As it is though I'm going to spend the next week moving and most of my gaming will be of the mobile variety so what better topic for a post? This is a current sampling of some of the stuff I'm playing on my iPhone 5. It's a good eclectic mix of puzzle and action gaming, all of it perfectly suited for on-the-go gaming.
Let's dig in!
First up is a game called ZiGGURAt, from Action Button Entertainment. Action Button is a little company started by a man known as Tim Rogers (not his real name) who got his start doing what else but writing things about video games on the internet. Now he has a company, in addition to his writing, in which he and a few other people make really cool video games. This was their first game which came out a couple years ago.
Ziggurat (sorry Tim I'm not going to keep the weird spelling!) is a simple game but pure. You are the last human being left alive after an alien invasion. You stand alone perched upon a mountaintop with big bad gun and fend off the onslaught of alien freaks who killed everyone else.
That's pretty much the whole game! The purity of it is in the gun. You swipe your finger or thumb across the bottom of the screen to fire the gun either left or right. Holding your digit of preference in a given spot will charge up the gun for a powerful charge shot and releasing will fire it. You can tap to fire smaller shots but they won't go very far because gravity is in effect here.
Those are your basic alien freaks from the start of the game. You gotta hit 'em in the eyes to make them explode, which will cause chain reactions making nearby alien freaks explode. That's how you keep the screen clear and from being overrun. Like Helix this is an endless game with an ending, in that if you survive long enough you see cooler stuff like different enemy types and things going on in the background. The sun falls and rises again in the background, for instance, making your last stand epic.
Also like Helix this game has awesome music by Andrew Toups which you can listen to right here. I'm listening to it right now!
Of course, eventually you slip up and one of those alien bastards manages to get close enough to touch you or one of his pink-purple shots floats nearby and you don't see it in time to brush it off with an overcharged shot you've been holding onto to use as a shield and then boom:
You die and get a high score screen, which is just white text on a black background telling you how many alien freaks you managed to kill before dying. And that's Ziggurat, folks. It's got style, it's got substance and it's got a lot of class. It's a classy game for classy people. It kicks ass and so should you, so give it a shot sometime.
This next game is a cool combination of Minesweeper and dungeon-crawler, called Cave Sweeper by Quikding.
Quikding is a small company of apparently one dude or dudette and whoever this person can get to do the artwork for him. You can find more of Quikding's work at this website. For now though, let's talk a bit about Cave Sweeper.
In Cave Sweeper you take on the role of an explorer who wanders deeper and deeper into a cave. The basic flow is like this: Encounter enemy, solve puzzle, get an item, encounter another enemy, solve another puzzle, get another item and so on.
The puzzles you solve are basically Mine Sweeper but constricted to a 5X5 grid. You have to suss out which ones are the green blocks and which ones are the red ones, and picking the wrong one will count as a hit against you and take off a bit of health.
At higher levels you encounter enemies that do more damage making the price of a mistake costly if you haven't been investing wisely. You see between rounds you either discover a treasure chest which gives you an item or you encounter another character who gives you a chance to make some money or modify one of your existing items.
The items are basically things like armor for you adventurer to wear that can affect your overall health in terms of your hit points, your armor rating which makes enemies do less damage, or reveal one or more blocks from the start. You also have a regen modifier which gives you back a little bit of health for each correct answer.
Sometimes you encounter a gambler who flips a coin and asks you to call it. Other times it's a miner who offers to let you keep all the gold you find. Usually it's a blacksmith who will modify one of your items if you have enough money. Very rarely it's a fairy who will either restore your health or give you a health boost for a small price.
Cave Sweeper has a series of quests to complete as well, which range from things like getting a certain hit combo, making a certain amount of money or beating the game (I still haven't managed this but I get pretty far each time I play). Successfully defeating enemies will net you either a health potion or a reveal wand which you can use to reveal a specific tile.
The further you get the harder the puzzles get because the colors increase. So instead of just red and green you end eventually up with red, green, blue and yellow to contend with all in the same limited space. Mine Sweeper is already an awesome game (shut up you know it's true) and apparently the only thing you could do to make it better is add rogue-like elements to it (which is probably true for a lot of game, actually).
Cave Sweeper is pretty awesome and you should check it out sometime.
Next up is Space Invaders: Infinity Gene from Taito. This is not your grandpa's Space Invaders! This is actually a modern day shmup (shoot-em-up) designed with a Space Invaders aesthetic.
The idea in Infinity Gene is that you complete stages and evolve your little ship so that it can withstand the later stages. It starts out simply, with a quite from Darwin on natural selection. It turns out it's not the strongest or the fittest that survives, but the one that is most adaptable to change. Take that, social Darwinists! Your ideology is bankrupt, Space Invaders said so!
I didn't take a whole lot of pictures of this one but suffice to say this is just from one stage out of the game. There are actually lots more stages with different backgrounds and enemy patterns and such. Not to mention a killer soundtrack. Infinity Gene is kind of too easy for a shmup but it's a great little experience to have on your phone. Play it with the headphones on.
This is Plague, Inc. by Ndemic Creations. I played this game back when it was just a free broswer game several years ago. I'm happy to see it thrive like this.
Basically Plague, Inc. is a strategy game where you try to kill the whole world with a plague that you get to guide along in its evolution. If you don't "believe in evolution" then that's fine too you can just pretend you're the intelligent designer but you have to reconcile the fact that the intelligent designer designed the whole world just to kill it all off with a plague.
This is what it looks like after things start getting interesting. Basically you select a disease, name it and then start the game looking at a map of the world. You tap a country to infect and your little bacterial germ, virus, fungus or parasite gets to work infecting people. The more your disease spreads the more DNA points you get to upgrade it's infectiousness, severity or lethality.
This game is all about the long game. The smart way to play is to spend the early game putting points into making it as infective as possible while keeping severity and lethality to as close to zero as possible. Once people start dying from the disease the world takes notice and once lots of people start dying it begins work on a cure. You better hope you have most of the world infected by this point because once the world starts work on a cure there's no stopping it. You can only slow the progress somewhat.
You can tell by this point I had the world by the balls. Their cure never made it very far past 50% completed.
I always name my diseases Necroti. I don't know why I guess it's just a good name for a disease. You could be tasteless and make a disease named Ebola. It would be funny but you would also be a terrible person. After you win or lose you get to see a few graphs that chart the progress of your disease.
The key to winning this game is to keep infectiousness high throughout and start ramping up the lethality only when you have no choice and the world is already working on a cure. In my case I choose a virus that is highly susceptible to mutation. While this makes it a more noticeable disease it also meant I didn't have to spend as many DNA points mutating lethality into because it just happened more or less on its own.
I've killed the world several times but this was my first shot at doing so on the Brutal difficulty level. At that level sick people are locked up in prisons and everyone washes their hands. That's why you have to focus so much on infection. If anything playing this game brings close to home the notion that right now we're all probably carrying all sorts of dormant viruses or bacteria or whatever that just haven't mutated enough to be lethal enough to kill us.
Finally the last game I'm going to talk about is an oldie but goldie, at least to the people in my age range:
The one and only! Wolf3D by id, as I've always known it, is the first first person shooter. It wasn't the first first person game, not by a long shot, but it was the first pure action shooter game from a first person perspective. This is all incredibly important to someone, somewhere.
So you all know the drill by now. It's Wolfenstein, after all. You walk around, you shoot Nazis and their dogs, you push up against the walls to find secret rooms and you gawk at the oddly detailed portraits of Hitler.
The game runs without a hitch (why wouldn't it?) and the controls are pretty good. It's a very simply game but still strangely entertaining to me even to this day. You just explore a maze while killing stuff and try to find all the secrets before moving onto the next stage.
I even beat the whole game once, not long ago, but I never found all the secrets.
For instance, look a secret passageway! I wonder what could be in this room I've just stumbled into...
Oh just the mother load! If you ever wondered what must have happened to all the gold the Nazis stole from people during the Holocaust here's your answer, courtesy of id: It was looted by U.S. soldiers like B.J. here.
It's okay though, everyone else was doing it too at the time.
Oh, also this version of the game has an overhead map which is a great help from the original, which had no map:
That's the partially explored map of stage 3 from episode 1. As you discover new rooms the map fills itself in. Like, see that little blue strip of wall up there at the top right? That's a door I hadn't been to yet, wonder what's up there...
It's a dong! At least that what it looked like until I explored the rest of the rooms in this section, which was actually a little prison areas. Each room was a jail cell. Also a neat feature is that you can zoom in on the map if you want.
It's pretty damn detailed, really. It shows you everything you see in each area, from where the tables and furniture are, to what's on the walls, even what kind of lighting the room has. The only thing it doesn't show you are the bodies.
As you can see I managed to kill everyone but couldn't find even half the secrets. Fun fact: This game almost didn't have secret rooms. John Carmack got the technology working, the whole "push a wall to trigger it to open" bit, and was like hey looks guys it's a neat thing huh. Later on he worried it might conflict with something else in the program making the game unstable and was going to take it out. But everyone else on the team said no you have to leave it in we'll work around it.
So secret rooms stayed, probably at the cost of something else like more animation or less repeating wall textures. I don't know, I read that anecdote from David Kushner's book Masters of Doom. Good book.
So that's all for this week, folks! Like I said I'll be busy this week but I'll be sure to take a few pictures of whatever I'm playing on my phone or tablet and hopefully I'll have something else to post next weekend.
Thanks for reading.
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