Oh, this is wrong. It’s so, SO wrong. It’s ultra-wrong. It’s the wrongest thing ever. It’s Naughty Bear.
The bears of Perfection Island are having a party, with yummy cupcakes for all. But they haven’t invited Naughty Bear. This makes Naughty Bear sad. And when Naughty Bear is sad, things happen. Bad things.
This is a real favourite of mine. I used to play chess when I was a wee laddie back home in Scotchland, but in this fast-moving modern world I don’t know anyone who has the attention span/mental discipline for it any more. Speed Chess (or Chess – The Speedgame, as it appears to have clumsily renamed itself), currently selling for the bargain price of 0p ($0.00/€0,00) is the perfect solution.
The picture tells the story, really. The rules are the same as normal chess, but you only have five pawns and one of everything else. You can play against another human or three levels of CPU opponent, and it took me about 40 games to beat it even at “Student” (the lowest). The move clock can be set to 20 seconds (the default), 60 seconds or off, which somewhat defeats the point. Apart from the fact that it says “Times up” if you let the clock run out, it’s excellently presented and generally lovely.
I can think of literally nothing else to tell you about Speed Chess. Bye!
Here’s one for those of you joining us late, and because this game still hasn’t sold enough copies.
Anyone who’s been reading anything I’ve written for any amount of time will probably already have noticed that I have very little time for videogames that want to tell stories. There are plenty of fields of culture available already for people who want to be told stories. Books, films, comics, TV, theatre and even music are all ideally suited to story-telling, and frequently do a brilliant job of it. You wouldn’t hire a footballer to come round and do your plumbing, so why would you look to videogames for storytelling?
What I’d like to draw your attention to instead is a glorious example of the art (dang!) of a videogame being a videogame. The unwieldily-titled Pix’n Love Rush ([59p]), in fact, goes beyond being a videogame – it’s a metagame. That is to say, it’s a videogame that’s about being a videogame.
Speaking as someone who’s tried pretty much all of them, World Series Of Poker Hold’Em Legend is the best poker game on the App Store* by roughly the width of the Atlantic. It plays a very decent game of poker, with an excellent career mode and some terrific local and internet multiplayer, but the real standout feature is the speed. You can skip past almost anything with a quick tap of the screen, so if you’ve folded your hand you can be playing the next one inside three seconds, rather than sitting around forever waiting for the CPU players to finish it. (You can, of course, watch the hand play out in full if you want to.)
You can take down an entire tournament this way in about eight minutes, making it the perfect portable poker pal. The only way it could be MORE perfect, in fact, is if it was free. Which, by fortunate chance, it currently (and temporarily) is. You know what to do with an open door, don’t you?
It’s not the first time we’ve asked the question, but do you love the look of Espgaluda 2 and Dodonpachi Resurrection, only to lack the appropriate hardware/funds/time to play them? (Since both games need a 3GS CPU or better, come in at a stiff [£5.49] price point and require a minimum play session of 20 minutes or so for a single game.)
Well, this time we’ve got you something that’s not just a decent substitute for people with older hardware, but is in at least one important respect better than either of Cave’s bullet-hell masterpieces. Come over here by the kitchen for a minute. We’d like you to meet Phoenix.
…is the only sense in which the word “free” is legitimately applicable in Namco’s new App Store blurb for Pac-Man Championship Edition (“NOW FREE: CHALLENGE MODE! NOW FREE: ALL 30 courses and 120 missions!”), as in “this game is now free from in-app purchases”.
What’s actually happened is that Namco have effectively made the game more expensive, by putting everything from the expansion pack into the normal edition and charging the previous full price of both of them ([£2.99]) for the new unified app. Previously you had the choice of just buying the base edition – which contained enough content for many players – and adding the expansion pack later, whereas now you have to buy it all straight away.
(Actually, if you previously bought the base edition and didn’t buy the DLC, this update WILL give you it for nothing – Scrupulous Fairness Ed)
But Pac-Man CE is great, and will inevitably be reduced in price at some point in the near future, and the updated version has a new virtual-analogue joypad option and incorporates GameCentre achievements and leaderboards, so we’re giving it another mention anyway. Call us old softies.
Normally we wouldn’t title a piece with just the name of the game, but I couldn’t do better than that. Run Forever! Jumpfinity! (now free, apparently permanently) is a platform game that’s basically the result of an unholy union between Super Mario Bros and the marvellous Spelunky.
It features infinite procedurally-generated random levels of SMB-style platforming, where you jump on baddies’ heads for points and avoid anything that looks like you probably shouldn’t jump on it. It doesn’t give much away, but I can reveal that there are [some] worlds, which [may or may not] differ from each other and are unlocked when you do [undefined] things. There’s a single high score, and playing various levels [maybe] enables you to get more points [or not]. Look, you’ll pick it up as you go along. In a slightly rubbish sort of way, it’s really great [someone check this].
Do we have a sub-editor yet?
This was odd. About a month back, a brilliant game arrived on the App Store called Finger Sling. I downloaded it, loved it, and posted a brief piece on my blog about it, promising more detail in the next day or two. A couple of days later I sat down to write about it in depth, fired up iTunes to get the URL and it was gone. While the Lite version was still available (weird in itself, as the full game had been free anyway), the game proper had simply vanished out of existence. Anyway, long story short, it’s back! Yay!
The returned Finger Sling (still free), now at version 2.0, claims improved graphics, controls and gameplay. After a quick spin through a couple of dozen levels I can’t spot a single thing that’s changed except for the Home-screen icon, but luckily that means it’s still the same excellent game it always was.
In all the many months I’ve been writing about iPod and iPhone games, I’m not sure I’ve ever got round to saying anything about this one, and now seems like a good time to put it right. Electronic Arts is currently having one of their frequent sales, and in focus on this occasion are some of the publisher’s classic-boardgame properties. The likes of Monopoly, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit and Battleship can all currently be had for 59p each (the first two in particular being very worthwhile purchases), but my personal favourite is the exemplary take on Connect 4.
Historically, “family” board games have had a terrible time on consoles, typically being the victims of awful, point-missing conversions clogged with useless bells and whistles that served no purpose other than the slow the game to a snail’s pace of cutscenes and over-complex interfaces. (Connect 4 itself suffered such a fate at the hands of an atrocious port to the Gameboy Advance.) But as part of the company’s general reinvention over the last few years as one that sort of vaguely knows something about games, EA has got it spectacularly right this time.
Just a quick heads-up that Namco’s excellent but badly-punctuated techno Pong derivative Bit.Trip Beat (previously reviewed here, where it was recipient of the prestigious Podgamer Recommended award) has just become considerably more buyable and even more recommended after a bizarre run of price changes. After launching just a week ago for £1.19 ($1.99), on Thursday it was briefly hiked to £2.99 ($4.99) before being slashed right down to 59p (99c) at some point last night.
The downloadable content is currently also available at 59p for all three add-on tracks, meaning you can get the complete game with all six stages for £1.19, the original price of the base version alone. At that price it’s a must-have, so rush off and have it as fast as you can, because we haven’t got the faintest idea what it’s going to cost tomorrow.
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