Cube Runner
Kerby turned me on to a new iPod Touch app, my first game: Cube Runner (iTunes Link).
The graphics are not amazing: mostly just red, yellow, and orange coloured cubes littered across a grey and blue landscape. (Somewhere in the middle of the easy level pack you get a glowing green set of cubes for a while, before it reverts back). Your objective is simple: avoid the cubes. Even a glancing collision will destroy your “ship”.
It’s unclear whether there’s a real ‘end’ to the game, and I’m suspicious that once you’ve played through the various levels (denoted by sandbox-gameplay-style cube fields separated by shorter static pipelines) it will simply cycle you through again.
Your score is determined by how many seconds you’ve been flying without crashing. Currently as you can see, my high score is 390: it looks as if they get into the tens of thousands.
For gameplay of increased difficulty, the user may select the “medium” or “hard” level packs. This, as far as I can tell, increases the speed at which your ship flies and possibly the number and density of cubes. Flying faster is harder, but definitely more exciting.
Gameplay to start with, though, is really what makes this game so much fun. Simply grasp the iPod or iPhone (I recommend landscape style, found by pressing the i in the lower right hand corner of the menu screen, familiar to OS X widget users). This makes it easier to grasp the device like a steering wheel. The brilliant aspect of having an iPod Touch or iPhone in terms of games is that it has a built in accelerometer: so instead of pushing buttons on the screen, you manipulate it in a real 3-D environment, which translates into the game’s 3-D world. Thus, as you tilt the device to the left, the ship angles to the left, while maintaining forward momentum (I’d hoped that by tilting the device forward I could cause the ship to fly faster, and vice versa for braking, but no such luck). This is what makes the game amazingly addicting though, being able to fly a ship like you’re actually flying a ship-sort of the way joysticks made flight simulators that much cooler.
The difference between this and some of the more pricier games (note: Cube Runner is as of right now, completely free) such as Super Monkey Ball and Cro-Mag Rally Racing is mostly the graphics and goal of the game. However, the overall feel is the same, I think, in the controls and the usage of the real treat: the accelerometer. I highly recommend Cube Runner for iPod Touch and iPhone users working on the cheap.
Also on my iPod in the way of games you can find Tap Tap Revenge, sort of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform. Mostly you just tap out the beat on the screen when the spheres line up at the edge of the screen (see screenshot below), and music plays in the background. It’s not a bad pass time, though, which is really the only reason I game on my iPod.
There was no small amount of iPod gaming Saturday Night while my two iPhone Buddies, Kerby and Ed, and I were in line for the Dark Knight in IMAX. Tap Tap Revenge is nice for that because it has a two player mode (shown below), but is much more useful in two player mode on the iPhone, because of the speaker. Otherwise you’re just tapping spheres on a screen.
Tap Tap Revenge isn’t terribly amazing, but that’s not to say poorly done. The idea is there, and the porting of music into gaming has been successful in the past, but it’s strange on a handheld device, especially since there’s no feedback or anything. It is, however, rich in graphics and laid out effectively. It’s also cheap (read: free), and can be found here at its iTunes Link.
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