iPhone games (also Ipod Tooch/iPad games too)

i just bought all these games because of this thread THANKS GUYS.

i got a blue 5c iphone and celebrated by grabbing 868-hack. okay u were all right it is fantastic. my high score so far is 54 - i haven't actually completed a game yet.

goddammit mordy

leave some points for the rest of us

I haven't played in a while, but my top score in a single run was 61 (didn't survive)

woo - just got 51 and *alive*

so apparently the more successful runs you string together the harder the game gets. my icon can only take 2 hits now before dying, and the enemies are starting to become more powerful (daemons take 4 hits instead of 3, viruses move 3 spaces instead of 2, etc).

whoa, really? didn't know that. how many runs have you strung together? i've only made it to a 3rd-go-around, and then i get greedy and go for megapoints.

http://oldmanandhisgames.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/survival-horror-and-868-hack/

Perhaps the most devious ingredient to 868-HACK‘s difficulty, however, is the “programs” you get. These are the powers you can obtain and use over the course of the game. You start with a small set of potential programs; as you progress, that set gets larger. This should be a good thing. It feels like a good thing, as you unlock more and more of the programs.

It’s not a good thing.

After a while, you realize that the programs you started with are largely the most useful of the programs in the game; a few good ones open up eventually, but they’re expensive and risky. .STEP is maybe the most useful thing in the entire game, and you have it from the beginning. .DEBUG, .ANTI_V, and .D_BOMB, powers that destroy the enemies, are all available from the beginning. .RESET, which gives you up to two more hits to absorb, is available from the beginning. These are all extremely useful programs, available from the outset.

Eventually, these simple, useful programs are replaced by things like .WARP, which switches your location with one of the enemies on the board, and .POLY, which changes each enemy on the board into a different one. Where the powers that are available early allow the player to feel more control over what’s happening, many of the ones that show up later introduce even more randomness. That’s fine in a pinch, but not the type of power you need when trying to sustain a streak.

After a while, you start longing for the old powers. You start wishing they would pop up more often, that you could start with a few of them, instead of “.REDUCE”, which can be useful in the long game, but doesn’t help at all when you’re facing a wall of enemies. You resent the game for taking away the powers you want, for making you learn how to use the powers it forces you into.

^^^^^^^^^^

out of all the new powers you get (i haven't unlocked all of them yet - i quit playing a week or two ago but may pick it up again), i thought .WARP is actually sometimes useful as a last resort. if you're trapped, you messed up somewhere along the way and you're about to die, you can use it to warp yourself to one of the enemies that's surrounding you. that not only gives you a new escape route, but it also kills the enemy you landed on.

but yeah, sometimes i find myself longing for the first time or two you play it, when pretty much every single program you come across is useful and you can load up by the end of the second round. once you've unlocked a lot of things, you can go through an entire game without seeing a .DEBUG and it makes things much more difficult.

xp -

there's a lot that's great in that post, but i'm highlighting one thing in particular i've thought about and had a hard time articulating: that after a certain number of playthroughs, the randomness and unpredictability of the extra available programs make this game not only harder than it was out of the box, but also tempt you that much more into risk-taking behavior (trying for .SCORE and .ATK+ for instance) instead of what got you through that many runs in the first place

which, if you think about it from the perspective of the game conditioning player behavior, is an incredible trick

yeah, i think the new programs add to the game and keep it fresh

oh totally! part of the allure of it is unlocking new programs and figuring out what they do - it just comes at the unadvertised expense of making the game more and more difficult

yeah this is what's dawning on me - everything's getting harder, good programs turning up less often, more risk is required, can see new strategies using different progs glimmering in the distance but can't quite reach them because I can't think clearly enough.

God it's a lovely game, just so elegant.

ya warp is great—you don't just trade places, you kill the enemy, and it can get you out of a tight spot. warp ftw

but yes during a streak it can give you a "bonus power" which is always something bad, like firing backwards

.ROW has to be my least favorite

*makes "rowww" sound and cat-paw gesture*

corrypt gets totally deranged once you get past the early puzzles - effectively find the rewind function becoming a necessary part of the landscape and glitches destroying the fabric of the game. how you control the deterioration of the game's logic determines how well you do. Michael Brough=hero at the moment.

woo - just scored a 66 single run alive in 868-hack. i parlayed an antivirus into an early game score - used score judiciously until around sector 5 when i was able to grab a debug (plus a reset) and then started popping the big score boxes + left score alone. grabbed a step before the final sector, siphoned a 8-pt box on sector 8, and then stepped all the way over to the exit.

i love the push / debug combo. push all the enemies onto a square or two and mass decimation. (i accidentally debugged myself to death once tho.) i also love delay / one-shotting daemons before they spawn

oh good idea

i love grabbing some big boxes on level 8 and peacing

what's a good newish game?

just set a personal best in HACK today (87 over 2 runs) and now i'm ready to try something new

i'm embarrassed to admit i've been playing pocket mine recently

honestly it looks pretty fun but a few weeks ago i got really into terraria and although it was addicting, i ended up getting really sad irl. it looks too much like that!

i loved terraria - but i played it around when it first came out and it looks like they've added a lot since and now i've been contemplating playing it again

this is more arcadey than terraria fwiw

i know, but the first thing i read on the description page was "DIG TO..." and i didn't get past it. it's not you, pocket mine, it's me. i have had an incident

puzzle quest marvel universe is match 3 addiction
pocket mine is a great time waster
Paint it Back is Picross
Quest Rush is OdinSphere style achievement quest
Fiete Match is Memory cards with nice design
Fist of Awesome is boingboing snark Final Fight with fun 8bit visuals
Kingturn Underworld is surprisingly deep SRPG with new wrinkles and lots of depth

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EdwardBrown/20131013/202251/Watch_Me_Squirm_as_I_Wrestle_with_Freetoplay.php

thoughtful post by the developer of paint it back (which is really fun btw) about deciding whether to make his game free-to-play

personally i'd pay three bucks for an ios picross game in a heartbeat, but that's just me, aka the dude who carries three separate picross ds games with him to work every day

then go buy paint it back! it's two bucks.

i did!

i guess my point is that i really don't envy ios developers having to make gameplay/creative sacrifices in the name of iap

then again as some dude in the comments writes: "IAP bothers no one except some developers these days, all the user tests I've ran and seen show this." guess that's settled, then!

wait, i thought there were only two Picross DS games. did they make one for 3DS yet?

it's kinda sad but we're largely inured to IAP design now. that said, Marvel Puzzle Quest did annoy a little with the recharging and grinding off the beat. puzzle & dragons really set a new standard for this stuff IMO

i'm counting picross ds, picross 3d, and color cross (a poorly-made picross derivative, but picross nonetheless!). i picked it up used off amazon for a couple bucks and i'm more than willing to forgive its flaws

I'm looking forward to things coming full circle until I can buy a truly awesome single-player RPG for my iPhone for like $10, no IAP.

Someday.

IAPs are never going away. Look forward to PC and console games adopting similar tactics.

i'm sure they're gonna get even worse once they figure out what the next big addiction scheme is past "energy use"

are there sites that track IAP price drops? not like for candy crush bullshit but for games where the f2p means more or less that you're dl'ing a demo? I mean I want to support developers but sometimes I want to wait it out, not pay $5 for a game when it's new but drop $3 a little later. I've got trackers for full price game drops but dunno anything about tracking iap drops

toucharcade has a system that works well for that. you have to register and then track via an app.

since discovering wechat & line games, i have been unable to live a normal life

http://img0.pconline.com.cn/pconline/1308/05/3413007_73.jpeg http://www.appgamed.com/photo_android/LINE-Pokopang_130613_02.jpg

help

there's a US version?

of the one i posted? honestly i've no idea. the second one (pokopang) is a line game, and that's definitely all in english.

Everyone on the trains in Tokyo was playing Puzzle&Dragons but it demands always-on data, so fuck that.

Yeah that's why I gave up on marvel puzzle quest too, seems to be an irritating trend, loads of games around at the moment which should be fine offline but which crap out when I enter the tube.

pocket mine and marvel puzzle quest both have terrible energy mechanisms but are completely addictive.

http://doomanddestiny.com/
just started but this is a lovingly crafted Final Fantasy / RPG Maker pastiche that promises 30 hours of play for a buck. it's fun.