Reviews & Articles

Recently, I was introduced to what I think may be my favorite iPhone game to date: Glyder 2. Before I get into the review, I need to mention that I expect iPhone games to be easy to play, have mechanics that are quick to learn, and have addictive gameplay to quell the raging hunger for electronic stimulation for which my brain begs. I don’t expect iPhone games to have too much depth, nor do I anticipate them to keep my attention for longer than a couple of weeks. However, from the moment I started Glyder 2, my imagination was flying wild.

You should play Twin Blades: The Reaping Vanguard because sometimes there is nothing else to do except mindlessly slash through zombies.

The team at Suponix (developers of iRoach) also sent me a copy of Budget Care. This app for the iPhone and iPod Touch is to help you budget your hard-earned ducats. It is simple to use and quite helpful for tracking your daily expenditures. I have found it extremely helpful in tracking how much money I spend on those superfluous impulse buys.

About two weeks ago, I woke up with an idea for a fun iPhone application that would pit you against one of the world’s most disgusting and highly adaptable creatures, the cockroach. I thought it would be a great idea to have bugs running across the screen so you could simply smoosh them with your fingers! So I checked out the App Store to see if there was anything out there like it. Lo and behold, I came across iRoach.

iFish Adventure is one of those great spare-time, standing-in-line-waiting-to-be-next, time-wasting games. You begin play as a small guppy-sized fish and must eat other fish on the game board without being eaten yourself. The game board is filled with different types and sizes of fish. You control the movement of your fish by using the tilt function on your iPhone/iPod Touch. The greater the angle of tilt, the faster your fish will swim. However, the boards are small, and the other fish can swim from off-screen, so be careful.

I’m an “old salt” of gaming. I’m known to endlessly ramble over legacy consoles and classic games. I don’t necessarily think they were superior to modern games. However, I do feel that there was something in the simplicity of those games that made them endlessly playable. When I play today, I often feel something is missing. I guess I’ve been secretly searching for a return to that classic style of gaming. When I downloaded Minigore for my long train rides after a friend suggested it, I realized my search was over.

Speed Forge Extreme is a snappy little racing game for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I love this game — I just wish I were better at it.

There’s a surprising amount of content in Speed Forge Extreme for such a tiny package. You start with one vehicle and can unlock five more as you progress through the game. Each vehicle has its own stats for mass, speed, agility, engine and ammunition. Since my personal car skills rank with knowing where to put gas, oil and wiper fluid, these stats weren’t that important to me, but they are provided. To me, the cool thing about the vehicles is that they’re all low-flying futuristic aircraft. There are no cars here. You’re literally flying in this one.

Mobile gaming for the iPod, Droid and upcoming Google phones is hot right now, and developers are all jumping on creating apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, EA Mobile was showing a slew of cool games for mobile devices, including Rock Band, Dragon’s Lair, The Simpsons Arcade, Need for Speed: Shift, Spore Creatures, The Sims 3: World Adventures, Madden 10 and Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I got to play the first three and expect GamersInfo.net will be bringing you reviews on the others in the near future.

Slingshot Cowboy Plus is a quirky little app for the iPod Touch (and iPhone). The premise is that the cows have gone mad and you need to round them up. Hit them three times with a missile from your magic slingshot, and they go right on their backs — hooves in the air.

I'm a lover of minigames, but if they're spatial, I'm awwwwful at them. I don't know why this is as I did really well in design in school ... but that's another conversation. The Plateau is minigame, spatial and freakin' awesome. And I'm not terrible at it. I just have no idea if I can describe it.

On a single plane are a series of points, no fewer than five in any single puzzle. Each point has at least two vertices so that the entire series of points is wholly connected through the lines. When first presented, the lines and points are a mish-mash so that the lines cross each other, often multiple times. The goal is to move the lines and points as to position them so that none of the lines cross.

As a compulsive writer and self-described word nerd, my love of math games often results in crossed eyes and exclamations of, "But you wubs the wurds?!" Yes, that is exactly what they say … it's not as if I haven't written about this before. Rock Ridge Games has fed my distraction that much more with Solution Zero for iPhone and iPod Touch by making it portable. Enough fun like this, and I may never write again.

I don’t mind the occasional casual game here and there. Sometimes, I just need to relax and cool off from mashing combos or firing headshots. And what better way to cool off than guiding some water through pipes? Droplitz proves itself to be quite refreshing in more ways than one.

I hate Tetris. There. I said it. And every ounce of that statement is true. I do not understand how arranging blocks of four is fun. It quickly becomes boring to me. After five minutes, I fall asleep. However, I have been playing a new puzzle game lately that doesn’t bore me at all: Droplitz.

Here's the thing: I have had Peggle on two of my mobile phones, my computer and now it is on my Xbox 360. I love it, but it is no ordinary kind of love. It is a time-suck kind of love. I sit down to play and then find myself half-comatose several hours later with atrophied muscles and five o'clock shadow. Okay, maybe not the beard stubble, unless the game causes hormonal imbalances I am not aware of yet, but my time rapidly disappears while I play the game. It won't let me go! I can hear it whispering ...

We football fans, we're in that rough time of year. The Super Bowl was over a month ago - a dimming memory even as I write this (unless you're a fan of either team that was in it, in which case it's still a glorious moment or a festering wound). The draft is a weeks away, which means until then it's just listening to Mel Kiper go on and on about the possible college recruits. And despite the weekend of the draft, it's still solid months before the preseason starts. The good news? The preseason has already started on my Blackberry with EFL Preseason, thanks to Enigma Games.

There are three types of games that I review:

Good games are games that I just have to keep playing and don't want to stop even to write the review. It takes me forever to get around to writing the review because I'm having so much fun playing the game. I usually keep playing the game after that, too.

As a kid I had a Commodore 64C. Amongst the other classic games I played on a regular basis was a game called Miner 2049er. I didn't know the "story" behind it, but it was a simple game. You were a miner-looking guy (especially relevant for my family, as a good number of my family were coal miners, and we lived in West Virginia at the time). Your goal was to walk on every little block of the ground, going up and down ladders and down chutes — all while jumping gaps.

Tilelander feels kind of like an old style arcade game. The vestigial background story is that I'm saving my home world of Tileland from the invaders of the evil Xyzom empire. "Great! Defend the world from the Xyzom bad guys," you might think to yourself. "Where's my army? Bring it on!"

When I read that Peggle was listed as one of the top five most addictive games, I had to check it out. Afterall, I play Bejeweled and I've broken a million points. How difficult or addictive could this be? In one word. Very. It's challenging. More challenging than you'd think; and more skill than luck is involved.

In 1942, the United States and Japan fought the Battle of Midway. Japan's Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto came up with a clever plan to defeat U.S. naval power. However, Japan's cryptography (naval code D) was cracked by the United States, and therefore, U.S. Adm. Chester Nimitz knew where the Japanese Navy would be and when. After four days of fighting, the United States — at the loss of one carrier and one destroyer of its own — had sunk four enemy carriers and one cruiser, plus myriad other ships as well as destroying a good part of the Japanese naval air power in terms of both planes and pilots.

If you're of a certain age then Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" is one of the most recognizable songs of two generations. We didn't grow up on the Peanut's comic strip, but if there's a holiday, we had a TV cartoon special. And where there's Peanuts, there's the indefatigable Snoopy on his Sopwith Camel dueling with the Red Baron. I know that my first knowledge of the Red Baron comes from Peanuts. I know my first knowledge of WWI comes directly from this.

There are times when working in this industry makes me feel old. I am about 10 years older than the average writer/PR rep/designer/coder and even producer. They don't make me feel old. Seeing Popeye and Olive Oyl on the floor at E for All with my 8-year-old son in tow and having him ask me, "Who's that?" makes me feel old.

Then there are the more-frequent times my age makes me feel very, very lucky. Heading to the Namco booth at E for All for a presentation of their new mobile titles and being presented with the new Popeye title ... starting to play with a confused notion as to why this is a remake and having that lightbulb-over-the-head-sensation as all of my old strategies kick in and I start to kick Bluto's behind! These are the times when I know that I'm lucky. I have more than nostalgia; I have an appreciation for just how far games have come and how fun they were and still are.

It's a cardinal rule of this site not to mention other games when doing reviews. You let a game stand on its own merits. However, it's prudent to mention that I am a Zuma fantatic. Not a fan, a fanatic. It's on my PC, laptop, Xbox 360, PDA and mobile phone. I also own Luxor and Magnetica. Apparently, this is a game mechanic that is part of my genetic makeup.

That being said, you can imagine my glee when Namco pushed their demonstrator off of Atlantis Sky Patrol (people were in line for this game) and put it in my hands. Wee! Colored marbles to shoot. Queue maniacal laughter ...

Circle Popper by Plazmic Games is one of those fairly simple games. You’ve probably seen one of the types before.

The top of the screen has a pattern of colored balls. They stick to each other and to the top of the screen. If you get three of the same color touching they’ll disappear, dropping any balls attached to them (that aren’t attached to anything else, like another column of balls or the top of the screen). Periodically, the top of the screen gets closer to the bottom.

Electronic Arts Inc. has announced that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be available on your mobile phone in the form of an RPG. It’s set up as a quick and easy game where you can pick up and play. All that is required is that you use the handset to make selections and move Harry around and talk to others. The storyline follows the book where Harry is helping students form “Dumbledore’s Army”. It can be finished in about two and a half hours.