iPhone games (also Ipod Tooch/iPad games too)

Fiz is so slow and dull. Geared against you from the outset.

I think I'm doing it wrong (as the actress said to the bishop).

max_read, do you play hoplite, and if so, do you rank 50th out of 2,074 players with a top score of 151?

wwe supercard

i came here to say that

yeah for real

IAP's :((( I know where this will lead.

I only downloaded it to get a $5 GameStop coupon, but Tyrant Unleashed isn't a bad card game

i played it a little - the theme is cool but the mechanics were too boring to keep my attention (lol bc i'm still playing wwe supercard)

Just got my 6+, upgrade from my 4S. The new screen makes games look totally amazing, even stuff like Puzzle and Dragons and Marvel Puzzle Quest have upscaled assets with great color and resolution. The aforementioned Tyrant Unleashed looks pretty awesome too

http://bogost.com/writing/swing-copters-the-randomness-of-the-universe-captured-in-pixels/

anyone else playing Galaxy Trucker? good lord it's fun.

so i heard.
i had a go at banner saga and it's very complex. i should maybe get galaxy trucker?

Banner Saga is pretty great on the desktop, anyway. Story and atmosphere are unrelentingly sad/moody/bleak so far, which is great. I love Galaxy Trucker as a board game but I've never really been big into iPad board game adaptations. I have always more friends who will play board games with me in real life than who have iPads, and there's no point in playing strangers unless it's a highly competitive thing with good matchmaking.

i was a big fan of the board game, which is a blast to play with friends, so i'm probably a bit biased. but i'm very pleasantly surprised at how well the single player mode works. for those who haven't played the board game, it's basically a two-phase game. in the first, you madly scramble to grab pieces from a shared pool and construct your ship as a timer ticks down. unless you're rain man, you're desperately grabbing pieces and seeing what fits and trying to build a diverse ship and there's not enough time and it's stressful and awesome. in phase two, you and the rest of the players go through 8 to 16 "events" and you see how your hastily constructed ship holds up. the events range from asteroids flying at you from different angles (randomly determined), visiting planets to collect resources, spending batteries to boost your engines and gain ground in the space race, etc. there's way more to it than that, but the success in phase 2 is largely determined by how efficiently and quickly you build your ship during the scramble at the beginning. at the end of the events phase everyone is scored on a variety of categories - whose ship held up the best, who picked up the most resources, who finished first in the race, etc. it's a fast paced game in real life and even more so on the ipad version, which of course streamlines everything.

fwiw the good folks at pockettactics rate it highly as well:

Galaxy Trucker isn’t a game for everyone. People looking for a sober and realistic space game will hate its light-hearted tone. People who only play games to win will hate it. Perfectionists who can’t stand to watch their creations explode will hate it. You shouldn’t hang out with these people. These are bad people who are just wrong because Galaxy Trucker is too good not to love. Honestly, I can’t find any flaws with the game, and can see myself playing it for years. Galaxy Trucker isn’t merely the best board game on iPad this year, it’s the best board game on iPad ever.

the reason that the single player mode is surprisingly fun is that it has a really long campaign with special scenarios for most missions. for example, in one mission you might be tasked with safeguarding two special radioactive cargo parts to your ship that explode if any of the adjacent pieces are damaged. or you might have a mission that heavily bombards you with asteroids, so you have to emphasize shields/batteries/lasers more than you normally would. i don't know, it's just simple stuff like that but it keeps each mission fresh, and it's an element of the game that's absent from the real life board game version so it adds something new to the ipad version.

im stoked

Really enjoying Spellfall right now - Puzzle Quest RPG type grinder, light and cute

I haven't gotten an app that has IAP since Marvel Puzzle Quest. Never again.

just dl''d campus life : sorority party bc of yr comment

I've been playing a shit ton of Goblin Sword. ONe of the best side scrollers I've played on iOS.

New brog game, Helix. It's an action game!

Yeah, Helix is a trip

anyone bought it on phone? i've just lost a load half a morning to it on the ipad, but still find i die mostly when my hand gets in the way of being able to see what's happening.

just had a look at at the high scores and TerryCavanagh is on 99 on Brog Mode. That must be driving him nuts. Serves him right.

I am probably way too hungover for his game this morning but hm: it seems like keeping yr thumbs rooted in then corners of he screen is the best bet, and switching thumb whenever you need to move into the quadrant the other is occupying

has anyone played Brianna wu's game btw

uuuuuuuuuugh Spellfall kept crashing, so I did a delete and reinstall. No cloud backup! Lost about 15 days of progress, deleted the damn thing out of frustration.

Brianna Wu's game looked ugly. Is it fun? It's like an action-based interactive novel or movie?

Has anyone gotten to the static monster in Helix (brog mode)? I did not beat it. This was around 41 or 42. Very brog-like (glitch in the mainframe coming to life).

my best is 51 but I don't think I know what you're referring to

yeah I got the static monster and came through the other side. 94 is my best.

it appears after a minute I think.

yet to beat the static monster, 9/10 tries I manage to kill myself trying to get to the warp zone

and it's barely worth it. only managed to stay in there for a couple of kills max.

fucking AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN. had enough of this with super hexagon.

i have now played this so much my left hand is cramping and can no longer grip things

I played the free portion of Brianna Wu's game last night. The art design is pretty ugly imo but it's interesting to see what a small development team can accomplish with the Unreal engine.

The early gameplay reminded me a bit of Heavy Rain, although it didn't seem like the events were timed. They consist mostly of tracing your finger over shapes.

Spent the day in, reviewing some ios games. I think these are mostly free apart from Banner Saga and Helix.

Helix: I never quite got the hang of Hack despite liking how it looks, but this one is very easy to pick up and play.

Banner Saga: Beautiful, but I got whooped on the second fight and felt like I didn't completely get what I was doing. Need to concentrate more on strategy for this one.

Retry: Sort of Flappy Bird-ish, conceptually, but more of a fully formed game. Trials-ish immediate replay, Angry Birdish three star system. Recommended.

Colossatron: Reminded me of Monsters Ate My Condo. You're building a giant worm robot thing in real time as it destroys the city. Great presentation.

Adventure Xpress: Kinda like if King Cashing was an match-three game? The matching itself is very good once you get further along. Methadone for a MPQ addict.

Giant Boulder of Death: Yet another Adult Swim title. This one came out a little while ago? An endless roller, I guess, with tilt mechanics. The challenge system reminds me of Tiny Wings.

Smash Hit: A shooting gallery / runner. I like that your shots have arc and you need to take that into account.

A Ride into the Mountains: Gorgeous and challenging. Has some of the qualities I like about Shadow of the Colossus (a loner on horseback vs. abstract enemies), visually more like Another World.

Javelin Masters 2: There's really nothing to this other than beating your high score, but pretty fun nonetheless. I like games I can play for a minute while I wait for my lunch order lol.

The Bot Squad: Short levels of tower defense puzzles. Three star system. Too easy so far, but very polished.

Rival Knights: The jousting mechanic is really cool.

Spiderman Unlimited: Mirror's Edge/Temple Run-ish, but not an endless runner. If you're going to run and jump across rooftops and deal with bad guys you might as well be Spiderman, right?

Angry Birds Transformers: I didn't realize that Angry Birds had deviated from its core gameplay. This one is sort of like A Ride into the Mountains, actually. You're moving left to right, and there's a shooting gallery of pigs and castles behind you. More dynamic than a conventional Angry Birds title.

I'm digging retry. It's just the right amount of annoying. At least as far as I've gotten.

Spider-Man game looks fun, but I refuse to play any games with a power meter that you have to wait to replenish.

So this New Words With Friends thing came out this month - basically a prettier version of the standard WWF, with more social networking junk, but they stuck a bunch of the old paid features in there for free (like stats, tile count) and apparently ads between moves, though I don't see them since it imported my old WWF Pro settings.

Weirdest thing about it - they added a wildly inappropriate dating-style matching system, where you get the opponent's average word score and photo. You swipe left or right to match, then you get matched if they do the same, OKC style, and it moves to the next photo.

Facebook integration is one of the slimiest things to happen to gaming

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/4f/a6/da/4fa6dae101a100546d117830c2915033.jpg

nice

I played a bunch of the Kim Kardashian game last night. It's pretty good actuallay

The train only has like five stops and one of them is Calabasas. lol

Anyone play the Monster Hunter game for iOS? Always been interested in the series and this looks like the first version on a platform I have access to.

I think I hit Day 450 in Puzzle and Dragons lately. Oh, life.
They did double the stamina rechrage rate in the last update, which was nice, though I hear it's from desperation that user numbers are going up not quite as astronomically fast as they were in the past in Japan.

Monster Hunter sounds like an absolutely terrible game to play via touch screen, it's known for hardcore reflex action. in the iOS description they even push you to use an MFi gamepad

i finally defeated dragon quest II. it was...really disappointing! definitely the worst RPG i've ever completed. even for an old school grinding RPG it was particularly joyless. :(

downloading Shin Megami Tensei (the 1992 SNES game, apparently unavailable in English UNTIL NOW). i've never played any SMT game so i don't know what to expect.

Wow, is that really the first official English translation of the original SMT? Crazy.

that's just what the item description says in the app store, so that could be totally false.