The cephalopods stared back at me from the screen, their cute eyes begging to be loved from beneath their rather bizarre hats. Hats! I grasped onto this new found glimmer of hope with grim determination. Surely, any game that features interchangeable hats which bestow great power upon their soon-to-be-calamari owner can’t be all bad?

It was only after an hour of joyful squid flinging that I realised the truth. This was no empty shell of a carbon copy. Beyond the need to pull them back on their little, gorgeous, elasticated limbs and fling them across a top-down, 2 dimensional map there were no similarities at all. Full of character, pizazz and – possibly, somewhere – jazz hands, this was gem of a game. Taking a turn based strategy game and making it into something far more action orientated is a mild stroke of genius, while making some of the characters look like cowboys or fat boy American footballers is merely the result of a mild stroke.

Tasked with telling their tale via the medium of the iPhone I embarked upon a journey that featured gorgeous static imagery between battles, stilted conversation that never really hit the mark and devious, dastardly opponents hell bent on my destruction. Countless skirmishes were lost in quick succession, the difficulty ramping up considerably well before the half way mark. Strangely, it wasn’t due to the enemies’ cunning AI or masterful skills. More often than not they just sit there until you come close enough to get bumped. No, my own ineptitude at aiming and firing squid across a screen that features traps and devices designed to hurt my little friends greatly scuppered me more than once.

But, oh, the bumping! It’s all about that here – speed, distance and hat contributing to the amount of damage my multiple-legged friends would deal to the opponents as they searched for salvation. With a variety of skills between them, such as healers, sharp shooters, double movements and whirlpool attacks, it soon became an orgy of calamari as I fought my way to the finish line.

Reaching that finish line soon became most difficult and I had to turn to my dear departed Grandfather and head some old advice he gave me to succeed. You see, during the Great War he and his squad had found themselves caught amongst a spiders web of enemy troops. Ambushed, alone and scared he hunkered down in the only defensible spot he could find, the cries of his injured and dying comrades the soundtrack to his despair. After a couple of hours he grew tired of this and decided to break through enemy lines, get re-enforcements and come back to rescue his friends. Out of ammo and time, he strapped 2 bayonets to his helmet and charged into the darkness, the flashes and reports of rifle fire his only company.

2 hours later he emerged at base camp, head caked in blood and the injured forms of 4 soldiers on his shoulders. When asked how he’d broken the enemy and rescued them single-handedly, all he could do was undo the chin strap and say “Always wear the right hat for the job”. It’s our family motto now.

Having changed things about with my little sucker legged friends I sent them back into battle time after time, new hats and abilities growing as we vanquished our foes. It lent such a charming edge to proceedings that I found myself lost in this alternative universe for quite some time.

It is then that, with great affection, I can recommend you assist these little lovelies on their adventure as well. There’s something wonderfully endearing about them and the challenges they face, while the game itself is bite-sized enough to lend itself perfectly to the platform. I can do nothing but recommend you invest yourself in it immediately.

Squids is out now on iOS 3.2 or greater for £1.49. See more artwork and screenshots from Squids in our Facebook gallery

Quarrel’s really bloody good.

For the unconverted, it’s a combination of Risk and Scrabble, but it retains all the fun of both and dispenses with the downsides. Risk is too slow and can ultimately fall apart due to chance. Quarrel rewards tactical skill and planning. Scrabble can limit you to whatever bad hand of letters you’ve grabbed from the bag. In Quarrel, you have access to the same letters as your opponent; you just might not be able to use all of them.

A Quarrel match takes place on a board divided into territories. Each of these is populated by varying numbers of units. When you want to take over another area you and your opponent battle using 8 letters that form an anagram. If you’ve got 8 units you can try to spell the entire word; any less and you have to make do with fewer letters and hope the other dude has a worse ability than you.

That’s the core conceit. It’s wrapped up in bright colours and interesting character designs for the units. If Denki had simply ported the game over from iOS to XBLA it would have remained wonderful but not seemed like a worthwhile investment since there’s an increased cost. Thankfully they’ve added an incredibly viable multiplayer mode which was offensively missing from the initial release.

There are some slight issues with controlling on a pad, like how the same button to confirm a move is the same button that will completely end your turn, so double clicking it can accidentally leave you ill prepared at the end of a round. That’s an absolutely tiny complaint when measured up to the countless successes that Quarrel makes.

Quarrel’s an excellent buy if you don’t already own the iOS version and still reasonable if you do.

In it he explains why they’ve decided not to go with the traditional 99¢ sales model and instead are pursuing the free-to-play route.

“There’s a specific revenue graph that you see for a typical packaged or downloadable game. You get a big spike of money that slowly trickles down to almost nothing. These are hit games in a hit driven industry with hit shaped revenues.

This has some fun psychological implications. When the money is good, it seems like it will never end. As a result, teams tend to overextend themselves. They hire on additional people, and they take on more ambitious and exciting projects…

…At some point, the money starts fading. The next game or port suddenly needs to be a success. You make decisions that start matching what the market is doing. You start listening to experts. You start looking back on your past success and trying to emulate them. All this makes it more difficult to comprehend and react to new opportunities. You’ve gone from a fresh new success to a fragile bloated company…

I’ve come to the conclusion that long term, the hit-driven model found in disposable, packaged games is an anti-developer business model.”

He goes into much more depth on why this is the case in the full post.

Instead of churning out hits that do well and fade away, Cook’s dream is to build games as long-term services and relationships with his customers. He wants steady streams of revenue that grow and to retain his independence.

Sounds like every entrepreneur’s dream and I wish him well. I just hope he finds a model a bit more compelling than the currently-popular one of making the game slow and filled with periods of not-playing unless you pay for a speed bump. I’ve seen it with Tiny Tower, I’ve seen it with 8 Realms and now we’ve seen it in Order Up!! To Go. That’s not what I call fun.

TripleTown’s model seems a little less punishing in that you do start out with several thousand bushes (the smallest building block for your town) and you can earn the in-game currency by playing games. However, I used about a hundred bushes in my first couple of games and earned enough coins to buy one, so I suspect that earning currency isn’t a sustainable long-term model for the gamers. Or perhaps I’m just not that good at it yet.

Have you seen any games that do the free-to-play model well?

[via @SpiltMilkStudio]

TripleTown is free for iOS 4.1+ and Android 2.2+

At various points in the game progression you’ll unlock special visits from restaurant critics offering a chance to earn more coins or more frequently surprise hygiene inspections. These see you frantically smearing the surface of your iPad pretending to scrub dishes or trying to flick rats off your counter tops. You can limit the more annoying of these visits by paying to have your kitchen cleaned. The cynical part of me suspects that this is just added motivation to buy in-game currency.

I played three restaurants out of a possible seven, simply because I don’t have months and months to devote to playing the game the cheap way. The management side of the game lets you decide what dishes to stock the ingredients for. This adds a very nice planning aspect to the fast-paced swiping-like-a-maniac segments. Once the cooking day starts you’ll receive a stream of customers and the game becomes a juggling act to keep everyone happy and dishes leaving your kitchen in a timely and presentable fashion. Alongside the normal customers you’ll also be served up picky versions who want a unique twist on their order – manage to work out what they want and you’ll earn bonus payments.

I would happily recommend this game to anyone. It’s free (to a point) and it’s fun. I just wish Chillingo hadn’t gone for “making the game dull unless you pay” route. That said, there’s every likelihood I’ll roll over and pay. A good game deserves it.

Order Up!! To Go is available now for iOS 4.0 or later.

Three different environments, each with twenty-four puzzles, are offered up and attractively presented. Each level has a variety of apparatus to use along with bonus marks for collecting the whistles located in fiddly-to-reach places. Points are then given for completing a level, the amount of clutter you have left unused and how many fiddly whistles you managed to bounce on. True to tradition, your points then convert to stars which in greater number allow you to open up later environments .. no junk yard for those who can’t even manage a back yard … unless you pay of course.

Puzzle difficulty ranges from “my dog could do that” all the way up to “insanely precise positioning of several springs required”. Solutions via the hints system are available but only cover the most basic answer. There are multiple ways to complete each level and this helps to increase the repeatability of quite a short game. To be honest though, I ran out of the desire to be creative about five levels in and just settled for “making do” .. this worked until I needed more gold stars to advance. Begrudgingly I returned to previous puzzles to have another bash.

Therein lies my issue with this game; it didn’t make me want to play it. It’s a perfectly nice release that you could take home to your Mum and it wouldn’t embarrass you with crudely-designed levels or piss-poor graphics. It’s just all very much the same with the soundtrack repeating, the graphics repeating and nothing to make you want to keep at it unless you’re a completionist that wants to get their pennies worth from this app.

It would work well as something you return to for ten minutes whilst waiting for public transport but it’s not addictive or amusing enough to warrant extended ignoring of your loved ones.

Backyard Bounce is available now on iPhone, iPod and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0+

The next update will include:

• New blocks and animals
• Doors and fences
• Bug fixes
• Foundation code for survival mode

Mojang plans to submit this update to the Android Market and the iOS App Store by the 8th Feb 2012.

Also check out our video of Minecraft: Pocket Edition in action on the Xperia PLAY from last years E3 Expo.

Order Up!! To Go!

I love management games. I love cooking. Order-Up does a brilliant job of combining the food preparation of Cooking Mama with a restaurant management sim. Make sure you have enough inventory to provide what’s the on the menu. Seat your customers and take orders. And my favourite bit, pop into the kitchen and manage 4 simultaneous food prep stations to make each meal – chop, deep fry, saute and boil. Insanely difficult to multitask but oh so satisfying when you get a full meal for four out to the wait staff.

Order Up! should be out on iOS in January, or there are Wii and 3DS versions already available.

Spice Invaders

Tower Defence seems to be all the rage these days and despite the name, Spice Invaders is definitely one of this genre. The key point for this incarnation from On5 is the upgrade trees. Swoop down onto unsuspecting planets and protect your spice-mining bases from the defending populace. Set acid traps, shoot down flying attackers or build booster towers to strengthen your defences on the open plains.

Spice Invaders should be out some time this quarter.

Home Sheep Home 2

This sequel to the previous game also features Shaun the Sheep and his friends Timmy and Shirley. Those of you who game with your children or who like a good problem will probably enjoy this game. The cutesy child-like art from Aardman Animations hides a fiendish puzzler. Thankfully, little of the challenge comes from precision and timing. These puzzles are more about doing actions in the right order and getting the correct solution.

Home Sheep Home 2 is out now for iOS 3.2 and above as well as playable online as a Flash version.

Diggin’ Dogs

If you prefer your games to require less thinking and more action, Diggin’ Dogs is a pleasingly simple game. Set your team of dogs off and they’ll start digging. Use the tilt controls on your iPhone to control their direction, picking up buried treasure, old boots and other things, in a sort of antithesis to Doodlejump. Good mindless entertainment for when you have 10 minutes to kill.

Diggin’ Dogs should be available from the app store later this month.

Yet here I now sit, at the tender age of 34, redeploying my grid based search skills on a £400 piece of electronic wizardry trying to find 15 dollar bills that have inexcplicably drifted around an inanimate, badly drawn hotel room. I want to break things. I really want to break things.

Not only are we completely wasting the genius of the iOS platform – and it is just that, genius – we’re wasting the potential that the base material of XIII offers. Being 34 I’m not only old enough to remember puzzle books, I’m also old enough to remember the wonderfully cel shaded FPS Ubisoft put out many years ago under the same moniker. It took the stylisation of the graphic novels it was based on and used it throughout. Sure, it little lacking in places but there was plenty of innovation there, long before Borderlands came along and stole all the cel shaded FPS glory.

But this – this! – is a lazy boring cash in on a sub-genre that doesn’t even deserve to exist. I don’t even know what it’s called. The “find lots of hidden objects in a static picture” pigeon hole? It’s on the bottom left, next to “interactive videos”.

Which all feels a little reactionary and unpleasant. I’m fairly sure that if you like scouring pictures for artificially darkened objects against near black backdrops you’ll quite like this. It’s pretty much all you do, except for the bits where you touch what is supposed to be dust or condensation to clear up the image, or press static cut-out bad guys to pretend you’re shooting them while they don’t shoot back, or play guess who.

After 2 hours – which is more time than anyone should really be spending with it – that’s about all there is to the game. Forget about reading the story, which is far less interesting thanks to taking it out the medium it belongs in and just plonking it here, as it actually just leads to confusion.

Take for instance the screen where you enter a bank to retrieve the contents of a safety deposit box. The plot gives you the number but, whatever you do, do not try to find it on the screen. First you must find 10 other boxes of different numbers and can only proceed to the plot point when the game allows you to. I know this sounds like fighting against the design of the game for the sake of it, but what point is there in dropping in a plot if you can’t drive it forwards? Yes, the aim is to find stupid objects in hard to see places, but if that’s it why add any narrative arc at all?

It goes from this to rank stupidity with alarming pace. Tidy up the hotel room so that you can think straight! Spot the soldiers so that you can find a way out! Pick out the fishing nets so that you can… ummm… head to the city!

Do me a favour and stay away from this game. It’s £6.99 (!!!!!) worth of not gaming, of doing the digital equivalent of standing in a room facing the door and throwing a pack of cards over your shoulder before challenging yourself to find them all. It has no merit whatsoever, either in production, intuitiveness of design or melding of graphic novels to this new interactive medium.

It’s tepid, uninspiring sub-mediocrity and I want to burn it and the rest of its genre cohorts in the fires of hell itself while laughing manically and disproportionately loudly over their smouldering remains.

If you really must, you could throw your money at your Apple overlords and buy XIII Lost Identity from the App Store.

This, Arkham Lockdown, is nothing like either of those games however. It has Batman in it, obviously, and it has thugs what look like them in the other games too. It does not have a detective mode, or a 3D environment for you to move around freely nor any particular narrative device outside of the opening cinematic. It lacks glorious fights featuring multiple opponents, has a limited set of combos for you to pull off and strictly occurs on a level to level basis. At its core, it’s an attempt to do an Infinity Blade, but stripped back with a level selection screen and no sense of rhythmn.

Which, seeing as Infinity Blade 2 just came out and fixed loads of issues with its predecessor, is a case of incredible shortsightedness and bad timing.

This is what happens: you select a level from a screen which looks like the Arkham City map and you get told a threat level and the number of opponents you face. You barely glance at this as it’s pretty redundant and borderline impossible to lose. Batman appears in the level, and thug number one appears. You dodge or deflect their clearly signposted moves and then beat them back with the same combo you’ve used every time before.

Rinse and repeat for each thug, complete the level, get some cash and potentially level up. Then select the next level for that section and play through the exact same environment and animations again. Clear these levels and you get a crack at the boss, which introduces a solitary and never used again mechanic for you to be subjected to before you kill them.

The boss levels are pretty much the only place where you will die and mainly because you have no way to prepare for the mechanic you need to use to beat them.

I was over half way through the game before I purchased my first upgrade (to health, mainly). I was three quarters of the way through before I bought my first gadget. By the end of my first play through (around 90 minutes or so) I had everything and it was just a case of turning me into a massive killing machine. Despite there being no real reason to go through it again, I’m half way through right now. It seems marginally more difficult, but the ability to stun opponents with gadgets makes it too easy. Even with the Waynetech points slowing to a dribble I would expect to be maxed out on everything by the third run through.

I doubt very much I’ll finish this play through though.

As a premium app it also offers you the nice opportunity to spend more money and buy alternative outfits. I don’t know why you would want to with such a limited camera and minimal interactivity with the game itself but, hey, knock yourself out. It’s your cash.

Right now it feels like a horrendously limited game – all flash graphics and licensing costs with little under the hood. It’s the epitome of riding on someone else’s coat tails, and it sullies the “main” franchise quite badly. At £3.99 it’s massively overpriced.

My recommendation? Get it if it comes up at less than a quid, otherwise go and see what Infinity Blade is doing. This was outclassed right out of the gate.

In the past week the astonishing act of trying to make money once again shocked gamers to their cores as EA once again set out to innovate and proliferate their idea of “monetization”. In the first instance they did this by a) pulling the Tetris app from the iOS App Store and b) releasing a new Tetris app onto it without any change in the title. While this doesn’t seem particularly dreadful, it wasn’t until the collective investigative journalistic powers of the web united to tell us the truth that the shocking horrors lying beneath were revealed:

• This was a brand new app, not a free update as we iOS gamers have come to expect, meaning people would have to shell out twice for the same game!
• The old version was no longer available, even to those who had purchased it before!
• It was full of some of the most ridiculous subscription based services we have yet seen in an iOS title!

I was literally quivering in my boots with moderate levels of frustration but felt it my duty to at least try to understand one thing I read on Twitter this week before reverting to type and frothing at the mouth. I actually bought the game, thus lining the pockets of our corporate overlords even further and perhaps revealing a bias in this thought piece (review coming soon!). Because I’m not a particularly good writer, I’m going to deal with each of those points but in reverse order. Take that, Hunter S. Thompson!

Stupid rubbish subscription services!

The game does, indeed, feature some of the most ridiculous subscription based services I’ve seen in any game, never mind an iOS title. I am rightfully angry that EA would assume I’m stupid enough to buy a 69p game and then subscribe to a service which costs me a further £21 a year for updates and other crap. What I didn’t do, however, was subscribe, thus saving me said fee and ensuring the game still only cost me 69p. Problem solved!

Wait, but what about the stupid people? The people who see some strange value in such a service? Let them buy it, I say.
House prices haven’t dropped enough yet and a few more bankruptcies might kick things along a bit. More seriously, if there are actually stupid people willing to pay £21 for an annual subscription (or even £1.99 just to try it for a month) on a device that is literally flooded with some of the best value games money can buy and often doesn’t have to, that’s their problem. Outside of the mentally handicapped and children – neither of which should be let loose on an iPhone with a credit card linked iTunes account – they’re perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and I look forward to openly mocking them as they cry “I paid for an annual T-Club membership and all I got was 15% extra T-Lines”!

I bought the old version and now I can’t get it again!

Actually just misinformed, knee-jerk, badly researched clap trap.

If you’ve been buying apps and then deleting them before you synced with your computer, your iOS device has also been telling you “YOU HAVE NOT SYNCED THIS AND MAY GET CHARGED AGAIN” for at least the past 2 years. You deserve to lose access through virtue of being one of the stupid people who will probably pay that bloody subscription fee.

If you’ve been buying apps and then syncing with your computer regularly, you’ll have noticed that it transfers purchases automatically. This means you have a local backup which you move across to your iOS device any time you want to, including apps that have been deleted from the store.

Even better, since iOS5 was released – well ahead of Tetris getting deleted, by the way – you’ve also had a copy in the App Store cloud. Just boot up your iOS device, go to the App Store and whizz over to “Updates”. At the top of this screen is something called “Purchased”. Head into there and you have two little lists “All” and “Not on this device”. Everything you’ve ever purchased is there, including every app that’s ever been deleted from the App Store, including including Tetris. Even betterer, if you also downloaded the iTunes update and have bought the old Tetris app in the few days before it was deleted, your computer has likely automatically downloaded it without you even needing to sync with it.

Truly these are future times. They are not, however, times where rants against EA get delivered with any degree of research or level headed investigation.

I should have got this as a free update!

Why?

Seriously, why? I genuinely don’t understand this line of thinking. The very same people ranting about all the shitty new features and the subscription model attached to this update and lying about the lack of availability of the old app would apparently have been partially placated if the old version people had bought had simply been overwritten with this stuff. Really?

The original Tetris app has been available since 2008 – that’s 3 years for the slow of thinking – and I have to sit here and wonder exactly how much ongoing support and how many updates should be expected. I mean, there are around 73 different variations of Angry Birds now, 2 editions of my beloved Sword & Poker, a newly released version of Infinity Blade, 3 epic adventures in Zenonia and Gameloft pumping out a new version of Modern Combat with alarming regularity. Yet no-one is bitching about these.

I guess, as suggested to me on Twitter yesterday, that this new version could have been released with a number next to the title and the old one left on the App store. It doesn’t ring true though, some of the knee jerk reactions here would have still come to fruition, the same old whinging about business wanting to make money off us applied.

Ultimately there are two criticisms that do resonate with me. First, the ever onward march towards freemium and subscription based gaming aligned to a micro-payments system. It’s been a long time coming, but it appears to be doing well. While it does leave a nasty taste in my mouth, I’m also of a generation that paid £65 for Street Fighter II on the SNES, so what the hell do I know about value and reward? Second, there’s the issue of digital distribution, ownership and support. Of all the systems out there I believe that Apple seem to have built one of the best. There are multiple ways for me to retain ownership and utilise my purchases however I see fit and it’s a system EA have to fit in. It ain’t perfect, but we’ve yet to see any of these (PSN, XBLA, Steam, Origin) truly tested by bankruptcies, server shutdowns and natural disasters.

When that time does come, though, do me a favour please. Get the facts right.

If you really want to after all this, you can buy Tetris iOS now through the iTunes store.