Entries Categorized as 'Sneak Peeks'
July 18, 2009
You know I don’t review genres that I feel have been well played out. Matching games of the Bejeweled variety certainly fall well into that category; there are a million of ‘em, and very few really offer anything significantly better or different over the basic concept. There have been a few that I have reviewed that were good enough or novel enough to catch my attention, but on the whole I tend to ignore the genre.
Interactive Fan, whom you may remember as the developers of the excellent Fan Caps, a game that spent a considerable amount of time on Frapstr’s top ten list to your right, have decided that they don’t want to…
Posted in Games: Casual, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks 
2 Comments »
July 6, 2009
As I mentioned on Flog!, posts were going to be a little threadbare this weekend. Originally that was going to be due to me working on a couple of new tracks for the next update to Galactic Chill, but it turned out that I ended up doing some work for Cowboy Rodeo, setting up a blog and some forums which are not quite ready for prime time as of writing this.
What is ready for prime time however is their highly anticipated next installment in the Pinball Dreaming series, Pinball Fantasies, and Frapstr’s got the exclusive first look at this classic and much loved pinballer. The thing about this…
Posted in Games: Arcade, Sneak Peeks 2 Comments »
June 21, 2009
Hot damn, it’s coming!
For those who don’t know, two months ago I hooked up with Ron Watson of Tesla Software to begin work on a new AmbiScience relaxation/entrainment app. Regular readers will remember that I’m a big fan of Tesla’s other AmbiScience apps, so when he asked if I’d like to do the music for a new one, I was very much interested. I’d never really written ambient tunes before, though much of the time when exploring sounds and instruments to use in the music I do write, I’d end up playing with them, creating lush chords and getting lost in the sound. And then I’d just…
Posted in Health & Fitness, Product Spotlight, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
June 19, 2009
I would like to preface this review by saying that I never played 1.0, and while I can point to some new features in 1.1, I couldn’t tell you everything that’s different with it, so I’m just going to approach this like any normal review and point to what I do know is different.
Urban Kick Academy can be filed away in the catalog of existing distance games inhabited by the likes of Kitten Cannon, Hot Dog Down a Hallway, and Monkey Sling (which I will also be reviewing), but throws in the butt blast from Ow My Balls! and adds just a splash of autoerotic electrocution. (Okay, I made that last…
Posted in Games: Casual, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
April 30, 2009
The dev crew at Artificial Life are a little preoccupied right now crunching to complete and release the full versions of Red Bull Air Race Championship and (finally) BMW Z4: An Expression of Joy, so they didn’t have time to cobble together an ad-hoc build of iDroids for me to play with. However, Keith Chan sent me some information and a trailer on the game, and I sort of wanted to post about it because the platform game category is one I feel is underserved in the App Store. There are some good ones out there, but not all of them are quite the “traditional” platformers or platform shooters…
Posted in Games: Platform, Sneak Peeks 2 Comments »
April 8, 2009
Another newcomer to the iPhone scene, Monte Boyd, isn’t a complete newbie. He wrote a popular 3D snowboarding game on the Mac called Slope Rider. Now he’s gone and ported it to the iPhone, and I must say, he’s done a fine job. I mean, I haven’t played the Mac version, but the iPhone version is certainly no slouch when it comes to trick snowboarding games.
Slope Rider lets you strap on a board and either kick it freestyle or race against a computer player down the hills, through the moguls, and over ramps while pulling off tricks, collecting bonuses, and involuntarily eating tree bark across 13 unique courses.…
Posted in Games: Sports, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
April 3, 2009
First, all you emu nuts out there, don’t get excited. This isn’t a PlayStation emulator. Instead, it is a shift in gears for Movile, switching from the ups and downs of roller coasters to the ups and downs of the stock market.
In iPSX, you are given a $10M portfolio that you can use to invest in a variety of companies in an effort to make as much money from the stock market as you can. You can pick from any company, put them on your watch list, get a history of their stock performance, buy when the stock is low, and sell when it’s high. There is an online leaderboard where you…
Posted in Games: Simulations, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
March 9, 2009
The second of our two sliding match 3 games comes to us from the sunny ‘Frisco-based Gnizama (is the G silent like Gnu or Gnocci?). If you haven’t read the first part of this showdown, check out Slida before reading this, since there’s no point in me going over the basics again. Instead I’ll cover the differences between the two.
The similarly-named Sliders (which may or may not have anything to do with Jerry O’Connell) takes the opposite tack to Slida in that in focuses more on chain reactions than combos. It’s certainly possible to and encouraged to set up combos, but since eliminated pieces cause everything above them to fall…
Posted in Games: Logic & Puzzle, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
February 17, 2009
Two things. First, I wasn’t sure how to categorize this because there are multiple elements that could make this an action game, a strategy game, and an arcade game. In the end I felt it fit better within the arcade category. Second, I must admit that I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to like this when Paramount initially sent me the press kit, which contained a few screenshots, a promo “poster” and a video. While the video looked like it had some decent action packed sequences and some nice graphics, it struck me as a little 16-bittish, with 2D animated sprites that…
Posted in Games: Arcade, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
January 26, 2009
Just when I was content in the knowledge that I had the ultimate hypnotic interactive toy in Spawn Illuminati, Gedalia Pasternak has to drop me an E-Mail and show me this. It’s actually an iPhone version of the same program he wrote back in 2001 for Windows.
It would be grossly unfair to compare iBeams to Spawn though, because they both take very different approaches and do very different things, even if on the surface it’s all about dazzling the eyes and occupying the fingers. Where Spawn is a particle toy with a wide variety of effects and patterns, iBeams takes a different approach using an array of procedurally generated dynamic objects…
Posted in Entertainment, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
January 5, 2009
It is due to a matter of time and the pace of the App Store that I almost never do product updates. There’s just too much coming out on the App Store on a daily basis for me to keep track of app updates and their new features. However, sometimes I have the opportunity to be kept in the loop about certain apps that I really like, premium or free, and in those cases I like to get the word out on what’s new and what’s coming.
Such is the case with Spawn Illuminati, which you’ll recall the first version of which I covered toward the…
Posted in Entertainment, Sneak Peeks 3 Comments »
December 14, 2008
I’ll admit it: When Antoine Cariou from Orange (yes, that Orange) offered me a preview copy of Pick & Play, I was a little dubious for two reasons: First, it’s a memory game, and I’m sure we’ve all seen plenty of those. Second, It’s has been commissioned by Orange, who developed the Pikeo photo sharing site, and I didn’t really want to take the chance that I’d come out of the preview looking like a corporate shill. Impartiality is important to me and it would damage my integrity to be viewed as a sellout. In the end though I came to the conclusion that because it’s going to be…
Posted in Games: Logic & Puzzle, Sneak Peeks No Comments »
