The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Let’s talk about a more “normal” app from me, I guess. You know, a game?

There’s been this game on all the top bought app lists called Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have To Burn The Rope, which is totally different) that is all the rage. As such, like just about anything, similar games start appearing. At least, I assume so. Because I’ve been playing Burn It All: Journey to the Sun, which has a lot of rope-burning, and I have to assume it’s similar. Is it a rip-off? I really have no idea. I want to say not, as this game seems to have been made by the same people who made the very nice Pix’n Love Rush, but it certainly seems similar just by looking at it. However, this one had the main difference of having a recommendation from a Talking Tyrant, so of course, I bought it! I’m glad I did, too. It’s pretty entertaining.

The main idea is that all flames are actually the children of the sun, obviously, because the sun is the biggest flame of all! So you are trying to guide the little flames upwards so they can go meet the sun. You do this by burning everything. The flame starts on a little volcano, and you drag the flame to what you want to burn. It then hops back to the volcano and recharges after setting the fire, which will slowly consume whatever you lit up. You attempt to set fires to do this as fast as possible, while dodging things like non-burnable stone, and water droplets which will make you have to recharge early. There’s a timer, and if you don’t burn it all in that time, you fail and have to restart. Do it really fast, and you get between one to three gems for that level, a sort of standard rating system for games on iOS these days (I think Angry Birds started that trend, but man, I don’t like Angry Birds, so I don’t even remember. It’s not a bad thing, though. I rarely care about high scores, so I rarely try, but I respect people who want to “ace” each level, and that’s a good way to entertain those people).

The game does a really good job of mixing it up as you go along. You start by controlling a standard “red” flame, but eventually you have levels with a “blue” flame who can light ropes on fire in the middle, instead of just at the end of them, and a “green” flame, who can pass through burnable objects and light multiple things on fire, but who recharges super slowly. These mechanics changes really seriously come at exactly the right time. I was getting bored of the simplistic red flame levels when they came along, and they do offer a lot of different scenarios while having the same basic pieces in play. Apparently, the game mixes it up even more in levels I haven’t gotten to yet, adding even more mechanics. It’s great the developers aren’t just grinding out levels, which you could probably do for this game with little issue, but instead is focused on making sure to maximize player fun.

The game also looks very pretty, too. The little flames are nicely animated and have character, and the fire effects look neat when they really didn’t have to. It’s also a universal app, but doesn’t look like they just stretched all the assets or whatever when playing on the iPad. I haven’t tried it on my Touch, but it seems much better suited to the iPad, too, because you have more precise control of where to drag the flame on the screen with more screen real estate, and some of the later levels can require really pinpoint movements to be really effective.

Really, the only problem I have with the game is something the developers can’t help all that much. All the time I’d quickly be moving my finger about to solve a level, and find out that my flame got caught on a rock early on in my crazy movements, and thus didn’t move how I wanted. This was really frustrating, especially since movement isn’t really confined to when your finger is on the flame. You can set the finger down wherever and drag it to move the flame about (I assume this is for the iPhone version). Thus, you miss one turn, but your flame doesn’t stop, but instead goes careening into something you didn’t want it to hit. There’s no good way to fix this without tactile feedback, which the game can’t give me, but that was really my main source of frustration with the game. It’s not a game-breaker, but it provided moments of less fun in the middle of my fun.

It’s a buck, and currently has like 100 levels or something like that. (I’m only through about 50, or so.) Of course, it also has the other iOS “More to come!” world icon after the ones that are there, but even if they don’t, this is plenty of fun game for a dollar. Well, at least to the level I value my dollars. If a fast-paced little maze game sounds like fun to you, do check it out.

It’s the end of the semester. I wanted to shoot shit. Bang bang bang! However, Gamefly just won’t co-operate! Even though the top of my want list is filled to the brim with shooters, they keep sending me other stuff. For instance, they sent me Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

I guess I shouldn’t complain, as it was a really fun game.

Mechanically, the game left something to be desired. It was basically a traversal game, a la a Prince of Persia, with a similar level of combat and some stealth sections where you had to sneak around automated guns and take them out. It didn’t do anything that really revolutionized this sort of gameplay, but it was completely fine.
One issue with the gameplay actually related to one of the game’s greatest strengths. This game is drowning in the work of Andy Serkis, who is the voice of Monkey, the main character, and did most of the motion and face capture for everyone in the game, from what I understand. You’ve got a pro in there, and everything animates beautifully because of it. Conversations look real, to the point where they can use expressions to get their points across and accent jokes: no small feat in animation, and fairly rare in video games. However, because everything is so beautifully animated, it doesn’t always play smoothly. Walking, running, jumping, all of these have beautiful animations, but they’re all pre-canned, so if you accidentally do the wrong thing (for example, you aren’t close enough to an edge of a platform to leap to the next, and accidentally roll instead) then you have to watch the whole animation, and no amount of jamming on the buttons are going to help you get things done quicker. It’s a minor annoyance, really. The only time it was really a problem that affected gameplay was when it screwed me out of an optional achievement you can get for winning a race in game. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but had I kept trying to get that achievement, it probably would have really frustrated.
The only other problem, really, was a silly oversight on the controls. Left bumper is “tell Trip to do things” which pulls up a radial menu. However, something like 70 percent of the time, what you want her to do is use her decoy power. Tapping the button to use the decoy would have made a lot more sense, and you could then hold it down for the rarer commands. Instead you had to hold it down and move to the left every time you decoyed, and it was a little annoying.

What really sells the game are the characters. Again, you’ve got an acting pro behind the wheel, and the other voice actors for Trip and Pigsy are fantastic as well. It really shows, as the characters say very realistic things, and you really buy their relationship. There’s almost no repeated dialog in the game (there are a few, such as the warning Trip gives you when her decoy charge is running out, but I didn’t find that to be jarring or anything) and everything they say is entertaining and endearing, really. I never felt like they were “telling” me these characters were close. You see their relationships build, and that is awesome and just so rare in video gaming.

Note that I said the characters are great. The story… well, it makes a really ridiculous turn at the end. I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that sounded so high and artsy and deep on paper, but in practice, it was just kind of a “what the fuck?” moment. That is really JUST the epilogue, though. Everything leading up to the after the last boss cutscene is just fine, and powered by that awesome character interaction.

Enslaved is a game worth playing if you enjoy characters, story, and things like that. A little love for traversal games like Prince of Persia will help, too. Although a lot of the elements, looking back on them, are pretty standard game fare, the game really, really feels unique as you’re playing it, due to it’s art style, the fantastic animation, the voice work, and the interesting world that the characters are in. It stumbles a bit at the end, but the experience is great all around.

Near the beginning of this semester, I invited Cara over for an experiment. I was in a mood, reading more stuff about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and wanted to see another ending. However, I had answered honestly and shit, and it seemed like it would ruin the magic of the game to try to, well, game it to get a different ending. This is when I had the great idea to let Cara make all the decisions, and I just drive. Then I’d get to see another ending, as Cara likely wouldn’t get the sex ending I got, and she could experience the magic. We sat down, and had a great time. We stopped, though, when we got to the Nightmare sequence after the most dramatic wheelchair scene. That nightmare is, by far, the worst part of the game, and I just couldn’t make myself keep going, especially since it was late. So we tabled it for later.

Months passed, and Cara mentioned that she wanted to finish the game off. I armed her with an iPad with a FAQ pulled up for her to help guide me through the stupid nightmares, and we polished the rest of the game off, with Cole joining in as spectator. I got to see a new ending (I believe we got what’s called the “family” ending this time) and we had a good time, so that’s nice. I thought I’d put down a few thoughts about the experience.

First off, it was interesting how much better of a person Harry was in the Family ending. He was still a person with flaws. He wasn’t some unrealistic knight in shining armor like in the video at the beginning of the game, of course, but he had much more genuine feelings for his daughter. While, perhaps, the more “normal” level of problem that Cheryl was facing of her father dying in a car crash right after he separated from her mother makes all the supernatural shenanigans slightly harder to buy than the pretty intense “evil” I saw in the sex ending, it still fit, to an extent. It certainly seemed like a happier ending for Cheryl, in any case, as she learned her father really did love her, much more than in the sex ending, where she found that she should leave him behind and move on. Though the big strokes of the story stayed the same, the outcome really was affected. It was impressive.

I also learned some interesting things about Cara’s gaming sensibilities. She couldn’t stand the mystery of what was happening for the whole game. Nearing the end, she really wanted it to be over so she could “get” what she was seeing. She wasn’t willing to wait for the conclusion, which takes a lot of time to get to in a video game, I admit. Much more than a movie or whatever, even in a short game like Shattered Memories. She also lacked the general idea of what was “interactable” and what was not, especially early on, when she’d see things and want me to do stuff with them outside of “shine a flashlight on it” and “call the phone number written on it” which really isn’t what the game does. Still, that meant she was engaged in the narrative, so that’s fantastic.

The second playthrough really made the flaws stand out all the more, though. The Nightmare sequences are just flat-out bad, which is acknowledged. The rest of the game is so good, though. Great, creepy as fuck narrative, storytelling, and presentation. It was enjoyable to experience a second time, though having a fresh pair of eyes on the game really was a big part of my enjoyment.

Tonight we played a game of things. That game is called The Game of Things. It is certainly a party game! We had a lot of fun with it, but I really wonder about how it’s built and if it could be built better.

A Game of Things is strongly based on that fantastic party game Balderdash. One player will draw and read a writing prompt. It will be something like “The worst thing to fall into” or “The best gift for a mother” or whatever. Each player, including the person who drew the card, will make up an answer and write it down. The person who drew the card is the “dasher” and will read out everyone’s answer, including their own, to each player. Play goes around the table, and each person tries to match one answer to one writer (the person reason is not someone you can accuse, so their answer is simply a red herring for the round). If you’re matched up, you can no longer accuse anyone when it becomes your turn. Each time you successfully make a match, you get a point and get to go again. Also, the last person to make a match gets two extra points, just because they weren’t already getting enough points for getting a freebie final point. Then you pass the reader role onward, and continue this way until everyone has read once.

On the surface, this seems like it could be a lot of fun. Trying to out-think what your friends would decide to write for these sorts of questions is a fun social game with a good crowd. However, it really lacks what Balderdash has: objectives.

In most of our games of Balderdash, things get super silly super fast, and we end up throwing around inside jokes and writing things down to make the dasher say embarrassing things and so on. That’s all in good fun, and why I enjoy playing so much, but all the while, there’s still an objective involved. There’s always going to be one or two people who actually attempt to create a fake definition, since you know there’s going to be the true one in there, and you might as well grab a ton of points from being one of the only two legit options. The basic game objective isn’t completely forgotten.

In Game of Things, there is really no motivation to actually responding to the prompt given. You can write anything, and it doesn’t affect the game at all. As long as your ridiculous non-sequitur could have been written by someone else, you’re home free. The “dasher” honestly has even more motivation to write something not at all related to the prompt, as it makes which one is the red herring all the harder to deduce.

Again, I will say, it was a fun time. We laughed a lot, and I was very entertained. But a game that kind of actively encourages not actually playing it doesn’t seem like a good game to me. At that point, we were just enjoying the witty brainchildren of the other players, and the game was just kind of an excuse. It wasn’t a game at all. At the same time, forcing everyone to play it straight wouldn’t have been nearly as fun, whereas I could see a “forced seriousness” game of Balderdash being quite entertaining and strategic. It just comes off seeming like a hollow excuse to socialize, instead of an actual game. But hey, sometimes, that’s what you need, I suppose.

Natalie, way back in the day, got me into The Sims. She was a big fan of fucking around with the original, and had all the expansions and so on, and in the course of dating her, I learned what all the fuss was about. I was never super into it, perse, but as soon as I got past what I thought everyone did with it (ridiculous murder of people) and figured out what people who enjoyed the game did with it (working to make characters and build stories around them in the dollhouse framework of the game) I started to dig it. I did so so much that I bought The Sims 2 the day it came out, and had a lot of fun with it. I never dug into all the expansions and shit, but I’ve played Sims products off and on, and I always tend to have a good time.

That’s the background to me playing The Sims 3, if you didn’t understand. Again, they’re not huge games I play forever, but I enjoy fiddling with them. Upon watching this Quick Look and learning that the console versions were full-featured this time around, I figured I might as well Gamefly it up and give it a shot.

I really must say, I was pretty impressed with The Sims 3 on 360. It really was the full-featured game. You had a full house-builder, all the menus and options of the full game, and so on. You could even design your own clothes and patterns inside the game, and if you had EA’s Project Ten Dollar code, could connect to their online database of more stuff to download and customize, which is not something you see on a console game very often. It even has pretty good support for controlling multiple Sims. From what I understand of previous console versions (I never played those), you could only really have one Sim in those. This game actively tells you to make a big family, which is certainly an interesting touch.

I had a good time, making my lesbian couple (Why do I always make lesbians, I wonder? My theory is because I want a household with romance, but I also want to personally associate myself with all my Sims, even though part of the game is telling stories about people who aren’t you. I guess I ignore that part.) and their son, and setting them out on their way. The little Perks system and Lifetime Goals actually add a lot to the game. It adds a more game-oriented system to what you’re doing than in previous games. Sims 2 had a “want” system where you had this list of constantly changing wants that you could succeed in to make your Sim happy, but these are much more far-reaching. The Sim will tell you their wants, and you can decide whether you slot them into the four “Wish” slots each Sim has. Complete a Wish, and that Sim gains Lifetime Happiness, and what wishes the Sim has come from the various personality Perks you pick when building the Sim. (It also affects their AI, of course.) It’s a lot closer to making an RPG character, actually, but not in a way that’s intimidating. Everyone knows what the “Flirty” perk is going to do, where they might not know what a skill in an RPG does. You can try to create a Sim that is perfectly suited for attaining their goals, or pick a weird variety of perks and see what happens. It all depends on your approach and what you want out of the game. Personally, I always just make my Sims grind lots and lots of skill points. I’m just wired that way as a gamer. It also just kind of shows off what I could accomplish if I wasn’t spending time with stuff like The Sims 3.

In any case, it’s obvious, no matter how impressively complete the game is, that this game is made for a mouse. Building a house is painful using a stick, as the interface just isn’t optimized for it. I had real trouble adding an extra bedroom onto the house I bought because it was just wanting me to use finer control than the 360 stick could handle. I found some workarounds eventually, but it took me way, way longer than it should have. If you’re one of the people who really likes building a dream house, this version may make you really frustrated. Similarly, there are a lot of load times in this game. I had it installed to the Hard Drive, but there were still serious loads while you jumped around town to get shopping and such done. One of the PC version’s goals, as I understand it, was to have a seamless world between house and town and such without load times at all. The console versions really don’t make that happen. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but when you accidentally pick the wrong menu option and have to go through two load screens to get back to where you were, it is sometimes frustrating.

In the end, I enjoyed fiddling with it, but I’m glad that’s all I did. Frankly, I got more enjoyment out of the one dollar Sims 3: Ambitions I bought on iOS. (Okay, that was an on-sale dollar, but come on, everything on iOS is on sale for a dollar fairly often.) It has most of the features of this full version (They split some features among three different versions for some reason, but as long as you do some research about what features each version has or doesn’t, it’s no problem) and has a much better interface. You can build in the iOS version much easier than in this one, and it still gave me more than enough of that Sims experience to sate my own personal craving for it. (Note that I’m someone who played a Sims GBA game to completion. This is much more a Sims experience than that weird game.) Sure, you don’t have quite the range of clothing and such in it, but it’s still enough for you to do some nice customizing. At the same time, if you’re a hardcore Sims fan, and do like having every option in the world, you’d be better suited just getting the PC version, I’d think. I suppose there might be people out there who liked the original Sims, but don’t have a good enough computer to run Sims 3, and I suppose the console version would be right up their alley. It’s not a bad product, but there are better versions of it out there.

I am trying to make the whole “If I want something done, best to just do it” kind of mentality make me life work. As such, I decided that, shit, instead of worrying about when I was going to make this Paranoia game I promised Cara happen, how about I just do it today? I send out the call, and go to the store and bought supplies and even baked a cake. And we played Paranoia.

Jonathan ended up as the team leader character I made, who was ordered by his secret society to basically be an internet troll, which he did constantly. He actively gave orders that inspired anti-team behavior, such as delegating all paperwork for the entire team to one person, and then punishing anyone who wanted to fill out their own forms. He also tried to enforce very strict communications chains to Friend Computer, seeing as “that’s the communication officer’s job.”

Essner spent his time as Loyalty officer constantly writing hilarious notes incriminating everyone (even himself sometimes) as well as higher-ranked citizens, which would not bode well for him. He started time-stamping his entries for awhile, at least, which was interesting to experience when going through the treason log at the end of the game. He also got to fill out most of the forms, and only drew a couple penises, honest.

Kevin tried really hard to follow orders. I mean, really hard. He took his dedication to equipment seriously, and his devotion to Friend Computer extremely romantically and inappropriately. He coined the phrase “fuck you in your ports,” but unfortunately attributed it to Essner’s character, so he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He was also very dedicated to using a bucket of soapy water as a weapon, so there is always that.

Cara really, really didn’t want to use her laser and really, really wanted to stab people with paperclips. She insisted on using an orange pen, which is an ink her Red Clearance troubleshooter shouldn’t be using, to send all communications to Friend Computer, which was unfortunate for her health. She also may or may not have been named “Pete” and may or may not have been turned into a camera cyborg.

I basically decided that since I had picked a definitely short mission, I was going to be extremely lethal, and tried to kill everyone more than I find I usually do when we play. Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to do it as everyone worked themselves into bigger and bigger corners. It was too entertaining trying to see how they were going to attempt to bluff their way out of being stuck in an Infrared Dorm room with an army bearing down on them. (The solution was to make two of the guards they had knocked out look like they were kissing, while a third knocked-out guard was made to look shocked that this was going on while holding onto a Communist Manifest from a Communist Trading Vessel. Well, their solution, anyway. Didn’t actually work out well for them.) Still, more people died than normal! And there were quite a lot of laughs. It seemed like a pretty good introduction to Paranoia for Cara, and a fun time was had by all.

Also, I didn’t ruin the cake I baked, so that was nice.

Everyone was talking about Burnout: Paradise like it was super awesome. I didn’t like driving games, but I tried it, and dammit, it won me over. It was fantastic fun, even for someone not serious about their driving and racing. Now, everyone was talking about Hot Pursuit along the same lines as Paradise. Armed with this new Gamefly account, I really wanted to see what Criterion followed that game up with. I had to rent Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. So I did.

While not the kind of revolution that Paradise was, Hot Pursuit is a really, really fun game, especially in multiplayer.

The single player is basically just a bunch of race events. There are two side by side “campaigns,” cop and racer. Racer events involve, well, racing. They are the events I care less about. Some are straight-up races, and some have cops trying to shut down the race as you race, but basically, your goal is to get to the finish line first. Cop events involve attempting to bring the racers to justice. You do this by wrecking their cars and brutally murdering them. Sometimes you are trying to shut down a whole race, sometimes you are trying to shut down one individual racer, and sometimes you’re doing a stupid time trial in order to get on with it and unlock the more interesting challenges.
Everything you do in the game earns you “Bounty” as a racer or cop, depending on your role in the event. This is basically a different name for experience. As you level up, you unlock new cars, new tiers of cars, and new events for the side you level up as. I don’t know why there is different EXP for cop and racer events, but since I don’t much care about cars or what I’m driving, I didn’t find myself particularly compelled to level up much anyway.

Basically, I found the racer events fine, though I don’t care about races. The cop events were, for the most part, a ton of fun. They’re variants of my favorite modes from Paradise, only with some more toys. Each side gets a limited amount of unlockable gadgets that they take into each event. You can do stuff like call in road blocks, drop tire-destroying spike strips, and jam your opponent’s gadgets. This gives the racing some extra spice, but somehow manages not to feel like Mario Kart. Since you have very limited uses, every item use is super important. The moment right after you release a spike strip is super intense, wondering if you wasted it or not. It works really well.

The best mode is the mode the game is named after, Hot Pursuit. Four racers try to complete a race, while up to four cops try to shut them down. The single player doesn’t do this mode justice: the moment I took the game online (with the free trial. EA and their fucking online pass, goodness.) and tried the real deal, it was even better. Having real people behind the wheels makes everything feel less cheap and that much more intense. Of course, I was bad at beating human players, but the game does a great job of still making everything feel tense, with people swerving all over the road and into oncoming AI traffic, throwing items left and right. Because you have a life bar and can crash quite a few times before you’re totally out of the race, I didn’t find being not all that great at driving discouraging. I just picked cars with higher HP and enjoyed myself. It was a blast.

Multiplayer is where this game is at. Even the single player is honestly based around the “Autolog” feature, which matches you up with things your friends have done in the single player to set special challenges for you on each race as you play. I wouldn’t buy it myself, because I won’t have people I know to online with and while playing with randoms is fun, I know eventually my lack of skill will start to dull the fun-ness of it. Still, if you like driving, this game seems like a game you should own. It’s a bit arcade-y, but it’s constantly fast and fun.

Let’s just look at a little thing today. Unpleasant Horse.

Apparently Popcap made this little spinoff studio called 4th and Battery who exists just to be kind of a “make whatever you like and not be bound by the fact that we’re Popcap” kind of deal. Which sounds like a great idea to me. Popcap is obviously a genius company, but they’re kind of restricted by the fact that most of their hits are so casual. Plants vs Zombies was kind of a shock coming from them, as accessible as it was, as it’s definitely not a game that seems immediately pick-upable at a glance (though honestly, it kind of is). Giving some of those honestly really brilliant designers, artists, and such a bit more of a loose leash makes sense.

Their first release is a free iOS game called Unpleasant Horse, as I already mentioned. I honestly don’t know why it’s free. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to make money from it built in. There are no ads or anything. I guess it’s just to get the 4th and Battery name out there? I don’t know. I’m not going to complain about a fun, free game, but they could have easily charged a buck for it and I certainly wouldn’t have complained.

Basically, you’re an unpleasant horse living in a world of “pritty ponies” who fly about a beautiful, cloud and bird filled sky. All this is floating over a ground of spinning sawblades, for some reason. Since you’re such a dick, your job is to leap around from cloud to cloud by tapping the screen. Ram into and kill a bird, and you get a feather, which you can use for an additional jump in the air without landing on something. You can stockpile a large number of these, I think up to eight. Jump onto a pony, and you ride the pony as it plummets down to the sawblades below, killing it in a spray of blood and bones. The longer you stand on the back of the pony, the more points you get, but if you don’t jump off fast enough, you’ll get caught in the sawblades too.

What brings it above is really the presentation. It’s sugary sweet, except the intense metal on the title screen, and the rather intense, though cartoony, gore in the game. The ponies neigh in great pain as the saws grind them up. It’s humorous to watch. Well, if you find a little black humor funny. It’s got that design polish that Popcap is all about, but it’s not Popcap-style stuff that’s being presented. Which is cool.

That’s basically it. You try for a high score until you mess up and land in the sawblades, with no feathers to let you jump away from danger. It’s a fine game for little short bursts, and has a nice risk/reward setup to it, where you can try to play it safe with how long you stay on the ponies and how brave the leaps you make are, or you can just try to play it safe and hope you don’t run out of easily accessible targets. It’s not going to last you forever, but I find many games of this sort, like your Tiny Wings and whatnot, to have similar amounts of replay time, and some people really, really, really play those all the time. I’m sure this can be the same way. And hell, this is free, as I said. Download it and give it a go.

Coin Drop! is the other game Lobst suggested people should buy when she tweeted about NBA Jam. Again, dollar, random recommendation, and I immediately purchased it. A review I saw on Slide to Play compares the game to Peggle. I feel like this is unfair to Peggle. As random as Peggle is, it still feels like it uses a lot more skill than a normal board of Coin Drop! uses.
I say that, but Coin Drop! is still a ton of fun and does require some amount of thought to complete the levels with a high score. It’s just even more “press the button and hopefully pretty lights flash” than Peggle is.

Basically, you go through a series of stages. In these stages are various things: moving pegs, breakable blocks, bumpers, and so on. You have 20 coins to drop from the top of the screen. Bouncing off of things scores points, but you have to collect all 4 “bad coins” to complete the level and be able to move onto the next one. The faster you get those four, the more focus you can put on point-getting.

You can drop your coins from anywhere on the top of the screen. Things have to be timed for all the moving parts to bounce your coins around. However, you can drop up to 5 coins at a time, and I find that on many boards, you can simply drop 5 right there at the beginning and the chaos will hit most of what you’re aiming at without trying. Some levels will mix it up enough so that that strategy doesn’t work, and many levels, as you progress through the game, start adding gimmicks that require you to take a little more care in your shots. Eventually, for example, the game starts adding little pink lady coins that you have to break out and rescue for extra points. Saving them and collecting all the “bad” coins takes a lot more skill. Of course, the rescue is optional, and just for more points, but it’s a nice goal to make the game more complex if you want it.

There’s only one thing I don’t like about the game, and that’s the shaking. You can shake the iDevice to perform a “bump” on the virtual cabinet that you’re dropping coins into in order to use some extra skill in maneuvering the coins around. This is great in theory, but any movement just causes a generic “bump” motion to happen. Holding my iPad and shaking it, it feels really weird that the direction I am shaking the device doesn’t affect the way the coin bounces to the point that it really distracts me. Maybe that’s just a minor thing that only bothers me, though.

Still, this game is the perfect phone “waiting in line” game. It’s satisfying, takes mere moments to play a board, and is cheap. It also has a better sense of progression than something like Tiny Wings, because you’re making progress through a bunch of levels. You’re also unlocking a lot of new “skins” for your coins, so if you’d rather drop slices of lime or chocolate coins, you can do that too. There’s also a promise in the game of more free level updates, as so many iPhone games do, so that’s wonderful. If you’re the sort who enjoys a good time-waster, Coin Drop! is a good time-waster, and worth a look.

Let’s bang out some iOS game review thought things I’ve been putting off, hm?
We’ll start with Neuroshima Hex.

If you feel like you would ever play a hotseat multiplayer sort of strategy game, buy Neuroshima Hex.

Neuroshima Hex is a strategy game played on a hexagonal board made of hexes. It looks like a Settlers of Catan board, if you want to picture it. Players pick one of four armies, each with unique abilities and units. Play starts with each player placing their base on the board. This base starts with 20 HP, and by the end of the game (which occurs when only one player is left alive or one player reaches the end of his “deck” of tiles) whoever has the most HP is the winner. Pretty standard in that regard.

Players draw from their “deck” of tiles each turn. They draw until they have a hand of 3 tiles, and then discard down to two. They can then play as many tiles onto the board as they can fit, and use any abilities, such as free moves, that their units might have. When they’re done, they pass the turn to the next player. Tiles can be actions, like a tile that causes Battle to happen, soldiers, who are the ones doing the fighting, or “buff tiles,” which gives bonuses to soldiers touching them on certain sides. You can hold off on playing tiles in a turn, but you always must draw up to three and discard down to two at the beginning of your turn. Finally, if the board is ever completely full of tiles, or every player has taken their last turn, a battle occurs without playing a battle tile.

Units only attack in specific directions from their hexes, which are indicated by various triangles (short triangles for melee attacks, and long triangles for ranged). Each unit also has an initiative value which indicates in what turn they attack during battle. It counts down, so a soldier with a value of “3” attacks before one with a value of “2” and so on. This is super important, because you can use these numbers to take out pesky units before they attack. There are also many other special abilities, like having “armor” on certain sides which blocks ranged fire, or having extra HP. The game using an iconography for all of this that can take a little bit to get used to, but once you learn to translate it, it’s really easy to see what any unit does.

That’s the description. The game itself is a lot of fun. It’s basically constant trying to fuck your friends over by undoing their plans while pushing yours forward. It can be slightly confusing in games more than 2 people with passing the iDevice around to keep track of who did what, for revenge purposes, but other than that, the game works perfectly on the platform. It’s deep, it’s interesting, it’s fun. Plus, they promise online multiplayer down the line. That’s not a reason to buy it now, of course, but if that would push you over the edge, keep an eye on it.

Also of note is a separate game, called Neuroshima Hex Puzzle. This is basically a single player experience set up like a puzzle game. You’re given a pre-set board and have to win in one turn. It’s almost like a tutorial of sorts, and is really useful in learning the game and the strategies each army can employ. It’s unfortunate it isn’t part of the main game itself, but I’ve really enjoyed it, and I bought both of them during a sale where I grabbed them both for less than what Neuroshima Hex normally costs, so I’m not complaining.

Basically, this game passed the “friends” test. I forced my friends to play it, and I’ve had them request playing it again. That means it’s got something there, you know? If you like strategy board games, it is worth your time.