You know you’re an O.G. iOS gamer when you’ve got fond memories of the original array of Ngmoco games. I’m talkin’ Dr. Awesome, Word Fu, Mazefinger, Rolando, and the Topple series. After all, there was a time when it was totally fair to say that ngmoco were well on their way of being the “Nintendo of the App Store" or whatever other cheesy phrase you wanted to assign to a developer that was continually raising the bar of what you could expect of iOS gaming. For better or for worse, the free to play explosion happened along side the release of Eliminate, and, well, here we are.
In the aftermath of the free to play apocalypse, the DeNA buyout, and all the other weird junk that’s been going on in the lifecycle of ngmoco a few of these classics have been pulled from the App Store as they originally existed, or replaced with strange Plus+ laden free releases. However, per a recent interview with our pals at 148apps, Topple 2 is on its way back.
As explained in our review, Topple 2 is a block stacking game that is/was a ton of fun. From our review:
The premise of the Topple series is simple, you stack blocks of various shapes and sizes to reach a set altitude goal within the provided time limit. Blocks can be rotated to fit better in to the existing stack and the game makes excellent use of the accelerometer. If your tower of multicolored blocks isn’t as sturdy as you would like it to be, tilting the phone left or right causes your stack to lean, potentially giving you the extra bit of stability you need in order to not send everything crashing down.
It’ll be interesting to see how the game stacks up now, as admittedly a lot of the original appeal of games back then revolved around the fact that it was super-nice to see titles that were cleverly designed to be iPhone games instead of just being games that run on the iPhone. It was a serious distinction that anyone around for the inception of the App Store likely will remember all too well.
[via 148apps]
Update: Aaaand it seems Topple 2 (Free) is now out. It’s 99¢, and filled to the brim with Mobage stuff pressuring you to sign in, link your Facebook, and all that. Oh, and it has up-scaled blurry non-Retina assets. And advertisements for CSR Racing on the title screen and ads that load on the world map screen in between levels. Le sigh.
Yep.
