The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

When I get depressed, I spend money since, you know, owning things is basically happiness, right? Yeah, okay, it’s stupid, but at least I’ve started to focus my purchases into small ones. Like iPhone games. When I make one of these purchases, and the results are awesome, well, all the better.

My recent purchase in this vein was Game Dev Story, a simulation game for the iPhone. People were talking about it in the iPhone gaming thread, and linked a video, which I will now link to you here. It looked pretty fantastic, and I was feeling shitty, so I ponied up 4 bucks to try it. It’s probably the most expensive iPhone game I’ve bought in a long time, but seeing as I played it for literally like 7 hours yesterday, I kind of feel it was worth it, especially since I’m still wanting to go back for more.

In case you don’t want to watch the video, or want my take on it, Game Dev Story is a simulation game where you run a game company. The game runs through something very similar to the history of games. For example, you start with just an Atari stand-in and a PC as possible development platforms, but that soon balloons out to Genesis-alikes, NES-alikes, Virtual Boy-alikes, and so on. It deviates as some points for gameplay, but most of the time the systems released correspond to how they occurred in reality, and have similar benefits and drawbacks. It makes sense to go with the NES, for instance, because it’s just that popular. However, the game takes into account your games, and if you really want to make the Virtual Boy a success, you can pump tons of money into making a string of successful, Triple A Virtual Boy games, and give it a boost in market share. You can also play the numbers: a passable game on a system with nobody developing for it means there’s a fanbase whose more likely to buy anything put before them, after all.

You’re the manager, so you basically make decisions. What kind of games should be made? You can see demographics and information on popularity for various genres. Making games in unpopular genres means less cost, as you don’t have to keep up with the joneses, but you’re also cutting off some potential buyers who want another Samurai game, for instance. You also need to keep track of your employees. When do you hire? When do you fire? Do you spend money training employees, or level them up, causing them to have bigger annual salaries? Or just dump them and hire someone more qualified? Or outsource more important tasks? You also have to work with advertising and keeping the buzz going on your game, as well as keeping your company’s fanbase happy. Do you hire booth babes for E3, or don’t go at all? Maybe your fans won’t like it if you don’t make another RPG, even if you really want to make that Dating Sim. At the same time, unless you diversify and try different genres and types of games, your studio won’t improve and you’ll lose creativity.

I never had much problem being successful at this stuff, but it was still fantastic fun naming my games ridiculous things and seeing how they did. You pick from a genre and game type for every game, and I enjoyed trying to figure out exactly what the games were. For example, my “Historical Trivia” game became “Which Assassin?” a game of assassin trivia. My “Educational Romance” game became a sex ed game. My “Online RPG Romance” game became “Fetish Online.” The role-playing element of the game was entertaining to me as well.

Still, there’s some things I would have liked to see. For example, I can set anyone to be, say, the “art director” for a game. It would seem logical that someone who was constantly the “Art director” would eventually up their Graphics stat, but that wasn’t the case. It would have made sense to me to be able to level people by “giving them a shot” on less important releases. The advertising in the game also seems less important than it really would be. It tends to just be one score for everything, but it would make more sense to have advertising based on specific games coming out. Finally, the game doesn’t let you have a back catalog, pulling things from retail shelves after a few weeks of release, so I can’t try to do things with stuff like “Steam sales.”

These are all minor nitpicks, though. The game is really fun, and I highly recommend it, especially if you have an iPad. (the interface is a bit hard to use on my iPhone, but I doubt it would be an issue blown up on the iPad’s screen. Just a guess, though.) If you have any interest in the game development community at all, you’ll certainly find something fun in Game Dev Story. Buy it! Or at the very least, put it on your AppShopper watch list for a sale. It’ll be worth it.

I’m not sure what I think about the title of Cut the Rope. On one hand, it’s simple and catchy. It explains what the main thing you’re going to be doing in the game is. That’s all cool. On the other hand, it suggests a simplicity that is quickly removed from the game as you play. Granted, it never gets overwhelming, but it is a puzzle game, and it does require you to have to wrap your head around some complicated, timed situations later on. It eventually gets a little less casual than it first appears.

Either way, though, the game is fucking fantastic and if you have an iDevice, you should totally pick it up for a buck.

Basically, the objective of the game is to feed a small cute thing candy. This candy is suspended from a rope or series of ropes in a box full of contraptions like bubbles, electric traps, and little grappling hooks that will tie the piece of candy to another rope if it comes near. You interact with these objects to feed the cute thing. The challenge, though, comes from 3 stars also placed in the level. It’s normally trivial to get the candy into the cute thing’s mouth, but much less so to make that happen after making the candy pass through all 3 stars. Solving the puzzle of how to do this is where the bulk of the gameplay lies.

The game starts simple. You slide across ropes with your finger to cut it and make the candy drop into the mouth. Simple. Then maybe you’re manipulating the physics by cutting ropes so the candy swings at the right momentum. Then you’re having to use multitouch to cut two ropes in different places at once. By the time you get to the last levels of the game, you’re using a rope on a slider to move candy in a bubble through a spike maze while a spider tries to walk up the rope and eat the candy. Also, electricity is shooting at the candy. It gets really crazy, but the game does a fantastic job of slowly adding more and more complexity as you go along. It makes sure to do everything it can with a mechanic before adding another, and then uses the combination of those two mechanics in every way it can think of as well. It’s really excellent.

I’m glad I listened to twitter rumblings and picked this game up. It’s one of the best iPhone games I’ve played, and one of the best game experiences I’ve had recently. The menu says, too, that they plan on having free content updates, so I am looking forward to playing another set of levels sometime in the future. Anyway, get it. Seriously. Seriously.

Sometimes, there is a game where, upon hearing the premise, you much purchase it.

UFO on Tape is one such game.

Seriously, just watch this teaser trailer and tell me this game isn’t amazing. I dare you.

The concept is so genius, I can’t believe it hadn’t been thought of before. We use our phones and such as cameras all the time, so a game where you are treating your iDevice as a camera just works, perfectly, without you thinking about it. You instantly understand what you’re doing when you pick up the game and play, and it’s immersive, as much as that word is overused. You’re actually doing the action you would be doing. The woman giving you advice is perfectly voiced: it seems just like the kind of voice you’d find on one of those tapes. Light poles, buildings, and the edges of the window you’re shooting through all get in the way. It looks fairly real, to the point where, when I show this game to people, at first they don’t understand I’m playing a game. They think I’m just watching a video.

All that is cool, but the bonus is that the game is actually very fun. It’s a simple, high score arcade sort of experience, but it’s very hectic. When the UFO drifts out of the frame and your companion berates you and tells you to refocus, it does create “oh shit” moments as you frantically try to move the viewfinder about and find it again. It also makes great use of Apple’s new Game Center: it connects with your Game Center account to track your high scores and compare them to your friends. Frankly, an arcade high score experience isn’t complete without this sort of thing. If I had more people into these kind of weird games, I could totally get into competing for the most footage. It’s pretty damn fun.

Seriously, the moment I heard people talking about this on Twitter, I bought it for a buck. In one play, I felt completely justified. I’ve been talking this game up and showing it off ever since. If you have an iPhone or whatnot, really do consider picking it up. This is exactly the kind of indie game worth supporting: incredibly creative, with one idea polished to complete perfection. I love it.

Capcom was having a sale in the iPhone App Store this weekend, and a lot of their games were a dollar. I’ve been sick all weekend, as well as depressed, so I wanted to waste some money in a stupid attempt to cheer myself up. Since it seems better to spend a dollar than, say, significantly more than a dollar, I took advantage of this sale.

For some reason, I’ve been on an RE5 kick recently. I’ve really, really been wanting to play it. Has it been from watching these Mercenaries videos? I don’t know. But man, I was suddenly in love with the game. I look back on playing through most of it in co-op with Jonathan, and I’m like, shit, that was fun. Co-op is what those games needed to make me want to play them.

Basically, as my madness about things I am obsessed with is wont to do, I nearly spent more than I spent on my 360 copy of RE5 to buy a PC copy of RE5 to play with Brer. But then I compromised and bought RE4 Mobile for a dollar instead.

In a lot of ways, RE4 Mobile is really impressive. The graphics look top-notch for the iPhone, and are very similar to the originals. I mean, Leon’s hair looks like one solid helmet mass, but it’s pretty good. The controls, too, are fairly solid. You’re never going to be perfect with virtual buttons and d-pad, but you have pretty solid control over Leon, and it gives you many sensitivity options to choose from so you can make it feel just right. Or at least something similar to right. It does seem like it might control a lot better blown up on an iPad, but maybe that’s just me wanting an iPad. It works fine as is.
The only real problem with the controls is that there’s no way to reload. I understand not having that while actually playing the game: screen real estate for virtual buttons is limited, and you want to have as few as possible. However, I can’t even find a way to reload my guns in the menus. This is really baffling to me, and really makes it hard to fight effectively at times, as you can only reload when you’re all out of bullets in your clip. Still, it’s bothersome, but not a game breaker.

Basically, the game is broken up into a series of combat arenas based on key bits of the actual game. They’re tied together with still-frame cutscenes to explain the plot. I completely skipped this. In between these combat missions, you can go spend your money to do upgrades at the trader, who is just a menu, but they still kept some of his sound clips in, which was nice of them. You also unlock “Mercenary” missions as you go, which I’m sure is only vaguely like Mercenaries in the actual game, but is a nice little remix of the combat scenarios. They also let you earn money that you can take back into the “story” scenarios to upgrade your guns, buy ammo, and so on, which is nice of them.

However, the game is kind of crazy hard. I got to the first area with Las Plagas, the tentacle bitches you have to shoot in the tentacle to do anything to, and I just couldn’t beat it. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, I just couldn’t stop these guys fast enough. The lowest difficulty setting has a “auto-aim” you can turn on, but turning it on did nothing that I could see. The red dot jumps more quickly to valid targets with auto-aim on, but it’s useless against enemies like the Las Plagas, where you have to hit specific points. It’s easy enough to move to center mass and shoot with these controls anyway, and the game gives you plenty of ammo to do so, but when faced with these enemies I couldn’t do that to, much less multiple ones, I could do nothing. Maybe it’s an issue of my lack of skill, or maybe I need to just grind out more money in Mercenaries, buy a bunch of shotgun rounds, and just blast through there. Still, difficulty seems to be an issue.

Is it worth a buck? Oh, completely. It’s fun enough, and if you enjoy the post-4 Resident Evils, the combat is very similar to what you enjoy. There’s plenty of levels and upgrades to work on, too. It’s a pretty smart thing. However, I would have extreme trouble paying the 5 dollars it supposedly is off sale. If the sale has ended by the time you read this, maybe you’d be better off putting it on your appshopper list and waiting for another one. Still, I think it’s kind of neat. I’ll probably keep fiddling with it for awhile.

Random thread on Talking Time lead me to downloading some more iPod games. One of them is called QRank. It is free and awesome.

Basically, QRank is a trivia game. Every day, there is a grid of 20 questions. 8 are 200 point “easy” questions, 8 are 400 point “medium” questions, and 4 are 800 point “hard” questions. These questions are in four categories every day. You pick 15 questions from the grid, and answer them in a multiple choice manner. Many of them hinge around current events in various areas: not surprising seeing as they have to have 20 good questions every day. It uses a point countdown, as a lot of trivia games do, where the faster you answer, the more of the “max” number of points you get. There are also daily 2x and 3x bonus questions hidden on the grid you can answer for extra points.

Then the game ranks you on leaderboards. It uses a friends list, if you want. It also ranks you locally, by state, and globally, using the location stuff in your phone to determine where you are. This works really well. I could never compete on a global level like some people, but hey, there’s a chance I could top the board for Cape Girardeau.

I’ve played for a few days now, and the questions are really good. The difficulties are nicely balanced. Easy questions are fairly easy, Medium is fairly medium, and the hard questions I normally miss, because I am not a trivia guru. I do like how I can strategize because of how the game is set up. For example, if, say, Science is a category that day, I may want to try to find the science question in the Hard questions, because I could probably get that one. If the Entertainment category is around, maybe I want to stay on the easier questions, because if that hard question is about celebrity gossip, I’m screwed.

The real benefit to the game, I think, is that it wants so little of your time. You can blaze through 15 questions in 5 or 10 minutes, no problem, and then the game requires no other input until the next day. It’s kind of like Words with Friends in that way. You enjoy it in small chunks of time, so it’s easy to keep going with it. Also, the fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt. I really enjoy the game, and I think anyone who enjoys trivia would get a huge kick out of it. So download it. And add me. I’m poetfox. Let’s trivia it up! You can trivia my ass.

I tried, but I just don’t understand Dungeon Solitaire.

This game was at the top of the App store lists for card games, and man, do I love card games. It was $2, and I thought, sure, I’ll give it a try. I’m down with card games, and a good single-player one seemed neat.

It just doesn’t work well, though.

Basically, you have two columns, an enemy column and a hero column. There are monster cards, hero cards, green buff cards, equipment cards, and trap cards. You place these down, and try to fill up the whole hero column with heroes to win the game. If you draw a 6th monster three times, the game is over.
Every card basically modifies one of the two stats on a hero or monster card: Strength and Magic. You line up the cards on the grid, and if the numbers on one are higher than the other, that card wins, and the other is destroyed. However, both stats have to be higher. If each card wins one stat, then a Stalemate is created. This can trigger special abilities, but mostly just results in the cards sitting there doing nothing. Equipment and Buffs are in the game to get you out of these Stalemates, but since a card can only be modified by one Equipment ever, and buffs are almost all completely random, they don’t actually help. And since you are forced to play every monster you draw, you get into Stalemates a lot.

That really isn’t fun.

So often you’re randomly drawing cards, hoping for a solution to a monster. But there’s maybe one hero in your deck that can beat said monster. So you keep drawing, but that just makes you draw a monster, and you lose. It’s really stupid, actually. A good card game has an element of randomness, of course. That’s what makes it fun. But there are so few options you actually have in the game, you are almost fully dependent on the draw. It’s very rare when your decisions on where to place monsters and heroes come into play. I’ve played many games now, and it really just seems like a slot machine. It’s pretty unsatisfying. Plus, the game seems based around you failing, and is all about getting a high score. But since it seems like the score you get is equally random, based on how long the random cards let you survive, it really doesn’t seem like a useful way to go.

The iPhone platform is perfect for a good card game. It would be fantastic. It’s a shame this isn’t it. I really want to play a good little card game. I really do! Oh well. I’ll try again, I’m sure.

Traditional action games on the iPhone are hard, thanks to the fact that you don’t have buttons. Traditional platformers are even more so. The virtual buttons most games have just don’t give you the accuracy you need to be able to play these things. However, I’ve recently picked up Pix’n Love Rush on a whim and tried it a few times during breaks at work, and it’s pretty amazing how well it works.

Apparently this game is based off some French retro gaming series? I honestly have no idea. All I know it is stars a very cute little pixelated person who plays a very traditional platformer. You’re randomly thrown into little snippets of stage for short periods of time, and have to collect the little + circles and shoot the little bats in order to maximize your score. It’s very simplistic, but it has a great art style and a great soundtrack. That soundtrack is kind of key. Normally, I hate iPod games that bring their own music, because I just want to listen to my podcasts while I play, but this short action-y rush game is set up to use such music, and it really enhances the experience, I think. At the same time, once you get tired of it, you can always go back to your iPod music.

The main thing that’s awesome is how well it controls. The only button I have problems with hitting is the shoot button. It seems too spaced-out, but I assume that’s so you don’t hit it when you want to hit jump, which is the more important virtual button. Running and jumping is nearly as good as with actual buttons. I rarely felt like they were fucking me over. My own skill was doing that. It’s pretty impressive, and I wish all games that attempted to have virtual buttons had ones as good as these.

In any case, if you’re looking for a cheap little arcade-y blast of a game, Pix’n Love Rush is a great purchase. It’s only a buck, and it’s pretty well exactly the right amount of content for a buck, I think. Maybe even more so if you really enjoy setting high scores in games like this. Give it a try.

Speaking of LoL, how about that LoL Turret Defense? It’s not so much Turmulent Defense as Tower Defense, and it’s on your i-type Phone and it’s completely free.

You could certainly do worse for getting a free fix for your tower defense love.

League of Legends: Turrent Defense is of the mazing flavor of tower defense. (The other flavor, in my opinion, being fixed path tower defense, if you cared to know.) You have a big map, and sprites stolen from League of Legends (Okay, not stolen, since Riot Games did this, too) run through, and you shoot them with your little towers, making a maze with them so that the baddies take a heck of a long time to get to the other side of the map. Sometimes, one of the League of Legend champions runs in there as a boss, and takes a lot more shots to kill. That’s basically it.

It isn’t the most complicated game in the world. There are only four types of towers. A basic tower, a slowing tower, an area of effect but ground only tower, and a slow to fire but high damage tower. Nothing fancy. There also isn’t a whole lot of options or anything. You can play for set numbers of levels to try to beat the game based on difficulty, or just play until you lose in an endless mode. Basically, this isn’t going to replace a more robust, paid tower defense game. It also isn’t going to really be anything fans of the PC game really have to play, as it has nothing to do with the DotA play of the PC game, besides being a free promotional tool. At the same time, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Everything works exactly as advertised, and it gives you a very basic, but very functional game of tower defense, with a much better map than most on the iPhone, because it requires scrolling. It’s well-built, just not complicated.

If you’re sick of the completely excellent and certainly better Tap Defense and need another cost-less tower defense fix, LoL Turmulent Defense will do that for you. It also might be more enjoyable if you like the mazing as opposed to the fixed path that Tap Defense is. It’s at least a good hour or two of enjoyment, and at the cost of free, it’s kind of hard to turn that down. Download it on your phone next time you’re stuck with something better to do. You’ll have some fun.

I once saw a link for an iPhone game on FurAffinity.

Now, I tend to have a sort of love/hate relationship for specific “furry” things. In general, I don’t feel like they’re needed. The subculture’s tastes are not so crazy for things outside of fetish sex that it really needs it’s own, say, music, for example. Yet, when I see these links for these “furry” music labels, I have to click on them and see. I have to attempt to figure out how the hell a music label could be that. I rarely find an answer, but it’s an interesting couple of minutes while I explore. (Most “furry” music tends to be chiptunes and electronica, by my research, if you care to know.)
In the same way, when I saw the ad for Mole: Quest for the Terracore Gem, I kind of had to see what it was about. Why would you make a game specifically for furries, and what would it be? It also helped that it was free when I picked it up. That also didn’t hurt.

Still, I suppose I got lucky. Mole is actually a pretty fun game, and if I had spent the 2 bucks it now costs, I probably wouldn’t feel gypped. It would be an easier recommendation at a buck, but it’s a solid bit of momentary distraction.

The easiest way to describe what this game is would be to compare it to Miner Dig Deep, but since that’s an XBLIG game nobody has probably played, it’s probably stupid to make that comparison. Basically, Mole is a casual game of risk/reward. You dig down as the Mole guy, and search for gems and minerals. You only have a certain amount of air, and if you pass out, you lose everything you collected during a run. If you return to the surface, then you bank all your gems and money, and can buy upgrades to your equipment, so you can go deeper. Then you do it all again, and keep repeating until you’ve upgraded enough, and unlocked enough elevator drills that you find during your trips, to dig all the way to the bottom and get the MacGuffincore Gem found there.

Controls are simple. Tap, and Mr. Mole Guy moves there. Walk over some goods, and he picks them up. You can tap on hard rock to bomb it open to get at the goodies inside. That’s basically it. The game is a race against time, but it rarely gets tense. You’re simply trying to maximize your profits per trip. A trip looks like it’s not going to get over 5 minutes or so, (I can get down through all but like two of the strata, and I have enough air for 3 at the moment, so I assume 5 after two more upgrades) making this fine for short bursts on the go when you’re bored. It’s music and podcast friendly, so if you just like having something to mess around with while you listen to such things, this is perfect for that too. It’s casual, relaxing, and non-stressful.

Basically, the fun comes from feeling a plan come together (If I circle down that way, I should still be able to make it back up in time, and I can get that big chunk of minerals I noticed over there) and from the progression. Slowly, but surely, you’re always making progression towards your goal, and that’s something that I can appreciate. Progress is only lost if you play it too risky, but even that doesn’t set you back too much. If you’re not holding back and grinding, you can almost always buy a new upgrade every one or two dives, so you’re always doing better and better. It’s that kind of progress which makes it fun, for me, anyway. I enjoy that sort of stuff. It’s why I played CoD4 multiplayer so much, for instance. It’s just enjoyable to see goals constantly being met. If that sounds like fun to you, then Mole might be a game for you.

As far as the “furry” nature goes, the two characters in the game, the Mole and the shopkeeper, are drawn as furries, but that is it. There’s no weird stuff. It’s really just a game with a couple of pictures that might not appeal to you. They made a little game, and decided that putting that spin on it would get them more purchases. Honestly, I do hope it works for them. Mole is a fine little game, and if appealing to the furry niche works, more power to them.

Yeah, so that was that experiment. It worked out well! Always nice when that happens.

There has to be a million cool games on the App store, surely. I mean, they’re completely impossible to find, but if I could find them, I bet they would be really great. Sometimes, I start looking around, just trying to find things. Part of me doing this made me download, completely at random, a game called “Let’sTans” because, I dunno, it was free. Then I ended up playing it pretty compulsively for a week.

I guess I’m suggesting you download Let’sTans.

Basically, this is a Tangram game. It’s no frills, really, though I appreciate that you don’t rotate pieces using a two finger gesture, as that can get really annoying after awhile. You tap to rotate, and double-tap to flip the piece. Then you drag it into position. Then you solve the Tangram. Really simple, honestly. There are other modes too, which give you crazy screens completely filled with Tangram pieces, and you have to find the various shapes in the screen. Those are a lot harder, but alright as well. Then, they offer you additional puzzles and modes for small DLC fees.

Frankly, I really had a lot of fun with this. Tangrams are basically perfect for on-the-go, five second entertainment. You can completely one quickly, and you can then completely put the game down. Similarly, it’s perfect to fiddle with while you listen to a podcast. It’s not much of a distraction, but it’s enough to get your brain working while you listen to something nice. As I said, I blazed through all the classic puzzles. The rest didn’t do as much for me, but I still appreciated them being there.

This is a great little package for something that’s free, honestly. Unless you think Tangrams are the dumbest form of puzzle imaginable, you will get some entertainment out of it. Download it and enjoy it. It’s fun, in a simple, uncomplicated kind of way.