On Tap

Good New Games

Sin or Win (iPad)

What it is: A frantic game about juggling cavemen that will test the limits of your touchscreen.

Why it’s interesting: During the natural flow of the game, you have to choose between two scoring systems that work against each other, giving its single mode unusual variety.

Ice Rage (Universal)

What it is: A polished, fast-paced, arcade style hockey game where you can play as a bear and slash the hell out of your opponent without penalty.

Why it’s interesting: On hard mode, you control both your skater and your goalie with the same input, which somehow works.

Pirouette (iPad)

What it is: A fascinating linear game with beautiful pixel art that tells the story of a woman (I think?) who either has several dying wives or is crazy.

Why it’s interesting: The game got rejected from the App Store with a request to reclassify it as a book, which raises all sorts of super deep philosophical questions about the nature of games. Also, the writing is fantastic.

—Nick

Get These Games

It’s basically impossible to keep up with every notable iOS game, so from time to time I go back through some sources to see if I missed anything good. Turns out I totally, totally did.

Corpse Craft (iPad)

Ever since Puzzle Quest came out a few years ago, I’ve been delighted by the trend of puzzle/RPG hybrids. But after playing Corpse Craft, I can’t believe I haven’t seen more combinations of puzzle and strategy. Corpse Craft’s core mechanic is beautifully simple; you play a SameGame-style block breaker in the center of the screen to collect resourses, then use those resources to build creatures to attack your enemy. The game includes tons of other compelling features, from the Edward Gorey inspired art to the day/night cycle of battles, but really the basic idea is so good that I would play it without any of that. So when you add in all the attention to detail, you end up with something pretty special.

Paul & Percy (iPad)

Sometimes it just feels good to push boxes around. For the lifelong gamer, it scratches a primal itch. Paul & Percy—a smart, simple, and pure puzzle platformer—scratches it but good. You play as the two titular characters, one on each side of a split screen, and you control one at a time to help both reach an end goal. The touch controls are perfect, the game looks great, it has a cheeky sense of humor, but above all else, the puzzles are just really well designed. The early stages aren’t too easy, the game introduces interesting new mechanics at a regular pace, and the harder levles never feel unfair. Very impressive.

Moxie 2 (iPhone or iPad)

From its intro video to its wooden textures to its utilitarian interface to its folksy slogan, everything about Moxie 2 feels old-fashioned in the best way. Building on a classic word game convention, your goal is to swap new letters into an existing word to make new words. Rounds are fast-paced—you only get 64 characters to make a high score—and the game gives you the freedom to play however you want. Moxie quickly becomes an intense balance of risk vs. reward—do you want to play low scoring common words that can accept most letters, or higher scoring complex words that will force you to skip valuable characters? I’ve played a lot of this game, and I feel like I’ve barely tested the surface of the strategy it offers. I can’t wait to see how deep it goes.

—Nick

Thank You Mr. Miyamoto

Twenty five years later, we’re still thinking up new ways to jump. But I doubt we’ll ever find a better one.

(Via.)

Tetris

Can you change the way you think about a game you’ve been playing for decades?

When you try the new version of Tetris, released to the App Store last week, you’ll need to answer that question. The developer wants you to cede control over the game’s iconic falling blocks in favor of their new one-touch scheme, and making this request even more troublesome, that developer is Electronic Arts. Oy.

Let’s get a few things out of the way: the best version of Tetris is Tetris DS, this new version, hereafter called Tetris for iOS, isn’t in that discussion; its “Galaxy” mode is kinda cool and kinda infuriating; EA’s Origin should be avoided at all cost, even though you can’t play multiplayer without it, which sucks; their “T-Coin” and “T-Club” systems for unlocking new content are similarly shitty; you can play the game the traditional way, but the swipe-based controls will let you down; and just so this doesn’t seem like a litany of complaints, the game is real pretty and makes nice use of Futura Bold. But none of that is important.

Here’s what matters:

Notice that one on the left, “One-Touch”? Tap that, select a difficulty, and this is what you’ll see:

I think you get where this is going. Tap one of the numbered shadows and the block falls into place—no rotating, no dropping, no nothing. One-touch Tetris.

EA has desecrated a masterpiece by dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator. Right? If you’re like me, it’s hard to resist that reaction. I mean, I’ve been rotating and dropping blocks for as long as I can remember, and no soulless conglomerate is going to take that from me. But before we get too carried away, take a second to back out to the home screen, fire up “Marathon” mode instead—which features traditional Tetris controls implemented via swipes—and crank it up to level 10.

It doesn’t take long for my screen to fill with accidental gaps. For high level play, I find the swipe controls completely unusable. Further, I can’t see any way to make them better while still giving the player full control over the blocks. I mean, what other option is there? Tilt controls? Not precise. Virtual D-pad? Please.

So, if we want Tetris on our iPhones (and I sure as hell do) then we need a new control scheme. Is EA’s “One-touch” mode the answer?

When I play Tetris, I only want to get four-line clears (aka “Tetrises”). I’m not trying to brag (because that would be an absurdly lame brag), but rather establish that I’ve played enough Tetris to have a specific style of play. And after a week of Tetris for iOS, playing One-touch mode feels completely natural.

Unsurprisingly, the game isn’t any harder with One-touch. Even when I want to do something unusual—like create a long gap for a straight piece—if the option isn’t presented at first, it will be after I tap “cycle” to display more options. (Pro-tip: you can also just tap anywhere on the field besides the shadow blocks to cycle options.) Cycling seems like a pain at first, and it does break some of the mode’s blissful simplicity, but without it the mode would in fact be dumbed-down. It quickly became second nature for me.

But I also don’t feel that One-touch mode strips Tetris of its challenge, or at least any of the challenge that I value. When playing with a control pad or keyboard, it doesn’t take long to for the basic manipulation of blocks to burn itself into muscle memory. Once that happens, Tetris becomes entirely a game of strategy and reflex, forcing you to rapidly place blocks in good places.

One-touch mode retains that element. The game doesn’t make good choices for you, and that frantic, panicky feeling still kicks in when the timer bar plummets through the shadow blocks. Okay, so you lose the struggle of having to squeeze blocks in unlikely places when your tower grows too high, and super-twitchy manual dexterity is no longer required to play at the highest speeds. Those things never mattered to me, but if those are core elements of your Tetris experience, then One-touch isn’t for you.

A week ago, I would have told you it was impossible to make a great Tetris for touchscreen. Now, when I pull out my iPhone, tap that horrible EA-ified icon, and load up One-touch mode, I feel like I’m playing an honest, real, uncompromised game of of Tetris. And that’s awesome.

Update Complete

New games on the list! We’ve added a couple to the “exceptional” category, a bunch under “enjoyable,” and links for everything. Here’s what’s new:

• Fractal: A beautifully made tile-based puzzle game, with a complex core mechanic that takes patience to master and will have you seeing hexagons when you close your eyes. If you like: Go
• Halcyon: A mutli-touch take on color matching that feels more like playing a virtual guitar than a videogame. The later stages will test your limits. If you like: Minority Report
• World of Goo: What needs to be said? One of the best physics puzzlers of all time, perfectly suited to touch. If you like: Lego

• Bloktonic: A well made matching puzzler where gems fall from four sides of the screen and stack up in the middle. If you like: Sega Swirl
• Current: Like Bust-a-Move, with a cyber style twist, and objects that reproduce in unusual patterns. If you like: Marbles
• Groove Coaster: The best pure music game to date on iOS, with great Japanese music, beat-based gameplay that goes beyond tapping, and, since it’s from the developer of Infinity Gene, an awesome art style. If you like: Gitaroo Man? No? Fine, Rock Band.
• Kosmo Spin: A simple, adorable game where you run around a tiny world, grab turnips, and fight an alien, from the makers of Bumpy Road. If you like: Super Mario Bros. 2
• LandFormer: Raise and lower the landscape to match elevations in this charming terrain puzzler. If you like: Sim City
• Minim: A cool looking and surprisingly accessible math-based puzzler that plays a bit like an exploded Drop 7. If you like: The Count from Sesame Street
• Monospace: A slick, perspective-shifting, cube-sliding puzzler, with a clean modernist look. If you like: Portal.
• Newtonica: An odd-looking game that turns out to be quite simple: rotate a sphere so that falling stars land on like-colored quadrants. If you like: Trackball games
• Steam Birds: Survival: A top-down, turn-based, WWII-era dog fighter that throws your tiny squadron against increasingly impossible odds. If you like: Baldur’s Gate
• Ticket to Ride: The classic train-based board game gets a solid iOS rendition. If you like: Settlers of Catan
• Tumble Drop: A cheerful, hilariously animated entry in the remove-blocks-so-an-object-falls-safely-to-the-ground genre. If you like: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge
• Vectorball: The classic Pong-in-3D flash game Curveball gets a Tron-styled iOS version. If you like: Ping Pong

Classic Block Breakers, with a Twist

If Tetris taught us anything, it’s that blocks are bad news. Blocks are a leading cause of cluttered screen syndrome, acute frustration, and in severe cases, death. Thankfully, makers of puzzle games been giving us new and interesting ways to make blocks disappear for nearly 30 years. And just when you thought the genre was all but tapped out, along came the iPhone.

Async Corp.

My favorite iOS games are those that would be clumsy if not impossible with traditional inputs, but feel effortless and obvious on a touch screen. Async Corp. demonstrates this perfectly: tap a block on one side of the screen, then one on the other side, and they swap places if a larger matching block results. It feels like a mechanic as old as Breakout, but it never would have been natural on another platform. On top of that, the little sneezing blocks are so cute you feel bad about killing them, and the game’s faux-corporate conceit is inexplicable to the point that it somehow makes sense. A keeper. (iPhone)

Blowup!!

It’s a rare game that can earn two exclamation points, but Blowup!! lives up to its bravado. It starts with what may be the most common formula in all of “casual” games: the screen is filled with colored blocks, you tap a contiguous blob of same-colored blocks to make them disappear, and the rest fall into the void. (Fun fact: this mechanic was pioneered in 1985 by SameGame.) Blowup!! stands out from the legions of lazy clones by focusing on a single aspect of the formula: creating the biggest single color blob possible. But what really makes the game special is how it creates that focus. As your blob gets bigger, the individual blocks transform into cooler and cooler robots. I know, right? Blowup!! uses a ton of other clever tweaks to breathe life into a tired formula, but really, you should just play it and see for yourself. (iPhone)

Unify

If it’s not clear already, here at On Tap, we ♥ Zach Gage. The dude just has a knack for making interesting, unique, and super pretty games. His titles Bit Pilot, Halcyon, and Spelltower are all instant iOS classics, but his first effort for iPhone, Unify, shouldn’t be forgotten. It uses the classic match-four-falling-blocks-to-clear-them mechanic, but in Unify, the blocks fall from both sides of the screen, landing on a central line. All sorts of unexpected gameplay scenarios arise from this one simple twist, but my favorite is how it affects combos. I’ve never really been able to “see” combos in puzzle games; they mostly happen as a result of chance rather than any deliberate planning on my part. But for whatever reason, Unify reverses this phenomenon. I almost never get combos on accident, and I find it unprecedentedly easy to design them. So rather than just feeling lucky when blocks start exploding all over the place, I actually get a sense of accomplishment. And isn’t that why we play puzzle games anyway? (iPhone)

You should download SpellTower

Last night, SpellTower (iPad) hit the App Store. It’s a new word puzzle game by Zach Gage, creator of Halcyon and Bit Pilot, so it was the easiest download in a while. It’s also one of the easiest recommendations in a while. If you’re looking for a new word game, you should feel good about skipping this post and just downloading it.

If you’ve played PopCap’s Bookworm then SpellTower will feel familiar. It’s largely the same interaction: you’re presented with a big board of letter tiles, and you drag from letter to letter to form words. I’ve spent a lot of time with Bookworm, and I was worried that SpellTower would feel too similar. In my brief time with it, I’m already convinced Spell Tower is a significantly better game.

The critical difference is that you have a few methods for clearing tiles without actually using them in a word. Some tiles cause a whole row to clear, and lengthy words knock out all adjacent tiles. These effects give you a small but robust set of strategies for tackling the challenges the game throws at you. The game modes are also nicely varied, each making you think about the game and your approach in a different way. I find that I enjoy spending time in each.

If you like word games, then this is a must-buy. It looks great to boot. Grab it here.

— David

Pinball Games for iPad and iPhone

It tends to be the case that pre-touch video game formats will always feel flawed on iOS devices. Surprisingly, there’s one that does better on the iPad than any other console or computer I’ve experienced: pinball. The vertical screen, the physicality of the device, the short session nature of pinball — all feel like a natural fit.

Unfortunately there just aren’t that many good pinball apps out there. And you can trust me: over the past few weeks I’ve purchased and played over two dozen different pinball games and it’s a very bizarre little pocket of the App Store. I tried every app that looked like it had even a small chance of being decent, and what I found were a few gems and some weird surprises. I plan on maintaining this post as new pinball games come out, so consider this The State of the iOS Pinball Union.

The Best

I’ll start with some recommendations. There’s a gold standard here, and it’s set by the Russian studio GameProm. They’re the team responsible for Pinball HD, War Pinball HD, Slayer Pinball Rocks HD, and the upcoming Da Vinci Pinball (presumably also of the HD persuasion).

If I had to recommend a single pinball game, it’d be War Pinball HD. It features three tables that are, for some reason, based on decades-old military films. The people of 1990 may have missed their chance to enjoy Charlie Sheen’s face on a pinball machine, but now we don’t have to make the same mistake thanks to the Navy Seals table. Platoon strikes me as tonally wrong for pinball, which just makes me like it more.

But my favorite of the bunch is the one with a tiny model of Chuck Norris shooting a gun: Missing in Action. It’s the easiest table in the game, but I think it has the best flow. The multiball is a delightful, well-earned payoff, unlike most of these other games which freely give away what ought to be a rare and thrilling moment.

Slayer Pinball Rocks is strange and wonderful, though not as well thought out as War Pinball. I do give it points for being frequently insane. Like, how awesome is it that you unlock needlessly long phrases like “GLOBAL GENOCIDE” and “MELTING FLESH”? But my favorite feature has to be a bloody spike pit in the corner that does nothing but increase the volume of the music when you land a ball in it.

All of the GameProm games are worth checking out, but they also suffer from severe crashitude. In fact, War Pinball will often lock up right when you finish, but before it saves your high score, which is basically the worst possible time for a pinball game to crash. They’re also fairly challenging games, especially War Pinball, and the tutorials are a confusing mess of arrows and broken English, so be warned that they aren’t particularly approachable.

If you are indeed looking for something simple and friendly, I find myself weirdly drawn to Frogger Pinball (from the team behind the great Metroid Pinball for the DS). It’s by no means an amazing game, but it’s breezy, polished, and short enough to master. It takes advantage of being a digital game, offering boss fights and such that you could never achieve with a real physical table. 

Another game that plays with the possibilities of digital is Undead Attack Pinball HD, a cute mix between tower defense and pinball. Hordes of zombies come in waves from above while you run them down with pinballs and defend the gutter. It’s not quite strong enough that I find myself going to it often, but it’s a nice break from the more challenging traditional games and it’s a great premise. I’d like to see more people designing tables that only work in a video game, and especially with multitouch.

Others

These aren’t my favorites, but if you’ve expired the previous, you should consider checking these out. Starting with the most recommended:

Theme Park Pinball: A very well made game with some fun in-app purchases (like one add-on to make all the games look run-down). All the tables are in the vein of older mechanical machines without much complexity, so there’s not much depth.

Pinball Tristan: I grew up on a Mac, so Tristan was one of the only games I had as a kid, alongside Prince of Persia and Glider. Tickles a nostalgic itch, but I think it’s actually pretty darn well designed for being a completely 2D table. This is actually the pinball game I’ve logged the most hours in, as the simplicity makes it a fair experience on the smaller iPhone screen.

Pinball Showdown: Some interesting ideas here, and nice art, but I never got into a good flow with it. All the main objectives are very hard to hit, and there’s not much else to do, but I’m still waiting to see if I find a rhythm with it.

The Weird

Normally I’d shy away from writing about games I don’t actively recommend, but it turns out there are some incredibly bananas pinball games out there and I’d feel bad if I didn’t let you know about them.

Ice Road Pinball is themed around ice road truckers. No, not Ice Road Truckers, the show, but ice road truckers the… trope? Icy ‘tudes are one thing, but rails instead of ramps? Whoa!

And Slayer isn’t the only band to have their own pinball game: the English electropop band Goldfrapp has a hallucinatory pinball game for iPhone where your play remixes their latest album. I, yeah, I don’t know.

And perhaps the strangest pinball game comes to us from the venerable Jerky Boys. I really did play this game. It features new recordings from the Jerky Boys. I believe this picture does more than any further description could.

— David

About That Dumb Kotaku Thing

Last month, Kotaku featured a reader comment in a post under the headline “iPhone Games Just Aren’t Any Fun.” It’s a silly bit of linkbait (which I realize I am taking), expounding a stubborn “hardcore” gamer’s perspective on the iPhone as a gaming platform, and it’s not really worth a point-by-point response. One section, however, caught my attention. He says:

 

I have used [the iPhone] for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment’ (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment’ (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment’ (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain.

I know what he means. I had similar experiences on all those platforms with those exact games. So why do I see things so differently from this guy?

I currently keep 63 games on my iPhone, ranked in order, plus a bunch more I’m still checking out. (Yes, I am that cool.) You can see my top 10 above. I have had moments in each of them.

In Edge, the first game that showed me the potential of the platform, when I perfected the delicate touch that allowed me to balance on an edge indefinitely.

In Bit Pilot, when I drummed my thumbs across the screen, snagged a power up, bounced off the boundary, slipped through a gap between to asteroids, and it wasn’t an accident.

In Canabalt, when I didn’t jump at a window I could safely fall through.

In Dungeon Raid, when I found a diagonal path I hadn’t seen before, letting my circuitous line to reach one more sword, so the red X of death appeared on an particularly vexing special skull.

In Hookworld (really, all of Rocketcat’s hook games), when I dipped into the lava, mashed my rocket boots, popped out just in time, and sailed over a high rock.

In Drop7, playing on hardcore mode, when a new level of grey disks appeared, setting off a chain reaction I’d been building all game, which razed the field down to the bottom row.

In Forget-Me-Not, the first time I cleared a level, saw the layout of the next one, and my mind could instantly trace a ridiculously high-scoring path through it.

In Infinity Gene, when I stayed still amongst a swarm of attacking enemies, keeping my rapid-fire active, as their bullets barely skimmed by me.

In Tilt to Live, when I jerked the phone to the side, just like I did when I first used the NES as a little kid, only this time the device did read my mind, as my ship performed an acrobatic dodge.

When Carcassonne announced “It’s your turn now” from across the room, and a bolt of excitement shot up my spine just because I had an excuse to play around with it some more.

On a platform as novel and popular as iOS, which has attracted so many skilled developers, it’s ridiculous to say that moments like these aren’t out there for gamers of every stripe. You just have to look for them.

— Nick

Links to all these games are available on The List.