Be Excellent To Each Other

Which is, in itself, lolsome as that's still about a quarter of the street price of a new DS game. I'm coming around to Penny Arcade's thinking:

Aha:



Well guessed, gospvg.



Funny thing is, I think I have the ISO somewhere and I could put it on my PSP... but I think I'd play it more if I bought it for iOS. Although I find all these tactical RPGs (Disgaea, Tactics Ogre, FFT) rapidly get too complex for my attention span so I only seem to enjoy the first few hours.

I've been banging that drum for years now, but I think most people don't get iOS until they're quite heavily immersed in it. It's pretty amusing watching what's happened over at Retro Gamer. The editor had the balls to do a massive iPhone feature when the App Store wasn't that old, featuring tons of retro-oriented games. The mag admittedly made one mistake, in not making it obvious that the games worked fine on the cheaper iPod touch, but it nonetheless got it in the neck from a ton of readers. Over the following months, people raged about the dedicated mobile DPS (which was about 75% iOS) and it eventually got removed.

Naturally, a lot of the nay-sayers subsequently started picking up iPhones and iPods and getting thoroughly addicted to iOS games—even some of the biggest critics. Now, the mag has barely any iOS coverage and a lot of people want more. (Mind you, its iOS coverage is often inconsistent, with some great games getting marked down over control issues that I just don't see.)

I think my latest moment related to the kind of thinking in the Penny Arcade strip came with Sega's All-Star Racing. Most kart games on iOS are poor, and I figured Sega could potentially create something along the lines of MarioKart. ASR isn't as good as Nintendo's DS MarioKart, but it's close (and, frankly, a much tougher game). The thing is, MarioKart cost me the best part of thirty quid, whereas ASR (which is universal and therefore works with my iPhone, iPod and iPad) costs three quid and is regularly discounted by 50%. MarioKart is still better, but not ten times better, and that sums up a lot of iOS gaming. Then again, there are also games that are demonstrably better than versions on competing platforms and cheaper too, such as World of Goo and Osmos.

Man... I sank hours into that on my GBA SP.

Z- note this is an upgraded port of the PSP version, which was itself an upgrade to the Nintendo version. Apparently.

Yeah, just realised that myself.

Will it run on my poverty class 2nd Gen iPod Touch?

think the wii version of world of goo is still the best version though (not that i disagree with the argument)

above, i meant dice soccer btw.. like it a lot..

ouch could be tough going

<hides in a corner>

I've not played it

I'm going to leave FFT for now at least until the iPad version is released

apparently groove coaster is mix between ouendan and rez.. wil report..

Be warned: the music is a bit like being repeatedly punched in the face by a weasel singing J-pop. Mrs G *hated* it and it's the first time I can remember her ever asking me to turn off a game's sound (which rather renders it impossible).

FFT is out, £10.99, iPod Touch 3G or later MaliA.

Thanks, sir.

My gamecenter name is DerekFME unsurprisingly.

I strongly recommend Surviving High School. Kind of a choose your own adventure dating game with quick accurate selection football mini game and boggle style word tracing mini game. It looks nice and is really fun to play.

I'm not upgrading my MaliA just to play a game on.

So what is more than a very expensive mecho wars or highborn?

mos speedrun on sale, looks nicely retro and the focus on speedruns is stiumlating for a beex highsocre contest..

Mos is an excellent game. More depth than you might imagine, due to the extremely smart rewards system. Instead of three stars, you get badges for: finishing a level; finishing within the allotted time; collecting all the gold; locating the hidden skull. This means you can speed through levels but also explore them to find the hidden areas and coins. Lots of replay value in the game's 25 levels.

wonder how anomaly will turn out, since the tower defence hype, i always wondered how a tower offence game would be like
http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/big-ga ... t-and-more

I recommend hard lines (free today). It's "only" a snake game, but one made with love. It has 6 geometry wars-style modes, all with leaderboards on both game center and open feint, and a very geometry wars look to it too. Highly addictive. Ipad owners who want to give the developers some money can get the extra "extreme" version as an in-app purchase for €1,59 or whatever the tier two price is in the UK these days ("extreme" has exactly the same game modes, but with much more screen space to play in - separate leaderboards for the ipad modes too ). I did.

phoenix hd is nice and beautiful and free (only online scoreboard support costs money)
http://wosland.podgamer.com/?p=10622

Hmm starting to go off playing games on my ipod touch now, apart from Carcassonne & Words with Friends I don't really play anything else.

I play Tiny Tower and Phoenix Wright every day.

I found Phoenix Wright boring and annoying.

Much like I find your face, sir.

Tiny Tower !!

Aargh !! KABOOM !!

That's what she* said.




*My wife

Hah! Good job you snared her into a loveless marriage against her will then.

That'll teach her!

tAKE NO NOTICE OF ME. i'M ONLY JEALOUS OF YOUR HAPPINESS.

Knackers. Caps Locked.

Rage HD is free at the moment on the AppStore go get it now !!

spymouse is out
http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/spy-mouse-review

the new game from fire mint (flight control, real racing)..first effect of the ea takeover.. immediate translation in dutch and so much polish..
it's dew line, get cheese, find exit

Tournament Time if any of you have Carcassonne or Disc Drivin - Sign UP

the top 100 ios games that have been free once
http://wosland.podgamer.com/?p=10665

What's with the title?

think it refers to people not buying cheap ios games, but either 3ds games or expesive ios games..

Seems a little vain to praise one of your own articles like that.

Odd list, due to its "must have been free at some point" criteria. Also: omitting the wonderful Magnetic Billiards (which has been free) is bizarre.

It's probably sponsored by the Free App Hero

well, it's ofcourse text from his 100 things he wrote for free app hero now collected in a blog post.. still, lots of nice things to discover.. (i would like a proper top 100 list though, always fun to discuss about)

he commented on magnetic billiards in the forum, and said he didn't like not giving full power to billiard balls.. which is errr interesting

Unless they pay him £2 and they can start their own threads?

I keep thinking about doing one myself, but the Tap! top 50 nearly killed me, with all the arguments we had. Plus it wasn't in order anyway, and had its own oddball criteria (nine retro games, nine modern games, the then top-ten, and then a bunch of other stuff).

I think you need a theme, otherwise it's too big, and ends up being a bit like "Ooh, this is the best restaurant in London". Yeah, cos you've been to them all. The theme of Stu's, of course, grows out of the idea that unlike other consoles it's possible to legally assemble a library for free, and that seems a pretty good one to me.

Well, with Tap! work, it's all a bit "busman's holiday" for me anyway; I thoroughly enjoy my work for that mag, but beyond iPhoneTiny's increasingly erratic updates, I'm not sure I have the time and inclination to write more iOS gaming stuff.

well lets do a vote then and make the official bees to 50...

Some recent tremendous games:

Quarrel: (Universal) Simply put RIsk + Scrabble. Combat is decided by a bunch of scrabble tiles popping up. The player who makes the word worth the most points wins. Except that the words length is limited by the number of troops in your territory (i.e. 6 troops = 6 letter word maximum). Lovely and polished. But only single player (so far?).

Muffin Knight (Universal) If you've ever played Super Crate Hunt its that. Otherwise, a single screen platformer where you need to shoot baddies and collect muffins. But every time you collect a muffin your character randomly changes. Full of leveling up and perks and great fun.

Jetpack Joyride (Universal) despite the worry of in app purchases this is lovely. Chopper basically, except with the missions idea stolen from tiny wings, and lots of tat to buy. Polished and lovely.

Wooords is quite nice...and free this weekend

Just found a nasty bug... I changed my OpenFeint account (due to connectivity problems when I first launched the game, it was signed into a "Userxxxxxxx" temporary account instead of my main one) and it reset my coins and purchases to zero. So that's three hours of play I have to re-do to get back to where I was...

Can I be on the first page list please?
I'm mrc863 on gamecenter.
Thanks.