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In case you are wondering, Stenches is Trenches with zombies instead of Germans. Having not played Trenches a ton, my time with Stenches was much like hanging out with a long lost girlfriend that moved away far too soon: it’s fun for a time, but then you realize why you weren’t so upset when she originally left.

Stenches lives in the side scrolling castle defense/attack genre that is populated by such titles as Trenches and Epic War 3. The basic concept is to build a bunch of units to fortify/advance your lines while fending off the waves of zombies that are approaching from the right. As you kill zombies, you get gold that you can spend on new troops or ballistic weapons that can strike the zombies from long range. The goal, much like a WW1 battle, is to advance your army to nearby trenches that not only provide shelter, but can be upgraded to become a troop spawn point.

Sales of the game, and its mass popularity, surely come from the polished exterior and likable characters. There are no NPC’s to speak of, but the troop units all have a likability that isn’t matched in the genre. The battlefield, zombies, heck, even the battle sounds in the game are all extremely well made… often sucking you back in after you are determined to stop playing.

Once you get past the polish though, the game quickly shows off its true colors. There are a few issues that I have with the basic game play, and most of the issues come down to frustrating troop movement. First off, the movement in Stenches is all done by line drawing, just draw a little line to tell a unit where you want it to go. This is a great implementation of the touch screen, but when you have 5 units standing in the same spot, what do you do? This problem comes to light primarily when you are advancing your lines to a new trench. To add difficulty, Stenches puts a troop limit in the trenches, and the only way to raise this limit is to upgrade the trench with an engineer. Singling out the engineer for movement is a pain in the rear, and protecting him is even worse. It would make sense to protect your hard-at-work engineer with a few machine gun units, but in the heat of battle when you are moving the units to the trenches their horrible AI will overshoot the trench and blow their cover. Needless to say, there badly needs to be an “advance to next bunker button,” in addition to the regular advance gesture.

My other squabbles come down to the maddening lack of hand to hand combat strength and the unfortunate low max troop count, but the movement issues are by far the most frustrating. Do these issues mean that Stenches is a bad game? No, but it’s hard not to think that the game could be much much better with a few of the kinks worked out. As is, it is a worthy buy if you love the genre or are a fan of Trenches… just be ready for some frustration.

[ Stenches Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by spokoloko \\ tags: castle defense, Games, genre, lines, stenches, stenches-review, thunder game works, time

A feeling of deja vu hit me the second I started playing Super Pirate! Plunderer Of World Treasures. I had played this game before, many times actually, in just about every brain age type game I’ve ever touched. The entire game is based around the pipe connection game where you have to help an object get from the top of the screen to the bottom by drawing horizontal lines to connect the vertical ones together. There is an obvious pirate theme, with pirate ships that must be guided to treasure, but the game is really just a new graphical overlay on a tried and true system.

Having an entire game based around a commonly found minigame seems like a silly idea, but Super Pirate! steps up the gameplay by not erasing your drawn lines between each level. It doesn’t sound like much, but making the lines stay from round to round adds enough depth for most fans of the minigame to stick around to play.

The game is organized into levels that each have five rounds. As you push through from round to round, your lines stay put until the completion of the level, causing a potential pathfinding disaster if not planned out well. When you finally lose, your high score equals the amount of treasure that you successfully captured. The breakdown of the organization comes when you start playing again and have to start from level 1. I realize that the final score system tallies up all the treasure that you collect, but the beginning rounds are almost painful to play through after the third or fourth go around.

In the end, there really just isn’t enough in Super Pirate to suck in the majority of gamers. Fans of pipe connection mini games will get some enjoyment out of it, but most fans of the sub-genre already have this game within other games like Brain Exercise and Brain Age.

[ Super Pirate! Plunderer Of World Treasures Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by nimajuni \\ tags: around-the-pipe, exercise, gameplay, iphone apps and games, lines, organization, pipe connector, super-pirate

If you are not familiar with Verizon’s Fivespot, it is a “global ready” mobile WiFi hotspot, and they are already launching some promotional material. Fivespot was able to gain FCC clearing, and will support EV-D and triband HSPA, while replacing the old MiFi.

I don’t have any word of when it will actually hit the market, but it should be very soon. I’m sure that we will be there to let you know if it actually does accept five users, hence the word Fivespot. Will it be better than Verizon MiFi?

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written by spokoloko \\ tags: 9650-on-verizon, article, fivespot, lines, lines-start, network, permanent-link, search, short-tomorrow, storm, storm-arrives, tagging, verizon fivespot, verizon-wireless