Loo Brings Bloxorz to iPhone and Touch
by Eric March on April 19, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Wait — wait, didn’t we just do this? Oh yeah, Dr. Watson’s CubicMan 5 stories down. But this is a little different. Weiphone’s Loo (or Loocube, depending whether we’re going by the app name or title screen) is an attempt to bring the orignal Bloxorz, in all its glory, to the iPhone and Touch. At first blush, it does manage to do a pretty fine job: All of the original graphics and levels are present here, and even the sound effects are there. All of the special tiles (switches, bridges, weak tiles, etc) make their showing too, and of course the object still remains the same: Manoeuvre your 1×2 block to the hole such that you can drop your Bloxor(?) through it on its end.
Unfortunately, two sticking points cause it to fall short of the mark. Most notably, this is not an OpenGL-ES application. All of the graphics are presented in isometric 3D, but are strictly object-based; no true 3D here, so no zooming or rotating, and your block moves are purely orthogonal; there are no intermediate animations to depict your block moving smoothly from one position to the next. This makes the game feel more like what the original Bloxorz would have been like in the early days of Flash games before it supported true hardware-accelerated 3D. Furthermore, the control scheme falls back on the old 4-button virtual gamepad on the right-hand side of the screen, which, if you’re accustomed to it, isn’t all that bad. Still, these two points seem to loom fairly large in my books, and in the end make CubicMan seem the more attractive version despite proprietary levels, lack of sound and comparatively plain graphics.
Still, both versions are still in their early stages of development and may well improve with time. Plus, two version of Bloxorz isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Loo is available on the Weiphone repository (http://app.weiphone.com/installer)
Screenshots (click to enlarge)
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Posted in Gaming Related
April 19th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
This game just looks like a different version of CubicMan which was posted a view posts back, but this has some differences from the screenshots, which is great because i completed all 8 of the CubicMan levels, to easy:P hoping that this will be more of a challenge, cant wait till i download this=)
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:02 am
Well, i like the other one 3ds better, but this one got great levels and truelly require some brain juice, i been playing this game for few days already, and im in level 20, and dont know how many to go, great job in levels,
March 4th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
How does the “copyright/rights to a game” thing work on these issues? Do they pay the creator of Bloxorz any money? Does anybody know?
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 am
So…how do you put this onto an itouch? (mine is jailbroken)