iPhone Goodies
The Good, the Paid, and…well mostly the paid.
So, in the past I’ve shown you a few free iPhone goodies. This time we’re going to expand the horizon a bit. I’m going to bring up a few free applications, and a handful of paid ones. These are a few of the better ways I’ve found to spend a dollar or two on the App store.
Rogue Touch: This one’s just been updated and is one of my favorite time-wasters on the phone. It’s Rogue, with touch-screen controls and the same hateful gameplay of a Shiren or any other roguelike. You die, that’s it. Game over. New character, start from floor 1. Your goal is to go through 51 floors of the dungeon (26 down and then all the way back up) to retrieve an amulet, and murder anything you find along the way. Searching for hidden passages, trying out new items in hopes they don’t kill you, avoiding starvation, randomly-generated dungeons, they’re all here. And it’s a buck. For that price this is absurdly good.
YouTube video follows:
Yeah, it doesn’t look like much, but hey, it’s a buck. And the controls are pretty much perfect for the phone. You touch the direction you want to go, or you touch yourself (dirty) for the inventory. Attack monsters by running into them or touching yourself (still dirty) and finding something to throw/shoot at them. An added bonus comes in the form of online leaderboards.
GalagaREMIX: I’ll be talking about the free demo for this, because I don’t love Galaga enough to pay $6 for it. We’re looking at another updated Galaga, though not as frenetic and awesome-looking as the recent Legions. Options are aplenty in this version, with a classic Galaga look as well as an updated look that resembles a good Saturn shooter.
Controls are available in 3 flavors.
The first places three buttons on the screen, shoot (holding fire continues to shoot, so no frantically tapping your phone), and two direction buttons (these you’ll be tapping). Controls are responsive but subject to the same problem of other iPhone control pads: Lack of tactile response means you can easily miss the direction button (They’re also rather small) and die.
The second setup turns the direction pad into a slider. This works substantially better than the buttons, but felt somewhat clunky to me. The fire button stays the same.
Finally, we have the 1-handed Galaga play mode. Which means you can play the game while riding the train, driving a car, typing a RobotPanic.com article, or even peeing. That alone makes this play mode well worth it, even if the controls seem a bit less responsive than I’d like. Shoot button remains the same here, but the accelerometer in the phone controls your left-right movement. A nice concept and I like that Namco is using the technology in the phone to try something new.
One major negative here is the game has load times. Yes, load times. I counted about a minute from tapping through the menus to actually playing the game. I’m also incredibly impatient.
More youtubage!
The free version contains two levels to try and all three play options to try out. The pay version apparently has boss fights, many more levels, powerups, and a $6 price tag. If you’re a shmup guy and can put up with the load times, go for it.
Flight Control: Another buck, another great timewaster. Basically you have to guide planes and helicopters to one of 3 airstrips while making sure none of them collide in a fiery explosion of doom. Graphics aren’t even as good as Rogue, but the gameplay is what you’re after in this one.
Dear God! More youtube!
This game is a pure high score chase. There’s only one board and all you do is try to keep playing as long as you possibly can. The controls are fantastic. I never once felt like the line drawn was different from what I was trying to do. That said, if you’re not a fan of drawing lines on your phone and watching tiny planes follow them, this probably isn’t for you.
And you hate freedom.
And kittens.
Kitten-hater.
On the free side, well, I don’t have anything new for you. I was busy playing Rogue Touch. However, Box Office has now turned into Now Playing, and in addition to offering full reviews for everything in a theater near you, also has DVD release listings and will hook up with your Netflix account so you can massage your queue on the go. As far as free apps go this is about as useful as anything I’ve found.
Google Earth is also available, for those of you who can’t get enough of spinning the globe on the Wii weather channel. It does do some cool stuff with the accelerometer and still gives you all the cool voyeuristic glee of normal Google Earth, so hey. Knock yourself out.
So, another day, another bushel of sweet iPhone App goodness. You could get everything here for less than you paid for that Chipolte burrito you’re currently packing into your colon. That’s right, I’m watching you. And you have something in your teeth. Lettuce, I think.
Until next time, I leave you with some gaming joy to suck your batteries dry and leave you stranded and phoneless.
Toodles.
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Tags: Applications, galaga, gaming, iphone, Rogue
April 20th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Rogue Touch is back up to $2.99, the $.99 price was temporary. Still totally worth it IMO, definitely one of my favorite iPhone games. The developers have been incredibly receptive to suggestions from people on their forums. In fact the majority of changes and fixes came directly from player feedback.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I’m kickin’ around the idea of a iTouch.
This will probably backfire somehow, but dunno…
keep being informative, man