TouchArcade.ru

We’ve had our share of decent endless runners lately, and Defiant Development’s Ski Safari [ $0.99 ], looks to continue that trend. With adorable graphics, great controls, and a decent amount of content, hits all the right notes for the genre and should be checked out.

Ski Safari challenges you to last as long as you can against an impending avalanche while you race down an eternal slope. In order to accomplish this, you’ll need to build up your speed (and score multiplier) and keep it up as long as possible. You can gain speed by performing a wide variety of tricks or by picking up ‘vehicles’ that range from penguins and yetis to hawks to even a snowmobile. Of course, several types of obstacles (rocks, ski cabins, e.t.c.) stand in your way to slow you down. It’s an interesting system that plays out like a constant tug-of-war between you and the never-ending avalanche. In some ways, the speed system is a bit vaguer than other endless runners but I think it adds to the tension and enjoyment.

Of course, Ski Safari wouldn’t offer much in the replayability department if it only offered a simple race against inevitability. Thankfully, a decent objective/leveling system similar to the likes of Jetpack Joyride is always in play, offering nice distractions during the race. Completing sets of missions raises your rank and multiplier, allowing you to gain more points (and speed). While the mission system doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table, it’s still a welcome addition.

Like many endless runners, Ski Safari’s controls are a simple mixture of taps and holds. A quick tap will have your skier jump while holding down on the screen starts a backflip. Your backflip speed depends a lot on your velocity and vehicle, adding a bit to the strategy of whether or not to actually start a move. The control scheme definitely hits the mark for being accessible while offering just enough potential for strategy to keep you coming back.

You’ll notice that once you get the hang of the gameplay runs can take quite a bit of time (relatively speaking) before they get hard. However, I don’t really see this as an issue as there are plenty of objectives to complete while you’re skiing and the ever-increasing multiplier means that you’ll eventually be able to reach those higher scores faster.

I’m a fan of Ski Safari’s lighthearted and playful presentation. Everything from the initial runs while asleep in bed to the mischievous music and cartoony visuals just illicit an amusing feeling. This continues with the pun-filled trick names and animal/vehicle companions. Obviously competent gameplay is an important facet for endless runners, but having well executed presentation goes a long way towards keeping me coming back. Thankfully, Ski Safari succeeds in all those aspects.

There are a few minor issues that I think keep Ski Safari from elite status. I really would have liked to see some sort of in-game use for all the coins you collect in a run. Even if it only offered cosmetic changes, an in-game shop goes a long way towards replayability. For that matter, while Ski Safari does a great job with its randomly generated runs, I hope that scenery changes are in the works for future updates. I really love the vehicle system and hope to see more options as well.

Still, Ski Safari definitely deserves to be put into the upper echelon of endless runners. The great presentation, well-implemented control scheme and overall enjoyable gameplay simply lead to a game worth playing. If you’re looking for the next great (and cute) endless runner, look no further and check out Ski Safari.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I’d argue that the only genre more saturated on the App Store than match-3’s has got to be casino style games. Whether you’re talking slot machines, card games, and other variations, there’s a bazillion of them. Well, the guys behind the United States Playing Card Company think they’ve got a compelling addition to the field, and that’s through their expertise of being the guys behind basically every brand of playing cards. Aviator, Bee, Bicycle, Tally-Ho, Congress, KEM, and PokerPeek are all their products, and the company has been around since 1867, so they definitely have some momentum behind them.

Anyway, the United States Playing Card Company have teamed up with the marketing firm Digi117 who themselves are behind widely recognizable brands like Morton, O’Reilly, and even Carfax. They’re partnering to form a company called Zeniz to throw their hat into the social gaming arena.

Who knows what will come of this, but if nothing else it’ll be interesting to see how the giant of physical playing cards transitions to the virtual space. Casino by Zeniz is on schedule to launch next week, so we won’t have to wait too long to watch this play out.

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Contre Jour [99¢] and its Universal HD brother, Contre Jour HD [$2.99], has always been a looker, but it’s now even more impressive on new iPad. Thanks to a late (but welcome) retina update, the HD version puzzle game is fully embracing Apple’s new high pixel density screen. As you’ll see below, this version is sharper and crisper and cleaner than it ever has been, which is saying something since it looked great pre-update anyway.

No update for a puzzle game is complete without new levels. A brand new jungle-themed chapter has been added to both versions of the game, ushering in some twists on the game’s pre-existing moveable tentacle and platform mechanics. Also, a new “bonus” ending has been added for those who can collect the game’s (now) 300 lights. Sounds like you’ve got some work to do, guys.

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Riverman Media is making good on its promise of content updates to its bizarre side-scrolling action game, Pizza vs. Skeletons [99¢, Free]. A complete chapter, filled with a total of ten new missions, was added this morning alongside a festive topping and even some new iPad tweaks, which ratchet up the game’s visuals for users with Apple’s new tablet.

The selection of content present in these new levels is dizzying. In the first, you’ll be flying a WWII-era biplane. Later, you’ll fight skeleton rabbits in an arena, destroy a cloud city, bowl through skeletal cricket players, and fight a boss on a suspension bridge who uses new “gust” ability.

In celebration of all this new content, Riverman has slashed the price of PVS. Through this weekend, you’ll be able to grab it at 99¢ instead of its usual $1.99. It’s a steal at this price, and all of these skeletal rabbits aren’t going to kill themselves, so consider acting on our glowing recommendation.

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Flight Control Rocket [99¢] now boasts more content courtesy a content update that hit this morning. Ten new “motherships” (or landing pads) have been added, subtly changing up the action by offering groovier ways to park your spaceships. Four new bots and a fresh game mode called “Rescue” fill out the rest of the meaningful offerings.

Rescue is probably the most interesting add: in it, you’re tasked with saving floating astronauts by ramming similarly colored ships into them. After you guide a ship and a victim back to the space harbor, you’re awarded with points. We would be equally stoked about the ten new motherships, but most of them require some major in-game scratch in order to use. We’re not too sure why this basic feature add has been tied to the game’s financial model either, but that’s kind of the story of Flight Control Rocket in a nutshell — beautiful, but weird.

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So, this morning we learned that EA Mobile had sent out a popup notification to users of the original Rock Band [ $4.99 ] for iOS effectively stating the game was shutting down at the end of the month. This naturally drew universal criticism from gamers and left me wondering one thing: why?

If EA wanted to stop the online support for the game and instead focus on the newer and better Rock Band Reloaded [$4.99 / $9.99 (HD)], well I can understand that. But the message clearly said the game would “no longer be playable on your device” after May 31st. It seemed pretty lame to not just leave the game playable in an offline way for those who had bought it and/or spent money on the IAP songs.

Well as Polygon reports EA has responded to the situation, issuing the following statement:

“Rock Band for iOS will remain live – the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error.”
“We apologize for the confusion this caused. We’re working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible.”

It seems highly dubious that this whole thing could have been one big accident, especially since the iOS Rock Band is listed on an EA support page as having its connected features discontinued after May 28th, and a comment on our previous post points to an EA representative confirming in a help topic on EA’s website that the game would no longer work after May 31st, but that topic has since been deleted. Perhaps their intention all along was to drop support for the online features, and the strongly worded “no longer playable on your device” message was the mistake. Either way, this reeks of damage control rather than an actual mistake.

Either way, Polygon notes that EA is looking into what caused the error in the first place, and we’ll let you know if there’s any more news on the matter. For the time being it looks like iOS Rock Band-ers will still be able to rock out on the go.

[Via Polygon]

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You see a form of this question in almost every high profile game’s review: why doesn’t this have iCloud support? Apple’s remote storage service is a tremendous offering that lets us resume any supported game from any connected Apple device. During our commutes, we can bang out a couple of minutes in Infinity Blade 2 on our iPhones. Later, at home, we can finish the section we were exploring on our iPads. When the service works, it’s awesome, but we don’t see a lot of games using it. It’s a surprise when one does.

We spent a few days asking a small pool of independent game developers why they aren’t incorporating iCloud in their latest games. What we discovered isn’t surprising: iCloud is always on a good studio’s radar, but the pitfalls of indie development keep it there. It’s too alien, and maybe even a little too wonky, for cash-strapped and low-bandwidth studios to take a chance on.

I’d Buy That For A Dollar

Time, cash, and bandwidth are the three most important resources to the production of any good game. If there’s not enough of one or the other, something goes bad. In the age of $.99 download these resources are even more precious. Their effects on the creation of games are exaggerated to the point where even experimentation on things like iCloud, no matter how easy it might be to implement, becomes a liability. Vlambeer says it couldn’t commit time and resources to iCloud with Super Crate Box because it didn’t have the time or cash to spare.

“We think iCloud is a great technology and we can totally see why Apple is pushing it,” Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail tells TouchArcade via e-mail. “The thing is that while from the user side it’s an easy thing to set up, as developers it’s a new thing that we have to consider, learn to use, and then apply.”

Super Crate Box is the first game Vlambeer has made for iPhone and iPad, so that put an unusual strain on the studio. By the time iCloud support could become an actual bit of functionality as opposed to just a desire, Vlambeer had decided its time would be better spent on tweaking the game’s controls.

Ismail tells us about another wrinkle: now that Super Crate Box is out in the wild and its users have multiple saves across devices, there’s a worry that throwing in iCloud at this point could cause something horrible to happen, like loss of progress or even high scores. It’s happened before with other games.

Zombieville 2, for example, launched and included the service when it was new. Creator Mika Mobile learned something in the process: iCloud has a hard time when both local data and cloud data are in the picture. If it pulls the wrong set, it could potentially corrupt a save.

This sort of problem has branching consequences. If Vlambeer has to fix a broken Super Crate Box, that’s a month spent on a finished game when it could be working on something else, draining resources that it just doesn’t have. Ismail breaks down how close to the edge Vlambeer was when it started on Super Crate Box and explains why this informed its decision to not include iCloud.

“Like with basically everything in life, money is a consideration when making games,” Ismail said. “Consider the following: Super Crate Box had five people working on it — the two at us at Vlambeer and two guys at Halfbot. Since we felt the people that made the original art and music deserved a bonus for their work on the original, we decided to pay them out a little holiday money as well.”

“We pay ourselves far below minimum wages because we hardly have any real-life costs at this point. However, the Halfbot guys both have families to support. Multiply the costs of two families and two students by the amount of months it took us to make the game. Then add a few thousand dollars for art and music — AND then add the Apple developer license, iPads, iCades and all other stuff we used to test the game on… the costs simply start adding up and up.” Ismail estimates that Super Crate Box on iOS cost his studio around $15,000.

“The shorter a project is and the fewer people work on it, the lower your costs are and the easier it is to create risky projects. This is essentially why a lot of indie studios remain small — we want to make games we love to make and honestly, if we could avoid all business and just do that without any worries, we’d be doing that. However, there’s always the economic realities, so we have to consider all that as well. In the end, we love making games, but we want to be able to keep making games.”

“During development, at some point, you run out of time or money — whatever you want to call it. If things went well, that’s a point at which most improvements you could make to the core game make barely have any noticeable effect. With Super Crate Box, we chose to spend a lot of time on such tiny improvements, especially to the controls. Burning through spare money from our release of Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, we just kept going until the gameplay in Super Crate Box iOS was the best we could make it.”

“That turned out to be six months later. Basically we found ourselves running out of everything. At that point, we considered adding iCloud, but obviously that was too late to do that. If we wanted to do that, we’d end up figuring out how to add it, where to add it to the code, how to make sure we don’t damage player save games or even delete some save games — basically, it’d add an additional month to development.”

Ismael said at this point Vlambeer had two options: it could either gamble by adding content and support that might or might not work or require additional resources, or it could release a good game. “When we have to choose, we always go with releasing a fun and solid game. We’ll usually pick a few technologies that we feel would benefit the game most, so in Super Crate Box’s case that was Game Center, OpenFeint and iCade support.” Vlambeer says it’ll always pick the latter when it comes down to quality versus any form of external support.

End Of The Day

Other studios that we talked to for this story, including Simogo and Uppercut games, told us that their latest projects didn’t launch with iCloud support because of similar reasons. Vlambeer isn’t the only studio on the App Store deciding to hold out on iCloud support in an effort to stay nimble and put out the best game that it possibly can within a sustainable timeframe.

It’s also obvious to us that iCloud and the implementation of it needs to be easier, and the service itself needs to be more reliable. Almost every studio we talked to had some trepidations or a horror story to share. Browse our message board, and you’ll find even more from users receiving the bad end of an iCloud problem.

That’s not to say iCloud isn’t awesome. It is. Games that use it, like Infinity Blade 2, are better for the implementation. iCloud could also be used for stuff beyond saves, so there’s promise of what’s to come. We simply want to see more of it.

Studios like Vlambeer and most others know that you take gaming as seriously as they do, so iCloud support isn’t ever going to just get thrown into the mix. Solid implementation takes time and money to pull off, though, and these are finite resources. Studios may want to roll in the support, but until they can afford to do it, iCloud will continue to be a staple of the cutting room floor.

[source]

You see a form of this question in almost every high profile game’s review: why doesn’t this have iCloud support? Apple’s remote storage service is a tremendous offering that lets us resume any supported game from any connected Apple device. During our commutes, we can bang out a couple of minutes in Infinity Blade 2 on our iPhones. Later, at home, we can finish the section we were exploring on our iPads. When the service works, it’s awesome, but we don’t see a lot of games using it. It’s a surprise when one does.

We spent a few days asking a small pool of independent game developers why they aren’t incorporating iCloud in their latest games. What we discovered isn’t surprising: iCloud is always on a good studio’s radar, but the pitfalls of indie development keep it there. It’s too alien, and maybe even a little too wonky, for cash-strapped and low-bandwidth studios to take a chance on.

I’d Buy That For A Dollar

Time, cash, and bandwidth are the three most important resources to the production of any good game. If there’s not enough of one or the other, something goes bad. In the age of $.99 download these resources are even more precious. Their effects on the creation of games are exaggerated to the point where even experimentation on things like iCloud, no matter how easy it might be to implement, becomes a liability. Vlambeer says it couldn’t commit time and resources to iCloud with Super Crate Box because it didn’t have the time or cash to spare.

“We think iCloud is a great technology and we can totally see why Apple is pushing it,” Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail tells TouchArcade via e-mail. “The thing is that while from the user side it’s an easy thing to set up, as developers it’s a new thing that we have to consider, learn to use, and then apply.”

Super Crate Box is the first game Vlambeer has made for iPhone and iPad, so that put an unusual strain on the studio. By the time iCloud support could become an actual bit of functionality as opposed to just a desire, Vlambeer had decided its time would be better spent on tweaking the game’s controls.

Ismail tells us about another wrinkle: now that Super Crate Box is out in the wild and its users have multiple saves across devices, there’s a worry that throwing in iCloud at this point could cause something horrible to happen, like loss of progress or even high scores. It’s happened before with other games.

Zombieville 2, for example, launched and included the service when it was new. Creator Mika Mobile learned something in the process: iCloud has a hard time when both local data and cloud data are in the picture. If it pulls the wrong set, it could potentially corrupt a save. Bummer.

This sort of problem has branching consequences. If Vlambeer has to fix a broken Super Crate Box, that’s a month spent on a finished game when it could be working on something else, draining resources that it just doesn’t have. Ismail breaks down how close to the edge Vlambeer was when it started on Super Crate Box and explains why this informed its decision to not include iCloud.

“Like with basically everything in life, money is a consideration when making games,” Ismail said. “Consider the following: Super Crate Box had five people working on it — the two at us at Vlambeer and two guys at Halfbot. Since we felt the people that made the original art and music deserved a bonus for their work on the original, we decided to pay them out a little holiday money as well.”

“We pay ourselves far below minimum wages because we hardly have any real-life costs at this point. However, the Halfbot guys both have families to support. Multiply the costs of two families and two students by the amount of months it took us to make the game. Then add a few thousand dollars for art and music — AND then add the Apple developer license, iPads, iCades and all other stuff we used to test the game on… the costs simply start adding up and up.” Ismail estimates that Super Crate Box on iOS cost his studio around $15,000.

“The shorter a project is and the fewer people work on it, the lower your costs are and the easier it is to create risky projects. This is essentially why a lot of indie studios remain small — we want to make games we love to make and honestly, if we could avoid all business and just do that without any worries, we’d be doing that. However, there’s always the economic realities, so we have to consider all that as well. In the end, we love making games, but we want to be able to keep making games.”

“During development, at some point, you run out of time or money — whatever you want to call it. If things went well, that’s a point at which most improvements you could make to the core game make barely have any noticeable effect. With Super Crate Box, we chose to spend a lot of time on such tiny improvements, especially to the controls. Burning through spare money from our release of Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, we just kept going until the gameplay in Super Crate Box iOS was the best we could make it.”

“That turned out to be six months later. Basically we found ourselves running out of everything. At that point, we considered adding iCloud, but obviously that was too late to do that. If we wanted to do that, we’d end up figuring out how to add it, where to add it to the code, how to make sure we don’t damage player save games or even delete some save games — basically, it’d add an additional month to development.”

Ismael said at this point Vlambeer had two options: it could either gamble by adding content and support that might or might not work or require additional resources, or it could release a good game. “When we have to choose, we always go with releasing a fun and solid game. We’ll usually pick a few technologies that we feel would benefit the game most, so in Super Crate Box’s case that was Game Center, OpenFeint and iCade support.” Vlambeer says it’ll always pick the latter when it comes down to quality versus any form of external support.

End Of The Day

Other studios that we talked to for this story, including Simogo and Uppercut games, told us that their latest projects didn’t launch with iCloud support because of similar reasons. Vlambeer isn’t the only studio on the App Store deciding to hold out on iCloud support in an effort to stay nimble and put out the best game that it possibly can within a sustainable timeframe.

It’s also obvious to us that iCloud and the implementation of it needs to be easier, and the service itself needs to be more reliable. Almost every studio we talked to had some trepidations or a horror story to share. Browse our message board, and you’ll find even more from users receiving the bad end of an iCloud problem.

That’s not to say iCloud isn’t awesome. It is. Games that use it, like Infinity Blade 2, are better for the implementation. iCloud could also be used for stuff beyond saves, so there’s promise of what’s to come. We simply want to see more of it.

Studios like Vlambeer and most others know that you take gaming as seriously as they do, so iCloud support isn’t ever going to just get thrown into the mix. Solid implementation takes time and money to pull off, though, and these are finite resources. Studios may want to roll in the support, but until they can afford to do it, iCloud will continue to be a staple of the cutting room floor.

[source]

It’s really hard not to start craving inventory management, pixel-hunting, and adventure game logic like it’s 1996 all over again after checking out Sky Goblin’s classic point-and-click game, The Journey Down. Set to hit iPad, iPhone, and Android “soon,” it’s often described by media as a love letter to classic games like Monkey Island. It has a really unique style, though, as you’ll see in the trailer.

Sky Goblin recently started up a thread on our message board dedicated to its game, and we’ve been staring at the screens it has shared for an uncomfortable amount of time. A 2D version of this first episode of The Journey Down has been available on other platforms for a bit, so this is technically “older” material… but we’re more than happy about it finally coming our way. We’ll have more soon on the game.

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