Entries for June 2009

Some games seem destined for certain platforms. It feels as if the Iphone has been awaiting the arrival of Star Defense since its inception and together they’ve merged to form a marriage made in the heavens. Ngmoco has created a game that turns tower defense on its head without getting you dizzy while maintaining the playability, depth and clarity of the genre’s finest.

If you ever play or simply witness Quake 2 running at full particle-sparking glory on a Nokia N95 you’ll be blown away by the capabilities residing in today’s modern cell phones. The powerful Iphone would seem ready to deliver some high-quality first person shooters to our pockets after demonstrating it’s chops on recently released 3^rd person standouts like Terminator Salvation and Resident Evil. Now arriving on the mobile killing fields is Prey Invasion for the Iphone by the storied 3D Realms.

When launching a flight simulator you have to know going in that it’s virtually impossible to satisfy everyone. A developer has to decide which wildly divergent audience they’re targeting: arcade (Top Gun), hardcore (Xplane), or somewhere in between. Red Bull Air Race World Championship by Artificial Life aims for the arcade side of center and for the most part lands on the runway.

3D mobile gaming is expanding by leaps and bounds thanks to the Iphone and its open SDK. The only problem with this is that some fine games from smaller developers may get buried in the avalanche of apps being released in the app store. Hopefully this won’t happen to TowerMadness from Limbic as this is a refreshing and innovative slant on the tower defense genre.

Top Gun was released in 1986 and such was its impact that 23 years later, without the benefit of a sequel, it is still spinning out salutes to Maverick, Goose, Iceman and Viper.

The latest is Top Gun for the Iphone by Paramount which provides an opportunity to step back into a time when few would of ever imagined we’d be flying jets on cell phones.