Developer: Satellite2
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.01
Graphics / Sound Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Game Controls Rating: 3.85 out of 5 stars
Gameplay Rating: 3.7 out of 5 stars
Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 3.58 out of 5 stars
If you’ve played StarDunk, you’ve played Dunk It, as they are so similar it hurts. The only problem is that Dunk It strips out the massive online multiplayer mode and the awesome assortment of balls that do a variety of things, leaving you with an Adult Swim inspired basketball based physics game.
The goal of Dunk It, like StarDunk, is to fire your basketball into the hoop. Unlike StarDunk, your ball is attached to one of 4 characters, all of which function exactly the same but have different grunting sounds for when they fall to the ground in bone crunching fashion. The graphics are fun, there are three game types to play through (although all have the same game mechanics), and aiming for high scores is exciting, but there is a lot of room for growth here.
Just looking at StarDunk for comparison, there are dozens of things that you can to with different basketballs and even more things you can do with player attributes. Double bounces, long range aiming, multiballs; there are countless variations to go through. As a dunk contest game, why not add some style to the dunks too? Would adding a backflip or a long range 1080 degree dunk instead of the standard swish be that hard? In my eyes, I see basketball and I see cartoon, so get creative.
The way it is, Dunk It is a pretty decent value at 99 cents. It’s not a good of a game as StarDunk, the game it clones, but it has its own style, and the style works well for the genre. If you’re a fan of wacky animation and cartoonish characters, and don’t want to play with a ton of other online players, give this one a try.
Developer: FDG Entertainment
Price: $0.99
Version: 1.2
App Reviewed on: iPad
Graphics / Sound Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Gameplay Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 3 out of 5 stars Overall Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars
Cover Orange is taking the physics puzzle game to fun new levels. Not only do you have to figure out how to protect Florida’s best fruit, but also you have to deal with an abundance of physics inspired levels. It comes together for a great time that can be enjoyed in both quick sessions, or long lunch breaks.
The goal in this game is to get oranges under cover and protected from a raincloud that spews the black plague. To do this you will have to use the tools like oil drums and crates as well as the stage layouts themselves. You drag and drop your tools from the top of the screen and drop them in calculated precision. Bombs that explode, boards that move, and even swinging hammers all need to be accounted for. Each puzzle presents a unique challenge that ultimately feels fresh and unlike anything before it.
The presentation is one of childish fun. The backdrops are brightly colored settings that have an oil painted feel to them. Animations are fluid and pleasing. The audio fits well, though the repeating soundtrack does get a bit stale.
The downside to all this artistic fun is an inconsistent difficulty curve. You may be solving puzzles like crazy and then run into one that stumps you try after try. You skip it and move on to find several puzzles after are easily solved in one to two attempts. Compounding this is you can see what the real solution to the stage is, but you can clear the stage by simply getting lucky and abusing the physics of your tools. This inconsistency can be very off putting at times.
Cover Orange is a cute and fun puzzle game. There is a fair amount to do here, and more planned down the road. If you need a quick puzzle fix that is great for the lulls in your day, this fits the bill. There is even a free version that you can try before you buy.
Real Racing 2, possibly the most ambitious app to hit the App Store launched today. It’s a new version of one of the best racing games ever seen on a mobile device, and better than many seen on consoles. Firemint, based in Australia, has a lot riding on this game with a reported 2 million dollars spent on it’s development. We fired off a few questions to the fine folks down under to get some of their thoughts on the iOS platform and development of Real Racing 2.
Q: Real Racing 2 integrates Game Center for multiplayer, leaderboards, and achievements. How have you seen the performance of the Game Center multiplayer system? You’ve been able to do something others haven’t by bringing 16 player multiplayer to iOS.
Game Center has been great for us and we are big supporters of it. Beyond just leaderboards and achievements, we can use your Game Center ID to locate your save games and link to other services like Youtube uploads etc. The awesome thing about Game Center is that it provides an easy way to create peer to peer multiplayer connections with up to four players at once. We have supported this in Flight Control, Real Racing, Flight Control HD and Real Racing HD.
For Real Racing 2 we have implemented a hosted solution because we wanted to support our 16 car single player grid in multiplayer games as well. We also wanted to make it really simple to find and play multiplayer games, on every device. This is something we have been working on for a long time. It is more difficult for us to do things that way, but it means we are able to support all devices.
Q: A few months ago you released a story about how you had tuned the AI in your bots to such an extent that they were cheating. Are you sure they aren’t still cheating? Some of the AI race drivers seem awful good! Tell us more about the AI in the game for the computer drivers.
Well the Real Racing 1 AI weren’t cheating as such, it was more that they were finding exploits in the physics engine, the same exploits that human players could find. An example of that was that the AI found if they hit a certain corner at exactly the right angle, they would explode down the track faster than any car could drive. Needless to say, we fixed that bug before release!
In Real Racing 2, we have gone to great lengths to make sure the AI are competitive without cheating. Some games allow their AI to have faster or more responsive cars, or add catchup code so that they are competitive. On release, our game has none of this, the opponents never drive a car that out performs the ones the player can drive in the game. However, they may take you to the cleaners if you enter a hard career race under-spec’d. So choose a car with as high a performance rating as possible and ideally well suited to the particular track, for example top speed is pretty critical on an oval but it’s not so helpful on a winding track. If the AI is driving a car that you know has a higher top speed than yours, then you can be pretty sure that they won’t be so good on the corners.
The AI have been written to use the same inputs that the player has, accelerate, brake and steer. The down side of this as developers, we have to make our AI really smart to keep up with a human player.
One advantage that the AI do have is that they are precision drivers, the best AI can hit a precise racing line every time, so while it may seem like they are cheating, they actually take great lines through the corners and may come out of them faster than you if you make a small mistake. So just like when you are down at the track, winning at the high levels in Real Racing takes precise driving.
Even with all our effort into improving the AI, we would still rather take on the fastest AI we have than try to compete with a top ranked Real Racing player!
Q: What can we expect in the future for Real Racing 2? Any planned updates? An iPad version perhaps? Voice chat like we’ve seen you recently add with Flight Control?
You can be pretty certain that we will do an iPad version and we want to do something special, but definitely not until next year. We also have the online save game system now so that we can share your progress across versions of the game including from iPhone to iPad.
We do have all sorts of ideas and plans for Real Racing 2, however they are just ideas at this stage. Announcing things is easy, but delivering is hard, so we are cautious about announcing too much at this stage. Hopefully then, when we do deliver something, we will have over-delivered
Q: You’ve developed your own 3D engine for Real Racing 2, Mint 3D. Can you tell us a little more about it and what are the advantages of a custom engine over a pre-built one?
Mint3D is a powerful and highly optimized rendering engine designed to get great performance out of the current iOS platforms, particularly iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4. It supports standout visual effects like shadow mapping, depth of field, motion blur, detail textures, reflections, level of detail, specular highlights, glints, flares, particle effects, animation and even some improved real time shadows, whilst being able to push large quantities of polygons and models through the hardware each frame. The cool thing is, we have a very optimized legacy engine within Mint3D that was developed along with Real Racing, which is how we are able to continue to support earlier devices, albeit without the same high level of effects possible on the newer hardware.
We have to render a 3 mile track being traversed at high speed, from any angle with 16 cars, sometimes all on the screen at once, all with unique textures, see through windows, reflections, shadows, damage etc. It all has to look great regardless of what the player is doing with their car or with the camera or where they are driving. Everything moves by very quickly so dealing with a large object count is very important to a racer, and when you have 16 cars with physics and AI on top of that, there is a lot of variety to deal with. Mint3D is designed to handle this and to do a large variety of things well and at consistent framerates.
The choice of going with a custom engine over something pre-built is something that should be made for each game and each developer individually. It is not just an economic choice, sometimes a pre-built engine is the right choice for creative reasons. In our case, we design the game first and the engine has to keep up with that. By using our own engine we have the freedom to do whatever it takes to make it deliver for our particular needs. It feels like that is the best way for us to build signature titles and make them stand apart.
Q: How about some racing tips? Do you have any tips our readers for getting the best times on the Real Racing 2 tracks?
Generally, the fastest race times can be achieved by turning and braking as minimally as possible: a good race line with the goal of taking straight lines through corners, sufficient but minimal braking (losing traction washes off a lot of speed) and trying to maintain a high, constant speed throughout the race will hold you in good stead.
Every car handles differently, and braking and acceleration in and out of corners can count for a lot. Learn to exploit the varying performance attributes of each car and practice the techniques listed above. Driving with assists can be a very helpful way to learn to get your braking and racing line right.
Thanks to the folks at Firemint for answering our questions. Real Racing 2 is out now, and I strongly suggest you grab it if you enjoy a good race. Feel free to add me in Game Center, I’m jeff148apps — I’ll see you on the track.
I have longed for World of Goo for the iPhone and then the iPad for literally years now. Hard to believe it’s been that long. The model of the game has just seemed perfect for a touch interface. Having played through the game three times on three different platforms (Wii, PC, Mac), I just wanted more. My PC is packed up. It’s loaded down with so much anti-virus software it can hardly be used anymore. My Wii has, like most Wii consoles, an inch of dust on top of it. And my Mac, well when I sit down at my Mac I see I have 1,000 unanswered emails. Makes me feel too guilty to play World of Goo anymore. I want it on my new cool device of choice, the iPad!
Well that day has finally come. 2DBoy were kind enough to send us a final build of the World of Goo for the iPad. And I’m in heaven. I had to stop playing long enough to finish this preview, but after this is done, I’m right back to it.
World of Goo for the iPad is the full game that you know and love. But what about if you’ve been living under a rock. What is the game about? Well, it’s a physics based puzzle game. One where you build structures out of these interconnected goo balls.
You start out not really knowing what the story is. You are just presented with a silhouetted world, the World of Goo. On the first level of Chapter 1 you are presented with a simple structure and a few goo balls roaming around. Your task is to help these goo balls escape via a vacuum tube at the top of the screen. To do this, you need to build a structure by dragging these balls, making connecting points, and thereby building structures that the free roaming goo balls can travel on.
Sounds harder to understand than it really is. It’s pretty easy to get a handle on once you have played a couple levels. Take a look at the following video and it will all make sense.
Seems simple enough, right? The difficulty does ramp up considerably. And alone the multiple chapters and levels you’ll encounter new types of goo balls. Some float, some are rubbery. All produce new challenges.
For a little background on the game, take a look at this promo video produced by the filmmakers behind Indie Game: The Movie, an in production movie about indie game developers.
World of Goo has something so many games are missing, personality, finish. It’s a great game, and it’s great to finally have it on the iPad. World of Goo in all it’s gooey glory releases on December 16th for the iPad at $9.99.
Developer: inXile Entertainment
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.1
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 4
Graphics / Sound Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Game Controls Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Gameplay Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Replay Value Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
A sequel to the first Fantastic Contraption, itself a conversion from a flash based online game, Fantastic Contraption is a bit of a mind bender for those who haven’t tried it before. It’s a physics based puzzler but one that offers a whole wealth of choice. It’s almost overwhelmingly so in fact.
The aim of each level is to create a machine to transport an object from the blue zone to the pink zone on the screen. To do this, well, it’s entirely up to you how you want to do it – within reason. You’re given an array of different objects to do this, you can add extra wheels, connecting rods and all manners of other bits and pieces. Press the Start button and the object takes off, hopefully following the plan you had in mind. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what needs to be done and will only take seconds, other times though it feels extraordinarily convoluted and complex. That’s the beauty to Fantastic Contraption 2 though, it’s really quite cerebral in nature. You just have to persevere through the mind boggling part until it all begins to click in your head.
It’s refreshing to not have a ’set’ way of finishing a level. All 66 levels are unlocked from the start so if you’re truly stumped on one level, you can always switch to another. And believe me, you’re going to be stumped. I was scratching my head many a time while playing through it.
Besides those levels, there’s also a level editor facility which is rather satisfying to mess around with and there’s also online level play functionality which helps extend longevity.
Controls are slightly fiddly at times requiring accurate touches of the screen, but once you get around this, Fantastic Contraption 2 is quite a thought provoking puzzler – one that requires a lot of concentration and a bit of patience too.
The goal of Dunk It, like StarDunk, is to fire your basketball into the hoop. Unlike StarDunk, your ball is attached to one of 4 characters, all of which function exactly the same but have different grunting sounds for when they fall to the ground in bone crunching fashion. The graphics are fun, there are three game types to play through (although all have the same game mechanics), and aiming for high scores is exciting, but there is a lot of room for growth here.
The aim of each level is to create a machine to transport an object from the blue zone to the pink zone on the screen. To do this, well, it’s entirely up to you how you want to do it – within reason. You’re given an array of different objects to do this, you can add extra wheels, connecting rods and all manners of other bits and pieces. Press the Start button and the object takes off, hopefully following the plan you had in mind. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what needs to be done and will only take seconds, other times though it feels extraordinarily convoluted and complex. That’s the beauty to Fantastic Contraption 2 though, it’s really quite cerebral in nature. You just have to persevere through the mind boggling part until it all begins to click in your head.
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