Feed: Slide To Play Top Stories - AggScore: 83.5

The producers of Skater Nation, an upcoming extreme skateboarding game from Gameloft, told us that Apple and skateboarding share a common spirit: They both are hip, independent, and appeal to youth. With the lack of a proper skating game on the system, now is a good time to come out with Skater Nation, long before Activision can release a real Tony Hawk game.

We found ourselves quite happy with the knockoff appeal of Skater Nation. The controls are very much like Tony Hawk, but distilled down to just two onscreen buttons, a virtual joystick, and the tilt controls. Balancing during grinds, manuals, and lip tricks using the tilt controls makes perfect sense to us.

Jumping with the same button to perform flip tricks, though, might take a little getting used to. Also, switching your stance from regular to goofy foot uses the same button as grinding and grab tricks, taking a few painful-looking bails to master.

In career mode, you'll have eight skaters to choose from, two of which must be unlocked. As you roll around a giant town between 10 different environments (some of the more interesting ones include a water treatment plant, beach, and steep, winding street), you'll take mini-missions to unlock new decks, trucks, and wheels. Some of these items have cool designs, like wheels with little black skulls, but they'll also improve your speed, jumps, and other attributes.

The missions come in three types: easy, medium, and hard, represented by traffic colors and presented by hipsters who hang around each environment. They'll ask you to beat a high score in a set amount of time, collect a certain amount of scattered skate decks, or perform tricks from a list. In total, there are 36 missions, but we were able to complete several in just a few short minutes. Hidden areas and more challenging goals may help improve the life of this game, as will a laid-back free ride mode.

One new feature we really liked, which will probably make free ride mode even more enjoyable, is the ability to save three or four minutes of footage and upload it automatically to Youtube. This will let you share your combos online from within the game. Gameloft also suggested they'll feature the top ten trick combos on a dedicated website.

While we thought the controls and environments were pretty much spot-on, there are a few areas of improvement we can see for Skater Nation. There's no character customization, for example, so if you don't like the look of your skaters, you can't invent your own. Plus, while the game does sport achievements through Gameloft Live, there are no online high scores.

Even with these complaints, we really enjoyed what we played of Skater Nation. It looks excellent, and it will satisfy the deep need to link together major combos, grind halfpipes, and ollie over a police car. Skater Nation will be out by the end of December.

What do you do with a game you can't play? In all our years of gaming, iSniper 3D is one of the most spirit-deadeningly difficult games we've ever suffered through. It's not a Ninja Gaiden-like satisfying high difficulty level that makes you keep practicing and coming back for more. It's a cheap, game-breaking difficulty more like your mom unplugging your console as you're about to beat a boss. Thank you, iSniper 3D, for turning us into the very exclusive group of gamers who throw their gaming devices out of anger.

The saddest thing is that iSniper 3D had great potential. In your mission to snipe guards from afar, tapping the screen lets you zoom down the barrel of your sniper rifle, and tilting your device moves your crosshairs into position. You've also got a nifty concentration button that lessons the tilting sensitivity so you can line a shot up. When you're flowing in the game, you really feel like a sniper.

The anger-inducing difficulty comes with having to race against the clock, which is much more dangerous than the enemies irrelevantly draining your health bar. Since you only start with a minute to complete a mission, you'll be constantly relying on headshots to put time back on the clock. Meaning, you'll have to nab 30 headshots with mere seconds between them. One of the hardest things to accept about iSniper is that, as we played and our sniping skills improved dramatically, we got really good at this game, but none of it was enough to progress. There's just not enough time.

Remember, this isn't the pin point precision controls of a mouse and keyboard or even two analog sticks. This is tilting and balancing your iPhone. It's finicky, and since the game practically requires headshots, it leaves no margin for error. When the guards are closer to you it feels like shooting an orange from a football field away, and when they're far, a pea. We can't even imagine trying to play this game on a bus or the subway.

And for all the game's developers expect from you as a player, they seem to feel ok about enemies spawning out of thin air and guards making their patrol routes through crates and walls. It's so teeth-grittingly tough, you feel like you're missing some crucial element for success, akin to playing Super Mario Bros without the jump button. We won't even get into the broken English during the cut scenes or how unintentionally hilarious it is that when you're asked if you want to cancel an upgrade, the two options are "OK" and "cancel."

The problem may be as deep as the design philosophy. With only one difficulty level, it almost seems that the tortuous game has been designed for you to fail your way into success. You gain a meager amount of "honor points" for each mission failure and we could possibly foresee scrounging enough to buy upgrades. But did the developers really intend for you to fail 30 or so times before you succeed on the first mission? More likely, it's just be a a case of a rushed game that wasn't play tested enough.

Tellingly enough, the developers are going to release an iSniper 3D version 2.0 soon because of the complaints they've received. The main changes? More time and level select. Essentially, they'll lower the difficulty so people can play a game that's, you know, playable. But we played the current version, and it's as broken and frustrating as lining up a head shot from a mile away and having your rifle jam. If you need a sniping game now, go for Sniper Vs Sniper: Online

There are some games that have great concepts and tons of content but falter when it comes to controls. This is unfortunately the case with JellyCar 2. While there is enough material here to keep gamers busy for hours, the imperfect controls take most of the fun out of this title.

JellyCar 2 is a game full of childish personality (in a good way). The hand-drawn sketch artwork and lighthearted soundtrack fit in perfectly with the overall theme. You can also customize your car’s shape and color to suit your personality. Don’t be fooled, though: this game is quite challenging and aimed at all ages. Multiple difficulty levels mean everybody can have a go at getting their car to the goal as quickly as possible.

With four unique gameplay modes, there is tons of content to keep just about anybody busy. Classic mode is a lot like the original, where you must move your car to the goal as fast as possible. However, moving platforms, vertical walls, and other obstacles stand in your way. That’s where the two power ups come into play: sticky wheels and balloons. These allow you to roll on any surface or float up gaps. Once you complete a level, you're shown online leaderboards so you can see how you stack up against other players.

Two of the other modes are Long Jump and Factory. Long Jump consists of three different ramps and records how many feet you can send your car flying off the end. Factory has little to do with JellyCar but is still fun in itself. The goal is to rotate objects in the path to direct falling shapes to their respective area. However, there is only one level to play. Online leaderboards exist for these as well.

An impressive level editor allows you to create elaborate levels and then play them. As great as this is, you cannot share them with friends. Since that is the fun of creating your own content, we ended up disappointed with this mode.

As great as all of this is, JellyCar 2 is ultimately held back by shoddy controls. Moving your car is done by pressing the left or right side of the screen, but we often found the touch sensitivity shaky. Another aspect of the controls is tilting the phone, which affects the car’s rotation. Without an option to change the tilt sensitivity, though, this only got in the way. Finally, touching the car will cause it to inflate, throwing off the controls even more.

We hope the developer of JellyCar 2 comes back and addresses some of the control issues, as the game has tons of potential. Until then, we recommend trying out the free original (which uses the same control method) before picking up this game.

Touch Pets Dogs is for the animal lover in you. It's also for the little person inside your heart who wants to dress up your dog, but doesn't want to risk getting both hands stapled by a pair of angry jaws.

Touch Pets Dogs plays a great deal like Nintendogs, the 2005 pet sim title that launched the Nintendo DS's popularity into the stratosphere. Touch Pets Dogs doesn't quite compliment the iPhone the way Nintendogs pulled down the barrier between gamer and console with the DS's touch screen, but there is a lot to do, and a lot of fun to be had. Just be prepared to continuously trickle money into the game if you want to experience all of it.

Touch Pets Dogs lets you adopt up to five puppies from various popular breeds, including German Shepherds, West Highland Terriers, Portuguese Water Dogs, Labradors, Dachshunds, and even Robodogs. You do all the things with your virtual pup that you'd expect to do with a real dog: you throw sticks, play with toys, feed him, groom him, pick up his mess, and make that no-good lazy bum get a job. Oh, and you shop for various outfits and trinkets that you use to deck him out like a Christmas tree. Of course.

Touch Pets Dogs is free to download and play. You start the game with your doggie, a few bags of food, and a pocket full of “Puppybux.” Puppybux will buy you accessories, toys, treats, new dogs, and the tools they need to embark on careers. Strangely enough, Puppybux won't buy you new food. Kibble is purchased through the “Puppy Master,” who will slide you a few bags of food in exchange for real life money—the same money you use to pay your rent and buy pizza and beer.

A dollar will net you ten bags of food, plus eight “bonus” bags. There are package deals on the App Store that will net you the game, plus several dozen bags of food. Seems reasonable at first, but these dogs zip through their rations fast enough to make a sonic boom. The more you play with them or work them, the more food they consume. If you run out of food, your dog goes to sleep and won't wake up until you make with the horsemeat.

There's also the matter of Puppybux being difficult to earn. If your dog is exceptionally happy, the Puppybux start rolling in. Making your dog happy is easy enough: by petting him and playing with him, you build up various stats, which are also useful when he seeks out a career. If you keep those stats high, you get paid. Unfortunately, you only get a few bucks at a time, and most items in Touch Pets Dogs cost thousands.

The idea is to grovel at the feet of the Puppy Master once again, and exchange bowls of food (in other words, real life money) for several thousand Puppybux. So what if your dog is in a permanent anti-food coma? He still looks adorable in his little police hat.

Grooming your dog for a job as a rescuer, scientist, policeman or politician(?) is the highlight of Touch Pets Dogs. When you meet certain requirements, you can send your canine to answer pleas for help. You even get a snapshot of the mission to post on Facebook and flaunt in front of your friends and their boring regular pets. But missions require significant stat build-up and “career tools,” which cost—you guessed it—thousands of Puppybux.

Really though, the dogs are pretty adorable (once we got past the slight creepiness of their biiiiiig eyes) and a lot of fun to train and interact with. If you're dying for a super-portable Nintendogs experience and you're okay with dishing out money for food, Touch Pets Dogs is worth fetching.

Star Wars dorks and fiends unite! If you’re one of the millions and millions of fanatics that are instantly excited by any new wrinkle to the iconic universe that George Lucas created, there’s a special treat that has come to you courtesy of THQ. Star Wars: Trench Run is an original iPhone game that largely rides the coattails of the climatic end of the original 1977 film. Not a shabby piece of lore to steal from, but does it hold up enough to be the underpinning of an entire game? Sort of...

Throughout the game’s Mission mode, which serves it’s main campaign exhibition, you’re taken on a whirlwind tour through some classic scenarios you saw in the original film. In all five interlocked missions, you play Luke Skywalker while piloting an X-Wing. Though you have a one-off dogfighting mission, the rest of the game is spent on the surface of the Death Star. In the trenches, maneuvering your X-Wing around obstacles while taking out stationary Empire cannons comprise the bulk of the experience. There’s no pauses or checkpoints as you go, so it’s completely possible to play through the game while thinking it was one long mission.

The game is solidly put together, but the lack of gameplay variety and length is a hindrance. Tilting the iPhone influences the flight path of your X-Wing. Actions are split into four quadrants on the iPhone’s screen, and they respond perfectly. Holing the bottom-right fires off your lasers, while holding the bottom-left triggers a bullet time slowdown effect to help with aiming. Rarely used options to toggle your cockpit view and pause the game use the upper regions of the iPhone’s screen.

As we alluded to earlier, the problem is that there isn’t enough core game to use these great mechanics. We were able to complete the game within 10 minutes. Completing the game lets you upload your total score to online leaderbards, but you can only view the top 10 scores. Though you can replay the Mission Mode in different difficulty levels, it’s not a good enough Band-Aid for the lack of game here.

On the side, there are two quick play modes dubbed Trench Arcade and Dog Fight Arcade for scenarios where you have a few minutes to kill. Both modes reuse the art assets from the Mission Mode to create never ending endurance style modes that keep going until you die. The objective of scoring the most points you can is undermined by the fact that only the ten best scores are viewable.

Star Wars Trench Run has an awesome presentation layer baked in. Everything looks and sounds like Star Wars, and there aren’t many rough edges at all. In all the standard measurable areas (e.g. object models, frame rate, special effects, soundtrack, etc.) the game delivers brilliantly.

All things considered, this is a good game in a variety of respects. Though it’s lacking in substantive depth, there’s a lot that fans of the brand will totally love. Everyone else, weigh the pros and cons mentioned here and make your own determination.

When it comes to App Store classics, Super Monkey Ball is near the top of the list. While it has become infamous for having sub-par controls, that doesn’t take away the fact that it was the first game ever available on the iPhone. But as the old saying goes, first is the worst, and second is the best. After spending some time with a preview build of their impressive just-announced sequel, we can easily say that SEGA learned from its mistakes and created an experience much like what we found on consoles. It's bananas!

We’ll cut to the chase, since this is likely what you're waiting to hear about: the controls. While this game seems to be running on a similar engine to the first, SEGA has got the controls spot-on this time. The sensitivity is at just the right level, so navigating thin passageways and turning away from near death is always possible. We never found that we couldn’t progress because the game didn’t respond like we would expect. In fact, we would go so far as to say that Super Monkey Ball 2 is among the few games we actually had just as much fun controlling as we did with the actual gameplay.

The latest installment doesn’t scrimp on content, either. You'll find 115 challenging levels built from the ground-up for the platform that keep things interesting by constantly bringing in new elements for you to adapt to. The classic bumpers and blockades are all present, but new features make every level feel different from the last. You'll now find moving doors and roller coaster tracks that make you tilt to their curves to keep from falling. If you have a particularly good round, figure out a shortcut, or complete an insane trick, you can save a replay of your round to watch later. You can also go back after the fact and try to master a level by collecting all of the bananas without dying.

On the console iterations of Super Monkey Ball, one of our favorite features was the minigames. Super Monkey Ball 2 includes three. Monkey Bowling, in which you use a monkey as a bowling ball, will come bundled with the game, but Monkey Target and Monkey Golf will be added in a free update expected to release in early 2010. It is great to see these extras included, as they could have easily been sold as separate games.

Multiplayer is a feature that has proved entertaining in the past for Super Monkey Ball, and seeing as the iPhone is viewed as a social hand-held gaming experience, it was inevitable that the sequel would allow head-to-head play. For the main levels, you can connect over local Wi-Fi to face off against up to four friends for the fastest times. The minigames sport hotseat multiplayer with up to four people.

Finally, the aesthetic got a major overhaul. The monkeys are now modeled in full 3D and the colorful, zany themes of the five new worlds really pop off the screen. These changes really bring out the game’s charming personality. We had tons of fun rolling on pirate ships, above the clouds, and in underground caverns.

Super Monkey Ball 2 is due out in December. In its near-final form, there is no denying that this is the game SEGA meant to release in the first place. It’s an amazing feeling to sit back and think about how far iPhone gaming has come since its prehistoric days. We’d say civilization is in sight.

Ravensword: The Fallen King is one of the most ambitious titles ever to hit the App Store. Inspired by the Elder Scrolls series, which contains some of the largest single-player RPGs ever made, Ravensword brings open-world 3D fantasy gaming to the iPhone. The result is a big, gorgeous game that's overly stripped-down in some respects, but vast enough to reward dedication and exploration. It's definitely not perfect, but when a developer aims this high and comes close to its goal, the result is still an impressive achievement.

At the start of the game, your character wakes up in the town of Aven with no idea who or where he is. By talking to the locals and working through the standard quests they ask of you, you'll piece together what's happening to the world and begin your larger quest to figure out who you are and what happened to the king, who vanished several years ago. The storyline is typical RPG stuff, and it's told in a competent - but not thrilling - way. The whole game should take around ten hours if you take on all of the side quests.

When you accept a quest, it's placed in a log, where you can view all of your quests and the steps required to complete them. The menu interface is easy to use and will immediately make sense to anyone who has played this type of game before. The basic controls are similarly user-friendly. There's a stick in the lower left-hand corner that controls forward, backward, and side-to-side movement, and you can drag anywhere on the rest of the screen to look around.

Fighting uses a lock-on feature similar to the 3D Zelda games. Tap an enemy to highlight it, and your view will hold steady on the beast, leaving you free to approach, evade, and hack away at it. And hack away you will, as fighting in this game is mostly button mashing. Your two primary options for taking down bad guys are to stand at a distance and shoot arrows into them, or to go up close and stab. Either way, you'll end up tapping the attack button as fast as you can.

Many players will be let down by the use of magic in this game. You collect stones with magic abilities, but their effects are hardly apparent and they require costly recharges. Your character is a fighter plain and simple, so if you usually play RPGs as a mage or priest, beware.

Also unlike many other RPGs, you won't find any emphasis on loot-collecting or stat-building in Ravensword. Loot-wise, there are only a handful of weapons and two different sets of armor in the entire game. Quests will occasionally reward you with a new weapon, but you won't randomly stumble upon any weapons aside from the occasional dagger or club dropped by a low-level enemy. Also, none of the items in the game have stats, so you'll be hard pressed to figure out whether the mace or sword deals more damage. Your character has stats, but you don't get to custom-assign points to them when you level up - that's done for you automatically.

Another weak point in the game is the map. Because the game emphasizes exploration, we expected the map show to show us exactly where we were in the game world. Unfortunately, the map only gives you a vague idea of your location. There's not even a compass to tell you which way you're facing. Also, quests will have you running all over the place, but you can only fast travel back to Aven, meaning you'll end up trudging over long distances to places you've already been.

But let's get back to the good, because there's a lot to love in Ravensword. The game world is very large, and you never have to travel far before you come across something interesting. This is extremely important in open-world RPGs, because it doesn't matter how big the game world is if no one wants to explore it. We had a blast just wandering around the varied environments, fighting polar bears on snowy peaks and lizardmen on the shores of lava streams.

The game saves your progress every time you close out of the app. The next time you boot it up, you return exactly where you left off, which is very useful. However, we might have liked a manual save feature that we could use before fighting bosses. The music is atmospheric and fits the mood of the game perfectly.

When it comes down to it, Ravensword is both blessed and cursed by its own ambition. Blessed, because it can easily go toe to toe with the best RPGs on the App Store. Cursed, because it attempts to give gamers a console-like experience, and it falls short of that goal. At any rate, we are glad to have this game in our pocket and enjoyed it from start to finish. Any gamer with an interest in Western RPGs should definitely pick it up. As far as steps in the right direction go, Ravensword is a big one.

Never a format to duck controversy, it would appear the iPhone is now in line to join the 'cloud-gaming' revolution, as contentious on-demand gaming service OnLive has been confirmed for release on Apple's iDevices at some point in the future.

The service, which lets consumers play games that are essentially streamed via the internet rather than downloaded to their PCs - bypassing any need for hardware upgrades - has drawn much criticism from skeptics, many of whom claim that it simply won't work. Nevertheless, OnLive's founders have forged on and announced via their blog that an iPhone version is in the works.

“Today, at a Wedbush financial conference in New York I showed OnLive running simultaneously on 2 iPhones, a TV, and a computer,” OnLive CEO and founder Steve Perlman states. “What is really cool is that all 4 devices had access to the full OnLive Game Service, so they could play the same games, spectate on each other’s game play, watch Brag Clips, check out Gamer Profiles, etc.

“While we only showed a tech demo today, it was great to give people in the audience a chance to try out OnLive on an iPhone. The large tiles that make up the OnLive user interface work perfectly on the iPhone touch screen, allowing easy access to all of the features of the OnLive game service.”

Just what will be included on any iPhone version still appears to be up in the air, but Perlman has stated that it won't be pitched at entirely the same audience as the PC version, admitting that “it’s the Community and Social elements of OnLive that we’re most excited about on mobile devices.”

“It’s amazingly cool whipping out your phone, checking out what your OnLive friends are up to, and then spectating their live game play,” Perlman concludes. Not as cool as actually playing games on your phone though, Steve.

Do you like taking tests? Who doesn't, right? Have we got a deal for you. How would you like to pay money for the opportunity to further enrich your test-taking lifestyle? Now, keep in mind that these aren't just any tests. These are test with astonishing yellow backgrounds and occasionally an image. You heard us right! Images!

Worst Case Scenario takes all of the fun from the best-selling books, in which you can learn how to survive all sorts of dire situations, and turns it into a boring, repetitive cycle of pain. Did you know that a Kodiak bear grows to only 9 feet tall, not 13 feet tall? Fascinating! So fascinating, in fact, that I'd like to be asked the same question about this twice in one sitting!

Granted, there are some interesting and enlightening facts tucked away in this bit of software (we now know how to safely dive into a dumpster from a great height), but the presentation is utterly dull and the game is simply not much fun, especially when there are probably a dozen or more free websites on the Internet with equally fascinating quizzes. And no, sharing my score with Facebook friends is not reason enough to warrant me paying a dollar plus tax for this when Facebook seems to exist solely for the purpose of providing me with an endless assortment of exciting quizzes.

Of course, should this pack of recycled questions no longer float your boat (or sink it which better fits with our theme here), you can always cough up extra dough for additional question packs with such ear-tickling titles as Deal With It and Likely Outcome. Yes, count us in for that.

So what's the worst case scenario? You buying this game.

One of the most amazing accomplishments in conceptualizing a product is when your audience understands what to do from the get-go without reading a single instruction. This is one of the key reasons Apple has succeeded with their “out-of-the-box” products. It is also why Auditorium is so exceptional. Upon opening it for the first time, you are immediately put into the first level with nothing more than a level design and a tile with which to manipulate it. Not only is Auditorium a surreal experience, but it will also test you to think outside the box to discover how both music and the elements of movement work together.

The idea behind Auditorium is that you must move a stream of light through music boxes to create a symphony. Each song is made up of multiple levels that come together in the end to create a masterpiece of orchestral sounds. In order to manipulate the stream of light, you must use both built-in elements and the provided movement tiles. For example, if the music box and light are different colors, you must first direct the light through a color-changing circle and then hit the music box. There are also splitters that send the beam of light in two directions.

Since Auditorium is a game without forced instructions, half of the fun is discovering what each element does and how they react when put together. A big part of it is trial and error, and since there is never a time limit you are always encouraged to try new methods. Nearly everything interacts with everything else in a different fashion. Instead of listing these, we will let you discover them for yourself. If you are having trouble deciphering exactly what a certain object does, there is a help screen to tip you in the right direction.

Apart from the first few levels, Auditorium is extremely challenging but ultimately rewarding. Upon the completion of a level, everything except the stream of light disappears and you can view the intertwining array of colors you created while listening to the tune. The final level of each song puts all of the parts together and allows you to manipulate the music by soloing different parts.

As far the controls go, all that is asked of you is to drag tiles around and expand or shrink a ring around them in order to change the scope of their effect. One issue we found was that there is no way to hide tiles that we were not using. This meant they could easily get in the way. We hope the developers address this in an update.

Something that is important to note about Auditorium is that you are only getting 1/4 of the game for the $2.99 asking price; the three additional level packs are available as in-app purchases for $0.99 apiece. Each pack includes a new musical theme, multiple additional gameplay elements, and a different array of colors. However, while you may end up paying $5.99 for this game, that is half of what the identical PC game costs. Besides, it is a bargain for such a masterpiece.

Auditorium is a game that needs to be experienced to be understood in its entirety. If you are unsure if this game is for you, there is a free demo online or a lite version to try. There just isn't another game quite like it.