Spikey's Bounce Around Review

I've been promising to start doing iPhone game reviews for a while now, and while it's possible that there is only a single person who reads my blog an iPhone, I'm still doing it.

Spikey's Bounce Around is a relatively simple little causal game made by Donut Games. Donut Games has been running a promotion offering three of the titles from their catalog for free. I've always been a sucker for a cheap/free game, so I picked up all three. While I haven't spent as much time in the other two as I have in Spikey, they all seem to be pretty decent with high production values.

The object of Spikey's Bounce Around is to shoot your little spiked ball around the stage to free butterflies. If your ball passes through a leaf/flower/stick cluster, it will disappear. If you remove all the plants from underneath one of the butterfly jars, the jar breaks and the butterfly is free. Free all the butterflies and you pass the stage. Spikey will stick to walls and other similar things but bounce off of the yellow and blue "bouncy" platforms. There are also other spikes and jarred wasps that cause you to instantly fail. Finally, you only have a finite number of times you can throw Spikey around, and in some stages, you are forced to make a single, perfect throw. There are 50 stages in all, and I can guarantee you that some of the later stages are really difficult; the difference between passing the stage and not is often the difference in a few pixels of aiming.

The controls are simple, but effective: merely tap where you want him to go. You can also hold down and adjust the directional arrow to get precisely the right shot. All shots have the same power, and the power is not enough to negate gravity entirely, so lots of shots involve lobbing Spikey just right across the screen. All in all, the mechanic works quite well and the levels are unique and varied.

Without a doubt, this is the game I have sunk the most time into on the iPhone. I've found myself sitting on the couch with the TV on trying to get a specific shot just right over and over again. Even after you beat all the stages, you can try to get the 3 star challenges on each which involve getting high scores, usually by using a fewer number of shots. I've three starred most of the stages, but am still working on the rest.

While Spikey's Bounce Around does not revolutionize anything, and the game play is not in any way deep, for a casual little iPhone game, it works AMAZINGLY well. I would easily recommend the game to anybody, especially while it's free, but I would have paid $2-$3 for it and come away happy. Pick it up; it's fun.

The Last Stand

I've still got a pretty big helping of excellent flash games to get through, so for today's Flash Game Friday I'd like to present you with The Last Stand.



This is another game that has been around for a while, long enough in fact to have a sequel. The gameplay in the two is more or less the same, and the first game still holds up surprisingly well, so I'm just going to lump the two together with a recommendation to play them both.

In both games, you play a survivor of some sort of zombie holocaust. Your goal: survive. Game play is a combination of keyboard and mouse controls, with the keyboard moving your character up and down on the right side of the screen, with the mouse controlling your shooting and your aiming. Each level represents a night that you must survive. All throughout the night, zombies of various shapes, sizes, and fitness levels stream in from the left side. Some are fast, some are slow, some have helmets, some are rushing dogs. All of them push toward you trying to take down your barricade (barricade has a basic health meter) and feast on the fleshy brains you are so selfishly hoarding.

During each day, you can spend time searching for weapons/survivors and/or spend time repairing your barricade (keep it repaired!). You can use found weapons to improve your awesomeness, with chainsaws and some serious assault and sniper rifles being some of the weapons to look forward to. Found survivors join you inside the barricade and help shoot the approaching zombies... although I generally found their skills to be relatively lack luster.

Survive enough nights (or get to the coast in the second one) and you'll eventually be "saved." For extra points, do it on your first try. I know I sure didn't.

The game play may be pretty basic, but the production quality is top notch. If you have even a passing interest in zombies and like shooters, I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Dino Run

For today’s Flash Game Friday, I want to present to you all another one of my favorites: Dino Run.

The premise is simple: run. What are you running from, you ask? Also simple: extinction. As the game begins, a meteor can be seen striking the earth in the background. The “doom” (fallout) immediately starts “chasing” you. Each level sends you on a mad dash away from certain death.

While the premise may sound deceptively simple (it really is honestly), the game actually has a lot of depth. There are little dinosaurs to eat, power up flowers to collect, and even secret eggs to find. By collecting/finding all that you can, you can level up your various abilities (speed, acceleration, jumping, and strength). Level up your speed to max, grab a speed power-up, and then use your speed boost for some wicked velocity.

As the game progresses, it becomes very difficult to escape extinction. The doom cloud moves faster and faster, the stegosauruses (stegosauri?) work hard to block your path, and the terrain gets ridiculous difficult to navigate. I definitely recommend you keep playing and trying to find to all the eggs… it really is a blast.

I think my favorite thing about this game is the great retro feel to it. I’m a huge sucker for old-school 8/16 bit games, and I especially love modern games that try to recreate that feel (I still desperately want to make one, so if you have art/design talent, let's mix in my programming skill and throw something together). PixelJam really nailed the old school vibe here.

For extra fun, see how long you can stay in the doom and how long you can ride on a tumbling boulder. I don’t remember my best doom surf, but I’m pretty sure it was in the 30 seconds range.

Have fun!

Stackopolis

For this week's Flash Game Friday (yes, I know it's Saturday... shut up), I'm presenting Stackopolis. Stackopolis is a flash game I discovered a couple years ago; I played through the entire game in one sitting. While it doesn't necessarily have tons of replay value, that first play is definitely a good time.

Basic idea: you are a city building planner (builder? architect?) and you are given a set of building blocks that you must rearrange in a set amount of time to create a building that matches a blueprint provided to you. Does that make sense? Probably not. Just go play it.

If you are like me (and I know I am), you'll start playing this and then continue to play it until you finish. The game mechanic is simple but, once again, strangely addictive.

Oh, and make sure you look the blueprint. I started replaying it a few days ago and forgot about the blueprint. Want a new challenge? Try creating the building merely from the artists rendition. It's... harder.

Hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did -- leave some comments and let me know what you thought.

Maintain your amateur status

Welcome to the first installment of Flash Game Friday. Each Friday I'll review/recommend a new flash game for you all to enjoy. This week's game: Dolphin Olympics 2.

The original Dolphin Olympics was a game I stumbled across a couple of years ago. I distinctly remember playing it very obsessively for like 2 days then basically forgetting about it completely. Well, last week when I was mentioning to my friend/editor, Shums, that I should write about fun flash games, he immediately recommended DO2. The next thing I knew, two hours had passed and the skin on my middle finger was sore from holding down the up button on the keyboard.

Dolphin Olympics is a deceptively simple game. The basic premise is that you control the dolphin as he jumps out of the water. While in the air, you can rotate him around both of his 2D axes to perform various tricks. By combining tricks, you can string together a masterful Tony Hawk style combo. Furthermore, if you reenter the water at the correct angle and quickly jump again, your combo not only continues, but you get a bit of a height boost to your next jump. The idea is to do as many varied tricks as possible while continually entering and exiting the water as perfectly as possible. The game is also deliciously bite-sized: each round lasts only two minutes.

Seems pretty basic, right? So why is it so addictive? I think it's the desire to pull off a perfect run. You can have perfect jumps for a minute and a half and then belly flop and lose all your momentum. Each time that happened to me I would immediately restart the game… and boy oh boy, did it ever happen. Instead of getting discouraged, I would just try again. And again. And again. In fact, while writing this blog entry I played it 5 or 6 times.

The ultimate goal in the game is to get as far into space as you can. While I've only made it to Mars, Shums says he reached the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a fantastic Douglas Adams reference that fits perfectly with the dolphins (you HAVE read "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,"right? Right?).

Just to save you the trouble, DO2 is superior to the original DO in pretty much every way. Seriously, don't even bother.

Now, go play Dolphin Olympics. I’m serious. Oh, and many kudos to Alan Rawkins for making such an addictive game.

Alright, now I have to get back to… crap. Another belly flop. Hmm… maybe I’ll just go one more time…