If you’re a fan of the Scene It? franchise of DVD board and mobile movie trivia games, then break out your knowledge of sappy, happily ever after romance movies. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Scene It? Romance tests your romantic film savvy and lets you relive moments from favorite boy meets girl flicks. Scene It? Romance spans decades of heartwarming romantic comedies from Grease, The Breakfast Club and Footloose to Leap Year and It’s Complicated.
Since the early days of the App Store, users have gotten used to a two tiered app distribution model: the paid version which comes at a cost, but comes with a full range of features, and the free/lite version, which comes with a limited set of features, but comes as a free download. This model is in part thanks to the inability of apps to offer in-app purchases before iOS 3.0 was released, so Lite versions couldn’t offer upgrades to full versions. Although developers and publishers have had the ability to offer a single version of games that are unlocked via a purchase in-app, no major release has dared to try to change up the working model, until now.
Gameloft’s new Zelda-inspired fantasy action/RPG game Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden is being released to the App Store as a free download. The game, compatible with 3rd generation and up devices, gives you a small taste of the game before requiring you to pay $6.99 to unlock the full game in-app. Very few apps have tried the same trick so far – Time Crisis 2nd Strike HD, Astronut, and Tilt to Live HD being notable examples. This kind of model makes sense, theoretically – instead of confusing users by splitting the game into two different SKUs on the App Store, and making users go download a completely different app if they want to upgrade, you let them easily upgrade from a transaction in the app itself.
The problem is if users will be willing to adjust to this new model that Gameloft is trying out. Gameloft is likely hoping that more people buy the game given that they can try the game out for no cost. However, will the in-app purchase model to unlock the full game confuse too many people, who are used to the free/lite model? Will the barrage of one-star reviews that Gameloft is likely to get from users who feel like they’re being deceived by the in-app purchase to download the full game? This is a curious gambit from Gameloft, and it will be interesting to see how users react to it, and if future releases adopt a similar pricing model or not. If this is a success, this could be a potential sea change in the release structure of games on the App Store, or it could potentially doom the concept.
Developer: Zima Software
Price: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Graphics / Sound Rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
Game Controls Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars
Gameplay Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 2.74 out of 5 stars
Interactive pixel hunters have been very hit or miss over the course of gaming history. Some of the most popular games of all time have been pixel hunters, but lately the gaming community has been moving away from the genre because of its lack of playability. As much as people like figuring out puzzles and completing stories, they like blowing things up with Rambo-like inventories more. This isn’t to say that pixel hunters are bad, but I will go as far as saying that they need to be exceptional for the gaming community to take notice.
Cop – The Case of the Cloned Beauty Queen is unfortunately not in the exceptional category. The problem lies with the control system, as it was definitely not made for the iPhone. Exhibit A is the mouse cursor that you must use to interact with items in the game. Say you want to search through a trash can, instead of just touching it, you have to drag the cursor over to it and then touch the screen like it is a mouse click. Nothin in the world annoys me more than fake mouse cursors on my beautiful retina display.
Past the obvious control issue, the game feels like a cross between Leisure Suit Larry and the Pink Panther. You play a doting cop who “brought no skills to the station but the flu.” Because you are the last cop available, you are assigned to the case of the cloned beauty queen. Throughout the game you travel through 50 settings and interact with numerous characters. The characters are all vibrant and rich, but they all have sub 65 IQ’s. If you don’t like slapstick dialogue, this game definitely isn’t for you.
At the end of the day, Cop seems like a low to middling budget point and click adventure that is deeply scarred by a miserable control system. If you are a huge fan of the genre you’ll probably get a kick out of the acceptably tedious puzzles, but the rest of the gamers should probably just stay home. Spend the few hours that you’d be playing Cop paying attention to your friends and family; you’ll be happier.
Developer: Ravenous Games
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Device Reviewed On: iPod touch 4G
Graphics / Sound Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Game Controls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Gameplay Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Replay Value Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 3.88 out of 5 stars
Games inspired by the age of gaming when all anyone ever needed was a d-pad and 2 buttons are finding a new home, ironically on a platform that features no physical controls at all. Welcome League of Evil to this stable of faux-retro games, featuring a very simple premise like those 80′s classics that it takes from. There are evil scientists that are in cahoots to develop weapons of mass destruction, and have formed a coalition, appropriately titled the League of Evil. Your goal, as a super soldier, is to take these evil scientists out in the only way you know how, by punching them in the face. There are 54 levels, each containing one scientist to explode, being guarded by a variety of traps and soldiers. Each level also contains a briefcase that you can collect, your ultimate goal being to complete each level with the briefcase and a 3-star time.
League of Evil’s mechanics are designed for fun – you can pull off a variety of acrobatic moves like double jumps, mid-air kicks, and wall jumps to help get you through the levels, and mastering these techniques is the key to succeeding in this game, and is quite fun to boot! League of Evil is perfect for fans of retro-inspired games, with a chiptune soundtrack and 8-bit inspired graphics. The game is also designed perfectly for short play sessions, as every level is designed to be beaten in less than a minute. This also keeps the frustration level of the game down, as when you only have to beat short levels, repetition is more forgivable. Also, the game comes with support for OpenFeint and Game Center for achievements.
League of Evil is unfortunately very short, though. Even with all the repetition of challenging levels, it still only took me 2 hours tops to beat all the levels, though completing them all with 3 stars and all the briefcases may take some extra time. While it’s a minor issue, the game doesn’t support the Retina Display yet. The movement controls are slightly problematic, as I often found myself accidentally moving in the wrong direction, and this could be an issue in the trickier platforming sections.
League of Evil is a supernova – shining brightly for a brief moment before it fades away. With some more content, this could be a fantastic retro-inspired action platformer, but for now, it’s fun but brief. If you love retro-inspired games, this is worth a pickup despite its short playtime. Others may want to hold off until the League of Evil beefs up its membership, but make sure you check out the Lite version, which features 7 exclusive levels not in the full version.
Well folks, it’s Thursday and you’re on Mobilewhack, and that means that it’s time for me to make a plunge into the depths of the Apple App Store to see what’s going on, and today, I’ve got something extra exciting, but kind of disappointing: iDOS.
iDOS is the revamped version of a Dos emulator that showed up for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch some time back–you know, the one that Apple promptly pulled because having a DOS emulator on Apple systems was making reality implode?–but now pretty much limited to playing half a dozen old shareware games, including, for some reason, two versions of Duke Nukem.
It’s hard to fault any app that’s prepared to give you a six pack of games, and all for free, even if they are pretty much antiques, but this one is just kind of sad. Admittedly, I tried this on an iPod Touch, and on an iPad it might be a different story, but the games just crawled along and were entirely too small to be legible. Still, while the size issue is a function of the platform on which I tested it, I’m not so sure the performance issues will be made up for by the move to iPad.
And even if the performance issues were cleared up, still, how good could it possibly be? Where the old one gave you access to DOS, and everything DOS had to offer, this gives you six old shareware games. It’s like being offered a magnificent roast beef sandwich and then discovering, surprise surprise, it’s mostly sauerkraut.
Still though, if you can’t get enough of those sweet old retro games and have discovered that most computers today turn the whole thing into a chopped salad because they’re orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers they were designed to run on, well, you’ll do pretty well with iDos. But under most circumstances, this absolutely isn’t worth it, even though it’s free.
If you’re a fan of the Scene It? franchise of DVD board and mobile movie trivia games, then break out your knowledge of sappy, happily ever after romance movies. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Scene It? Romance tests your romantic film savvy and lets you relive moments from favorite boy meets girl flicks. Scene It? Romance spans decades of heartwarming romantic comedies from Grease, The Breakfast Club and Footloose to Leap Year and It’s Complicated.
Cop – The Case of the Cloned Beauty Queen is unfortunately not in the exceptional category. The problem lies with the control system, as it was definitely not made for the iPhone. Exhibit A is the mouse cursor that you must use to interact with items in the game. Say you want to search through a trash can, instead of just touching it, you have to drag the cursor over to it and then touch the screen like it is a mouse click. Nothin in the world annoys me more than fake mouse cursors on my beautiful retina display.
Well folks, it’s Thursday and you’re on Mobilewhack, and that means that it’s time for me to make a plunge into the depths of the Apple 
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