July 29, 2011
How Many Pongs Can You Handle?
Multipong!
The name kind of says it all.
Seriously, though, Multipong is kind of cool. It’s Pong Meets Warlords. You basically play Pong in a square, with four players. Using the power of MULTITOUCH, you can actually set your iPad down and have four people move their own individual paddles and play. This, and it being temporarily free, was what drew me to it in the first place. As you play, powerups appear that do things like lengthen your paddle or turn on “gravity” towards one player, so the ball “falls” towards their goal, making them have to be hyper-defensive for awhile. Sometimes the playfield also changes, adding pegs for the ball to bounce off of, or areas of “Fog of War” to keep you guessing. When you let a ball go past you, you lose a life. The last player with lives wins, of course.
It’s really simple, but it is really good at what it does. For example, the music in the game is actually pretty good chiptune-type stuff. I dig it. They also have many themes that you can skin the game with, but the default theme, which looks like old wood panel furniture meets pinball, is so classy and awesome I don’t know why you’d switch it to something else. Still, if you want it to look like actual Pong, you do have that option. There’s even a single player mode, and while I don’t know why you’d really invest much time into it, it does do it’s best to throw a variety of scenarios at you to keep you interested while you play. The developers really wanted to make a complete, polished package, and not just put a quick and dirty game onto the app store, and it shows.
With a name like “Multipong,” I wasn’t expecting much, but this is a really well-done little app. It’s never going to be something more than a silly thing you break out with your friends for like, one round while waiting for popcorn to pop before you movie or something, but for that sort of use case, it’s actually quite a lot of fun. I do recommend giving it a try.