Archive for the ‘fake’ tag
‘Buck and the Coin of Destiny’ Review – GameStop Bunny Gets His Own Game
Some of you gamers out there may remember a ad campaign from a couple of years ago featuring a foul-mouthed little bunny named Buck who would find himself in funny situations as he made his way through fake versions of Mario-like 2D platforming games. For reference, there is a nice showing some of Buck's commercials. The ads were a hit, and there was even a short-lived game available on GameStop's website that let you play through a level featured in one of the commercials. Now, GameStop has given Buck another chance at video game stardom in a new iPhone game just released on the App Store called Buck and the Coin of Destiny [99¢].
Buck and the Coin of Destiny is an auto-running platforming game that have become quite popular with the success of games like Canabalt [$2.99] and Monster Dash [99¢]. There's a Story mode that has Buck running through five different video game-themed levels in an effort to get from the start to the finish of each level as the story of the Coin of Destiny unfolds. For example, one level is reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda games, one is very Castlevania-esque, and before and after each level are some funny animated Buck the Bunny cutscenes. Buck automatically runs to the right and tapping the screen allows you to jump or double-jump as you collect coins and powerups while avoiding spikes, pits, and enemies.
The five levels of the Story mode are fairly short, and it won't take too long to complete the whole campaign. However, there is an Arcade mode that lets you play through any of the five level themes in randomly generated endless fashion. This mode has the potential for unlimited replayability, but I do have one small gripe about it. You start the endless portion with only one heart, meaning if you hit any hazard it's instantly game over. Like the Story mode, you can pick up additional hearts along the way, up to a total of eight. That's fine for the Story levels that have a definitive ending, but in endless mode the ability to pick up additional hearts can cause a game to drag on for a pretty long time. I'd much prefer to see how far I can make it with the threat of instant death looming, or even just a cap of 3 or 4 hearts instead.
The gameplay in Buck and the Coin of Destiny isn't the best available in the running platform genre, but it's really not bad at all. The jumping controls are responsive, the level designs are interesting, and it's simple and fun to play. I'm really surprised by how much I continue to come back to Coin of Destiny. The Story portion is pretty short, but a fun ride while it lasts. The end of the game offers a “to be continued…” so the brevity may be rectified in the future with updates. The endless Arcade mode is a great addition to lengthen out the game, even if it does tend to drag on a bit. There's also a number of achievements to earn in the game, and local scores are kept for the Story mode and each individual Arcade level. Sadly there's no Game Center integration or online functionality other than the ability to share your scores over Facebook.
If you were familiar with the GameStop Buck commercials, like many of the , then you'll likely get your dollar's worth of enjoyment on the cutscenes alone. If you don't really care about the Buck character but are looking for a new running platform game, then Buck and the Coin of Destiny really isn't a bad choice at all. I'd really like to see the game evolve with updates to add more content to the Story mode, some tweaks to the endless Arcade mode, and some sort of online functionality for achievements and high scores. There's a really nice foundation in place here, and even in its current state Buck and the Coin of Destiny is a solid running platformer for the price.
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Sony Gets Desperate: Releases Second App Store Smear Ad
Whether or not you remember it or were even aware of it, earlier this summer Sony launched a fairly silly ad campaign starring Marcus, a sassy kid who has had it up to here with games like Paper Toss [Free] for the iPhone. Sony released starring Marcus as part of the "Step Your Game Up" campaign, but this was the video that started it all:
The basis of the video seems to be that Marcus is outraged that on the App Store you're charged for a "fake version of a real game" despite the fact that Paper Toss, the game shown in the video, always has been and likely always will be free. After the initial surge of Marcus videos, the ad campaign seemed to die off, until this week when Sony released their next video:
The latest video highlights Sony's PlayStation Network "$9.99 Favorites" section with five year old games like Twisted Metal: Head On and Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee. What they neglect to mention in this recent video is that new PSP games, such as Madden 11 which is available on the App Store for $7.99 sell for just as much as their physical media counterparts at $39.99. They also leave out the fact that if you own a PSP Go and are limited to downloaded games only, you will often need to wait for games to be released on the PlayStation Network after they're released in stores, and sometimes they're not even released for download at all.
Then if you add in Sony's requirements of needing to be running the latest system software which can take hours to download and install to even browse the PlayStation Network store or that when you're downloading a multi-gigabyte game on your PSP you can't do anything with the system but wait for it to finish… I could go on and on. It should be interesting to see what Sony's next move will be, as declining PSP sales along with the failure of the PSP Go seems to be driving them to desperate measures to try to regain a foothold on the mobile gaming market.
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‘Madden NFL 11′ Review – GameFlow, Where Have You Been All My Life?
The Madden series hardly needs an introduction, as football player turned coach turned commentator John Madden has had his name on football games for the better part of 20 years now. On home consoles, it has become tradition for EA to release a new Madden game each year with updated rosters, a few new features, and other various tweaks. As of tonight, the second yearly installment of the Madden series has arrived for the iPhone.
Last year we took a close look at Madden NFL 10 and thought it was a really great football game for the iPhone. Madden '10 came loaded with all the licensed players, stadiums, logos, and everything else you'd expect of a Madden game along with game modes ranging from single exhibition games to full seasons. The two hip new features of Madden NFL 10 for the iPhone were hot routes allowing players to draw on the screen to control players, and "action control time" which switched the game to slow motion mode allowing for precise maneuvers with the virtual controls.
There wasn't much to complain about with last year's Madden, which really left me wondering what EA was going to include in this year's release to up the ante. The preview we got revealed substantial graphical upgrades including Retina Display support, but it wasn't until I got to spend more time with the game today that I realized just how much more fun the other new features made playing Madden NFL 11.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a sports person by any means. I don't remember the last time I watched anything more than the Super Bowl on TV, and the only sporting events I've attended have been the result of friends with extra tickets. I play sports games, but generally gravitate towards arcade style sports games like Homerun Battle 3D [$4.99 / Free], or sports games that have RPG elements such as Baseball Superstars 2010 [$4.99 / Free].
I mention this because I generally never really got into a Madden game, or really any full football game. The weak link for me always came in choosing from an endless array of both offensive and defensive plays, with each yearly iteration of football game boasting even more plays to choose from. I don't know enough about the strategy of football plays to have ever felt like I was making a wise decision, and when it got down to it, play selection just always seemed like a needless interruption every few seconds while playing the game.
GameFlow changes all of this, and I really can't overstate how awesome a feature it actually is. Using some new AI algorithm likely designed by a team of people who know way more about football than I ever care to, Madden 11's GameFlow will intelligently chooses plays for you. It is absolutely insane how much this changes both the feel and the pace of the game. Using GameFlow, endless submenus of plays are a thing of the past. Instead, you just play football. The plays it selects work fairly well too, or at least, much better than my typical choice of plays which usually alternate between the hail mary and the fake field goal kick– both favorites of mine.
What's also shocking is how much this actually speeds up playing the game. You can tap the screen to skip through the extra animations, victory dances, and other junk and play through a whole football game in what barely seems like any time at all. Of course, if you are the kind of person who knows exactly what every play does, all you have to do is flip GameFlow to off and you have complete control of each and every play.
The hot routes functionality from last year has been expanded, and at any point during the game you can pause the action and draw paths for your players. If you're playing offense and do this, you can save those routes as an audible, or if you're playing defense you can just send your players wherever you want. The whole system works very well, and by drawing lines you can send dispatch players to man to man duty, follow the ball, or really anything else. This really makes defense a lot more fun because you can now actually sensibly direct your team around instead of just tabbing in between players and chasing after whoever has the ball. Check out my top secret LOL offense:
As mentioned already, the graphics of Madden NFL 11 look fantastic. The stadium crowd has actual depth now, and they even wave around signs for the home team. The included weather effects look good, and overall it seems like all the player models and animations are more detailed. Every texture in game also seems to have been substantially improved, making going back and forth between 10 and 11 seem fairly drastic.
Madden 11 also is host to some other noticeable tweaks over last year's as well such as controls that feel a little better and a spruced up interface. There's an in-game store which currently is home to a free roster update, but seems like it might be used for future DLC . Finally, Madden NFL 11 behaves beautifully as an iPhone game, gracefully saving your game and resuming quickly when you load it again.
Like last year, the inevitable comparison between Gameloft's NFL 11 [$6.99] and Madden NFL 11 will likely take place in our forums for months to come, but in my opinion, Madden wins by a landslide. Gameloft's offering seems to run at a higher frame rate, but Madden looks better overall– rspecially when it comes to how the crowd and stadiums are rendered. Madden NFL 11 has local bluetooth multiplayer while NFL 11 is single player only, and the commentary in Madden seems less repetitive than Gameloft's. Where Madden really wins though is in the extra features. With how much I've fallen in love with GameFlow I can hardly bring myself to deal with NFL 11's play selection, and Madden's total defensive control makes playing defense in NFL 11 flat out boring in comparison.
At the end of the day, people who like Madden games likely don't need this review, or anything more than the iTunes link to download the game for that matter. Who I really expect to sway into checking out Madden NFL 11 are the casual sports fans, or people like me, who are vaguely interested in sports games but found the various technicalities of football games to generally be annoying. GameFlow fixes all this, and I can hardly believe that I spent the majority of my day today playing Madden 11 on my iPhone– not because I was trying to power through it to write a review, but because I was actually really enjoying a football game for the first time since on the Sega Genesis.
The iPad and iPhone versions are essentially the same aside from the price difference and UI tweaks to make the controls more comfortable for playing on the iPad. The iPhone version is workable with pixel doubling, and the only thing you're really going to be missing out on is the upcoming "Vintage Voltage Football" mode which is basically just Super Shock Football [$1.99 / Free] with Madden graphics.
International App Store Link: Madden NFL 11
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‘Let’s create! Pottery HD’ Review – All the Fun of Making Pottery Without the Mess
I'm not entirely sure that I'd call Let's create! Pottery HD [$4.99] a game, strictly speaking, but somehow it managed to soak up a ridiculous amount of my time this weekend as the iPad was passed around the house with everyone making their own pottery creation. It's not strictly an entertainment app either, as there are objectives to follow, goals to meet, and things to unlock as well. Regardless of how you want to classify it, Let's create! Pottery HD is a really cool experience, and shares a similar feel to the with a relaxing mood and controls that feel remarkably natural.
As you may suspect from the title of the game, the object of Let's create! Pottery HD is to create pottery. Tapping "create" on the main menu takes you to a spinning pottery wheel with a lump of clay on it that you then transform using your finger. Dragging up or down changes the height of your piece of pottery, while touching and dragging in or out changes the width or whatever section you're touching. I'm sure there will be some pottery wheel veterans who don't like how dumbed down this all is, as you never need to deal with adding more clay, maintaining any kind of balance, or the million other things that can lead to all-out pottery disaster.
Once you're satisfied with the shape of your creation, you fire it up in the kiln. After that's complete, you're able to paint it with all kinds of different colored paints and "brushes" which are basically just stamp tools of pre-made stripes and other designs. Following that, you then add your masterpiece to your collection, at which point you can either keep it there to bring up later (and send emails including an image of it) or you can sell your creation at auction. Using the coins you earn from selling your in-game artwork you can then buy more paints and brushes to make even more diverse pottery.
All this by itself would be cool, and make an entertaining little art app, but what really caught my interest is the fake email system that's included in game. As the player you take the role of the proprietor of some kind of custom pottery shop, taking email orders from people who send you photos of things that they want, and you try as hard as you can to duplicate them. While you're trying your hand at filling their order, you can slide the photo they sent you out from the side of the screen and see the customer's satisfaction levels in real time with both the shape and coloring on a scale of five stars.
When your creation is completed, you mail it off to them, and if it meets their satisfaction you're met with a reward and another order. If not, it's back to the drawing board (or, pottery wheel, I suppose). This component of the game seems entirely optional, and initially just seemed like a basic tutorial I had chosen to ignore. After revisiting the faux-inbox, it doesn't take long until the creations your customers are asking you to come up with get quite complex, requiring careful study of the photo and sometimes even trying more than once to meet their pottery needs.
It seems so far that everyone who has tried the game has enjoyed it, although I do agree with some of the criticisms, specifically, Let's create! Pottery HD is a game that badly needs a profile system for multiple players. Easy to play games like this on a device like like the iPad are just begging to get passed around to give everyone in your house a try. The email pottery commission system is really cool, but once you get a few projects in they start to become way too complicated for a beginning player.
Even without a multiple player profile system, Let's create! Pottery HD is totally worth a look. The entire game is a very unique experience that works extremely well on the iPad. As mentioned, I could see some people being annoyed by how amazingly simplified the developers have made everything, but as a veteran of horrible summer camp pottery creations that only a mother could love– I appreciate the non-existant skill requirement to make great looking pottery in game.
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‘ESP Training’ and ‘Fake ESP’ – Two Neat Toys For Ghostbusters Fans and Aspiring Psychics
Yesterday I stumbled across ESP Training [99¢] and have since had a lot of fun fooling around with the test at bars with friends, then I discovered the even better free app, Fake ESP [Free]. While not technically a game, these two apps can be a great time, especially if your friends are fans of Ghostbusters.
The cards included in these apps are actually Zener cards, designed in the early 1930's to test for clairvoyance and telepathy. Consisting of 25 cards, 5 of each design, the subject is asked to determine which card is being held up without any visual or vocal queues. With the iPhone, this is accomplished by placing your iPhone screen down, and assuming your extra-sensory perception is in order, you should be able to determine the correct card with greater than 20% accuracy.
Dr. Peter Venkman administers this very test at the beginning of Ghostbusters:
While ESP Training actually is a serious app which graphs your progress, Fake ESP is the same test with a much more fun fake mode. In fake mode, the next card which is displayed is controlled by which area of the bottom of the screen you touch. When you're doing this, it's probably a good idea to miss a few every once in a while to try to make it not too obvious that you're faking it.
App Store Links: ESP Training, 99¢ – Fake ESP, Free
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The Next iPhone Revealed
On late Saturday, some fairly believable photos of what was believed to be the new iPhone. Apparently it was found on the floor of a bar in San Jose, CA wrapped in a case to have the appearance of a iPhone 3G. Not long afterwards, a photo of a Japanese counterfeit which looked very similar but later found to be fake , adding even more doubt to the seemingly impossible situation that the new iPhone would just wind up in the hands of Engadget months before its expected release this summer.
With message boards everywhere more split than Team Edward and Team Jacob regarding the authenticity of this mysterious device, with a thorough examination of what seems to be the next iPhone.
For a full examination, , but from a gaming perspective the biggest benefits of the new iPhone come from the higher resolution screen, an even larger battery, and the likely inclusion of the Apple A4 processor. Needless to say, we're going to be following the developments of this very closely and hope to see a full teardown of the new iPhone soon to get an idea of the performance to expect from the device.
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