, and enjoy that.

Even within this simple game, though, they’ve really mixed it up. The “worlds” refers to the various different game types. You have “Curse of the Watcher,” which stars the father of the heroes of Hook Champ and Super Quick Hook. It’s fairly similar to how Hook Champ plays, so if you had always wished that Hook Champ had an endless mode, this would be it. “Bounty Gunner” is the second world, and it stars one of the DLC characters from Hook Champ, Zelle. Instead of having rocket jumps, Zelle instead has a gun. Her stages have many jump pads that throw her into the air, but she also has enemies about that she must shoot. Her points come from the number of ghosts and other enemies she shoots down and collects bounty money from. Finally, there’s Cybergnome 202X, which features a crazy gravity-flip instead of a jump. You can end up hooking on the floor or the ceiling. It’s hard and pretty insane to wrap your head around. There’s also a secret fourth world that was unlocked for early purchasers, and will be unlocked later for everyone else. It’s basically the first world again, only harder and with retro Atari-style stylings. A nice addition, since World 1 is actually fairly easy. (Then again, maybe I have some hookin’ skills after having played the first two so much.)

This game is an amazing value at a dollar. You still have all the hilarious dialog like the other games, and plenty of unlockable hats and hooks (though they are much harder to unlock, being purely based on reaching various scoring levels, rather than building up currency like the other games). If you own a device that can play it, and like action games, you really should purchase it. You’ll have fun. It is fun!

I don’t want to brag, but I am now a bartender, apparently. I even have the .jpeg to prove it, as you can see. How did I earn such obviously official training? Why, by playing Nimble Strong: Bartender in Training, of course.

Nimble Strong is a fascinating game, since it is in a fairly small group. Here’s a game that’s actually entertaining that teaches you a potentially useful set of stuff, much like, say, the majesty of Typing of the Dead. While you aren’t mixing the drinks for real on your iPhone, of course, you are having to memorize the names and recipes of many drinks in order to succeed in mixing them in the time-crunch scenarios the game puts you in. You can always look at your little book to read the ingredients while playing, of course, but you have to look at the book in real time, and eventually taking too long to review will cause you to not have enough time to mix the drinks properly. It really does start to make you learn the various drink types, and once you finish with the story, a “survival” mode lets you quiz yourself by constantly throwing drink orders at you, outside of the story, and without being able to look at your book of ingredients.
The only thing, gameplay-wise, that bothers me is the Recipe book you have outside the game. There’s a menu option to just let you look at the book, to help mix your own drinks. However, you have to unlock them with the tip money you get from playing the game. This seems needlessly game-y. It would be much more useful, if I was going to actually attempt to mix drinks, to simply have that reference always available for IRL situations.

The story elements of the game are acceptable, although not particularly amazing. The website promises an “epic storyline,” which it really isn’t. At the same time, it does a decent job. It’s obvious from the title and character design that the game is trying to steal some style from Phoenix Wright, and it does that to an extent. The characters are interesting enough to keep you from being completely bored in the story segments, though aren’t spectacular, perse.

Still, if you’re the sort who’d like to learn how to make these drinks, this game seems like a fantastic purchase. I had fun just with the game aspects of it, though perhaps it was a bit pricey, considering I’m probably not learning anything that will ever be of use to me. However, if you were to drink, I think this is a great way to learn the basics. Wrapping it up in a game just makes sense, and it is fun. It’s worth a look, anyway.

I now dub this “iPhone Game Review” weekend, as I realize there are a lot of cool games I haven’t written about.

Like, say, Super Mega Worm.

Twitters was all going on about this game, so I had to pick it up. I must say, I’m glad I did. I’m not usually one for Arcade action, but this is a game where said action is too good to pass up. It’s hilarious, frantic fun, and a great time.

Basically, humans suck, and are polluting the earth, so Mother Nature unleashes you, the Super Mega Worm, to destroy all humans. You do this by leaping dramatically out of the ground to eat humans and destroy vehicles. You can bounce off of vehicles for extra air time, and can eventually fire EMP blasts and mouth lasers to help you destroy everyone. However, you have a life bar, and the humans don’t just sit there and let you eat them. This bar is constantly draining, and is hurt by attacks, but you regain life by eating humans and animals, and causing destruction. This keeps you from being able to turtle: you have to constantly be balls-to-the-wall destructive, which works, as I would hide and slowly pick targets if I was given the option. This would be a lot less fun in the long term than the crazy explosions and such that occur as the game is now.

The main benefit of Super Mega Worm is the progression. It’s an arcade game, sure, and designed around getting high scores. However, there is also a level progression, and your Worm levels up as you go along, gaining new abilities and increasing the power of old ones, while the human forces slowly amass more weapons and give you new challenges. This makes it so that even I, who doesn’t care about high scores, feel like I’m accomplishing something as I play. It’s a great way to meet people who don’t want to top a high score list halfway, and help them to enjoy the game, and I really appreciate it.

Like many iPhone games that are unsure what to do, Super Mega Worm offers many control schemes. I found the virtual d-pad the easiest, but that’s because I’m the most used to using such a d-pad. The slider option, as seen in the video, also works extremely well. It just takes a little to wrap your mind around how it actually moves the worm. Either way, something will work for you, and while precision is nice, most of the time you’re just trying to deal with so many things happening at once that it doesn’t really matter.

Super Mega Worm is just a distraction. It’s not “artistic” or even particularly unique. But it is just extremely polished, extremely solid, and full of amazing, amazing action. It is a fucking fun distraction. As someone who doesn’t normally get into arcade games, I played this solid for several days during my downtime. It was certainly worth my time, and I think it would be worth yours.

Back when iPhone games were a young market, one indie title stood out: Edge. Everyone was talking about it. I really kind of paid it no mind. Then a certain jackass started suing because he’s a jackass, and it got taken down. Then put back up. Then taken down again. About the second time it got put back up, it was on sale, and I said, “Hey, I guess I could figure out what that is.” I bought it. I tried the first level. I didn’t get it at all. I never played it.

Until recently, of course.

I was depressed and had only my iPod recently. I needed something to do, so I gave it another try, and you know what? The game is pretty fantastic. I’m on the last few levels, and I’m glad I picked it up.

I feel I have to start by mentioning the music. I’ve gone on record as not giving a shit about iPhone game music, because if I’m playing a game on my iPhone, I’m going to be wanting to listen to a podcast while I do it. However, I ended up actually listening to the music in this game, and it really is fantastic. There’s just enough tracks so that when one comes around again, you’re ready to hear it, and they are some fantastic chiptune songs. Just listen to the music in the trailer I linked above, and you’ll see what I mean. Smartly, though, the game lets you easily turn sounds off to listen to your own stuff too, so it’s good no matter what.

The gameplay is pretty simple stuff. You move a cube to a goal, collecting little rainbow bits along the way. Your cube can climb up walls the same height as himself, as long as he has clearance behind him. He can also “stick” to surfaces using the edge of the cube, thus giving the game its name. Using “edge time” is the trick to most of the more difficult levels, where you have to balance on the sides of moving platforms to carry you to new areas. The cube also has interesting moving physics which you have to master, as you need to know how fast it’s going to fall forward as you move across the stages.

There are three control schemes available. All work to some extent, but I found that, to use edge time properly, I eventually had to turn on the virtual buttons, as that was the only way I could properly grok the feathering needed to make it work. Give the other schemes a try, but you’ll probably end up just turning the buttons on, too.

The game is basically a time-attack game, designed around mastering levels and moving through them quickly. I have no interest in that, but thankfully, the game is designed in such a way that I can still have fun. The levels are all clever, with neat little gimmicks on the basic ideas of the game that make you smile. When I play, I just want to see what wacky levels I can see next. There’s constant checkpointing, and the only penalty for dying is losing time, so if you want to play as a tourist, like I do, the game is very nice in making that easy. Sure, you’ll get the “D” rank at the end, but you’re still upping your overall game completion, so you’re still getting progress.

The only problem with the game is that you have to complete a level in one go. Some levels, especially when you’re still learning the tricks and keep dying on attempts, can take awhile, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really do mid-level saves for when you need to exit into another app to do something real fast, like change the podcast you’re listening to.

That’s a minor complaint, though. The game is fantastic. It’s creative and fun, and completely worth a dollar. Of course, you’ve probably already played it at this point, seeing as it’s old as hell. Still, if you haven’t, get on the app store and grab it! It lives up to the hype.