IO

This is one of those typical sci-fi scenarios – ship lost at space, crew has vanished, what happened?  It’s up to you to find out and bring the ship safely home.  You can rest assured that if something like this ever became a reality I would not be in charge – or anywhere near – the rescue crew, because I would just add to the mystery.  I have as yet to make it past the second bad guy in this game, and after I’m finished with this review I will be more than happy to delete IO from my device and never try again.  I think there is a lot of potential here – a nice “rails” platform game that still has a sense of depth, hidden areas in multiple layers of the ship, a cool atmosphere.  All the makings for a deep space thriller are there.

Isn't He From Robocop?

Unfortunately, the game is just too difficult.  On top of that, small things in the interface just bug me, like the fact that the toggle button for running, walking and crouching is a bit flaky.  Also, as I found out the hard way, if you try to select a gun you don’t own yet, it unselects your previous gun, leaving you unarmed.  Shooting doesn’t seem entirely accurate either, which is somewhat essential for a game like this.  You’re supposed to tap on the screen where you want to shoot, but I think the pseudo 3D nature of the levels confuses the targeting sometimes, and you can be standing right next to a guy and tapping on him, yet you aren’t actually hitting him.  It gets quite frustrating after a while.

Visually IO is okay.  The actual playing field is only about one third of the full screen, so the graphics aren’t overly detailed.  The background colors are kind of muddled to give the game an ominous atmosphere, but in the end they just look muddled.  I do like how foreground objects and things that can be interacted with are more colorful to stand out, but that has a mixed effect of almost making things feel cartoonish.  The sound effects are pretty basic sci-fi affair, and there is no music, which I think is absolutely essential for a game like this.  In the end, though, sloppy controls and insane difficulty are IO’s downfall.  Fix those two things, and this could be a decent platform game.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link

Zingles

I’m not really sure what the name Zingles means, but basically this is another variation on Sudoku.  Sudoku is a game of logic and numbers.  The standard version uses the numbers 1 through 9, and the object is to fill the board such that each row and each column contains the numbers 1 through 9, and each 3×3 grid within the board also contains the numbers 1 through 9.  It sounds a bit odd, but once you actually play it the game can be a blast, and it can certainly tax your reasoning skills.

Well, It's Sudoku

My general philosophy about electronic Sudoku has been “Sudoku is Sudoku, and it’s all about the interface”.  Well it turns out that Zingles challenges that philosophy by actually presenting variations on the game.  You can play on a nice selection of board sizes, ranging from 4×4 (definitely designed for kids) all the way to 16×16 (requires the use of the letters A-G in addition to numbers).  There are also two variants called Jigsaw and Killer, but sadly the game has no instructions, so I’m not sure what’s different about these modes, though looking at them tells me they are different.  To fill a square you double tap it and select the number or letter that you want in that square.  To take notes you select a square and then tap the pencil icon, and whatever letters / numbers you tap will show up in the square as suggestions and not your final answer.  There are a couple of other icons as well, but without some help I’m not really sure what they do.

Visually the game looks fine, though there is nothing exciting about the graphical scheme.  The numbers and letters are easy to read, even on the 16×16 grid.  There is no music or sound effects, but thankfully the game supports letting you listen to your own music.  I give Zingles a shaky recommendation.  I’ve seen better interfaces on electronic versions of Sudoku, but I like the fact that there are multiple board sizes.  A game having no help is a big turn off for me, though, especially when there are modes that don’t appear in most versions of a game that I’d like to know how to play.  Still, there’s some nice variety here, and the smaller board sizes are a great way to introduce the game to your children.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

Potpourrii

I love match 3 games, so I really thought I’d enjoy Potpourrii.  The first couple of times I tried it, however, I just didn’t get it.  Turns out that was the problem – I just didn’t get it.  Revisiting the game after all this time I realize that it’s actually a nice match 3 game with a twist, and it’s quite fun.  The playing field is a pool that contains spirits floating in it which represent the seasons.  To remove a spirit from the pool you must shoot it with a spirit from the previous season (ex: spring spirits remove summer spirits).  If the pool gets too crowded the spirits will get stuck, and if they can’t move for 5 seconds you lose a life.  When all lives are gone the game is over.  Spirits will continually be generated from four points along the pool, one for each of the seasons.  If a spirit stays queued up too long it will be launched automatically, which can result in less than desirable circumstances.

Well Done In Winter

To launch the spirits yourself you take control of a cannon that rotates 360 degrees around the pool.  Moving the cannon simply requires you to turn a wheel in the lower left corner of the screen.  Once the cannon is positioned in front of a spirit spawning point you can pick up the spirit by pressing the lower right corner of the screen.  Then you position the cannon where you’d like and press the lower right corner again to fire.  There are also supposed to be bombs that you can drag and drop to use, but so far I haven’t run across any of those yet.

The graphics in Potpourrii are both cool and functional.  There are nice little details, such as leaves floating in the pool during the fall and ducks swimming in the summer.  The spirits and gnomes look pretty neat as well, as does the little warlock in the upper left corner.  Even though he’s the evil guy, he’s actually kind of amusing, much like Gargamel from the Smurfs.  The sound effects fit the game quite well, and love the sounds of joy from the gnomes when you clear a level.  The music is okay, but I actually like the little riff that introduces a level better than the music that plays throughout the level.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to try Potpourrii yet, I highly suggest you give it a whirl.  This is one of those oldies but goodies.

Final Verdict: Recommended
App Store Link

That wraps it up for this week. Hopefully it was still Saturday somewhere when I posted this, but if not, oh well. I’m not sure what’s on tap for next week yet, but we’ll all know by the time I get it posted next week, won’t we?

Starting To Get Full

Pieces come onto the playing board much like Tetris where they fall from the top of the screen and head towards the bottom.  Also like Tetris, each piece is comprised of multiple small blocks.  The most blocks used in a TriColor piece are 3, however, so you’ll get a single block, a set of two blocks, or a set of three that’s either in a straight line or that looks like a corner.  Your job is to position these pieces so that blocks of the same color line up horizontally, vertically or diagonally in groups of at least 3.  Once you’ve gotten a group together the group will disappear.  Depending on something, pieces that were attached to or on top of the ones that disappeared will fall.  What this depends on I really don’t know.  This is the biggest problem I have with TriColor.  Whether or not the pieces fall should be consistent (my vote is that they always fall).  On top of that, blocks that do fall will often stop short of coming in contact with another block.  I’m not sure what determines how far a block falls, either.

The goal is to keep going until unmatched blocks have reached the top of the screen.  That’s really all there is to it.  There are no sub-goals, no power ups, nothing to make the game stand out in any way.  To control the game you use the arrows at the bottom of the screen to move left or right.  Tapping on a piece will rotate it counter-clockwise.  There is no way to rotate a piece clockwise.  Clicking the down arrow will immediately send a piece as far as it can go towards the bottom of the screen.  It would have been really nice if the down arrow would have made the piece descend faster but not automatically move to the bottom of the screen.  Also, since I already have my hands to the sides of the screen in order to use the buttons, I would rather the pause button be the rotate button and make me click the game play area to pause.

The game looks decent, but it’s nothing special.  The main special effect is the lightening that encompasses a group of blocks before they disappear.  The sound effects are a bit odd.  Pieces coming together sound like cubes of ice rubbing, and the end result of the lightening destroying blocks sounds like a glass ornament popping and shattering.  As I mentioned at the beginning I do like the music, but even that can get kind of old since it’s the same song playing repeatedly.

Mobirate, the developer behind TriColor, has put out some other fun iPhone games including Brain Fit and Stick-Fu, so I guess I expected a bit more from this one.  Maybe they’ll revisit the game in the future and beef it up some, but until then I’d suggest getting Tetris, Columns, or one of the many match 3 games that exist on the App Store as an alternative to this.  Of course at 99 cents, you’re not out much if you don’t trust me.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link

[All About Quick Looks]

You launch the game and you’re taken right to the game board.  No splash screen or anything.  If you recognize the layout of the board and / or are familiar with the inspiration, you’ll realize this is a Mastermind clone.  If you’re not familiar with Mastermind and you haven’t really read the App Store description then good luck, because there are no in-game instructions.  Just in case you’re wondering, I’ll give you a brief rundown of how the game is played.  You have somewhere between four to six slots to fill, depending on the level you choose.  You also have a certain number of guesses, depending on which level you’ve chosen.  The higher the level, the more guess you get.  So what are you guessing?  What goes in the slots, of course.

Discover The Sequence

To the left of the game board are somewhere between 6 and 8 pegs, again depending on skill level chosen.  To fill the slots you click on a slot in the first available row, then click on one of the pegs to the left.  Up until you “check” the correctness of a given row you can change the combination of pegs as much as you want.  Once you check your answer, which is accomplished by clicking the icon of two pegs in the menu panel (a check would have made much more sense), the game will tell you how many you got right, and then go to the next row.  This is one part that confuses me.  There is a second set of slots on the right side of the screen, and they will be filled with white, grey or no pegs when you check your answer.  The white are for “right” answers, but I can’t determine if it means the pegs are in the correct position or if you just have two pegs of the right color in the row, or what’s going on.  This is where instructions would come in really handy.

Basically, you keep guessing sequences of pegs until you either get the sequence right or you run out of rows to fill in.  Or, like in my case, you just quit the game.  Without knowing what exactly the indicators on the right hand board mean, it’s really difficult to know how to win the game.  The App Store claims that this is 6 games in one, but what that really means is that there are six difficulty levels which change the size of the board and number of peg colors to choose from, as well as whether you want to allow duplicates in the sequence or not.  Personally, calling that “six games in one” is a bit misleading as far as I’m concerned.

Now if the game’s presentation was good, I might be willing to muddle through and try to determine what the “correctness” indicators mean.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  Beyond the fact that there is no help, the menu system is ridiculous.  The icons don’t do a great job of representing their tasks, and because of the small space allotted for things you actually have to click a button to get the second half of the menu.  The sad part is all the second menu does is let you change the look of the game, so why couldn’t that be in the options screen?  The game itself is nothing special to look at.  The backgrounds are fine except that they are mostly covered by the board anyway.  Some of the tile sets for the pegs are nifty, but nothing really wowed me.  You can also change the color of the board for what that’s worth, but personally I felt the overall look of the game was a bit amateurish.  There are no sound effects or music.  You can play your own music, which I actually decided to take advantage of for once, but if you don’t pick enough songs the music will just stop in the middle of the game.  Guess they don’t believe in looping playback.

I’m trying to think of a single reason I can recommend this game, but nothing comes to mind.  If you’ve never played Mastermind before, you can probably find a free clone on the internet.  If not, maybe check for one in the App Store itself.  If you’re really desparate to play, try tracking down the original board game on eBay.  Whichever route you go, it will probably be better than Enigma.

Final Verdict: Not Recommended
App Store Link
App Shopper Link

[Note: image courtesy of App Shopper]

• Cost to developers.
• Bandwidth and storage capacity available.
• Level of customization
• Level of security

Due to the lack of details presented thus far, it is hard to tell if this online retail solution for Windows Mobile developers can truly deliver an experience that goes above and beyond what developers currently utilize to deploy their own titles online.  Most Windows Mobile developers sell their products directly on their own website or through a third party site like Handango, Clickgamer, PocketGear and others. Technobrains has an affiliate site based on Clickgamer.com located HERE. What this provides Technobrains is a source of added revenue whenever someone purchases a title directly from this affliated website. If you look at the actual URL, it is the original www.clickgamer.com url with the banner image and few key words being replaced to turn their own online website into a branded Technobrains website. This is all controlled by a file stored on the individuals computer called a COOKIE file. This method of branding benefits the original creator mostly since there are no safe guards in place to insure that the purchase is credited to www.clickgamer.com/?b=technobrains and not www.clickgamer.com when a consumer returns later to make the actual purchase directly on www.clickgamer.com. Once the original visiter to www.clickgamer.com/?b=technobrains goes to www.clickgamer.com on another computer or on the same system that has the COOKIE feature disabled, will not see the branded Technobrains version of Clickgamer.

PocketGear has their own App Store HERE which currently has over 2500 Windows Mobile applications available for purchase directly from your Windows Mobile smartphone. Unless Handmark can offer a cost effective, very simple marketing plan and deployment capabilities for independent developers, I cannot see this taking off for the shrinking Windows Mobile market. It will be interesting to see what Handmark actually offers when the complete details are made public.

You can go HERE to read the current details available from Handmark.

Added Note:

This offering is really geared towards carriers that can effectively deliver the servcies direcrtly to the consumer on specific devices. Developers with a few titles available will still deal with Handmark directly to promote their titles. Still not certain how beneficial this will be for the small Windows Mobile developers out there though.

Now that Microsoft has announced a new online mobility store to compete with the Apple iTunes store. The war for the shrinking disposable income will begin. In the end, the battle will not only be between the different operating systems and hardware only. A good percentage of iPhone and iTouch users are not happy with how the iTunes store operate. This frustration also translates over to the software developers that must wait months for their newly completed title to be approved and made available for access on the iTunes store. Developers will soon have a non Apple store where titles can be made available for sale quickly and potentially with a greater return in profit. This is done via a third party installer called Cydia. Cydia will allow you to choose from a number of different download sites and even from sites that will be offerring commercial titles for purchase.

I have been an avid developer on the Windows Mobile platform and there has never been any limitations on how or where a mobile title was available for download. Either a title can be downloaded as a standard PC file and synced over to the mobile device or installed directly on the device via a CAB file. The Windows Mobile developer has always had the ability to sell their titles via their own online store and indirectly via stores like Handango, Clickgamer, PDAMill and many others.

Mobility Products in Canada

I have always admired the Apple mobility products from afar. Being in Canada means that we have typically been 2 – 3 years behind the United States in access to innovative products from around the world. The conservative nature of the big carriers and business in general within Canada means, the “Wait and See” attitude is always front and centre.

With the increasing number of foreign investment and foreign company takeovers in Canada means that more aggressive marketing and leadership is starting to appear in Canada. I truly hope this trend to be market leaders in new technology continues and we start to see more innovative products created around the world become available in Canada quickly. Many techies have always taken advantage of travel to the States to purchase mobile products months and even years before hitting the Canadian marketplace.

I have been waiting for the Eye-fi product to be released directly in Canada and it finally arrived via Black’s Photo around November of 2008 according to Eye-fi. I have not seen it yet locally in any of the Black’s stores but is available online. This at least is a great start to see an exciting product available in Canada less than 12 months after being widely available in the States. More companies can learn from a fast growing company like Eye-fi and penetrate the Canadian market where many tech savvy users exist.