TwiddleGeek

In many ways, I feel Marble Mash Premium represents what's wrong with the iPhone store right now.  Since it's launch at $1.99, it's been listed at prices ranging from free to $8.99.  Now it sits at $.99, a "limited time offer" that's been running since January, down from the $8.99 price it held for a mere two days.  Marketing folks, ain't it wonderful?

That aside, Marble Mash is a clone of the popular title Labyrinth.  Unfortunately, it just doesn't match up in quality.  Questionable art choices like weird animal backgrounds mar the passable programming and gameplay.  Though while there may be just over 150 levels to play through as advertised, you'll find most are very similar and passable in a matter of seconds.  In fact, most of the level appears to just be for show as you can roll along the wall to most goals without ever touching 90% of the screen space.

For free (when I got it) or at the current $.99 price point, it can be a fun distraction to roll through some levels for a few minutes.  It lends itself well to pickup and play, and as mentioned, the programming is fairly decent.  A buck isn't much to lose either, but the iPhone gives you a lot of choices for that buck.  It's probably best spent elsewhere, like the much higher quality Labyrinth game.

Tiki Towers is one of the few iPhone games that I can honestly say has PSP quality, at least so far as graphics are concerned.  Wonderful art direction really pulls this game along, and at it's current $0.99 price tag, there's a lot of bang for the buck.  Picture something like World of Goo, but with some very neat differences.

Gameplay and gravity are paused while you play, and there's no editing once you hit go.  A handful of monkies swing their way from start to finish, causing your structures to bend, break, and often just completely fail.  In practice, it's fun and unpredictable.  My only complaint is that it doesn't do much in the way of guiding you to proper building techniques, and often times I felt I was solving the puzzles by means other than what was intended by the developers.

Like most iPhone games, It can be blasted through fairly quickly, but getting gold on every level took me quite a few days of off and on play.  I imagine it'd take at least a dedicated weekend afternoon.  For the price, that's not too bad.  It's further extended by a Eco Mode, where you have to beat each level using only a certain number of sticks.  This would probably just be annoying, were it not for the fact the game saves everything you do.  Thanks to this it becomes a matter of optimizing each solution.

SpaceKitty, being the awesome fiancée she is, picked up Rock Band for my birthday not so long ago.  Having been a fan of the original Guitar Hero back in the day, I'd been eying the new band kits but waiting for the price to drop to something I considered reasonable.  It finally did (sub $100) and SpaceKitty was there to pick one up before I had the chance.

The first thing we did was jump right in to Band World Tour.  I had experience with Guitar Hero so I took the guitar, while SpaceKitty (who was new the genre) was on drums.  What surprised me most compared to Guitar Hero is that the frets made a whole lot more sense.  I could actually play on Hard and Expert for a change, unlike Guitar Hero where the insane fretting made playing all 5 frets just about impossible for me.  The avatar customization and save a bandmate function were also big hits throughout.

There are some downsides, however.  The focus on an entire band made the experience less of a "Rock Legend" simulator than Guitar Hero to me.  Songs are less focused on wild guitar solos and more on an overall band.  Understandable, of course.  What bothered me most however was the lack of focus in the Band World Tour.  Hopping from city to city replaying many of the same songs with little more than changed flavor text really lacked that critical sense of progress and accomplishment I had expected.

Regardless, we had a lot of fun in our playthrough and that's about all we hoped for.  I had also spent some time deciding between Rock Band and Guitar Hero: World Tour before deciding on getting either.  While GH:WT appeared to have more songs I enjoyed, the Rock Band interface and controllers simply appealed to me more.  The best part is the compatibility on these titles are great, so we can Gamefly everything from Rock Band 2 to GH: Smash Hits to keep on playing.

My initial fears with World of Goo was that it seemed like little more than a trumped up, $20 Flash game.  I'm certainly not against the casual genre, but there's a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for almost any game in this genre, and generally speaking, the cheaper the better.  $10, Sure;  $15, Maybe;  $20 or higher?  I'm more likely to wait for a price cut.

So recently when Vavle's Steam had World of Goo on one of their specials for $10, I lept at the chance.  I've got to say, I'm quite pleased with the purchase.  It's lengthier than I had expected, and the length is underscored with great variety and story throughout.  SpaceKitty and I clocked in at just over 8 hours by the end of the game; not a vast amount of time to be sure but pretty good for a game of this nature.

What puts World of Goo over the top is the stylish graphics, creative puzzles, and engaging world in which you play.  From The Sign Painter to the gooballs themselves, it all comes together to be much more than the standard puzzle game.  It's a puzzle game with story, varied gameplay, and with heart.  World of Goo is to the puzzle genre what Briad is to platformers or Plants vs Zombies to Tower Defense.  The extra polish and depth makes it an exemplary title in its field.  That said - $20 is still more than I personally feelis a decent asking price.  I'd hold off until you find it at a discount.

It's funny, I had fully expected to like Chinatown Wars.  Despite the fact that it wasn't really even on my radar, I decided to rent it from GameFly shortly after it's release.  Old-school gameplay, 2.5D graphics, lessons learned between GTA I / II and GTA IV, critical acclaim - sounded great, in theory.

In actual practice though what I found wasn't all that enthralling.  Sure, the game is technically sound enough, and moderately entertaining - but only moderately.  The best way I can think to describe it is like the various Gameboy Color ports of console titles from yesteryear.  Some of them were, technically, fun enough - but pretty much all of them were lacking from their console counterparts.  Watered down to fit on the lesser powered system in a lower budget production.

A few things in particular that bugged me here was the monitony of doing very similar tasks, being frequently chased by the cops for every little thing, and the incredibly bad aiming system.  Driving around in a 2.5D world also turned out to be a lot less fun than I had expected.  Without that 3rd dimension, there's a lot fewer thrills to be had.  After games like GTA IV, Saints Row, and Crackdown,  I guess I just expect a lot more than a Gameboy port like Chinatown Wars has to offer.