The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Hook Champ is fucking awesome. If you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone, and you don’t have this game? I will probably punch you. Just saying.
Seriously.
A punch.
Likely to the face.

Okay, I guess I could tell you why, huh.
Here are a list of reasons why Hook Champ is one of the best iPhone games out there.

Reason 1: It’s got fantastic retro styles. I mean, just look at a screenshot or anything. Immediately you will say “Spelunky.” It just looks fantastic, and yet has enough detail that, when you buy a million different hats for Jake, the main character, you can clearly see what he’s wearing. It’s gorgeous.

Reason 2: It contains much humor. Now, Hook Champ is an action game, and you wouldn’t expect a lot of humor, but man, there is a lot of it in there! Before every level, it throws you two quick lines, easily skippable, but they tend to be very funny, and there are so many of them that you’ll still be seeing new ones even after several deaths on a level. The shopkeeper descriptions of upgrade items are equally entertaining. A small example: “Husk Musk Lv. 3: Women will crash into you at high speeds. Also, bats.”

Reason 3: It’s built from the ground up for the iPhone. Seriously, the controls are extremely simple, which is exactly what this game needs. Tap 3/4ths of the screen? Throw your grappling hook. Tap the bottom fourth? Walk forward. There are big buttons for the rarely and situationally-used Shotgun and Rocketboots, too, which are no problem to hit. It controls precisely, which is great, due to reason 5.

Reason 4: It’s got a great upgrade system. It’s always good to see a character improve, and the upgrade system in this game is balanced extremely well, at least to me. Every time you beat a level, there’s probably some upgrade you can unlock afterwards. The cost scales, but so do the number of times you have to try the level, and thus pick up extra loot, each time due to the difficulty. As such, I’ve almost always had something useful to unlock any time I went to the store, and that just feels fantastic. I’ve never had to grind for an item so far. Perhaps I’ll have to for the Max Level items, but at that point, I’m probably going to have to be grinding away at beating the hardest levels anyway, so I have no problem with that.

Reason 5: The game is old school hardcore and challenging, but not in a cheap way. Like the best action games, every time you die, you realize it was your fault, and that had you just thrown your hook a little earlier, or released it a little later, or deployed your Rockeboots right then, you would have made it. At the same time, every death makes you better at the course, and makes you feel like you can get farther next time, and you get to keep the loot you picked up, even when you die, so if nothing else, you’re working towards upgrades to make the level easier. I spent an entire day basically doing nothing but playing Hook Champ, only taking breaks to charge my iPod. It’s addicting in a really good way, and that’s because of the challenge and “one more try” mentality it puts on you.

Watch some videos of the game in action. Be convinced, and then BUY THIS GAME. It is so, so good. You won’t regret it.

There is one thing I’ve been doing all day for several days, and that thing is playing Words with Friends. Please note how awful that title is. Words with Friends. Ugh. It sounds like you’re about to confront your friends for something they did wrong. It’s… pretty terrible. However, it is actually a well-implemented Play-By-Email style Scrabble Clone for the iPhone. I’m enjoying it a lot.

I learned about the Words with Friends phenomenon (okay, it probably isn’t a phenomenon) from Cara, who was playing it with her aunt as we sat down to take our awesome final. The final consisted of having lunch, good conversation, and, as it turned out, playing fake iPhone Scrabble, because I downloaded it immediately onto my iPod Touch and had at it. See, the main feature to this game is that it has a fully-featured free version, so you can just tell anyone you want to download it and play with you. This is a really effective feature. The free version isn’t a demo. It’s the full game. The only difference is that it pops up an ad every time you make a move. However, there’s nothing stopping you from immediately hitting the home button, backing out of the program, and not looking at the ad at all. If you are monetarily challenged, you’ll have no problem dealing with these ads and having a good time. Still, they annoyed me, so I splurged and spent the 3 dollars on the ad free version. I didn’t mind: even though the company that made this game obviously had no idea how to title something, they still made a game with a great interface that works very well for a game you play slowly over the course of a day or two.

Basically, you set up anywhere from 1 to 20 games running simultaneously. As I said, it’s done in a casual “play at whatever pace” style: You play your turn, and then it sends a push notification to who you’re playing, who can respond whenever they want. Then you get a push notification, and so on. This works extremely well for Scrabble, especially since it’s often a game where you’d like some time to stare at the board and evaluate your options, options, options. This also works surprisingly well with my iPod touch. When I’m at home, not doing anything, I’m in Wifi, and I get these notifications, so I can play. When I’m out and about doing things, I’m not in Wifi, so I don’t, but they’ll be waiting for me when I get home. Granted, the game can’t entertain me during boring parts of life that way, but it actually still works fairly well when not always connected, like when you’re on an iPhone.

The game lets you challenge Twitter and Facebook contacts, as well as type in usernames on their little service. It also has a matchmaking thing for play against random people, because random people are your friends whom you want to Word with, obviously. You can leave messages after every move to gloat or just talk, and when you finish a game, you just hit the “rematch” button and start a new one with your friend again, immediately. It’s pretty well everything one could want from a mobile, online Scrabble game, and it’s available for the price of free.

I’d have a hard time not recommending that you download the free version. If you enjoy playing it and hate ads, feel free to throw some money the developer’s way, if you want. But you don’t have to to have a great time. If you download it, face me. I’m, shockingly, named poetfox on there. We can words. With friends. All day long. Perhaps.

So, as of iPod Touch firmware update 3.1.1, my beloved Mahjong Mobile no longer works. It crashes on startup. What’s worse, the program has apparently been completely removed from the app store for some reason, so it seems unlikely that it will ever be updated. This really makes me unhappy, honestly, but, especially seeing as Saki just ended and thus pushed my Mah Jong lust to new heights, I attempted to find another understandable Riichi Mah Jong game for my iPod.

Unfortunately, I could only really find one. Most of the others I had looked at when I got Mahjong Mobile seemed to have disappeared! It seemed my only real option was Simple! Jong Touch. But it was only a buck, so I felt little hesitation in trying it.

Simple! Jong Touch is a completely adequate single-player Mah Jong game. The interface works fine. It’s not quite as slick at the sliding bar in Mahjong Mobile, but since it’s on its side, it’s easy enough to tap the tiles you want, and then you just tap again to discard. I haven’t made any mistakes in that regard yet. It also has all kinds of options on rules, if you know enough about Mah Jong house rules to have preferences in that regard. So, you know, it seems to work pretty well.

The problem is, where Mahjong Mobile was completely aimed towards a more casual effort, Simple! Jong Touch assumes you know Mah Jong backwards and forwards.
Mahjong Mobile only shows you options when you can do them. It puts up useful markers on tiles immediately discarded so you can learn to track the pond better. It breaks down how everyone who goes out scores in pieces, tells you what their fan was and so on, so you can try to figure it out.
Simple! Jong Touch does none of this. When people go out, you see the official name of the hand and a score. That’s fine, but again, the foreign words that make up the names of the hands aren’t helpful in me figuring the game out, because they’re just nonsense to me. It also displays buttons for basically everything you can do in the game all the time. Even if you have an open hand, it still offers you the option of calling Reach constantly, for instance. You can also call false Tsumos and Rons all day long, and the game penalizes you according to the rules. This is probably preferable for higher-level players trying to train and remember the things they need to while actually playing at a table, but since I still haven’t completely gotten all the rules to the game down, this just makes the whole experience less fun.

So, basically, I really hope that Mahjong Mobile gets updated again so I can play it. Still, if you’re some actual person who plays Mah Jong, Simple! Jong Touch seems like a pretty solid buy, especially with that dollar price tag. I think Mahjong Mobile was worth the $3 I paid for it, but I can see someone not needing all the helps I want as I figure it out, and just wanting the most Mah Jong for their dollar. Simple! Jong Touch can give that to you.
And hey, at least it’s not another stupid Mah Jong Solitaire game. (Not that I dislike Mah Jong Solitaire, it’s just, seriously, you can’t even find anything about the actual game under the millions of shitty Solitaire games.)

So if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that Hitler is a dick. I mean, what’s up with that guy? Seriously. So we have no choice but to blow up his head in a robot body again and again and again. And again. Forever.

But wouldn’t it be better to do it in some sort of Turn-Based RPG?

And so here comes Wolfenstien RPG! To your iPhone! Spectacular Timing!

I’ve been waiting and waiting for this game for a long time, actually. Mr. Carmack announced it was coming forever and ago, and then went and screwed it up by releasing some shitty port of Wolfenstien 3D with shitty controls and going “Oh, we don’t want to confuse people!” Fuck that shit. Nobody wants a horrid port of Wolf 3D, and everyone should want this RPG, because it is awesome.

Basically, the game is set up like Wolfenstien 3D, though with better graphics, and Hitler replaced with some weird guy with a soul patch. So you move around, just like you do in that game, but every step you take takes one turn. Every time you fire a gun? One turn. Enemies work the same way, So you slowly run and gun through the spaces in a turn-based style. Along the way you pick up healing items and syringes which give you various buffs, as can use those to your advantage to make it through all the enemies, and eventually kill Hitler. Or his brother. Or something.

So remember yesterday, when I was talking about how shitty virtual D-pads were? Well, Wolfenstien RPG has a virtual D-pad, and it is perfect. Doesn’t bother you at all. Why? Because it’s turn-based, of course. There’s never any pressure, and you rarely actually need precision. It’s pretty good anyway. But because of that, it goes so easy. It’s not hard to move around at all. The only thing that doesn’t work very well is the swipe to strafe, but since turning doesn’t cost you a turn, you never actually HAVE to strafe, so it’s never really an issue.

The combat itself is pretty simple. You pick a gun, and fire like crazy until the other guy dies, using health kits as needed. You can do some advanced things with dynamite packs and buffing up appropriately, but for the most part, it isn’t needed. It’s a very casual experience. On top of all that, it saves when you leave the game, and you can save at any time. Since the levels are mostly linear, unless you did something silly before you quit last time, you never really feel lost when you jump back in, because chances are, you need to move forward. This makes it an amazing portable game, because it’s extremely easy to play for 2 or 3 minutes, and then get back to something else.

But seriously, there’s achievement-like things in there, if you like those. There’s a decent amount of gameplay and plenty of portability in a game suited very well for the iPod platform. It’s totally worth your money. You really should try it! And then you can wait eagerly for the Doom 2 RPG, which is apparently coming out next year or something. Sure, it’ll probably be similar, but, you know, running through hell: better than killing Nazis? Maybe. Should at least have a bigger enemy variety, anyway.

Because I am a robot, and I buy anything on the iPhone platform that is ever recommended to me, I read this and I bought Zenonia.

There’s nothing particularly off about that review. It’s fairly accurate. But the entire time I was playing away at it, it was hard to do anything but wish for buttons. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly never seen a BETTER virtual D-pad and button on any iPhone game, but that doesn’t make it suck any less.
Add that to the fact that this game is very much a button masher, and you have a recipe for not-as-nice. I’m expected to slam on the attack button constantly, especially as the Paladin class, which is built for survivability as opposed to damage dealing. (And I had to pick Paladin. It had a heal spell. I always pick the one with the heal spell.) But since it isn’t a button, it can be very easy to get slightly distracted, and have your thumb slide just so, and suddenly your character is just standing there, getting his ass beat. Most of the time, it works just fine, but when such errors happen it is really frustrating.
It’s the same with the D-pad. Most of the time, it works really well, and the game is smart enough to have some very minor pathfinding so you don’t have to be extremely precise. (For example, if you are walking straight towards a box that is only blocking one space in the middle of the path, holding up towards the box makes your character go ahead and walk around it) But it’s really easy to slip, and suddenly your character is facing the wrong way when his big attack goes off, making him miss.
You have a hot bar of various abilities you can set on the bottom, but these also pose problems, as the buttons aren’t very big. Setting a move to the slot closest to the virtual D-pad had me turning just as often as pulling off the move, which was annoying. It also normally took me two or three presses to pull off. That isn’t what you want to be happening when you want to heal in the heat of battle.
On top of all this, the menu system uses the D-pad, instead of being touch screen based. There’s no good reason why I can’t drag and drop equipment into slots instead of having to use the D-pad like I’m playing a GBA game. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Still, the only problems I really have with the game are control issues that can barely be helped. The game is pretty deep, and it certainly is engaging. But when it started to get difficult due to the controls, I kind of started to put it down. If you really wish you had a deeper jRPG-style experience on your iPhone, Zenonia will deliver. Just expect to have a lot of frustration with the controls.

I’ve said that I’m a fan of the animes that involve Mah Jong. For whatever reason, these shows continue to be mind-blowingly entertaining to me. But it’s only so much fun to watch a game being played, even if it’s being played intensely dramatically. Eventually, you want to play it yourself. But damn, Riichi Mahjong (the Japanese variant used in all these shows) is very complex, and whats worse, it’s almost impossible to find a place, in English, to play it, especially against a computer. (Seriously, you Google Mahjong, and it’s all Solitaire. All of it.) I tried the main online Japanese site to play Riichi Mahjong, called Tenhou. But there’s a big language barrier to get into games, not to mention that games on there are played with an incredibly strict time limit. Like, discard in 10 seconds or we discard for you. Completely not conducive to learning the game.

But I didn’t let that deter me. If I wanted to learn the game, I needed to play it, and that required some little tiny portable game. What better place for such a game than the iPod Touch? So I poked around, and looked what Riichi games there were on offer. Most were all in Japanese, and the rest were Solitaire or shitty. But there was one game, simply called “Mahjong Mobile.” The description in the app store is some incredible engrish. “And the slider is done in the tap and the tile is discard.” Intense. But I don’t mean to make fun of this guy. What’s important is the English in the game, and it’s completely correct and understandable. His app is totally worth the 3 bucks if you want some Riichi Mahjong practice.

The previously mentioned slider is actually, from what I hear, a very nice innovation. Since so many tiles have to be on screen at a time, it can be difficult to actually tap the tile you want to discard. The solution Mr. Matano came to was a slider, which you move along the bottom of the screen. As it moves, it points to the various tiles. Tap the slider to discard the tile it is pointing to. Simple.
The game also has many features perfect for the English speaker learning the game. For example, it lets you use the “American” tileset instead of the traditional one. This one is so much easier to parse because, instead of having the symbols on the tiles, which is especially hard to figure out in the Character suit without experience, it just has a little symbol for the suit and the number of the tile. So much easier to figure out and read at a glace. It also does the thing (which I hear hardcore players don’t like, but I appreciate) where it labels all discards that come from a draw as opposed to from their hand. The tiles players threw away immediately, in other words. This is a huge help in learning to read player’s ponds to figure out what to discard. I’m still rubbish at it, but it’s nice.

But yeah, it’s a solid game. It’s all understandable, so I can tell what it’s saying when it’s trying to tell me I don’t have enough fan to actually call Ron or Tsumo. It gives a results screen that can help explain what fan you have and such so you can figure it out. Sure, it isn’t as good as some sort of dedicated tutorial, but it’s a nice trial by fire, and since I don’t really give a shit if the computer embarrasses me and beats me, I’m having a good time learning it, playing a few hands here and there. It’s also a very podcast-friendly game (although it does the annoying thing where it shuts off the sound when you boot into it. But you can pull up the music controls in-game and just start it back up.) which I always appreciate. It doesn’t have many bells and whistles, but it’s a very solid program that sets out to do one simple thing and does it very well. I can highly recommend Mahjong Mobile to anyone wanting to try the Riichi rules out. It’s fun times.

I like music game.
There is music game on iPhone.
Music game is called Mevo and the Grooveriders: Galactic Tour.
It’s good.
Buy it.

…

Okay, fine.

So, this game came out on Steam, and it was called Mevo and the Grooveriders. I was interested, because it’s a music game, and I am a person who loves their music games, but unlike most good indie games, I heard absolutely zero buzz around this one, so I gave it a pass.
Then, John Davidson aka “The reason I still listen to ListenUP”, talks about Mevo and the Grooveriders: Galactic Tour on the iPhone. He says it’s some sort of Mario platformer with music and it’s good. I go “hm” and then promptly forget about it.
Two days later, I open up the app store, and there it is on the front page. And it’s a dollar. So I buy it.
The next day, I get to work way too early, so I boot it up in front of the time clock.

It’s really fun stuff.

The game is really simplistic. Mevo, the little red dude, walks and jumps his way across this platformer world. When he gets to an arrow, you push it in time with the music. There are only two kinds of arrows. That’s basically it.
But man, they use those two arrows beautifully. Across the five levels currently in the game (Apparently it started with three, and they’ve added two more with free updates, claiming that they will slowly add all the content from the PC version) hitting the buttons in time gets to be quite the challenge. There are difficult rhythms, but the best part is that the rhythms themselves make sense, and don’t seem like they are cheating just to up the difficulty. They fit pretty well perfectly with the songs.
And the songs! They’re completely original compositions made for the game, and they’re quite good. You can’t help but nod your head in time with them. This kind of solid indie soundtrack is exactly what an indie music game needs. It’s great. Of course, since it’s a music game, you can’t listen to your own music while playing. Normally that pisses me off in an iPod app, but this is for a good reason, so I let it slide.

The biggest worry is the fact that there are no buttons for you to hit on the iPod, and this is a game designed around buttons. The game would still probably control a little better with physical buttons, as it would be easier to hit very rapid combinations with tactile feedback. However, you couldn’t ask for better virtual buttons. They are perfectly spaced so you can have a thumb on each and hold the thing and they aren’t all picky, so they respond very well. So have no fear there.

Basically, even with just five levels and three difficulty settings, this is a great $1 buy. If they do put in all the levels from the PC version, it will be an amazing $1 buy. If you like music games at all, you really should probably pick this one up. You aren’t going to be disappointed by it.

Speaking of games I bought on the iPod for a dollar, let’s talk Star Trigon.

As per a lot of my iPod game purchases, this started with a twitter tweet. Once again, I’ll try just about any game for a dollar, and I had recalled reading about Star Trigon on one of the 1up Blogs, though fuck if I can find the post because 1up’s search is so god-awful. In any case, I bought it. And then never booted it up for days. And now I have.

Verdict: Totally worth a buck.

Apparently Star Trigon is an old arcade game of Namco’s that was made by the Mr. Driller team as some sort of side project. Now, I kind of extremely disliked Mr. Driller when I finally got to try it with a cheap copy of Mr. Driller Drill Spirits. Going fast got you crushed, going slow got you suffocated, and it never managed to get me into that “puzzle game groove” that I can get into with, say, a Puzzle League. I know it has its fans, but it wasn’t for me. Luckily, this game doesn’t carry much over besides the art style, which is awesome, and the air mechanic, which is… an okay mechanic, I suppose.

The game works like this: You’re some crazy space rescue guy. There are these little cute aliens floating in space. You orbit around planets. By bouncing between them, you can form “Trigons,” which are just triangles. Any aliens inside the triangles are rescued. You rescue all of them, you move on to the next stage. Simple enough.

There’s only one thing you can do in the game: Go. Thus, it works pretty perfectly on the touch screen. You just tap anywhere to send your little spaceman flying through space. It is a game of skill, much more action than puzzle. You have to be able to time your little spaceman’s flight to go the direction you want and hit the next planet’s gravity field, and it’s not as easy as it may look. On top of that, you have to complete the level before you run out of air, or pick up more air that the people you rescue drop, and as you keep playing, your guy speeds up faster and faster, making it harder and harder to make the jumps. There’s actually differences in the characters due to this. One has a huge air supply, but speeds up extremely quickly. One has almost no air supply, but never goes to fast. The third is right in the middle of those two. So the character you pick can really change up your game, actually.

It’s all really simple, but honestly, they do a pretty good job mixing it up. As you get going, there are different planet types, like a sun that you can’t orbit and bounces you away, or a poisonous planet that drains more air if you orbit it. There are aliens that require multiple triangles to rescue. All the while the levels are getting bigger and bigger, so you have to balance your air supply and work faster and faster… it’s pretty fun stuff! The levels are short enough that you can knock one out in a few seconds and go back to what you were doing, a good thing to have in a portable game as well.

One thing that really confuses me, though, is that you can’t type your name in in the score list. What? There’s a high score list, which is good for arcade games of this type, but you can’t enter your own name, it just lists the character you used. I want to at least know if I beat my friend whom I handed my iPod to to try it, you know? That just seems kinda odd.

Still, it’s a solid, well-rounded experience for a dollar, I think. I’m sure if you were a fan of the original game, it would be worth more, as it seems like a pretty solid port. (Again, hard to mess up a game that only requires one button, eh?) But I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth in the couple hours (read: probably barely 2 and thus qualifying for the word “couple”) I’ve played today, and I can see me playing it a bit more. At least until I beat all the modes. (There are four “difficulties” but which are actually sets of stages. I wouldn’t mind seeing all of them.) But again, it’s not hard to make a game worth a dollar. Still, I love getting an actually solid title for that price. I think Star Trigon fits the bill. It’s probably too arcade-y “the fun is in beating your best” for me to have paid any more, but I’m glad I tried it.

If you clicked on the link in Tuesday’s post, you might have noticed that Monster Trucks Nitro has an iPhone version. It’s true! And since it too, was on sale, and was only a dollar, I also gave it a try. If you make an interesting-looking iPod Touch game for a buck, I almost certainly will buy it. I’m like that.

The game actually works pretty well. On the screen, on the corners, you have a little virtual brake pedal and a virtual gas pedal. There’s also a Cruise Control button, if you’d rather not hold down the gas, which is a nice idea. To lean your car, you just rotate the iPod. It works really well, though you get some weird views you don’t get while playing the PC game because of it. Nitro, instead of being deployed by the player, is now just sort of a generic speed boost, much like going over a set of arrows in Mario Kart or something. That takes a little of the finesse of using the nitro in the PC version out of the game, but at the same time, I don’t have any idea where you’d put a button for that that would work well, so I don’t have a problem with it.

Visually, the game looks almost exactly like the PC version, though a little dumbed down. If I didn’t have the PC version’s stuff maxed, it would probably look pretty similar. It looks nice, though. The iPod Touch is kind of a hoss like that. The wheels on the monster trucks do seem very oddly detached from the trucks themselves in this version. They get really out there! But it doesn’t really affect gameplay, it just looks funny.

Gameplay-wise, most of the “tricky” levels seem to be missing. These levels are designed purely to test your skill with keeping up your speed. The goal times are much harder to achieve because of this, as well, with takes a little of the casual feel away from the game. You really have to know exactly how to lean your truck to maximize your speed and whatnot. It’s still plenty of fun, though, and as I said, it controls impressively well.
Still, it’s hard to overlook the fact that there are only 8 tracks in this release. At $1, I have no problem with this at all. Especially if you want to go for the gold times for each different truck (which all do handle a bit differently) you can get plenty of fun out of the game, and each level only takes 30 seconds to a minute, which makes it perfect for just picking up and playing. But I have no idea what the normal price for the game actually is, and I would have a hard time recommending it at anything other than a buck.

Man, there are so many neat little games like this out for the iPhone and iPod touch, though. Maybe I’ll spend some time reviewing some more of them this week. I really do need to find myself a good review site for these things… there has to be one out there.

(Pardon the long, rambling intro. This is a review for Rogue Touch. I promise I get to reviewing it at some point.)

I’m relatively new to the Roguelike scene. I played Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon 2 way back in the day on the Playstation, but much like my first play of FFT, I didn’t get it, and I never got far.
Fast-forward to a year or two ago. I love Pokemon, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon looked like fun, so I picked it up. I ended up putting a decent amount of hours into it. It was pretty easy, and since I knew Pokemon, I already knew all the moves and elemental charts and whatnot. I had a great time, and I picked up the sequel and had a great time with that too. (SMILES GO FOR MILES!) About that time, there was much talk and reviews on the Talking Time about Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. It was apparently the game that all Mystery Dungeon games were based on, and was more true to the Roguelike pattern than others. I tried it, and completely sucked at it! I went back to my easy baby Roguelike. But a few months later, I picked it back up again, and really started to learn it. It was good times. It’s still hiding in Best Buys for like 10 bucks, and everyone should buy it.

But yes, I’ve come around and I like Roguelikes. Which means when I heard that the original Rogue was ported to the iPod and iPhone for a buck as Rogue Touch, I decided that I could give it a go. I mean, it’s the game that all the other games are like, you know? I’d never played it. And surely, portable, with a different interface, I might be able to enjoy it.

I was completely right on that point.

The idea of Rogue is, of course, that you are a Rogue going in to the Dungeons of Doom in order to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and score some phat lewts along the way. It is the game that came up with the random dungeons, the randomized scrolls and wands you have to test, the cursed items… all those things that make up the strategy of most modern roguelikes are already here. It’s brutally hard, but I can already tell that it’s earned its reputation.
The game doesn’t use ASCII like a version one might play on the computer. It does use tiles. Personally, I vastly prefer such tile systems. I hated Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup until I realized how much help the tiles were and installed them. So yeah, I’ve no complaints about the tiles.

The controls, too, work surprisingly well. You tap to the sides of your character and he moves a square. Double-tap, and he keeps moving in a direction until you tap again, or he hits something like a door, or an item, or sees an enemy. He even automagically turns when moving down the twisty passages between rooms using this double-tap. Tap on him directly, and you get options like pulling up the inventory screen, descending stairs, and shooting a bow. There’s a button to tap to rest for a turn, and a button to tap to search. That’s basically it. It works pretty well, although not always perfectly. I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to zap an enemy with a wand with a keyboard, since you could just hit a key or two. In this, you have to tap on the guy, then tap on inventory, then tap on the wand, then tap on zap, then tap a direction. Yeah. Still, I have no idea how it could possibly be better on the iPod. I’ve no complaints.

I’m still figuring out how to play the game worth shit, but I’m finding it as addictive as any other Roguelike I’ve tried. My best run so far is only to floor 17 (From what I understand, you have to pass at least 52 floors, maybe more, to actually win) but even then I was testing scrolls and potions and really getting going with my hero, whom I named @, actually. My main problem is probably that I fight too many things, but that’s just how I roll. I do find it funny that, due to all the fighting I do, sometimes the game changes my class to “Fighter” instead of Rogue. I don’t know exactly how it determines that, but it’s fitting.

Anyway, it’s certainly a solid roguelike experience on your iPhone or iPod, if that’s something you want. Apparently the sale that had it for a buck is over, and it’s three dollars now. But it’s probably worth that if you’re a fan of the genre. And hey, if you aren’t sure if it would be fun, you can always download the original game to your computer and try it there first, hm?