Frapstr Digest II: Nov. 1-8, 2008
by Eric March on November 9, 2008 at 3:58 am
There’s no doubt about it. The App Store has exploded. In the early days, for the first couple of months, I was able to keep up. It was a challenge sometimes, keeping up with all the new freebies, but I managed it every few days. But it has picked up more and more, and I had to start cherry picking instead of covering every single release. To give you an example, in the last week-plus on Frapstr I’ve done 56 reviews. 56 apps in 8 days, or an average of 7 per day, and that’s barely half of them. The time I put into those reviews, if I had to hazard a guess, is over 30 hours of testing, screenshotting, and writing. Since this isn’t my full-time job, and since Frapstr isn’t the only thing I have on the go, that’s a hell of a lotta time. And that’s not including the hour or two I put into this weekly recap.
But I still love it. I get to check out all kinds of stuff and then give my opinions, for better or worse, and since I’m an opinionated jerk, it works out pretty well. So this is all by way of saying that it is once again time for the weekly update on the latest apps I’ve covered on Frapstr over the last week, good, bad and what the hell is that? Let’s have a look, shall we?
As always, click the app title or more links to get the whole story and enlargeable screenshots.
App Name: Tangram Puzzle Pro: Holiday Edition Lite
Developer: The Embassy Interactive Ltd.
Category: Word Games
Another Tangram puzzle. Not that this is a bad thing. I like tangrams. They’re very casual, very Zen. This one is well designed with some nice graphics and a lovely old-timey Christmas theme. (Yes, I said it: Christmas. I’m not religious in any way, but damnit, it’s Christmas. You offend-no-one-PC nuts can sit ‘n spin.)
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App Name: Rainbow Ruffle Free
Developer: Powerhouse Games
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
At first glance I looked at this and immediately thought, okay, another train track path type game ala Derailed or Candy Train (which are based on a much older original whose name I forget and may or may not predate a similar well-known game, Pipe Dream. You youngsters might be more familiar with this style of game as the hacking minigame from Bioshock). I was a little surprised to find that while it is rather similar, the objective is not.
In Rainbow Ruffle, the object is to rotate rainbow pieces on the board so that ultimately they form a complete loop. As you rotate your pieces, more pieces are showing up, giving you more path options to create larger or more numerous loops. Points are based on the size of the loop, and you must score a certain number of points in order to advance to the next level. The game is over when the screen fills up with unused pieces.
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App Name: Custom Sounds of Nature Lite
Developer: Zachary Carter
Category: Health & Fitness
One guaranteed aphorism when it comes to software is that the easier an app is to write, the more of them will eventually turn up, especially if one of them becomes popular. Audio relaxation apps, being essentially nothing more than incredibly simple sound boards, are no exception — in fact, the hardest part is not the code, but finding/creating good samples and looping them seamlessly.
White Noise, the original, did it pretty good, though some of the loops were too short, but for the most part it was well done and provided a nice, relatively sizeable array of sounds by which to chill. So here we have the latest in a run of competitors, this time from Zachary Carter, who has been milking the genre pretty good, given that this is his third entry into the genre, succeeding Custom Sounds of Life, Beach Paradise, and a self-hypnosis thing which I’ll be getting to later.
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App Name: Loops of Zen Lite
Developer: Arend Hintze
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Look, I consider myself a fairly intelligent sort of dude with an affinity for logic games, but I have to admit that this one was hard to grok. Arend’s description wasn’t exceptionally helpful: “Rotate each tile until perfect harmony is restored. If no loop is open anymore the screen will invert.” The website didn’t help either. So I was left to look at whatever screenshots I could find hoping one of them would be the Rosetta stone to figuring this puzzle out. They helped, but mostly it was a matter playing one of the puzzles until I completed one to see what a completed puzzle looked like and what I did to get there.
Unfortunately that doesn’t really make it any easier to describe, which may explain Arend’s own rather nebulous instructions. But damnit, I’m going to try, so if this doesn’t many any sense, blame Arend.
The object of the game is to rotate the tiles (a bit like Rainbow Ruffle, and thus like its progenitors) to connect all of the lines such that only loops are left. The real brain thrashing part is figuring out which parts are supposed to be arranged in loops and which are merely paths that connect one loop to another — and if that isn’t enough, the entire puzzle may or may not represent one contiguous path; some loops may end up disconnected from other portions of the puzzle.
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App Name: iThrown
Developer: Magnatron
Category: Entertainment [Hall of FAIL Inductee]
There has been a disturbing rash of “physical” games or toys released to the App Store lately — games that require you to actually swing your iPhone around to accomplish various things. Mostly they’ve all been okay so long as proper safety measures are observed. But then there’s iThrown.
iThrown requires you to physically, and with as much strength as you can muster, hurl your iPhone as far as you can. You aren’t supposed to let it leave your hand of course, but you have to go through the same motions all the same. It will then use some mathematical formula which may or may not be based on real ballistic calculations to calculate how far you’ve “thrown” your device.
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App Name: Adrenaline Pool Lite
Developer: Eurocenter
Category: Sports Games
I’ll admit, I’m just slightly biased against computerized pool games, but only because I prefer shooting some real stick. Still, there have been quite a few good pool and snooker games come around over the years. Jimmy White slapped his name on a couple of true classics back in the 90s that remain two of my favourites to this day.
Pool on the iPhone has always been a bit of an iffy proposition. Touch controls are fine, but pool is a game of finesse, and it’s hard to finesse a 3.7″ screen with a finger, so it becomes necessary to implement granular fine-tuning controls to get the aim, the power, and the English you want, which is fine, but can be a little cumbersome. So how does Adrenaline pool stack up in the pantheon of digital pool games?
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App Name: Zombie Invasion
Developer: Conniption Entertainment
Category: Entertainment
A game clearly taken straight form the pages of Flash-based zombie defense games such as The Last Stand. This is one case where being derivative is a good thing, since it’s sticking with a formula that works, and Conniption have followed the script pretty closely.
Rather than being sheltered behind some sort of fortification though, you’re fighting off the ravening undead alone and on your own two feet, Bruce Campbell style, and the only thing between you and a bloody, gib-filled death are your wits and your weapons. You know the battle is futile because they just won’t stop coming, and you can only last for so long, but you’re going to take as many of those bastards out as you can before you let them taste your sweet, sweet brains.
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App Name: AutoMangle Lite
Developer: Phart Games
Category: Action Games
Aw, yeah, who’s ready for a beautiful ballet of twisted metal, smoking tires and heavy ordnance? Of course I’m talking about a smash up derby — quite possibly the first of its kind on the App Store. For those of you who are looking to take your frustrations out in an apocalyptic arena of four-wheeled death but aren’t willing to risk damage to your Prius, I’m here to give you the low-down on AutoMangle.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the concept of a destruction derby, so I’m just going to focus here on everything else. Upon starting the game you have your choice of cars, base colour, and arcade or simulation handling. There are also numerous game modes to choose from — a free-for-all vehicular melee, team deathmatch, or circuit race. Each mode can be further customized by whether or not you want vehicles to respawn after they are destroyed, the max health of all vehicles, how many AI opponents you will face, whether there is a time limit (and what that time limit is) and what sort of weapons to allow in the game.
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App Name: Fliparoni
Developer: Squires Studios, Inc.
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Anecdote time.
Back in 1995, during the battle of the then-next generation video game consoles between the Atari Jaguar, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn (3DO was pretty much on the outs at that point), Atari released a CD-ROM attachment for the Jaguar affectionately referred to by users as “The Toilet” due to its very throne-like shape, particularly with the lid raised. Back then, the buzzword of the day was “multimedia,” and to that end, the JagCD included a pack-in game called Vid Grid. It was a simple tile-based jigsaw puzzle where you had to pick up and move pieces around, but the hook was that you had to do it to a running music video — and these were no cheap videos, either; they featured A-list rock bands of the day like Aerosmith, Van Halen and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sliding pieces of the puzzle around to restore the video to normal while it was playing was a challenging feat, especially when you only had ’til the end of the song to do it — but it was very addictive and a very cool concept at the time. Bleeding edge tech, this was.
There have been games inspired by the same concept since, but this, I do believe, is the first I’ve seen for the iPhone. There are no big name rock bands or anything — in fact, there’s no sound at all — but you nevertheless have to rearrange tiles to restore a running video to its rightful place. (Still images are also available for those that find the videos too challenging.)
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App Name: PixelCrossLite
Developer: mobileFlavour
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Hey, look, they spelled “flavour” correctly.
So anyway, PixelCross is a picross game where the object is to fill in grid spaces to form a picture by using the clues along the left and top of the grid. It is in its own way a bit like another game everyone in the world knows: Minesweeper, except whereas in Minesweeper you’re using numbers to determine the location of bombs within the immediate vicinity, you’re using number keys along the edges to determine what spaces you should flag.
The numbers along the edges represent both the number of separate filled areas there are and the size of any contiguous filled areas. For example, if one row has “1 1 3″ then you know that you need to fill one square, then another square that is not beside any other square, then three consecutive squares that are not beside any other squares. To figure out which order this goes in you use the keys along the top which determine what squares are filled in the columns.
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App Name: iClouds Lite
Developer: Studio-Kura
Category: Entertainment
I’ll admit, when I saw the screenshot in the App Store and then saw the small size of the app, I thought “This is either a cheap, short looped-video or maybe, just maybe, it’s OpenGL 3G and it’ll look as awesome as the screenshot makes it.”
Well, it wasn’t either as it turns out. It is perhaps not quite as good as I had hoped, but it was far better than my cynical ass was expecting. It portrays a scene of you floating forward through the clouds in the first person– and it’s smooth. If you don’t analyze it too closely you’d swear they managed to fit a perfectly looping, high quality yet compact video or incredibly realistic 3D rendering in there. The effect is pretty impressive to look at.
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App Name: Starquake
Developer: Magnificent Library
Category: Educational
For one brief, shining moment, I thought someone had ported the classic 8-bit adventure/platformer Starquake to the iPhone. Then I remembered I was browsing the educational category and my hopes were heartlessly dashed.
What it is however, is an app that any armchair astronomer will enjoy, especially ones with a particular interest in our own little star. This rather large app features 10 videos covering various aspects of the sun — solar flares, close-up videos, even a lunar transit.
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App Name: Autodesk® Fluid
Developer: Autodesk Inc.
Category: Entertainment
Well, you can cross Autodesk off the list of software heavyweights who haven’t written anything for the iPhone yet. The folks behind industry leading 3D design apps like Maya, Animator and 3DS Max have officially released something for the iPhone.
Unfortunately, it’s not Maya, Animator or 3DS Max — but let’s keep the dreams realistic, shall we? No, actually, Autodesk have brought just a tiny little piece of Maya to the iPhone in the form of Fluid, a scaled-down iPhone version of the Fluid Effects module found in Maya. Except of course that you can’t actually use it for anything — it’s just a toy to show off what said module is capable of to get you interested in Maya.
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App Name: ZooZ Control Lite
Developer: ZooZ Mobile Inc.
Category: Utilities
There are a number of remote PC controllers available on the App Store now; apps to control your entire PC or just specific parts of it, like keyboard and mouse. I think this may be the first game controller I’ve seen though.
ZooZ Control Lite essentially emulates a wireless joystick, using the accelerometer for analog stick positioning, plus virtual areas for POV hat, X and Y sliders, and 6 buttons. You need to download the ZooZ Host in order for it to work, but connectivity is a breeze; ZooZ Control will tell you what IP to connect to when you launch it, and all you have to is click the connect button in ZooZ Host and plug in that IP address. ZooZ Control will play a little ding when you’re connected.
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App Name: Tatomic Lite
Developer: VGViews, Inc.
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Here’s a twist on the classic Dr. Mario brand of Tetris variants. Various coloured atoms fall from the sky, and you must manoever and rotate them into place so that they form contiguous chains of like-coloured atoms in order to eliminate them from the board.
Sounds pretty standard so far, but where the game tries to diverge a bit is that the number of atoms required to form a chain for any given colour varies from level to level. Along the side of the screen is a key that tells you how many atoms of a given colour are required to form a chain to eliminate them from the board, which both increases the challenge and encourages high scoring chains and combos.
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App Name: Magic Words Arcanum Lite
Developer: Audacity Software Pte. Ltd.
Category: Word Games / RPG & AdventureAnother crossover game much like the original high concept freebie Aurora Feint from the first days of the App Store, which I covered in the very first issue of Frapstr. In Magic Words Arcanum however, bits of Puzzle Quest get mashed up with Bookworm.
Primary gameplay is pretty much entirely Bookworm but with hexagonal tiles, and instead of filling up a meter to advance levels, you’re just eliminating tiles from the board. Eliminated tiles still have letters you can use though, so you can still form words as normal. Longer words score more and can eliminate extra tiles as a bonus. Occasionally jewels will appear on letters. Words formed with jeweled letters will score those jewels, which can be spent on spells which will further aid you in your quest, RPG style.
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So there’s your pre-digested sampling of what’s new on Frapstr for the past week. Tune in next time when I review more apps while wrestling a giant anaconda. Naked.
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Posted in Application Related, Free App Store Review, Gaming Related, Round Ups
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