We know what you're thinking, but give Trucker: Parking Simulator [Free] a chance. Parking a massive truck with a stupid big trailer can be as rewarding as landing a video game airplane. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of understanding of how physics, momentum, and trajectory play into the perfect parking job. It's kinda surprising (and awesome), as Eli and I discovered today.
This sim's a particularly hard sale because the titling is so awful, so we decided to do a little video of the game in action to show it off. In the below, Eli and I power through several levels, carefully avoiding all road cones and parking like pros. Give it a look and, hey, maybe get as hooked on this thing as we are at the moment:
You can grab this right now, by the way, and you should if you need another simulator in your life. Here's a Steam link to Eurotruck Simulator 2 for PC, as well, since we talked about it so much.
EA's The Simpsons: Tapped Out [Free] received a new update the other day, adding in a bunch of new stuff especially for maxed out players. Of most note, the update expands the cap to level 29 and allows you to pick up Agnes Skinner. Also, new buildings, including Sprawl-Mart have been added in addition to a new quest involving Agnes and new Springfield Park Entrance and Cobblestone Wall decorations.
The Simpsons: Tapped Out, for the 12 of you or so who haven't seen it yet, is a free-to-play city simulation game that tasks you with building a new Springfield after the first one got blown up. Along the way, you'll meet familiar faces and build familiar places. EA constantly updates the app, adding in stuff like the above for users.
You can download Tapped Out now, of course, but be warned: this thing seems to eat up folks' time.
The introduction of airplanes changed the face of warfare. The same could be said of Firaxis' entry to the iOS gaming scene: when a Triple-A studio headed by the cherished game designer Sid Meier starts putting out iOS exclusives, you just know things are never going to be the same. Only, instead of bringing about unparalleled death and destruction, this watershed moment marks a new era of quality mobile gaming.
Firaxis has stormed on to the mobile scene: first came last week's spooky strategy game, Haunted Hollow [Free] (see our review here), and later this summer should see the release of the much-anticipated iOS port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Sid Meier's Ace Patrol [Free] completes this strategy trifecta, and is the first iOS exclusive to bear the legendary designer's name. His involvement shows: Ace Patrol is a fantastic, meaty title well-deserving of your time and gaming dollar.
Ace Patrol sees the player leading a squadron of pilots in World War I, witnessing the infancy of aerial combat. Ace Patrol is a premium game masquerading as a freemium title: the free download serves as a demo and gives you a portion of the British campaign to play. The full British, French, German and American campaigns are unlocked as IAP for $0.99 a piece.
In recent years, Minecraft has become the common ancestor of an entire sandbox subgenre. While it boasts a player base bursting with creativity, this is a subgenre that often suffers at the hands of less ambitious developers. Uninspired Minecraft imitations continue to pour into the iOS market, each trying to capture and cash in on a piece of Mojang's magic formula. Cast adrift on an ocean of Cavern Clones, Block Knock-offs, and Tryin'crafts, I sometimes catch myself wondering if it's all been done; if we've already seen the best Minecraft's successors have to offer. But then, inevitably, a new diamond emerges from the coal pile to disabuse me of that notion. The Blockheads [Free] is the latest game to set me straight.
So... what's its gimmick? What exactly makes The Blockheads stand out? Normally, the Minecraft-inspired iOS games that grab my attention are titles that take the original's block-sandbox premise and spin it in some wild new direction. Block Fortress, for example, created a fresh, intense experience by combining elements of Minecraft and the tower defense genre. Another of my recent favorites, Junk Jack, rebooted the block-sandbox aesthetic, resulting in a charming game with a look and feel so distinct that I occasionally forgot about its Minecraft roots altogether.
If your haven't seen Crabitron [$2.99 (HD)] in action, you owe it to yourself to check out this TA Plays. Two Lives Left's Crabitron is fast, funny, endless but kept remarkably fresh with boss fights and classic game parodies, and has spot-on controls that make it one of the most iPad-native games I've played.
In hindsight, a game that takes advantage of the multi-touch screen by asking you to use your fingertips like chopsticks makes perfect sense, and the kaiju (giant monster) theme really suits that mechanic. If the original Rampage captured something about the potential (and limitations) of the arcade technology of it's day, Crabitron does the same thing for the iPad, very much including the Mini.
It also, and seemingly unintentionally, sports really good single-device cooperative play.
Most of the games that offer single-device multiplayer on the iPad are turn based. There are a few with simultaneous competitive play, like Shufflepuck Cantina [Free / $0.99] and the HD version of Fruit Ninja [$2.99 (HD)], but only where the controls can be kept to separate parts of the screen, to avoid input confusion.
By default, one of the challenges of playing Crabitron is trying to use both claws effectively at the same time. It's hard to do anything fancier than having one claw mirror the other. But share your tablet with a friend, and the challenges change. Now you can each focus on your own claw, but you have to worry about what that other claw is doing. This can lead to almost Spaceteam [Free] levels of confused shouting. Even the fact that the claws can get tangled due to input confusion if they're pressed together feels more like a feature than a flaw.
Perhaps best of all, players of widely varying skill can play together. This is the only videogame I've found that I can play with my toddler without one of us quickly getting frustrated or bored. It's amazing, really. So far, my high score for the game is from a run I started with him, played a little by myself, continued with my spouse, and then finished alone.
The biggest problem with Crabitron's co-op potential is that it doesn't mesh well with the game's coin-based upgrade system. You can upgrade each arm separately, but upgrades are costly, permanent, and irreversible. Thankfully, there's no IAP grubbing: you can buy a coin doubler or a tripler, that's it.
It feels like he devs were preparing for the possibility of needing to release Crabitron as a freemium game, but took the risk of charging Happy Meal prices instead, something they deserve credit for.
Regardless, it would be a lot more fun (especially in co-op mode) if you could choose different claws or abilities for each game. Fixed-upgrade systems, with their roots in RPG character customization, tend to feel really player-specific.
To be fair, I don't think I'm playing Crabitron "as intended," it just happens to be a heck of a lot of fun this way, a bit like the tricycle that became cooler when you figured out you could ride it backwards downhill. Just don't hold Two Lives Left responsible if you injure yourself. Whether or not you've got a friend (or toddler) to play Crabitron with in this unintentional co-op mode, you really need to check the game out as Crabitron is a perfect example of how to intelligently craft a game for the iPad that really could only exist on the iPad.
I still have fond memories of playing Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon on my Treo 650, as they were pretty perfect light simulation timer-based games that just seemed to work really well on the tiny touchscreen of ancient smartphones. Well, the Grow Brothers are revisiting that similar gameplay with Weed Farmer Homegrown [$3.99]. However, if like me, you assumed that Weed Farmer would be a super-simple game designed to prey on the same type of people who buy trucker hats at Spencer's, you'd be way off. As my first play session revealed, Weed Farmer seems to be surprisingly complex.
Cultivating your, err, crop, involves going through all the different stages of raising plants starting from germinating your seeds all the way up to ensuring maximum yield across 30 different plant varieties. You need to worry about bugs, fungus, hydration, and even nutrient deficiencies in your plants while you deal with your lighting, ventilation, and so much more- It's actually sort of intimidating.
Better yet, there's even a full online component which tracks multiple leaderboards for growers and even constantly backs up all of your data. Weed Farmer also has a shockingly active online community of players in their own forum to supplement the extensive guides and FAQs on how to play the game.
It'd be super-easy to dismiss Weed Farmer as just some dumb drug game, but it's totally not. Sure, the goal is to cultivate and sell marijuana, but I guess I never had reason to realize just how involved it all is. If you're in to simulation games, and don't mind the admittedly fairly strange subject matter, give Weed Farmer Homegrown a look.
Back at GDC we took a peek at some of the new stuff heading to Pixowl's The Sandbox [Free], and today the first of those updates has gone live in the App Store. The Sandbox, if it wasn't obvious, is a 2D sandbox game which lets you play as the almighty finger of God and create things by mixing different elements, making machines, using electricity and steam power, and so much more.
It's really incredible some of the things players have created in the game, and in addition to passing the 4 million download mark Pixowl has also announced that more than 200,000 user-created levels have been shared in the online gallery. You should definitely check out what's on there.
Today's update adds to The Sandbox in 6 new elements based around lasers and pipes and all the various items to go with them to make them work. A new 10 level campaign is available for $1.99 that has you putting those new items to work in different ways which will teach you the ins and outs of how to use them.
In addition to the Lasers & Pipes campaign content, there are 5 new levels for the Dinosaurs campaign and 5 new levels for the Pixel Art campaign. And the Contraptions campaign, which was previously a paid DLC item, is now free for all players. Finally, a set of new instruments have been added to the game – guitar, bass, drums and trumpet. Some of the musical levels created by players are just mind-boggling, and I'm sure they're ready to go nuts with these new instruments.
If you haven't checked out The Sandbox previously, give it a shot. It's free to download and comes with enough content to give you an idea if it's the sort of experience you'll dig, and there's tons more content available as IAP if you want to dig in even deeper. The second update we covered at GDC, which will add zombies to the game, should be hitting sometime next month, so keep an eye out for that too.
Two Lives Left's Crabitron [$2.99 (HD)] is one of those games you've just got to see. It's an endless crabber that tasks you with charging through the cosmos, crushing and devouring anything that gets in your way. You do this by mimicking the pincers that you're steering around. Want to crush something? Pinch your fingers together. Want to eat something? Bring your fingers (and thus the pincers) to your crab's mouth and go to town. It's a wild control setup that's, surprisingly, good.
Jared and I gave it a spin this afternoon in an attempt to show you what's up. Our run is pretty good: you'll see a couple of the game's mini-games that break up the pacing, and if you don't blink, you'll even see some teleporting cars and explosive burps. And maybe a puzzle game knockoff. Man, this game is good.
I've been waiting for this game since it was first announced in summer of 2011, and I've got to say, it's about damn time we see Crabitron [$2.99 (HD)] on the App Store. Created by Two Lives Left, makers of the absolutely fantastic Wheeler's Treasure [Free], Crabitron puts you in control of a giant space crab with some of the best giant space crab controls we've seen so far in an iPad space crab simulator.
Essentially, you control your space crab's massive claws by making familiar pinching gestures on both sides of your iPad. It's best to just see the controls in action, so be sure to take a minute to watch the trailer:
Two Lives Left are also responsible for Crabstarter, a Kickstarter spoof where they're going to publicly share all of their sales data and you can "back" the game by just buying the completed version of it for $5 from the App Store- What a innovative concept! Anyway, we'll be taking a closer look at the game soon, but if you've been waiting forever for Crabitron like we have, you can grab it (or pinch it, I guess) off the App Store right now.
Hold the phone: a new video game with Story in the title is out? Can it be? Is another Kairosoft joint on the App Store so soon after the release of the Sushi Spinnery? Oh no, I'm going to be questioning how messed up my priorities in life are pretty soon, aren't I? I'm not going to make it to the gym or remember to give my cat her pill or water the plant on my porch or take my fiber supplement because I don't want to stop playing. Oh, wait, this isn't a Kairosoft game. It's from a developer that obviously digs Kairosoft's telltale mechanics and trimmings, but Epic Pirate Story [$1.99] is definitely not a Kairosoft game.
At the top-level, EPS seems like the same sort of hybrid RPG meets Simulation game that often comes out of the Studio That Built Game Dev Story. But, it's not, even though EPS does its best to copy every single mechanic we've ever seen from a Kairosoft title. It's more of an RPG than anything else. In the game, you're tasked with the chore of building up a fledgling pirate village while sending out pirates on quests that'll net them phat loot and experience points. This is all represented much like it is in a Kairosoft game, right down to your pirates leaving and then you seeing them interacting with chests and coming across monsters on a horizontal strip rendered in the bottom of the UI. Combat is represented similarly, too, tasking you with arranging multiple conga lines of your guys to take out opposing conga lines of bad guys.
The digital money printing machine known as The Simpsons: Tapped Out [Free] has received a new update themed after the most important fake holiday known to man: Whacking Day. Ok, maybe it's the second most important right behind Festivus, and let's not forget about Love Day, but Whacking Day is definitely up there.
Despite being your typical freemium Farmville-ish city building game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out does incorporate a ton of excellent fan service. Basing an update on the iconic show's fictional snake-clubbing holiday is further proof of that.
Whacking Day is officially on May 10th and in this new update there are all sorts of new ways to celebrate this special day. Take place in a time-limited event to whack snakes and earn special rewards, expand your city with new buildings and decorations, and complete new quests. You can also play with a handful of new characters including "washboard abs" Willie. Just don't be playin' with him between 4 and 5. That's Willie's time!
If you've been dutifully building up your own virtual Springfield in The Simpsons: Tapped Out then you should be pretty stoked to check out the new Whacking Day update content. If you're a Simpsons fan but haven't dabbled in this city-building adventure then it's a free download if you want to give it a look firsthand.
Here is a video game that caught our attention last month, but I really only just got around to checking out. It's called Mayday!! Emergency Landing [Free], and it's a flight simulator of sorts, except rather than tasking you with successfully flying an aircraft it instead thrusts you into emergency situations on said craft, and it's your job to figure out how to handle the problem and land all of your passengers safely.
Here's the thing with me and flight simulators: I'm terrible at them. Especially the really realistic kind. Mayday I would say falls into this category. In each of its dangerous scenarios, you'll need to be patient as you hold your device steady enough to follow the proper path that will lead to a safe landing. I am not that patient when it comes to things like this, and my movements also aren't so subtle. So try as I might, every single time I end up flinging my plane all over the sky and ending in a fiery crash. Note to humanity: don't ever give me a pilot's license.
We briefly talked about Maydayon our podcast last month, and found it to be an interesting premise but weren't too sure how much lasting appeal landing planes in disaster situations would have. I'd have to say that I do love the idea here, but I just can't get into it, even though I really wish I could. It's much too hard for me. However, your experience might be different with flight simulation games, and since the idea behind Mayday is so neat we thought we should let you know about it in case you missed its release.
Mayday is free to download and try, and there are options to buy IAP currency or you can shell out $4 to unlock the full game and all future updates outright. If you've felt like your flight simulator experiences have all been much too safe, give Mayday a try for a new spin on things.
At the top level, Star Command is a sci-fi simulation game that focuses on the real guts of an interstellar ship -- you know, the people, the facilities, and the technology that makes travel and battle possible. As far as feel goes, it's something of sci-fi slugfest where you find yourself limping out of every battle in a charred ship that's being staffed by a skeleton crew because everyone either (a) got sucked out of the hull, (b) got incinerated by phasers, or (c) died in a fire. I'm not really sure that this is the feel that creator War Balloon was ultimately looking for, but this is how it came across to us for the first couple of hours. And, spoiler, this is a pretty cool thing.
We didn't know this when we first booted it up, but Star Command is story-driven. You play as a commander of a ship in Star Command, a "Star Trek"-inspired Federation of sorts. In the opening moments, you're tasked with responding to various threats in our system under their watchful eye. After a brief tutorial, things get real when you discover a busted up ship which explodes as soon as you get there. Star Command gets on the honker and blames you for the explosion, saying you fired on the thing. From here, the adventure takes on a different tone entirely. You're now the commander of a rogue ship in a big galaxy with an assortment of alien species and various tricks, traps, rewards, and oddities.
If you're not tired of the whole zombie thing yet, maybe consider giving Van Der Veer's War of the Zombie a look. From the looks of it, it's a mash-up of simulation with over-the-top strategy that tasks you with (presumably) saving the globe from the undead. In the clip of the game we've got below, you'll see how you'll be able to outfit a squad of dudes with various modern weaponry, order missiles from a cruiser, and then engage in a real-time point-and-click-y battle against a roving horde (while calling in missiles). It's a juicy display of a game that could be cool, no doubt.
According to Van Der Veer's Facebook page, War of the Zombie is in active beta right now and it's slated to release wide at some point in May 2013. We'll keep our eyes on this one, and hopefully get our hands on it soon! Here's some screens:
Masters of the pixelated career simulation Kairosoft are back at it again on iOS with their just-released Sushi Spinnery [$3.99] which dropped on the App Store early this morning.
As you might be able to guess if you're familiar with Kairosoft's ways, Sushi Spinnery is all about running a sushi restaurant. In fact, a main feature of your restaurant is a motorized "sushi boat" which spins around and offers customers a selection of your delectable menu items from the convenience of the rotating conveyor belt. It's the future of eating!
It appears that Sushi Spinnery is your standard Kairosoft fare, which is always great from a gameplay standpoint but brings a few recurring disappointments like lack of iPhone 5 widescreen support, no Game Center, and kind of half-hearted iPad support, though the title is Universal.
Still though, Kairosoft games are some of the most engaging simulations around, and if you're a fan of their brand of games then you'll likely enjoy this latest release, which has been out on Android for nearly a year. Stop by our forums for even more Sushi Spinnery impressions from our community.
We know what you're thinking, but give Trucker: Parking Simulator [Free] a chance. Parking a massive truck with a stupid big trailer can be as rewarding as landing a video game airplane. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of understanding of how physics, momentum, and trajectory play into the perfect parking job. It's kinda surprising (and awesome), as Eli and I discovered today.
