Over the past decade I’ve grown to love a lot of iPhone games, but there’s a handful of games that I love on a whole different level, like I SUPER DUPER LOVE them. Andy Wallace’s Particle Mace ($2.99) is one of those games. Released in early 2015, Particle Mace on first blush looks like your typical retro-inspired top-down space shooter. Except… you can’t shoot. After finding your ship’s weapons nonfunctional, you improvise by tying a bunch of garbage to an array of bungie-like cords to your ship. You defeat enemies and smash asteroids by zipping around and using your momentum to sling that makeshift weapon (let’s just call it oh I don’t know a PARTICLE MACE) into them, and it is honestly one of the most unique and satisfying gameplay mechanics I’ve ever used. Here’s the trailer for Particle Mace so you can see what I’m very poorly attempting to explain in action.
So anyway, yeah, I love Particle Mace. Unfortunately, due to not being updated since close to when it released, it wasn’t 64-bit ready and therefore was a victim of the dreaded 32-Bit Appocalypse that hit when iOS 11 released back in September. I made peace with losing a bunch of my older 32-bit games, but Particle Mace was one of the harder pills to swallow. After not receiving any updates for so long, and not seeing much action from the developer in our forums, I sort of assumed it was dead for good. I didn’t delete it from my phone or anything, JUST IN CASE, but I highly doubted we’d see a 64-bit update. But what’s this? A glimmer of hope? Developer Andy Wallace took to Twitter to say he was investigating updating the game for 64-bit, and asked if owners of iOS devices in various shapes and sizes wouldn’t mind helping out with it.
I'm currently looking for testers for the iOS11 update of PARTICLE MACE! Folks with the super big iPad and iPhone Plus especially appreciated. If you want to help, hit me up with your email & I'll send you a test flight invite.
No iOS device, but want to help? Just retweet this! pic.twitter.com/wtSHhkAbP6
— Andy Wallace! (@Andy_Makes) December 6, 2017
I haven’t replied to the tweet myself just yet, so let me take this opportunity to say – Hi Andy! I have an iPhone X and would love to help test the Particle Mace update! If you’re interested in testing too, hit him up on Twitter. If you’re one of those holdout types who haven’t updated to iOS 11 just yet and you missed out on Particle Mace when it released, I (obviously) highly recommend you check it out as it’s still available in the App Store for non-iOS 11 folks. We gave it 5 stars in our review, I gushed over it during one of our TA Plays videos, and I picked it for my personal Best Games of 2015 list. I understand how difficult and costly/time-consuming updating older games can be for small indie devs like this, so if the update isn’t in the cards it’s not in the cards, but hopefully this glimmer of hope will result in an iOS 11-compatible update for Particle Mace and I can once again enjoy one of my very favorite iPhone games.
