I already touched on the physics puzzler once this month but here's another one, and quite different to boot. In Cling Thing you control the titular Thing. By touching the screen you can make your little guy shoot out gooey tendrils and grab walls and platforms—any that are covered in purple goop, at least. The main goal in any level is to reach the exit pipe. Along the way you can collect up to three stars, which are used to unlock later worlds. You can also earn a gold, silver, or bronze medal for each level depending on how fast you complete it but I haven't figured out the point of those yet.
Don't expect any realistic simulation here! Train Conductor tasks you with getting numbered trains onto the watching numbered tracks by drawing tracks to connect the two. It's a simple concept but executed very well and things can get really hectic once a bunch of trains are going at once. It starts with just three tracks but I'm up to five now. You can tap a train to stop it, with another tap sending it on again, but you have to watch for anything coming behind it. Keeping the trains from crashing into each other can be difficult! That's an instant game over. If a train makes it across but is on the wrong track, you merely lose points. You don't have to "beat" a level to move on though. That just nets you an achievement for getting through your shift at that city without any crashes. The game is set in Australia (Blake should appreciate that lol) and the different levels are different cities. You have to achieve a certain cumulative score to move on, and it's visualized by laying track to the next city.
Most of us older folks have good memories of games like Wing Commander, and Strike Wing scratches that space dogfighting itch. It's harder to get a feeling for a game like this in the short time I spent with it than with some quick twitchy game, but there seems to be an interesting story here, some nice graphics and music, and, most importantly, fun dogfights. You can control your ship using the built-in accelerometer, though I prefer the virtual joystick (it floats so that you can touch anywhere on the left half of the screen). The missions seem to be mostly "kill all the bad guys," but maybe there is more variety later on. You can unlock better ships and play challenge missions for extra experience. There seems to be a lot of content, too, with both free and paid paid DLC available to download. Sure, it's not Wing Commander but for a game on my phone, it's pretty good.
One of the unequivical facts of gaming today is that there are not enough new Mega Man games. Heck, there are no new Mega Man games! So when I came across a game on the App Store that is an obviously love letter to the blue bomber, I really want to love it. Steam Punks wears its inspiration pretty blatantly. Sure, it has a...wait for it...steampunk setting instead of some time in the near-ish future but it's totally Mega Man. You can choose what order to play the levels in, the bosses have funny names, and you get their weapons when you beat them. The main character even jumps the same way as Mega Man, lifting his front leg. You know what I'm talking about 
I've never been into racing games very much, other than things like Mario Kart and F-Zero, but I loved Hydro Thunder in the arcade. That was an awesome game! Riptide GP 2 reminds me of it. Oh, it's not the same, of course, but the racing-on-water thing is and it provided me a great burst of nostalgia. The game stands on its own, at least so far, as a great racing game in its own right.
Even though tower defense games are a dime a dozen on the App Store, I haven't played very many. Kingdom Rush is one of the more well known of the genre, though, and it's easy to see why after playing some. First of all the characters are really small, so you can actually see everything that's going on (very important!). There are four main types of towers—barracks to put out troops and slow down the enemy; archer towers for long-range; artillery towers for heavy firepower; and mage towers for enemies resistant to physical damage—which can be specialized once they're upgraded enough. It provides enough variety to keep things interesting. And there are a lot of different kinds of enemies and I'm sure there are more to come. You also get a hero character that you can move around the level to help out and a couple special powers that recharge after you use them. The graphics and music fit the medieval theme perfectly.
If you've been on Pixlbit for a while, you probably know that I like hippos. And today I have a silly hippo game to tell you about! Hippo High Dive is a very simple game. Your purple hippo, wearing a pink leotard, dives off a high board and must try to fall through a series of flaming hoops before landing in a little pool of water. You have three lives. Missing a ring costs one life, though you can get burned twice per live. Use up all three before making it to the pool at the bottom and you lose. And that's all there is to it. Beat a level—that is, a height—and a higher one unlocks. I'm at 450m right now. It has 45 flaming hoops! Thankfully, there is a little indicator at the bottom of the screen to show where the next hoop is coming. Otherwise, this really would be impossible. A few more tries and I'll get it for sure!
Another kind of game that has flourished on the App Store is the super hard high score chaser. A lot of credit there goes to Super Hexagon, in my opinion, which is one of my favorite iPhone games (I wrote about it way back in 2013). But today I'm here to talk about Unpossible, a game that definitely reminds me of Super Hexagon. In this one, though, you're traveling along a curving cylinder way up in the air trying to avoid obstacles. Have you played F-Zero GX? It's like the cylinder level in that game but with lots of stuff in the way and played from a first-person perspective. Since it's a high score game, you just go for as long as you can without messing up. That length of time is your score.
Mobile is great for little puzzle games that you can pick and put down at any time. TanZen, a collection of tangram puzzles, is a great example. Tangram puzzles consist of seven geometric shapes cut from one large square (as you can see in the app icon to the left) that are rearranged into other various shapes. It's a Chinese thing lol. In TanZen there is a solid dark outline that you try to completely fill with the seven shapes. It's a simple concept but can be difficult to figure out. Some nice, relaxing new agey/Oriental music should help you keep your cool. I've done quite a few of these now and there have been a few so far I haven't figured out. That's no problem, though, because there are plenty more puzzles to move onto. Over 550 in total! I have a feeling this game will be on my phone for a long time.
There are a lot of endless runners on the App Store. I mean, there's a frickin' ton of them and Worm Run falls into that group, technically. But a few things set it apart from similar games. First of all, your character doesn't run automatically. Swiping left or right sends your little guy in that direction and swiping up (including diagonals) makes him jump. You also have a little boost you can do several times in the air that recharches when you touch the ground or a wall.
There are only so many kinds of things and eventually everything falls into an established category (barring a game changer, of course). The physics puzzler on the App Store has proven very popular and a good fit for mobile, and Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage falls firmly in that category. It's similar to Cut the Rope but instead of trying to get a piece of candy into the mouth of an adorable monster, you're getting one or more Vikings into a little Viking barge (whatever those are called) with the power of slicing with your finger. While you do cut ropes sometimes, you mostly cut through giant blocks of ice, hence the name.
2014 was a great year for me, and a great year for gaming. Lots of great games! Daftman suggested to me that I make a list of games to beat for the year, so that's what I did. Actually, I made two lists: one for games I beat, and another for games I bought. I won't bore you by telling you the 73 games I bought last year; many of them were old games 'cause I love old games and used many of those for Retro Game of the Week. Some were fairly recent and just a few of them were new. Anyways, I beat 24 games in 2014, easily the most games I've ever finished in a year. They were all good games, worthy of being finished. Here they are, in the order in which I beat them.
Another year down! Which one was this? 2007? 12? Oh yeah, 2014. I still have a hard time believing it was 2014, let alone that it's over. But let's get on with this, shall we? First up are all the games I beat this year and then how many I bought or somehow acquired (don't worry, I don't list those specifically). Be sure to stick around for the Golden Hippo Awards after that!
First of all, Happy New Year! But let's talk about last year. December was a super busy month. Between December 1 and Christmas Day, I worked about 200 hours...which is really pretty crazy. Nice paychecks though 
So I didn't do a lot of gaming, though I did finish one thing...
Hey, everybody. I know I've been pretty much MIA except for the odd comment. November was a busy month and December is even crazier. I just finished a 60-hour week at work and have two more of those to look forward to. That's why we're nearly done with the first week of December and I'm just now posting the November recap. Let's get to it!
Man, the week+ since my last blog has been very busy. New baby, going back to work (plus an overtime day), and my wife has had some trouble with her stitches (she tore a little during the birth). I've played a little Monster Hunter on PSP but that's about it. Been reading a lot of comics lately (courtesy of the library, of course) because that's so much easier to do than play a game. I finished Sandman 3 and it was really good. I've started vol 4 and it looks like we're back to main story again (vol 3 was just unrelated short stories, though very good ones). I'm just in the first section of that but so far it's really interesting.
Started the day out with a breakfast burrito from my freezer. Then I went to my usual Starbucks and got a grande iced coffee with mocha and two rivet shakers from Philly Pretzel Factory right next door. Then I made my way to Mark's place to play video games and watch the football game.
My wife has been pregnant for a while now (months and months!) but her due date arrived and still no baby. So we had an induction scheduled for Friday, October 10 (yesterday as of this writing). But Thursday morning, right after I finished my shower before work, her water broke. I love clear signs like that lol. So we headed to the hospital and literally an hour later she gave birth to our second son. Thing is, it went so fast that she didn't have time to get an epidural AND my son weighed 9 lbs 1.5 oz and was 20 inches. That's a big baby to push out! But mommy and baby were both healthy and complicaton-free, so we're not going to complain (too much).
This week I came up with a new way to select games to play. I pick a random genre on allgame.com using random.org to get a number from 1 to 15, and then sort the games by rating and look down the list until I see one I want to play. I generated an 8, which means the Racing genre and saw Diddy Kong Racing (DKR) for N64 near the top of the list. I have this game still in its box for N64 and haven't played it in ages. So I packed up my N64 and the game to take with me when I go to my friend Mark's place on Sunday.
I read the second volume of Sandman last week and let me tell you, it was really good. Whereas the first volume was a series of stories loosely connected by Morpheus's plight, volume 2 told one long story (well, there was one off-topic story, but I really liked that one too). It also tied in with one of the human characters from volume 1 (Unity Kinkaid) and introduced more of the Endless, Desire in particular. That one will make more trouble down the line, mark my words.
Well, my friend Mark finally has his gamer-tag up and running again on Xbox 360, and so it's back to modern gaming as usual, playing co-op in new and exciting virtual worlds. I expect to log twenty hours or so in EDF 2025 this weekend.
Destiny is all the rage these days. I know we have a number of folks here on Pixlbit who are playing it. My wife was particularly intrigued and so we picked it up from Redbox tonight to see what it was like. And it seems like a really cool game. Very pretty, even on old hardware (PS3 in this case), and the feel of the gameplay is really good. But for our situation there is one glaring flaw: NO LOCAL MULTIPLAYER. Perhaps this wrinkle was common knowledge but neither of us had heard about it and surely the folks at Bungie threw in all the options. After all, their Halo games support local, LAN, and online multiplayer. Why should Destiny be different?