Katja makes iPhone cases from felt. This one looks like a Game Boy.
These little phone pockets are already sold out at her etsy shop but, Katja writes, “Don’t be afraid to contact me if it’s already sold—I have tooooooons of them.”
Not yet sold out: an iPhone case sporting a mustache.
Remember Dragon’s Lair? With Dirk the Daring starring as the blundering hero, tasked with rescuing the princess? Kind of tedious?
Within the year following its release, Don Bluth Studios loosed yet another multiple-choice, feature-film-quality adventure into arcades. Called Space Ace, the titular hero—Ace, I mean—was sort of an intergalactic refitting of his medieval forbearer.
And while the thought of conducting Ace through a sequence of quicktime events doesn’t exactly thrill me, the idea of cramming an entire laserdisc game onto the iPhone absolutely does.
Touch Arcade, with undeniably impressive gameplay footage, below:
Maybe I shouldn’t be so dumbstruck by this; hell, Space Ace was gorgeous to begin with. But on the iPhone? Holy cow.
I think I like the idea of this game—a onetime feat of technology—being marvelous and novel all over again. I guess the medium really is the message.
3D Me JitterPic for iPhone makes it easy to take two photos, align them with each other, and automagically make an animated gif that can be instantly uploaded to Myspace (I’m not even kidding—that’s a built-in feature). The 3D effect is accomplished using “wiggle stereoscopy.” Hours of house party fun! A live demonstration of the finished product, above.
JitterPic is US$1.99 in the iTunes App Store.
Until a few days ago, the iPhone game Eliss was knuckle-crackingly, hair-tearingly, eye-drippingly tough. Multicolored orbs swarmed the screen too quickly, perhaps, and new game elements popped onto the touchscreen with hardly an introduction.
But Eliss’s creator, Steph Thirion, very actively sought out players’ opinions during this March’s GDC; even after, he went so far as to assemble a whole new crack team of beta testers. Seldom have I met a developer so sweetly wracked with concern after his game has launched—and, moreover, even after his game has already received generally favorable reviews.
Two days ago, Thirion released Eliss v1.1, an update that both eases the difficulty curve and lengthens the game. He’s also clarified the tutorial—although, for my own part, I really preferred the murkiness—and, on top of everything, he’s reduced the app’s price to a comparatively paltry US$2.99. That price point is honestly small potatoes, considering Eliss is every bit as full an experience as Every Extend Extra or Gunpey.
I think it’s really important to note all these changes. Destructoid posted its review of the old version of Eliss today, which is really too bad: a lot of major complaints have been addressed, if not resolved. In any case, if the difficulty curve frightened players off before, Eliss certainly warrants another look.
I’m really, really bad at Eliss, the multi-touch plate-spinning game for iPhone. I think my failure falls somewhere in my personal Venn intersection of shortsightedness, panic, and a total lack of coordination.
You’re nodding and thinking to yourself, “Stop worrying! No one can be that bad at Eliss.” You’re wrong. I am starting to realize there is something genuinely wrong with me.
There are 20 levels. I passed the first stage after a day of trying. I can’t pass the third stage.
I can see what needs to happen, and I want to make that happen, but I’m graceless and stupid, my brain motoring at half-speed. I’ve shown Eliss to others, demonstrating its artfulness and my stupidity. Friends invariably pluck my iPhone from my hands, to show me how it’s done, and then they don’t want to give me my phone back.
“Stop beating my phone game,” I snapped at Scott Sharkey, grabbing at my phone. I put my iPhone somewhere private he couldn’t get to it, like in my purse or in a drawer, I can’t remember. Scott smiled at me quizzically.
This is so frustrating because Eliss is obviously the raddest game for the iPhone yet. And I can’t play it! It’s right in front of me, and I can’t do it! I’d wanted to talk about it once I’d played it except I can’t. I can’t do it. And everyone else can!
Anyway, you’ll love it. It’s a $3.99 download.
Every morning, my mom hops onto her twelve-year old Hewlett-Packard PC and reads the news.
Specifically, she reads MSN. She only visits websites and articles that have been linked to from MSN.
The twelve-year old computer sits on my childhood desk in my childhood bedroom. When she reads the news, I am usually still asleep in my childhood bed. She likes to read the news aloud.
“The Ten Greatest PC Games Ever,” she read aloud.
“Oh, cool,” I said sleepily, “read them to me.” I sat up to put on my glasses, then lay back down. “Let’s see if we can guess them in advance. Uh, Doom or Quake. Diablo or Starcraft. OK, go.”
Midway through the list, my mom hesitated. “Number six. Um. ...Rogue?”
“Really! Who wrote that,” I said, sitting up in bed.
A long pause. “Benj …Edwards,” my mom said.
I snapped my fingers. “Of course!”
Read the rest of this entry »I have a major soft spot for the Squadron of Shame, a videogames book club built around zealously attacking those artful games that no one seems to get around to playing (hence the titular, “shameful” feelings). The club’s frequent game playthroughs eventually and inevitably spun off in a podcast, for which the Squadron’s founders periodically assemble across the globe and Skype together.
In the most recent episode of their podcast, A.J. suddenly announces that he has uploaded his video performance of the 1UP Show theme song (here, also) to YouTube, as performed on the iPhone’s “Ocarina” app. I’m familiar with the Ocarina application—it’s a nice little nod to Zelda—because “Ocarina” was named among TIME Magazine’s Top 10 iPhone Apps of 2008.
There is nothing more resplendently geeky than announcing, on a podcast, that there is a YouTube video of you whistling into your iPhone, and more specifically, that you recorded it in honor of a popular videogame webcast. Here’s A.J.:
Isn’t it eerie and melancholy? It’s perfect.
I promise to type about something other than 1UP’s staff cuts soon.
Last month I pointed you toward the D20 Gaming Dice Set, a 99-cent iPhone application—its developer followed the first release with a US$2.99 “PRO” release, which allows for the rolling of multiple sets of dice at a time.
Since that distant time, though, a bevy of dice rolling applications have been added to the esteemed ranks of the iPhone’s App Store. There’s the DieRoller app, which costs a meager 99 US cents. Its developer, Derek Jones, writes:
Non-gamer tip: use 5d6 to play Yahtzee, or use the Percentile roll to make up statistics!
Tempting!
There’s also the simpler DiceDaemon (99 cents), the comparatively pricy Dicenomicon ($3.99; pictured at left), and of course, Dice Bag (free).
Recently, I called Twitter “the new Doom.” Just as Doom can seemingly be fitted to run, inexplicably, on any device, so too can Twitter. It wasn’t a very good analogy: when Doom runs on a mobile handset, for instance, it’s really less as a game and more as a tech demo. Twitter, on the other hand, is perfectly usable.
So, I was wrong. Twitter really isn’t ‘the new Doom’ at all. Then what is?
From Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
During a bout of iPhone willy-waving down the pub recently, someone observed that there are two things that always get released for any piece of hardware that’s hacked to run homebrew code, and everyone duly installs them. Then doesn’t do anything with them except show them off to people in the pub. The first is Quake. It used to be Doom, but in the 3D age the big Q seems to have become the de facto way of demonstrating that a given piece of hardware has something decent under the hood. Touchscreen controls mean iPhone Quake isn’t hugely playable, but it does look amazing.The second, and the source of my point, is SCUMMvm, the esteemed emulator for the old LucasArts adventure games. I suspect everyone who installs SCUMMvm, whether it’s for their PC, their PDA, their PSP or whatever, has a favourite game they install alongside it. For many it’s Day of the Tentacle, and God knows there’s a legion of Monkey Island die-hards, but for me it’s always Sam & Max Hit The Road. Except I never play it. I only watch the intro.
Last night I was sifting through the iPhone’s app store (again), and I noticed a 99-cent application called the D20 Gaming Dice Set.
Seriously?
I tapped at my iPhone, which brought me to a download screen. I don’t really play tabletop games but, sure enough, the D20 Gaming Dice Set is exactly as I’d hoped:
D20 Gaming Dice Set provides a set of dice compatible with most dice based games. The application provides 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, and 100 sided dice. It will let you roll between 1 and 9 dice at a time.
I love this idea. You’re sitting around a table with friends, and then you suddenly blurt, “Oh, I know what we should do!” And you bring your iPhone out and pass it around, and your iPhone really is a Swiss army knife of technology. And everyone is so impressed with your phone, and therefore, by proxy, with you! And the game is going wonderfully; truly, you are the life of the party!
But then your battery dies before the game’s end, and everyone looks at you a little bit accusatorily. You shrink in your seat, wondering why you don’t simply travel with a spare die. And I pat you on the back and I tell you it all reminds me of that time in NYC when I mocked my friend Dave for using an enormous travel guide with fold-out maps, but then my iPhone’s battery died and I was suddenly useless. In junior high, I once flunked a survival mission—it was “map orientation,” the real-world application of a compass in the wilderness—and even with a map, even today, I am perpetually lost.
Seven types of die? Nine of each type of die? I’m no mathematician, but that’s 63 dice! The D20 Gaming Dice Set is, if nothing else, a moneysaver.
When Game Life’s Chris Kohler reported that the Wii had finally outsold the Xbox 360 in the U.S. yesterday, he also reprinted Nintendo’s annoucement, which itself is written in a strange, alien shorthand. “After just 20 mos, Wii is the new console leader in the US @ nearly 10.9 million units, says NPD 2day.”
Kohler received said information from Nintendo directly—not through a formal press release, but instead through a text message.
That’s a text message that Nintendo of America just sent to journalists’ phones, knowing they’d be away from their desks covering E3. (The company used the same delivery medium to announce the Wii MotionPlus controller on Monday.)
Although Kohler’s SMS message from Nintendo isn’t the main point of his update, I find this unbelievably interesting. Two days ago I noted that I’d followed E3 news and rumors using Twitter almost exclusively—and using the new Twitteriffic iPhone app, at that. “When I look over my Twitter friend-feed,” I’d said (yes, quoting myself is bizarre), “it’s like this extremely concise liveblog written by ten or twenty people.”
Nintendo, SMS, and Howard Rheingold’s ‘Smart Mobs’: connecting the dots
