Neon Surge, who brought us the 3D side-scroller SolarQuest has released Solar Blaster [App Store] through the iTunes App Store.
Solar Blaster is basically a simplistic on-rails, galactic 3D shooting gallery. The player controls a mother-ship armed with three different weapons: machine guns, laser beams, and photon torpedoes. The goal is simple: destroy the advancing onslaught of alien enemies (which happen to bare a striking resemblance to Death Stars and Borg cubes…). Targeting is handled via accelerometer and the trick is to switch to the next weapon before the current one overheats and becomes ineffective. It’s a rather simple game but does provide mild amusement when one is in the mood for a little target practice.
Adding gameplay incentive is an integrated, online scoreboard that keeps track of who are the true interstellar marksmen.
Solar Blaster is available as a $0.99 download through the App Store [link].
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It looks like "Sonic Bandicoot."
It looks pretty awesome, really. I could never get into Bugdom much. This looks much more appealing.
its kroll: armadillo version!
Well, hopefully more gameplay than Kroll...
having played the mac version of this, I"m very much looking forward to this port. The iPhone needs more platformers. 3d graphics but a 2d control scheme keep things looking nice but the playability constant. I'm quite a fan of platformers.
This isn't like kroll, as you can jump and can jump on enemies.
The Kroll demo videos from WWDC showed jumping, but they obviously removed it for some reason. I would like to see the successor to Kroll.
Can't wait!
BTW... look up severance blade of darkness on youtube or something. It's done by some of the Kroll guys, back in 2001. A brilliant game, I thought Kroll would be more like that.
Wow! Is this the first platformer? That is so cooool! Go little Armado go!
Sonic Bandicoot? Yes please. :)
"Wow! Is this the first platformer?"
Erm, no.
This look like it could be fun, but looks a little repetitive. Remember the game Pandemonium on the Playstation? In the same way, that used 3D graphics mixed with 2D control (left/right/jump) and had a surprising amount of variety in it's levels.
This in comparison, whilst looking nice and polished, seems to always follow the same formula of following a path up the side of a hill. MAY get boring. Reviews will tell. Not buying until I read some.
However, I do agree that the 2D control scheme should work better for the iPhone/Touch compared to what Bugdom was trying to achieve.
Pandemonium! I'd forgotten that game. Great game. Would be perfect for the iPlatform.
This game could benefit from a lot more variety. Take a look at the game Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. That game was similar in that it's a 2D game in 3D clothing, but there's much more variety in the environment with regard to how you move through it. In this game you always appear to be going around a hill, and the hills are even seem to be the same size. Maybe there is more variety in the actual game, but then you'd think they'd have shown it in this video, so probably not.
@Barry Ward: I was trying to recall the name of that sort of "on rails" 3D platformer I played back in '97 on my AMD K6 PC. It came with the unfortunate 3Dfx Voodoo Rush board I was using. Pandemonium [video]. This game instantly reminded me of that.
I looked at the Pandemonium video and that's another good example of how this game could be so much better. Look at the variety in how you move around the world in just that clip of Pandemonium. Much better. I'm not sure how the developers of Armado could have not figured that out.
looked good until I saw that they created spore
I'm still bitter over that
I played the first level of the Mac version. The mountain climbing reminded me of a level of Super Mario Galaxy. I think it's fun and could work on the iPhone, but in the long term it surely will get boring, even if it's a nice mix of run, collect, jump & destroy.
I really like the 3D games, but I am sick of the memory issues with high quality games that are hitting the app store. I am not sure if the solution is Apple (more memory or software) or if the dev's need to learn how to handle the memory on the iPhone. From what I have read it appears the iPhone has better specks then the PSP and DS, but they don't have memory issues where the game just shuts down (Guitar Rock Tour comes to mind). X-Plane seems to have the best handle on this, but still needs work so I don't have to restart my phone everytime I want to play a game.
The manual for the mac version is here btw http://www.trickysoftware.c...
looks like what a Sonic 3D should have been
ke what a Sonic 3D should ha