by ZombieSkittles on March 10, 2010
Mobile games can be simple, requiring only minutes of time to play, with minimal concentration needed. These are good games. Then there are games where you don’t even need to play them to win. In comes Accelerate, a game for the iPhone powered by OpenFeint, which asks the question “how fast is your iPhone?”.
Accelerate is a tremendously simple program; turn it on, specify what vehicle you’re in, and wait. The game checks the iPhone’s GPS to see how fast you’re travelling and gives a (rather) rough estimate of your speed, which can be measured in either kilometres or miles. The faster your speed, the better the score. Simple. There are also OpenFeint achievements obtainable for hitting certain speeds in certain vehicles.
The game isn’t much, and doesn’t restrict you from specifying whatever vehicle you want, and get the achievements from them. In the course of 10 minutes, I switched through each vehicle option and got most of the achievements the game had to offer, while travelling at 60km/h.
There’s not much appeal in it after the initial few minutes, and unless you’re really after an easy way to boost your OF score, isn’t worth buying. If you really want those achievements though, you can grab it via this handy link.
by ZombieSkittles on February 22, 2010
Texas Tea by Snakehead Software is a game which can be (and has been) best described as a game which takes elements from games such as Bejewelled, Yahtzee and Poker and creates an interesting puzzle game out of them.
The premise is simple; there are dice on the board, and you need to construct poker hands out of them (such as a three of a kind, straight, full house) by dragging your finger along such a combination (across or up and down). When you highlight a successful combination, those squares black out and more dice drop. To win a level, all the squares must be blacked out. You can swap dice around by tapping the two that you want moved, as long as they’re touching.
The whole time you’re playing a level, there is a timer at the bottom of the screen to watch out for. However, if you’re playing without distraction the timer isn’t much of a worry as the game tends to go quickly.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many levels, so the game ends quite quickly if you sit down with the intent of playing continuously. Texas Tea does utilize the OpenFeint network, and as such has achievements to be earned. However, these are relatively simple, and you’ll get most of them in the first sitting (the majority are for completing levels).
Hopefully, as with many iPhone games, more features and levels will be added in future to increase playability, but for now it’s a good simple puzzle game. You can grab it from the iTunes store here.
by ZombieSkittles on February 20, 2010
OpenFeint is best described as Steam or Xbox LIVE, but for your iPhone. Developed by the crew at Aurora Feint, the OpenFeint gaming platform joins mobile gamers together with forums, scoreboards and classic social networking tools (Friends lists, messaging, etc). OpenFeint boasts millions of users (of which at least one is me, and another is a Mr. Citron.) and over 1000 games attached to it. Once a profile has been created, you have full access to all of the program’s features. Much like Steam, OpenFeint gives access to games that are OF enabled in the App Store, even going so far as to offer one game that you’d normally have to pay for, free for a day.
While many games have achievements these days, OpenFeint works like Xbox LIVE, Windows LIVE and Steam in that any games that are OF enabled and have achievements, run them through OpenFeint. Achievements count towards your OF score. All your gameplay stats are displayed on your profile for anyone to see.
While OpenFeint has it’s own management program (which you can get here, for free), you don’t need it. Any OF game will let you access game specific OpenFeint information, as well as access to your profile.
It’s an interesting program that has quite a few games attached to it, which you can recognize most games with OpenFeint software by the dual leaf logo sitting on the game’s icon, such as that on Texas Tea’s icon.
Mobile games can be simple, requiring only minutes of time to play, with minimal concentration needed. These are good games. Then there are games where you don’t even need to play them to win. In comes Accelerate, a game for the iPhone powered by OpenFeint, which asks the question “how fast is your iPhone?”.
