Archive for January 20th, 2012
‘Dance Central 2′ Now Has An App
If you have a Kinect, you should probably own Dance Central 2. It’s one of the best and brightest games the hands-free motion tracking device has in its library. It’s also one of the few that actually shows off what the device can do well. If you need more a push, Microsoft might have just the thing: an app that pairs, loosely, what Harmonix did with VidRhythm [Free] to Dance Central 2. It’s a promotional preview app, basically, dubbed Dance Cam. [Free]
In it, users can record video performances of themselves dancing to a sampling of tracks from the Dance Central 2 proper soundtrack. Then, the app spits out a music video containing both. Pretty simple stuff, really.
Dance Cam also has social hooks that allows for sharing and even mash-up videos between friends. The below fleshes out some of the finer details:
Hard to believe this might turn someone onto Dance Central 2, so we’re kinda thinking about this more as a strange little toy than anything else. It’s free, so give it a spin — especially if VidRhythm is your thing.
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‘Jazz: Trump’s Journey’ Review – Perdido Street Platformer Blues
The world of Jazz: Trump’s Journey [$2.99] is a lush throwback to 1920’s New Orleans, brought to life with watercolor backdrops and great tunes. You take the stage in parades and theaters, prisons and sewers, all the way to the French Quarter as you run through the history of Trump’s success. You rise from a boy with dreams of making beautiful music to a man at the top of his game.
The game you play over the course of that journey is a platformer, with all your standard platforming elements: running, jumping, collecting widgets, and so on. Trump’s music has the power to stop people in their tracks – literally freeze time – which opens the way for a few clever puzzles and challenges. But imprecise controls and terrible translation keep Jazz from reaching the heights it deserves.
The translation is the worst offense, completely mangling what may be a touching story or may be a heavy-handed lesson on racism. It’s hard to tell when it’s presented with phrases like this:
“To be honest. I got prepared to that, but even tough I didn’t lost my hope because I knew my music affected her.”
We can overlook a few misspellings or grammatical errors, but this translation is inexcusably bad. Oh, and the “daring parallel with the real story of Louis Armstrong,” as mentioned in the app description? Ignore that. It’s a cute story, but pretty banal, and beyond the setting, the jazz and the color of their skin, Trump and Satchmo don’t have much in common at all.
The controls aren’t nearly as bad as the grammar, but they need to be fine-tuned. They’re laid out with movement on the left side, action on the right, but movement is split up into two sections (back and forth, up and down) and action is laid out so you can’t really do more than one thing at a time. If you need to, say, climb a ladder and jump or push a box and freeze time, it’s a finger-twister. The game seems to delight in making you do those sorts of things from time to time. Throw in occasionally sketchy physics and strange inconsistencies in the properties of objects and you have yourself a recipe for serious frustration.
If those problems get fixed up, Jazz will be an absolute gem. Every bit of it is gorgeous. You can clamber over the menu and credits, laid out in an elegant theater. The levels, silent movie cut scenes, and animations look fantastic from start to finish. The game is accompanied by a lovely jazz soundtrack that gets better and better as you put your band together and move toward the climax. It’s all downright beautiful.
Aside from the frustratingly floaty controls (and the lack of consideration the level design gives them), the platforming is quite cool. The ability to freeze time opens up interesting possibilities for puzzles, allowing you to manipulation sections of your environment and the people around you. Objects that can be frozen are visually distinct from those that can’t, but that doesn’t make solutions immediately obvious.
For difficulty, I’d stick Jazz at a comfortable middle of the road. It stays too easy for just long enough to get worrisome, but things ramp up apace once they start moving. There are eleven long levels, broken up into several sections that are filled to checkpoints, so you’ll never have to replay much unless you want to go back for collectables. Within those tiny bits between checkpoints, however, there are occasionally big-time challenges. Usually these difficulty spikes come at a welcome moment, but every once in a while they’re phone-throwingly frustrating.
I can’t recommend Jazz: Trump’s Journey wholeheartedly. It sells itself as a game with a unique and engaging story, and that’s something it simply doesn’t have. Setting aside the translation, the message of the game is still iffy at best and you’ll only find parallels to Louis Armstrong if you squint really hard. But it is, for the most part, a solid, fun platformer. And can you argue with the looks, or the sound? Let’s settle on a cautious recommendation, with a side of hoping for a significant patch-up sooner than later. If you decide to take a look, swing by our and let us know what you think.
TouchArcade Rating: 
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A Quick Look At ‘Triple Town’
If you’re still into match-3 games, give Triple Town a shot. It’s a fresh take on the style of puzzle game that doesn’t mess with the purity of the mechanic, but it does do a good job integrating and introducing an interesting wrinkle: town building.
You might have heard of this one already. It has seen a couple of releases across other platforms, including Kindle and Facebook. The latter one should give you an idea of what to expect, actually. This is a free-to-play game with “social” game hooks, much like any other title on the social networking site. Where it departs is that it seems to feed off its best players in a particularly non-aggressive way. On iOS, you can just play and not worry. At least, that’s been my experience with it so far.
Your usual game goes something like this: each grid-based instance is a new, fairly unremarkable world that you need to fill by matching three alike items. Match three grasses to assemble a bush, and then match those bushes to make trees. The catch is that you’ll be given these tools at random and you can only “store” on piece at a time. Also, you can’t move any of the game’s pieces around; you can only put items down next to pre-existing items, which introduces turn-based thinking.
There’s more to it. After some bush laying, you’ll run across your first bear, which is a piece that you need to isolate around other pieces in order to kill it. Line up three dead bears, and you get a building. (I don’t understand it, either.)
Higher-level play involves doing all of this and using its currency functionality, which allows you to buy more moves on a single board — and if you’re just OK at the game, you won’t really be running to the well — and buying pieces that you need. The IAP will let you buy more coins or turns for real-life dough.
Triple Town has created a bit of buzz on our boards and … some grumbling, too. The game’s lead designer , revealing that it has been balanced to limit even hypothetical millionaires from slaughtering the high score boards.
“… In general a more skilled player will always get a better scores than a less skilled player, even if someone buys every item in the store,” he writes. “Triple Town often seems like a simple game on the surface, but there is an immense amount of depth and strategy…”
“To make things even more fair, there are only a limited number of items in the store. Even if you were a millionaire, the best that would get you is the ability to play more often but you wouldn’t be able to buy your way to a high score.”
He adds that he sees a lot of “expert” dudes who never buy items, but he also sees people who buy more stuff because they like the game. I haven’t felt pressured to buy anything yet, so if your IAP alarm went off, go ahead and relax.
Triple Town is free, so give it a try. It’s a solid match-3 with a cool new element that I think anyone with an itch for this kind of puzzle game will dig. We’ll have a review ready soon. Also, those bears! So cute.
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Buckle Up: New ‘Kids vs Goblins’ Trailer Hits
‘ tactical RPG Kids vs Goblins has been getting a lot of traction for good reason: it looks hot. In the game, you’ll control three kids with up to 80 different spells on a quest that’ll see them exploring a total of seven unique environments. As you’ll see in the new trailer below, the spell system takes a cue from ; it encourages users to combine individual spells and then exploit the combined power in order to progress and beat up waves of bad dudes. There seems to be a fair bit of standard action RPG-ery, too.
Kids vs Goblins is being published by , and is expected to hit the iPad first later this February. In the game’s message board thread, the publisher has noted that Apple has it in its hands right now, so it’s just a matter of approval. We’ll continue keeping our eye on this one, for sure.
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‘Junk Jack’ For iPad Is Still A Thing That’ll Happen, But Now The Wait Is Longer
The ‘ Junk Jack [$2.99 / LE] is easily one of our community’s more celebrated games for two reasons: (a) it’s a fun game and (b) The Pixbits has demonstrated a clear commitment to making it a bigger and more fulfilling experience via frequent updates. The rub with the latter, though, is that it’s causing a slight delay with the iPad version.
Speaking to us about the eventual Universal update, PixBits tells us that it’s still being planned, but has been postponed in order to make the iPhone version as good as it can be beforehand. “We are really busy developing the new update that will include many new features like walking mobs, , etc,” a studio rep says. “The iPad version is still planned, but we have delayed it. We want to make sure to have a stable and full featured game before doing that version.”
It’s a bummer, but you can’t argue with that logic, right? We’ve asked to make double-sure that Junk Jack iPad will still make it out at some point in 2012.
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A Quick Look At ‘Puzzlejuice’
Our collective gut says that we’ll be talking a lot about ’s Puzzlejuice [$2.99] in 2012. That’s big praise considering it’s January and all, but it has that indescribable feel of a remarkable game. To its credit, it does a great job convincing you that it is, in fact, this good; it has an unparalleled swagger, presence, and charisma that crops up in almost every aspect of the title, including the UI and tutorials. It knows it’s hot.
We’re not sure if it knows how crazy it is, though. Puzzlejuice deftly pairs the block matching of a Tetris to a free-form spelling mechanic like the one used in last year’s stand-out, SpellTower [$1.99]. Basically, you create lines by rotating blocks of varying shapes and smashing them together at the bottom of the screen. Once you make a solid line, the matched blocks magically transform into letters that you then have to spell words with.
When you spell a word, the blocks disappear and allow for more matching action. This is especially vital since blocks are constantly tumbling from the top of the screen Tetris-style and threatening to end your session if they breach the top of the level. The push and pull of the action is beyond frantic, as you’ll need to keep your eye on everything at once. Puzzlejuice also tosses in challenges, like, say, “spell a five-letter word,” to the mix, which pushes your dexterity and mental fortitude to its limits.
There’s a lot of smaller mechanical treats within in the package, too: it has power-ups like bombs and total game freezes; it has color-specific hooks in the blocks that allow you to pop matching colors before side-to-side lines are formed; and it has two kinds of “core” scoring modes, one in which asks you to spell at least five-letter words for the maximum amount of block clearing.
Puzzlejuice keeps you on your heels and fighting against a whirlwind of blocks, colors, letters, and challenges. The franticness of the play is a nice change of general genre pacing, which is a big reason why we’re so behind the game. It’s also a looker, too. Check it out:
If you hate word games with a capital H, we can’t imagine that this will be an exception to your overall distaste. If you do enjoy these kinds of titles, Puzzlejuice is probably something you should check out. We’ll be giving this the official go for review shortly, but obviously our impression so far is, er… pretty good.
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