A Quick Look at 'Spheroids': Asteroids on a Sphere
posted February 14th, 2009 4:54 PM EDT by Blake Patterson in $1.99, iPhone games, iPod touch games, Retro, Reviews, ShooterRetro shooter fans won't want to miss Spheroids [App Store], a recent iPhone release by Fabio Policarpo.
Spheroids takes the classic, black-and-white game of Asteroids and wraps it around a wireframe sphere. Your familiar-looking ship remains centered on the screen while rotation of the sphere is controlled by tilting the iPhone in any direction. A one-finger tap to the screen fires while a two-finger tap sets off a bomb. Large asteroids drift lazily about the sphere and break into smaller pieces when fired upon. On higher levels, homing mines are added to the mix. Various power-ups, dropped from large asteroids, can be picked up to enhance your ship: a weapon power-up to increase your rate of fire, a bomb power-up, and a shield power-up.
The game looks and plays much as I imagine Super Stardust HD would, had it been released for the Vectrex.
Spheroids convincingly conveys a sense of the vector displays of old thanks to its clean anti-aliasing and the subtle glow present on the brighter vectors. I find this title quite enjoyable and my only gripe is its lack of an accelerometer calibration feature (the neutral point is exactly parallel to the ground)--hopefully the developer will do the right thing here in a future release. I feel that most gamers who enjoy a nice retro remake will find Spheroids to their liking.
See our gameplay video for a closer look.
[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]
App Store Link: Spheroids, $1.99
