18 months ago, I wrote the article 7 Nintendo DS games we'd love to see on the iPhone. It's not often that I get an opportunity to gloat, but it hard not to given the circumstances. Sure I'd pegged that Scribblenauts should be ported to the iPhone, but that was a no brainer. No, the reason I need to gloat has to do with the specifics. You see, as I sat down to write this review, I couldn't help but realize I'd written the exact same words before - back when I was arguing why Scribblenauts was such as great fit for the platform.
I had to force myself to quit playing Triple Town in order to write this review, which might give you some idea of just how addicting it is. It's almost scary. One minute I was logging in with the intention of taking a few screenshots and verifying a few notes, and the next I was grumbling that an hour had gone by and I hadn't written a word. Triple Town was already incredible when it made its first appearance on the Kindle almost exactly a year ago, but this new Facebook release manages to improve on what even then seemed like an almost perfect puzzle strategy game. Combining challenge, fun, and gameplay that can last for hours or minutes, Triple Town is everything a casual game should be.
A sequel to the match-3 puzzle game Azkend is on the way from Finnish developer 10tons. Azkend 2 introduces a seafaring adventure with animated background art, scripted story sequences, and several new game modes including one called The Bug Hunt. Watch the teaser trailer behind the cut for a sneak peak at Azkend 2's gameplay and art.
It's an unspoken rule of the universe that when you take another person's cookies, you're also taking your own life in your hands. When you take all of their cookies, no jury in the world would dream of convicting them were they to track you down and visit some retribution on you. But, as Aiko Island teaches, going after someone who's pilfered your bedtime snacks can be an awful lot of fun.
As you may or may not know, many fairy tales have been sugared up from their original versions. For example, in Cinderella, did you know the evil stepsisters originally cut off their toes to fit their fat feet into the glass slipper? While not as awesomely gruesome, South Africa-based RetroEpic's A Day in the Woods is a sliding puzzle game that shows us just how extensive Little Red Riding Hood's trek through the forest actually was.
Stupidness 3 is stupid. Well, at least that's how it makes you feel. Credited in the App Store to Ming Liang Chien, the game, as a whole, is developed by OrangeNose Studio. A compilation of various questions, puzzles, and mini-games, it's an app that is creative in its design, utilizing several out-of-the-box answers. That in mind, the game actually seems to try and make the player feel like a moron by limiting their answer time and making the answers as ambiguous as possible.
I'm still not quite certain where Brick People went wrong. On paper, the game sounds like a total winner: it's developed by Sega, it's got a goofy concept, and it features some fairly original puzzle gameplay. Somewhere along the line though, something got lost in translation. The game is certainly competent, but it isn't anything folks will want to play for very long.
Grab Games recently released its new iPhone game, Penguin Patrol, and with it, a slew of cute and cartoonish penguins that easily mask its underlying puzzles. Hosting over 50 levels, Penguin Patrol is a game in which players must navigate levels of treacherously thin ice in order to rescue a seemingly endless supply of baby penguins, all while trying to optimize their pathing so that they don't slip into icy, Antarctic waters, as the ground beneath them falls away.