1st Impressions

Zamby is a $0.99 game that I really wanted to like, but couldn’t quite get into. I am not sure why. I think the graphics of the splash screen and the depth if the back-story and game rules had me expecting more from the graphics of the game levels themselves.

Zamby reminds me a bit if Sokoban with a hint of a top-view platform game, all set in a fantasy theme. Your goal is to go around and collect as many gems as possible. This requires pushing boxes out of your way, creating bridges, defending yourself from wizards (by putting/keeping stuff between you and them), and collecting and strategically placing bombs.

A free lite version comes with a starter pack if levels that act as tutorials. When you purchase the $0.99 version, you get the first of three aditional packs of 30 levels added to that. These additional level packs are in-app purchases for $0.99 each. What thus allows you to do though is get the free version, read through all the back story and help, and then play through the first ten tutorial levels. If you like what you see, $1 gets you the next pack. It is a nice marketing strategy that I wish others would follow.

If the rules engine is more important to you than retro-style graphiscs, then you will probably like this game. If you are more into eye candy, you may give it a pass. Either way, it isn’t going to cost you anything to take it for a spin.

A while back, I reviewed these games.  Unfortunately though, the posts have somehow disappeared.  The recent move of the blog and changing of the perma-links might have something to do with it.  Regardless of why they are gone though, it is a perfect excuse to revisit these incredible titles and highlight some of the changes and updates in them.

Sentinel, at it’s core, is one of the best Tower Defense games out there.  Set in a sci-fi “Mars Defense” theme, the graphics will blow you away.  Prior to playing Sentinel, I thought that Fieldrunners was probably the best TD game for the iPhone.  As soon as I launched Sentinel though, I was immediately re-thinking that idea.  This impression was not just because of the quality of the graphics, but of how the graphics actually work into the game play to give it almost a 3-D effect.  For example, your enemies may have to run a gauntlet between buildings and you can place your towers on those buildings to fire “down” into the path that the enemy is forced to use.  From a programmer standpoint, I realize that this is not much more than any other forced TD enemy path, but the implementation makes it seem much more than that because the landscape plays a more visual part of your strategy.  Instead of a typical enemy path being seen as a limitation to them, it flips that idea so that terrain comes across as something you can use to your advantage.    This terrain feature is enhanced with the addition of temporary barriers that the enemy can eventually tear down and get through.

Sentinel  allows you to defend your base in typical TD fashion with five tower types against four enemy types with three different terrain maps and two different modes of play, but comes with a bit of a real-time strategy feel to it as well because you can also harvest resources and create robot droids to repair your towers.  These additional features make this $0.99 game (originally priced at $4.99 and worth it) a real competitor to the $2.99 Fieldrunners.  And, if you watch for it on AppShopper.com, the developers even drop the price to free on occasion!

Sentinel 2 brings the same look and feel and great graphics down to earth in a “Earth Defense” theme.  But the Origin8 developers didn’t just create the same game with different graphics.  This $2.99 sequel improves on Sentinel with additional OpenFeint features (location based leader boards), further RTS-like features of attack drones and additional harvest drones, and special weapons that can be fired from space once enough energy is harvested from the playing field.  There is also a new booster tower that can be strategically placed to “boost” the effects of your other towers.  And, in addition to upgrading your placed towers, you can also upgrade your ship from which the towers and such are deployed.

The timeline of the game really ties into the first title.  In this game, your “Mars Defense” has failed and the enemy has set it’s sights on Earth.  The game offers four different “locations” on earth that serve as different playing maps, and four different levels of difficulty.  This will, guaranteed, provide any experienced TD player with enough to challenge the very best of their efforts.  Both endurance mode and mission mode (with 10 pre-defined missions) are available as well.  And, because this title builds on both the original Sentinel story line and technology, I’d recommend starting with Sentinel until you get the basics down and then progress to the further depth that Sentinel 2 has to offer.

If you enjoy quality games of this type, you also need to check out the new release, Space Station: Frontier, by the same developers.  All three truly take the Tower Defense genre to whole new levels and, along with Chillingo’s Defender Chronicles, probably offer the best this genre has to offer on the iPhone platform.  Needless to say, both of these titles make it to my Must-Have category.

Space Station: Frontier is new favorite of mine. At $2.99 in the app store, this game is a mixture of tower defense and real time strategy games. Playing it reminds me a bit of game elements of those tower building games (with goo or coconuts or whatever), SimCity, and a RTS game like Warfare Inc. Basicallt, the developers have created a real winner if a game by combining some great elements if other winners.

Created by the same group that brought us the Sentinel TD games, the game is set up as a space station. Your goal is to not only defend your station against attackers, but also expand it within reach of the resources that you need to collect. The ten campagns start out with lots of help to get you started with the basics of both construction and defense. As you complete goals, credits you earn can be spent in the store for improvements. And these credits can be spent across different campaigns and game modes. As you complete campaigns, two additional game modes become unlocked.

Your game play is not over when you complete the ten campaigns. Game modes that allow for endless play and competition on OpenFeint leader boards exist to make certain that you never run out of game play. The two endless modes do not have the specific goals of the campaigns, but rather focus on either survival or mining. The longer you last before destruction or the more you can mine before destruction, the higher your can rise in the leader boards.

I found Space Station: Frontier to provide a unique blend of some favorite game genres and it makes my Must-Have list. That being said, I would like to offer some suggestions. First, some additional campaigns would be nice. I would also like to see the additional game modes to be unlocked earlier. These are small things though and there is no reason to not download either the lite or full version and take it for a spin.

Aztec Quest is another casual physics puzzle. Each level has a set number of pieces to be played and a playing board with opennings that will accept the right parts in the right places. Having pre-defined locations can be both a plus and a minus though. The game comes with 50 built-in levels for $0.99, but also has a built-in editor to allow you to create and share your levels and download those shared by others.  This offers considerable game play for a buck.  A free version is available as well.  As I can’t think of a single thing I’d do to change this app, this review will be fairly short.  That is just as well though.  I have some levels to beat!

Collider is, at it’s core, a casual physics puzzle. The goal of the 56 included levels is to make all the positive and negative particles on the level to pair up and disappear. When they collide, they cancel each other out and vanish. The first levels are very simple to show you the basics in a tutorial fashion. They don’t stay that way though. They get increasingly complex.

The graphics are surpurb, the physics life-like, and the dynamically generated music really combine to produce a game well worth the $0.99 price tag (a free lite version is available as well). The developer isn’t just sitting on his laurels though. An update is coming with 20% more levels (bringing the total to 70) and a new sensor type that will literally turn everything on it’s head.

While this game, unlike most, will make my Must-Have list and stick around on my iPhone, I do have some suggestions. I would love to see different player profiles, volume adjustment for effects and music, OpenFeint leaderboards by level, and the ability to create and share levels.

Overall, this is a really nice little game from the developer of another of my all-time favorites, Block Drop. If you like puzzle games, I highly recommend both. They promise hours and hours of fun at an excellent price.

I remember as a kid having those plastic puzzles where you slid the pieces up and down and all around until you got them in the right order.  It could be numbers, letters, or if you were real lucky, a nice picture. While it has been years since I held one of them in my hands, electronic versions of the sliding puzzle games are now relevant on the PC as well as on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

If you were to swap a picture with a physics based theme then you would have the beginnings of an idea of what to expect with the game Cogs. That is because the game Cogs does not limit itself to two dimensions but to three.  By wrapping the puzzle around multiple sides of a cube then you end up with a 3D puzzle that adds an extra dimension of difficulty when it comes to solving the puzzle.

The physics portion of the game involves solving each particular puzzle using gears, pipes, balloons, and much more. The game not only contains 50 puzzles for the low low price of $0.99 but you can also purchase additional puzzles in batches of 10 from within the game.  The puzzles start out easy enough and additional levels are unlocked as you progress and gain experience.

The game is played in an Inventor mode where you gain points based on the number of moves and the amount of time used to solve each puzzle as well as a Time Challenge mode where you are given only 30 seconds to solve each puzzle and a Move Challenge mode where you must attempt to solve the puzzle in 10 moves or less.  The levels in the latter two modes are unlocked by completing them first in the Inventor mode.

While all this might sound challenging (and it is…), the best part of the game is the absolutely gorgeous graphics which are accompanied by a beautiful sound track as well. Once you start the game it is hard to put down because not only do the levels get more and more challenging but the  graphics are so beautiful and the animations so fluid that it easily makes my top ten list of must have games to keep on my iPhone.  The only thing more surprising than the quality of the game is the incredible deal.  I struggle to think of a better game that you can get for less than a buck.

OK.  I admit.  This is first part is a bit of a rant.  The one thing I hate the most about the iPhone is the hubris of Steve Jobs in thinking that no one can do it better than he can.  The internal clock app is a perfect example.  While not allowing other developers to run background processes (like an alarm clock) because of alleged performance issues and battery drain, it’s actually all about control.  Steve has no problem at all with you running an alarm clock in the background as long as it is HIS alarm clock.  The iPhone is basically marketed as not only a phone, but a mini-computer with thousands of programs that you can run on it – as long as they are programs that Steve approves of.  If Microsoft were to sell you a computer and only allow you to run their chosen programs on it, folks would go nuts.  If GM were to sell you a car and tell you where you could drive it, they’d go nuts.  But in the cult that is Apple, the sheeple buy the party line of “it’s for our own good” and see the hubris of Mr. Jobs as a good thing.  But, thinking outside the box, now there is an app for that…or rather to get around that.  Fishbone Studios has, until Steve figures out someone has created a better mousetrap, created an app that gets around the “background processes” limitations of the iPhone and does it in style.  The way they did this is pure genius.

Alarm Clock is a $0.99 utility in the App Store that gets around the “background processes” limitation of the iPhone with an ingenious use of push notifications – alarms that are synchronized with a push server.  It is such an obvious solution that it leaves you smacking your forehead for not thinking of it first.  Not being satisfied with getting one over on Steve though, they went further and created one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich clock apps I’ve ever seen.  Not only does it support both portrait and landscape modes, but the interface is fully customizable with built-in themes and manual overrides and will allow the user to select separate brightness levels for both the clock and the background.  Even fonts (standard or italics) can be selected.  Alarms can be chosen from included sounds or selections from your iPod library (shuffled or not) and can be faded in over a chosen period of time.  Snooze times are also configurable up to 30 minutes and alarms can be set to repeat on certain days of the week.  The alarm can trigger the standard push notification, no push notification at all, or a selection of a couple of other sounds.  This is in addition to the sound selected for the alarm itself.  (Be warned though that without the push notification set to trigger the alarm, you need to have the app running in order for the app itself to trigger it.)  One of the handiest features though is the built-in flashlight mode.  If your alarm goes off in the dark, a shake of the iPhone will fade in a “flashlight” white screen to illuminate your surroundings.

This app is so feature-rich that I had to really search for my typical list of suggestions….but I did come up with a list.  Right now, the app has very few built-in sounds and no access to the iPhone’s regular alarm sound library.  The ability to choose any sound from your music library allows for all kinds of opportunities, but it would be nice if there were other alarm sounds available.  Also, while the alarms can be repeated on particular days of the week, it would be nice if they could be set like a calendar function with specific dates and repeat weekly, monthly, annually, and so forth.  I don’t know if there is a way to have a “silent” push notification that automatically triggers the selected alarm sound from the app, but that too would be cool.  Maybe one way around this is to have the required push notification to play a selected song from the iTunes library at the selected volume level so that “viewing” the push notification is not required in order to hear the selected alarm sound.  Finally, and this is the one feature I expected and was surprised not to find, it would be cool if you could select an image from your own photos to use as a background.  That, in conjunction with the adjustable placement of the clock digits, would make this app pretty much perfect.

All in all, I’m very impressed with this app.  With push notifications for an alarm turned off, it acts like most other alarm apps.  With them turned on (particularly with that obnoxious “digital nightstand” sound), it alerts/wakes you no matter what you have running.  If/when Apple ever allows a push alert to automatically launch an app, you’d already have all your alarms set up for that.  For those of you that ask me privately if I’d recommend this app for you, the answer is yes.  It’s a buck well spent and definitely makes my Must Have list as it will be replacing the other alarm apps on my iPhone permanently.  The fact that it gets around some of Steve Jobs hubris is just icing on the cake.   Even if you don’t use your iPhone as an alarm clock, support the ingenuity of this great little work-around.

PathPix is not my ordinary review here.  In fact, it is extraordinary.  I usually don’t review things other than iPhone apps, but in this case I make an exception for two reasons.  First, this PC app now has a iPhone port, and second, the game is extraordinary in every sense.  I’ll be doing a separate review of the iPhone port, but until then, here is what the PC game is all about.

PathPix, at it’s core, is a graphical logic game.  It reminds me of a cross between paint-by-number, Sudoku, and Nonograms.  Created by Kris Pixton, the game features grids of varying size filled with numbers designated with different colors.  The concept is simple.  Connect the dots so that the total number of covered squares matches the numbers indicated at the ends.  In other words, if you are dealing with a black 5, it has to connect to another black 5 with three squares in-between so that, when you add in the two ends, you get five squares total.  When you do that, you end up with a line covering the area in the color shown by the number.  Sometimes this isn’t as easy as it sounds though because you run into a brick wall, so to speak; a red line that cannot be crossed and has to be gone around.  As the puzzle nears completion, you actually start developing a picture.  Once the puzzle level is complete, the grid disappears, the colors merge together, and the full picture is revealed.  In the example posted here, it is pretty obvious that we’re creating a lighthouse.  In other cases though, I you don’t really see the pattern until the image is complete.

To help with this process of finding the single way the level can be solved, the PC version of the game has a couple of nice features.  If you hit the “/” key, it will indicate if the puzzle is correct so far.  It doesn’t indicate where the errors are though.  You are left to find those and fix them yourself.  If you need the additional help though, the “F” key will “fix” any incorrect paths by removing them and allowing you to try a different path to connect the numbers.  This comes in very handy when there are multiple blue 12′s, for example, in a single area and you are not even sure which pair of them are supposed to link up.  These options are also available from the menu.  Finally, as you near completion, you may loose track of what pairs remain to be connected.  This is real easy with the 2′s as, but default and design, the have to be right next to each other.

PathPix is one of those games that is both simple to learn, and compulsively addictive.  The “reward” you get upon completion when you see the final solution is a lot like finishing a jigsaw puzzle.  It makes you want to “just start” a new one.  Problem is that once you start it, you don’t want to put it down.  Like a jigsaw puzzle where you really need to do something else but are going to find “just one more piece first”, I found PathPix to be more addicting than any game I have played on any platform in quite a while.  I just had to have more.  Luckily, the free demo version offered, while providing hours of game play with the included 25 levels, isn’t all that there is to the game.  When purchased for $19.99, you get 26 extra puzzle packs (in addition to the 30 “regular” packs) for a total of 1,400 levels.  Some of these have grids as large as 63×43…significantly larger and more complex than the easy 12×12 grids that get you started in the game.  And new packs are made available on the web site for registered users to download for free.  An average 30×30 grid takes me about 30 minutes to complete.  This equates to roughly 700 hours of game play for $20.  That comes out to about 1.75 cents per level or less than 4 cents per hour of entertainment…a steal in any economy.

The game offers both background music and sound effects.  Both can be turned off or on, but volume adjustment isn’t an option.  The background music is MIDI files, and you can add your own from any source to have in the background as you play.  As you play through puzzle packs, the number of solved puzzles shows up next to the puzzle pack name, and as you open the pack, a thumbnail of a solved level shows up to indicate which ones have already been solved.  This makes it easy to find a particularly entertaining level that you may want to clear and replay.  The game also allows for different user profiles so that you can keep track of your own progress separately from another player on the same machine.

My selections for this game would be very few.  I’d love volume settings for the sound and music, notifications when new packs are available for download, buttons on the top for checking for and fixing errors, and, most of all, I’d love some kind of editor so that users could create and upload their own puzzle packs.  I am not sure how these levels are created to begin with, but if users were able to create these and upload them, it would be really cool.  One last suggestion would be upgraded graphics.  I can understand the need to have something that would run on OS versions going all the way back to Windows 98, but does it have to look like something from six operating systems ago?  If a “new and improved” version allowing for in-game downloads and uploads of new content is considered, some new buttons and such might make the GUI a little more 21st century.

Overall, if I were to give this game “stars” on a 5-star spread, it would definitely get 5 stars.  While I do offer some suggestions of how this almost-perfect puzzle/logic game can be improved, none of those things distract from the game play or overall enjoyment of the game.  It’s a “Must-Have” in my book!

If you like Chillingo’s Toki Tori, probably the best platform game for the iPhone, or are a fan of the  Ice Age movies, then their new Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs is not only a must-have app, but a GET IT NOW! app.  Originally introduced at $4.99 (and what I paid for the game), it is a downright steal right now at $0.99 sale price.  The game comes with a very Toki Tori feel to it, but you are using Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from the movie, to collect acorns.  You do this by climbing around, pushing and moving things, jumping, and so forth.  As the game progresses, you are introduced to new things you can do with helpful little signs.

The game comes with four different environments to explore.  Each area has nine different “chapters” to play.  This give you 36 different levels to explore.  It may not sound like much, but doing all the right things at all the right times in order to collect all the acorns on a level is not always an easy task.  It will take you hours to get though the game.  One thing that helps, which I didn’t discover early enough, is the ability to do a two-fingered pan to move around and see more of the levels and obstacles than what fit on the screen in regular resolution.  If I could suggest one thing to the developers (besides more levels), it would be a pinch/zoom feature that seems oddly lacking.

Overall, the graphics are excellent, the game-play both casual and oddly rewarding, and I give the game a big thumbs up.  It makes my my must-have list at this $0.99 price point.  You can do a whole lot worse.

There are two things I’m very sure of.  One, Facebook is increasingly the new internet.  One recent article I read said it makes up 25% of US internet page views.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it.  The second thing I’m sure of is that the Facebook Birthday Calendar application is the most useful application on the site.  It is one of my primary reasons for being there.  And now, they have an iPhone application that brings all that to your fingertips.

In a recent review, I mentioned how to get the birthdays of all your Facebook friends into your calendar.  With this app, that is not necessary.  Instead of needing your calendar app in order to notify you of a friend or relative’s birthday, this $1.99 app will do that for you.  The interface is what you would expect from a quality application.  The person’s profile picture is displayed along with their birthday.  It also displays if you have alerts set for the individual and if you have contacted them and how.  Tapping their entry will bring up a page of options to view their Facebook profile, write on their wall, email them, call them, send them a Facebook gift, send them a text message, and so forth.  You can also set whether to give you alerts to this person’s birthday.

Application options include what time of day you want to be alerted, whether you want an alert 3 days or 7 days ahead of time, the email address you want to use for reminders (in addition to application alerts), how many events you want downloaded at one time, and which national and/or religious holidays you want to also show up on the calendar. And, if your friend or relative is not on Facebook, there is an option to add in their information manually.  And, as you would expect, any changes to your settings on the application will sync to your online Facebook Birthday Calendar.

My only complaint about the application is minor.  When you sign in with your Facebook email and later enter your email address for alerts, you do so with the default iPhone keyboard.  It would be nice if your alert email defaulted to your Facebook email and if it used that email-friendly keyboard layout that had the “at” symbol and period on it.  Also, it would be nice if there was a way to link a Facebook Friend to their contact entry in your iPhone address book without it actually marking them as having received an email, text message, or phone call.  I would think that this would fit nicely in the Modify window of the Friend Details where you can currently edit their name, add a birth year, or mark if the year is unknown.

As far as suggestions go, there are probably limits to what Facebook and the iPhone would allow.  If possible, it would be nice to have an option to update contact info in the address book with new friends’ profile pictures and birthdays.  If there was a way to capture or cut-and-paste contact information from the person’s Facebook profile information screen and get that into their iPhone contact record, that would be cool as well.  I’d also like to see an option to go the other way with information.  If the application could scan your contacts in your address book and find any records with a birthday field and automatically add those or link those to the Facebook list, that would be a plus as well.  Finally, with an option to go to your own profile, this application could even replace the native Facebook iPhone app.  You can still view your news feed, change your status, and so forth, but it takes a jump to your page from the profile page of one of your friends to get there.

Overall, I’d give this application 9 out of 10 stars.  It’s almost perfect and makes my Must Have list.  If you would like to give the application a spin without spending the $1.99, you can check out the free lite version that  disables the option to call/text/email your birthday greetings.