Good Game Get! Spirit

Spirit may be the best deal in the app store right now. Seriously. It’s only 99¢!

Now lots of apps in the in the app store for the iPhone and iPod touch are 99¢; this I know, but Spirit is polished contemporary retro arcade goodness.

The premise is simple, it’s a top down score chaser with typical alien enemies with fairly recognizable behavior, hence the classic feel. The catch, and it is an awesome catch is that you have only one way of destroying enemies, and no you can’t shoot them, nope.

Your only defense is flying away from them, and your only offense is making circles quickly to form space-time holes to send them into another dimension. Once the field is clear of enemies, you too, move on to the next dimension and continue on until the game’s difficulty takes a toll on your limited lives.

The controls are spectacular, you just offset your finger from the spirit and begin to move your finger and fly around. Excellently simple and well executed.

The art style and graphics engine are great too, with great particle effects and a pseudo 3D top-down view where the field is manipulated by your death and when you create space-time holes.

Totally nerdy looking and sci-fi, but completely fitting and overall cool. Definitely the best score chaser on the iPhone, next to Canabalt.

Good Game Get! Eliss

Eliss is a multi-touch iPhone/iPod touch game that destroys any notions that the iPhone and iPod touch aren’t relevant video game systems.

The game is much easier played than it is described, but simply it’s a game about controlling different colored planets with your fingers, keeping them from colliding with one another, and turning them into supernovas.

On top of that you have to deal with splitting and combining them with fluid multi-touch controls. You also have a health meter and that decreases when you collide planets (or let them collide) and when other sources of danger affect your planets, thus killing your health, and decreasing the size of the planet making it difficult to create supernovas and stardust which can be swiped to regain health. The goal is reached when you create a predetermined number of supernovas.

If that sounds simple, it is. On paper. The difficulty develops when the game forces your multi-task abilities into over-drive forcing you (if you want to win) to use up to three or four fingers at a time (put your device on a table-top for best play) to control various colors of super novas, especially when a black hole is trying to pull them into one another. It’s challenging, but oh so satisfying when you complete a level that you’ve failed at numerous times, and like any good game, it rewards you with satisfaction when you best it with knowledge learned from failure.

Graphically the game is something behold with its modern minimalist and retro appeal. The color pallette that creator Steph Thirion developed for the game is also awesome. The graphic design from the interface to the GUI to the actual gameplay is top notch and solid throughout. Not only is Eliss an achievement in incredible and original gameplay, it further innovates games as art, and the wonderful music contributes to that as well.

You’ll love the game if you play the lite (free!) version, and if you do so happen to most likely dig it, you should pick it up and support the incredible yet tiny (compared to most of the shit on the App Store) indie game movement on the iPhone OS.

If you have an iPod touch or iPhone, you have nothing to lose.

Trust me. Eliss is pure mobile magic.

Packy & Marlon - An SNES Diabetes Adventure Platforming Game

As you may or may not know, I was recently diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and that really blows, but I’ll manage, so I’m not too worried.

Thanks for the kind comments, and of course, thank you Matt for the great email!

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of Googling on the subject and I found a ridiculous SNES game for Type 1 Diabetics called Packy & Marlon.

According to Wikipedia, “Packy and Marlon are diabetic elephants who must remember to take their medication throughout the day and eat healthily. At the end of the game they face the evil bosses Veets and Yebur of the Lunch Room Crew who force them to eat highly refined snacks and drinks which raise their blood sugar level.”

That last bit sounds fucking terrifying. Also what is that Elephant doing in a tree without shoes or socks on when he has Diabetes? Crazy ass Diabetic pachyderm!

Also in the wonderful ’90s, Diabetic insulin supplier Novo Nordisk sponsored this gem of a game, Captain Novolin:

All jokes aside, apparently Packy & Marlon has helped Diabetics with Diabetes.

From Wikipedia:

“A six month study undertaken in 1999 on behalf of Click Health by researchers at Stanford University’s Medical Center on 60 diabetic children ages 8 to 16 found that after playing the game the children were four times less likely to require urgent care visits than children who had played other games.”

Good Game Get! NobyNobyBoy iPhone/iPod Touch

Katamari Damacy put creator Keita Takahashi on a fairly high podium, and since then countless Katamari Damacy sequels have been released by the assholes at Namco and the franchise sadly has been severely diluted.

I recently picked up Katamari Damacy for the iPod Touch and it was such a let down as the seemingly sensical tilt controls were actually really awful and un-tweakable leaving the game very broken, uninspired, and just an all around example of how much Namco has been attempting to milk the Katamari series.

I think Takahashi had been pretty jaded by all of that, so for his next game, I think that he set out to create something so ridiculous, so fun, so unable to make money (only $5 on the Playstation Store!) that it would really satisfy his desire to be the introverted, un-famous game designer that he wanted to be with Katamari Damacy.

He succeeded. NobyNobyBoy is totally weird, but oh so delightful. Its less of a traditional video game, and more of a video toy. Of course it has a goal, which is stretching Girl throughout the galaxy, but thats really just background noise when compared to the meat of the game, which just so happens to be centered around nonsensical fun.

The game received mixed reactions and reviews, but I wonder if that hardly matters to Takahashi now that he understands how a company like Namco can take something and really ruin it’s value.

Oddly enough though, Takahashi recently released another game through Namco, and also oddly enough Namco actually released it, despite the terrible sales it’s most likely going to have.

The game is essentially like it’s bigger PS3 brother except it’s a top-down 2D rendition complete with all the cool iPhone/iPod Touch features you’d expect from a game like this. You can do mostly everything you can do on the PS3 version and you can even set your device up so that using GPS you can stretch boy across a map while you walk, ride, or drive.

Even cooler, all of the stretching you do with Boy inside of the NobyNobyBoy app can be added to the overall Girl length which includes Boy lengths from the PS3 version.

The game is absolutely full of surprises as every time you start the app you get new music and new objects to play around with your fingers, Boy, and the accelerometer. You can even take screen shots and send them via eMail to someone while in the app.

The game/toy is wonderful and if you want to pick it up, you can search for it, or you can go to categories as the game is listed in the Productivity apps section of the App Store, but you can type reminders on Boy’s body so I guess that kind of helps with productivity, but it’s mostly just sweet irony.

This Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda Video Will Blow Your Mind

Using the DSi camera, Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda will implement some seriously cool motion tracking to create a 3D world you can explore by manipulating the DSi.

I really hope this drops in the states, it looks so neat!

via TC

P.S.

The logo is ultra-cute!

an explanation

So I haven’t posted in a week, which isn’t normally like me since I at least like to update every other day, but I have a reason for not being able to post.

Last Thursday I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and put into the hospital for six days.

I had the symptoms for months, but never really thought anything of it and eventually I decided to do some Googling and then a doctor’s visit. My blood sugar levels had been in the 400s for about three months. The average person’s glucose levels should be in between 80 and 100.

Being twenty-one it is strange to be diagnosed with Type 1, but my pancreas decided to kick the bucket, so here I am with a new diet, an eventual new exercise plan, and a life-long dependency on insulin. Currently I take four shots a day, but the delivery technology is pretty incredible so I have the insulin pens with the ultra tiny needles, and it’s fairly painless.

Hopefully in the future, I’ll be eligible for an insulin pump which will sort of act as a digital pancreas.

While in the hospital I asked my rents to pick me up an iPod touch using my income tax return, and I can’t wait to write about all the wonderful games I’ve been playing. I am going to absolutely begin raving about the iPhone/iPod touch as a great video game system, so get ready for some pretty passionate posts about some awesome games in the coming weeks.

I’m really glad I purchased the iPod touch actually and in fact I really haven’t used it for music at all, but not only is it one of my favorite video game systems, it’s one of the coolest tools I have right now for tracking and documenting my Diabetes.

I bought a $2.99 app called Islet and it’s absolutely incredible! It enables me to simply enter all of my data for tracking and it’ll make doctor’s visits even more helpful.

It’s a great little application and I wish everyone with Diabetes with an iPod or iPhone knew about it. It’s a lot better than jotting things down into a notebook and I can even create graphs and charts with the data. It can also be emailed to yourself so you can print hard copies of the data.

Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Thank you for reading Good Game Get! and I hope you continue to once I start posting regularly again, which will hopefully be tomorrow.

Now I leave you with a Wilford Brimley Bitches Don’t Know ‘Bout My… shoop.

First Person Tetris

Tetris most likely has more releases, tweaks, and variants than any other game, but First Person Tetris is the most ridiculous of them all.

The game is almost unplayable for me, but its concept is wholly unique and it really isn’t first person, it’s like Tetris Block Orientation Picture in Picture style Tetris. Yeah weird, and hard to explain. Just give it a try and see what you think.

Good game get! Castle of Magic

Gameloft’s Castle of Magic was originally a 3D side scroller for the iPhone and iPod touch, but I guess they decided the game could be successful on DSiWare as well, so they made an all new 2D port of the game for the DSi. However, like many good games on DSiWare, I don’t think it’s sold very well, which is sad because Castle of Magic is superb.

The game reminds me a lot of a Super Nintendo game, and while it isn’t very original, the game just pops with personality and that is what really has kept me playing. You’re a boy who becomes a magician because he and his girl friend fall into this magic book they find.

An evil wizard takes the girl and challenges the boy wizard to find and rescue her. The game is a good length and has a variety of levels and worlds to venture through.

The only annoying, yet creative thing about the game is a photo booth that you are sometimes required to enter and then to use the shitty DSi camera to take a photo of a color to earn a certain power-up. While unique and original, it ends up blowing because that color isn’t always around you, and when it is, the lighting blows so the software doesn’t end up recognizing the color.

All in all, the game is so much fun and is a blast to pick up an play a level or two every now and then, and the best part is that the game is only five dollars. Five hundred DSiWare points. That’s it.

You can’t beat that, so pick it up the next time you load some DSiWare points on your DSi.