The iOS gaming thread

Hmm... a few more:

Punch Quest is free for the holidays.

Le Havre is $2.99

I don't know, man. It's a 6.6MB download, so it's probably totally legit.

I just think it's great that Microsoft is giving opportunities to little known indy developers like Toan Tran for their iOS conversions!

If you like Halo 4 for iPhone, you're going to love Populous: http://www.appshopper.com/games/populous

Peter Molyneux is doing a Kickstarter for a game that is a total ripoff of this. It's pretty shameless.

Yeah, AppShopper is the best. iTunes has a wish list feature but Apple has never gotten around to putting it on the device. AppShopper fills that need and lets you watch for sales as well as looking at an app's price history. It's a shame Apple is trying to kill it; earlier this week the AppShopper app got dropped from the store because of a new rule about not duplicating app store functionality.

TouchArcade's app does the same thing (for games only of course). That's what I use.

The Populous guy could learn a few things from the Halo 4 guy. Like how to flood the store with fake five star reviews so people don't instantly recognize it as a scam from the rating.

It frustrates me that the only way I can search the iTunes Store is to first load the iTunes Home Page. I have no use for the iTunes Home page and I've never purchased anything based on seeing it on the home page. Its like a stupid splash screen I need to click past to see the real content.

Why can't I set my home page to a blank search screen? Or even an AppShopper/Pocket Tactics etc home screen? I guess thats my PC roots showing, wanting to customize the interface. I understand Apple wants to put advertising in my face, but at least let me mark my interests so they can advertise strategy games to me instead of Taylor Swift CDs.

I guess my mistake is that I'm using iTunes at all. I probably should just bookmark something like Appshopper in my web browser and then only open iTunes via external links, straight to the relevant page.

You know you can browse the App Store from your iDevice, right? You don't have to open iTunes on your 'puter.

Thanks for this. I have Spectromancer on Steam but wasn't aware its on iOS. Well worth a buck its implemented decently.

For some reason, maybe its dyslexia, I sometimes read Appshopper as Asshopper.

The iOS port of Spectromancer is quite excellent. As for the game, I didn't care for the duels which IMO are ruined by the totally random card distribution, but the campaign is very enjoyable if you don't mind replaying some scenarios when those random card selections ruin your hand. Also, play on Easy because it's a Russian game!

It's been a while since I played, but IIRC, my biggest beef with Spectromancer was that the lack of any control over what went into your deck made winning new cards more of a penalty than a reward. It's like if Ascension didn't have a mechanic for removing cards from your deck. Without that, adding new cards is just watering your deck down and making the game increasingly random.

Spectromancer is an excellent game, but it's best not to approach it as a "card" game. There are no shuffling or drawing mechanisms, just a set of abilities with inter-related cooldowns. It has more in common with Guild Wars and Le Havre than Ascension and Dominion.

Yes, the abilities are randomly selected (with some hidden constraints), but I think good players can come up with a decent strategy for pretty much any combination. Maybe not a perfect strategy, but random setup is one of the few ways to keep an otherwise deterministic game interesting for all skill levels.

I've been playing some SolForge, because I was curious - I'm not opposed to a good CCG on iPad, but I'm not sure this is it.

It looks gorgeous and I like the leveling mechanic, but basically it feels like a limited Magic, pared down to just the creature combat with very few 'enchant creature'-cards and even fewer instants.

You draw five cards each round, play two and discard the rest. Deck management isn't in yet, but unless they have a lot of very different cards coming, there's no cards that influences draw, deck orders, the opponents cards or anything like that. There's a bit of manoeuvring on the battle fields, since each side has five spots and a creature fights the one directly opposite, but once creatures are down, they can't change places (apart from one I've seen). There's no creature abilities to activate, what few there are fires off when the creature is played or are passive. There are also only a few creature abilities. There's trample and the one where they don't get summoning sickness and that's it.

When you play a card a version one level higher goes to the discard pile, after some time you level as well and gain the ability to play higher level cards. So strategy seems to be all about playing the cards that will benefit you right now (block whatever the opponent is sending towards you) balanced with playing cards, you'd like to see show up leveled later. You do sorta pick certain cards to count on, so you level more of those if they show up, but there really isn't a lot of themed strategy or great card combinations that I have seen.

SolForge fell flat for me, too. It's certainly no Ascension. It reminded me of Spectromancer, but worse (so far--I know this is just a preview).

One of the commenters over on my site left a really well-thought through breakdown of why he didn't like SolForge - here's his synopsis:

The whole thing's over here: http://forums.pockettactics.com/discussion/comment/6054/#Comment_6054

While I'd agree in a general sense that SolForge needs a more meat to be an interesting game at this point (it's worth remembering that it's still a long way from launch), I would strongly disagree that criticism #2, above, is a problem. In fact, I think the hard limit on card plays is one of the game's main strengths. It forces you to make tough choices every turn, and that's a Good Thing. I'm also not really convinced that it needs a resource mechanic (especially since card plays effectively act as a resource in the sense that they limit what you can do in a turn).

The design does have a number of other problems that need addressing; in particular, as Hanzii says, it needs more (and more interesting) non-creature cards to really tighten the screws on that "two cards per turn" core mechanic. I like the idea of giving the player the conflicting goals of either playing more creatures or playing cards that support the creatures that he already has in play, but in the current design, playing more creatures is almost always the wiser option.

How's the iOS version of GTA3? It's currently $0.99, which I'm quite tempted to pick up unless it's absolutely terrible.

I prefer the 2D stuff like Chinatown Wars on the platform, but they did a pretty good job porting the 3D versions to it. If you're good with virtual controls, which I am not.

Cool. For $0.99, I figured it was worth checking out. And I think the controls work really well. Spent the past hour driving around Liberty City. I know these maps better than I do Vancouver.

Also the limit isn't hard. There's a Something Scout that at level 2 and 3 lets you play an extra card each round. It's pretty weak and thus hard to keep alive, which fits with what Ben is saying.
I agree a lot with point 4 above.

Rare cards are also very powerful. You're almost never in doubt whether to play one of them. Like the scout above they aren't necessarily unbalanced, but you know you want to level them, when they come up. So not much decision making there.

New ipad owner here. I've read back few pages for current tips and bought Bastion. I've never played it before on any platform, but it seems to work nicely - well maybe except for the slightly blurry scrolling, which I assume is because the screen has 3 megapixels.

Yeah, seeing the screenshots of GTA3 with all those virtual buttons made me expect terrible controls, but they actually work really well. I bought it a few days ago for a buck and was so impressed I turned around and paid the full five bucks for Vice City.

Downloading GTA3 for my iPhone. I hate you all!

Going for a spin around Portland is interesting. Nostalgia factor isn't bad. Can't actually picture playing it all the way to the end. Heck, can't picture making it to Staunton. This is one controller I don't want to throw across the room.

It's 50/50 if it'll CTD after the intro movie. Going to try it on my wife's iPad, too.

You should just assume every game is going to crash on an iPad 1.

It didn't crash after the intro movie, so ha! It crashed when I went to save at the safe house.

One of my all-time favorite iOS games, Orbital, is now free for the first time ever. Jump on that!

Thanks for the tip. I now have a high score of 4 points.

Spaceteam is absolute genius. Everyone with a friend with a phone or tablet should own it and buy upgrades. The Verge agrees and has a video.

Puzzle & Dragons is pretty awesome. Its like Bejeweled + Pokemon.

Kairosoft's Dungeon Village is $.99. I put it in my top three of their games. It still has the issue of limited replayability, but it was totally worth a buck. I think I played through 3 or 4 times.

Orbital is freaking hard. I have a high score of 26, but I can't even get close to that again. Also, I don't want to play anything but gravity mode. Is that so wrong?

I managed to get a score of 81 in Supernova mode. Closest I've got since then is 35. Freaking hard is right.

I only play the supernova mode, my current high score is 96. But all those 3-5x combos are mostly luck.

This is truth. Terrific at any gathering for both the players and non listening to the nonsense being frantically called out. We had some network flakiness, so hopefully that can be made more robust.

I found it hard to get everyone joined into a Spaceteam game, even all on the same Wifi network.

I turned on Bluetooth, and that made it work?

That is probably just generic Apple iOS wifi flakiness. My iPhone / iPad sync over wifi, or music library sharing regularly just fails to work. The latest itunes seems slightly better.