January 12, 2009
Looking for a bit of retro-styled shmup?
Powerhouse’s latest offering, Choppy, is a horizontal side-scrolling shoot-em-up that takes its cues from more vintage airborne shooters on the order of R-Type or Side Arms, only a little more sedate. You are Choppy, a pink little spheroid thing with a propeller on its head, and you are required to defeat various forms of enemies armed at the outset with a particularly lethal form of halitosis which I shall call “Bullet Breath.” This can be upgraded to various other forms of regurgitory ordnance through powerups, including
missiles and a little orbiting satellite that destroys enemies that run into it. Perhaps it could be said…
Posted in Games: Shmup 
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November 13, 2008
App Name: Squirgle! Free
Developer: Powerhouse Games
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Funny how some things work. Bejeweled took the world by storm in 2000. That inspired a whole passel of clones and variants, some looking to step aside from the theme a little bit to offer some sort of original gameplay. This led to variants where gems were rotated in groups of 4 or 6 in order to make matches, changing the dynamic of the gameplay and requiring you to think about your moves in new ways. This has recently, in turn, begotten Bejeweled Twist, itself a variant of the variants their own original Bejeweled inspired. (Stay with me here.)
Squirgle then is one of those rotate variants based within Powerhouse’s established aquaverse seen also…
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November 1, 2008
App Name: Rainbow Ruffle Free
Developer: Powerhouse Games
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
At first glance I looked at this and immediately thought, okay, another train track path type game ala Derailed or Candy Train (which are based on a much older original whose name I forget and may or may not predate a similar well-known game, Pipe Dream. You youngsters might be more familiar with this style of game as the hacking minigame from Bioshock). I was a little surprised to find that while it is rather similar, the objective is not.
In Rainbow Ruffle, the object is to rotate rainbow pieces on the board so that ultimately they form a complete loop. As you rotate your pieces, more pieces are showing up, giving you more path options…
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October 25, 2008
App Name: Bubble Bay Free
Developer: Powerhouse Games
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Here’s something a little different. In Puzzle Bay you play an octopus who, through an unfortunate birth defect, have tentacles permanently arranged in a pattern resembling the universal biohazard symbol with an extra segment — a rather tragic configuration for a biological lifeform to have, let’s not mince words.
This poor toxic cephalopod is on a quest to find the lost city of Atlantis, and by the strange rules that govern the undersea realm, he will eventually be able to accomplish this by popping an ever-rising array of colourful bubbles. To do that, he must grab a coloured bubble in a pair of tentacles and carry it over to a like-coloured bubble, causing them both…
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