FingerGaming

Rating:

• Price: $4.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0.0
• Official Site: Illusion Labs

I enjoy a good challenge. I have a great deal of respect for games that are able to successfully balance difficulty with a sense of fairness, as far too many “difficult” games are only so because of cheapness or unwieldy controls. Sway, unfortunately, falls into the latter category. Despite its fun concept and great graphics, a clumsy control scheme ultimately kills the fun.

In Sway, you’re charged with guiding a ragdoll-like creature through a series of stages, avoiding obstacles and collecting star icons on the way to each level’s exit. Using both thumbs, you control your character’s arms. By pressing on either the left or the right half of the screen, you’ll make your character grab on to whatever object is in the background. After a successful grab, moving your thumb left and right will make the creature swing back and forth. The idea is to constantly transfer movement from one thumb to the other in order to make your character swing through each level.

When you get a good bit of momentum going, it’s possible to link several swings together at once. This is where the game is at its best. It’s incredibly satisfying when you’re able to traverse a great distance and overcome a string of obstacles all in one well-timed run.

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Tags: Action, illusion labs, Puzzle, reviews, sway

ngmoco has released its latest iPhone app today: the word puzzler WordFu ($0.99). “Oh no,” you say. “Not Boggle. Anything but Boggle.” Well, yes, it’s essentially Boggle. But! It’s a particularly feature-rich Boggle, with enough original mechanics to make it worth a look.

WordFu presents players with a screen full of dice, each of which has a different letter printed on each side. By shaking your iPhone, you roll the dice. Spelling words using the top faces of the dice will earn bonuses and power-ups, which can be used to freeze the timer, flip individual dice, or double your score, among other things.

WordFu features a robust physics engine, which allows players to tilt their iPhones to peek at the letters printed on each side of every die, for maximum die-flipping effectiveness and strategy. An achievement system and online leaderboards are included as well, along with the ability to battle other players over WiFi.

A preview video is available on ngmoco’s official website, complete with obnoxious kung fu noises. Watch your speaker volume, there.

Tags: ngmoco, Puzzle, word game, wordfu

Ah, now this is more like it. Though titles like iSniper and Super Sniper managed to attract a fair degree of App Store popularity, they never really caught my interest. It seems to me that iPhone sniper games have up until now focused exclusively on point-and-click shooting, and have done little to recreate the gameplay variety and tense atmosphere that made Konami’s Silent Scope series so much fun to play.

Codename Lone Wolf: Elite Sniper ($1.99), on the other hand, looks to feature everything I like about sniper games, along with the requisite in-depth shooting mechanics. Players will resolve hostage situations, protect VIPs, perform assassinations, and out-snipe enemy snipers throughout Lone Wolf’s 25 missions.

The control scheme also sounds like an improvement over previous releases — whereas other sniper titles have introduced artificial challenge through random scope shaking, maintaining a steady aim in Lone Wolf actually requires keeping a steady finger on the on-screen trigger. With its mission variety and well-thought-out control scheme, this one easily stands out among its App Store competition.

Tags: codename lone wolf, shooter, sniping

Tommy Refenes, developer of the Independent Games Festival finalist title Goo!, has revealed his company’s latest iPhone project: the scratch-off lottery ticket simulator Free Money ($0.99). This exciting application blesses players with the opportunity to accumulate thousands of dollars in virtual cash prizes. Unfortunately, the current version of Free Money will not make your iPhone magically dispense actual money. Don’t be fooled!

It’s a silly idea, sure, but all it took was the screenshot above to instantly win me over. According to its App Store feature list, Free Money features amazing graphics, amazing sound, and amazing gameplay, along with “OTHER THINGS!” Agreed.

Refenes is also the developer behind the Simon-styled memory game Beat!, which recently saw a major gameplay upgrade and the release a free Lite version. Give it a try, if you like.

Tags: beat, free money, pillowfort, simulation

In this round-up, Gamasutra highlights some of the notable jobs posted in its industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Capcom, NetDevil, Realtime Worlds, PlayFirst, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site’s daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, ‘serious games’, independent games and more.

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Tags: career, gamasutra, jobs

Every Thursday, FingerGaming rounds up the most popular free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as current that day on the iTunes App Store. This week’s top titles are:

1. Tower Bloxx Deluxe 3D Free
2. Deal or No Deal: Million Dollar Mission Lite
3. Arcade Bowling Lite
4. Vault Breaker FULL Free
5. Fastlane Street Racing Lite
6. Pole Position: Remix Lite
7. Bounce On Lite
8. iSniper Lite
9. Truck vs Grenade
10. Super Monkey Ball Lite

Digital Chocolate’s recently released Tower Bloxx Deluxe 3D Free soars to the top of this week’s free app chart, but fails to make an impact on the paid side. The App Store reviews for the Free version tell an interesting story: many users report that they are unwilling to pay $5.99 for the full version of Tower Bloxx Deluxe 3D when cheap or free alternative titles like Topple and Tiki Towers are already available.

The Lite versions of Deal or No Deal: Million Dollar Mission and Fastlane Street Racing face similar issues. Though both titles place high on the free charts, their paid versions see considerably fewer downloads. The full version of Deal or No Deal currently ranks 29th in App Store sales, while Fastlane Street Racing places 30th.

Skyworks’ skeeball sim Arcade Bowling is the only title to make an appearance on both the free and paid charts this week. Pole Position: Remix and Vault Breaker also make impressive showings this week, while former chart leader Super Monkey Ball Lite drops to tenth place.

Tags: arcade bowling, charts, deal or no deal, top free apps, tower bloxx deluxe 3d

In an interview posted today at FingerGaming sister site Gamasutra, id Software co-founder John Carmack reveals that his team has been experimenting with a rudimentary version of the Quake III codebase on the iPhone platform.

Quake Live, id Software’s browser-based upgrade of its classic PC first-person shooter Quake III Arena, debuted yesterday. Carmack says that the game’s core rendering technology transferred relatively smoothly to the browser-based Quake Live, while preliminary iPhone experiments needed significant renderer tweaking.

“It’s interesting, because I am kind of poking through the Quake III codebase on the iPhone right now, for some after-hours work a couple of us are doing,” Carmack said, “and I’m going to have to go in and make some serious renderer changes to get that up to the performance that I want. But for Quake Live, the game rendering code didn’t change at all.”

Carmack did not confirm whether these experiments will lead to a full Quake Live port for the platform. He believes, however, that Quake Live’s gameplay upgrades would likely find their way into a future iPhone Quake product, should its development officially begin.

Carmack explains: “I could go on for a long time, again, just about the iPhone stuff. We’ve got a couple things going on on that, and some things have not gone great with our working with outside companies on it.

But there are several of us that are poking around in our somewhat after-hours and discretionary time on things. It’s kind of exciting to look at that. We’re working with a more vanilla Quake III codebase.

But now that I’m thinking about all this stuff, if we turned this into a product, even if it’s not part of the Quake Live framework, we’ll probably go in and pick up all the tweaks and changes to the core gameplay and the levels that have been developed for Quake Live.”

id Software is currently developing an iPhone port of Wolfenstein RPG, and confirms that other projects are in the works for the platform.

Tags: id, john carmack, port, quake iii

Man, that was fast. After making its iPhone debut only a few days ago with the release of Space Invaders, Taito forges onward with its second release for the platform: a port of the Nintendo DS and Wii cooking sim Cooking Mama ($6.99).

Like its console and portable predecessor titles, Cooking Mama for the iPhone challenges players to successfully prepare a number of culinary dishes that range from simple (instant ramen, popcorn) to offensively decadent (shark’s fin soup). You aren’t trusted enough to do this on your own, though. The ever-present Mama will be with you at every step to provide you with ingredients, utensils, and advice. She also won’t hesitate to disown you at the slightest screw-up (“You’re not mine!!”), so please cook carefully.

Cooking Mama’s price runs a little high for an iPhone title, but if the controls are properly implemented, this could easily end up being just as fun as the original Nintendo DS titles. As a big fan of Cooking Mama 2 in particular, I’m seriously thinking about picking this one up.

Tags: cooking mama, port, simulation, taito

Fresh off of its win in the Excellence in 3D category in this year’s International Mobile Gaming Awards, Secret Exit releases its winning title Zen Bound ($4.99) today in the iTunes App Store.

Described as more of a “tactile experience” than a traditional goal-oriented video game, Zen Bound challenges players to wrap rope around sculpted objects throughout its 51 included levels. Zen Bound supports both tilt and multitouch control schemes, and includes an appropriately soothing 22-minute soundtrack, which can be downloaded to your iPhone for free via an in-game download link.

Zen Bound is also a finalist in the Best iPhone Game and Audio Achievement categories in the upcoming Independent Games Festival Mobile 2009 competition. Zen Bound’s official gameplay trailer is below.

Tags: chillingo, Puzzle, secret exit, zen bound

Illusion Labs follows up on its hugely successful iPhone titles Labyrinth and Touchgrind with today’s release of Sway ($4.99), a unique action-puzzler controlled via the iPhone’s multitouch functionality.

Sway begins with a wizard blowing up your home planet. Stupid wizards! You play as the now-planetless Lizzy the Lizard as she searches for her missing friends Ninja Man, Stitches, and Box Boy, all of whom are now scattered throughout the galaxy. It’s up to you to guide Lizzy as she swings through a number of bizarre worlds to reunite her extremely diverse family.

Sway has a vibrant, cartoony look to it that I like, and it could shape up to be a lot of fun. See the trailer below for a good idea of what the gameplay is like, or check out the official website for more details.

Tags: Action, illusion labs, Puzzle, sway