Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
I love my iPhone games. With my busy lifestyle, I rarely have time to get a game loaded up on my WII or XBox and just a few minutes of game play is all I’m looking for at a time. So many games on the iPhone meet my basic gaming criteria and Infinity Control is no exception.
Game Play
The game’s creator offers this introduction to Infinity Control:
Welcome Recruit! You have just joined the Federation of International Space Marines! You start on earth where you learn the basics managing incoming craft while avoiding passing by satellites, then you will help the researchers maneuver craft around the dense asteroids of Saturn. Keep ahead of satellites orbiting around earth while docking ships! Watch out! The random appearance of black holes is possible!
Playing the game is as simple as drawing lines with your finger… but the lines are flight paths… for space ships. The screen shot below should give you a pretty good idea of what it takes to become a flight controller in space.
Over all, the game play is pretty straight forward and very easy to get the hang of.
Strategy and Features
The strategy of the game is just as simple as the controls. You have a red space station and a blue one on the screen. Entering the screen from all sides will be red and blue space ships. Your goal is to get each ship to dock safely to its matching colored space port. To do this, you swipe your finger along the screen to draw a flight path. As with any flight control, you need to make sure that you don’t direct your space ships into each other or other objects. The video below demonstrates this.
The game starts out incredibly easy and gradually increases in complexity as you play. Having to think about the colliding paths and plan ahead is critical to getting a good score, often involving re-thinking your ship’s path a couple times to avert disasters.
Conclusion
This was a fun game, but very simple. With limited goals and no enemies or weapons, it’s more of a test of coordination than it is a battle or puzzle game. At $0.99, it’s as cheap as it gets (other than free) and it does offer the ability to just play forever, unlike games with levels that get beaten. For a buck, it’s a good game that will remain unbeatable for as long as you play it, which is always good. Get your own copy and let me know how long it takes to beat my high score of 77.
Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
With a $1.99 price tag in the App Store, Sand Slides, a physics-wielding original game runs the risk of being overlooked in a sea of flashy games with thousands of downloads, but when you dig deeper, sometimes you find gems.
First Impressions
I have to come right out and admit that I judge a book by its cover, occasionally, and that’s true with software more than anything. When I first saw Sand Slides, I thought it had some potential, but the graphics didn’t draw me in. They weren’t bad, but I’ve been spoiled with some of the more popular games, I guess. At first glance, this looks like a simple game without a lot of depth, but looks can be deceiving. To be fair, I’m not sure how much you can dress up sand.
How To Play
This is where simple comes in. The basic premise of the game is to get the sand to flow in to the correct bins by color. Blue sand goes in the blue bin, yellow in the yellow, etc. Sometimes you get lucky and it can fall straight in, but usually, it’s up to you to create a slide by drawing a line. The slides help guide the sand to its proper destination.
At the start of the game, you get a kind of bank of 30,000 grains of sand and every grain that goes into the wrong colored bin deducts from your bank and every grain that you get into the proper bins adds to your score. Below is a video showing how the game play works.
It looks easier than it is to keep all your grains, though. In the harder modes, you can easily lose with one simple mistake.
Hard To Put Down
This game was surprisingly addictive. You could spend hours just trying to beat your own personal best score, and when you do, there are several other difficulty levels to try. This is also one of those games that generally only lasts a few minutes, opening the door to that “just one more game before bed” mentality. Losing track of time with Sand Slides was not hard to do.
Conclusions
At $1.99, Sand Slides doesn’t stand out as a deal that you can’t pass up. There are plenty of well-polished games in the App Store that I could easily spend money on, instead. That said, beauty is not just skin deep. The addictive nature and smooth play of this game are features even some of the best dressed apps forget about. If I’m playing this game months from now, it’s $1.99 well spent.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ve probably played plenty of games with zombies, castles that need destroying or defending, or unhappy birds flinging themselves at pigs. The game I’m reviewing today has none of that. What it does have is bubbles that you have to pop, and it’s called Just Pop It from Zoltán Kovács.
Game Play
Unlike most games, this one is surprisingly simple. It starts with an empty grid and a set of four teal colored bubbles, each with the number 3 in them. You get a bubble on the grid by aiming and releasing your finger on the screen. The number inside a bubble indicates how many times you must hit it with another bubble of the same color before it pops. Each time you pop a bubble, you get another bubble to throw at the grid. When you run out of bubbles, the game is over. A bubble can be bounced off the virtual walls and top, but not the bottom. If a bubble touches the bottom, the game ends. It’s as simple as that.
The grid includes an overlay with the level, number of total bubbles popped, and number of bubbles to pop until the next level in large numbers, making it easy to read while playing.
Addiction Factor And Longevity
This game is addicting, and that caught me off guard. It doesn’t look very exciting, and frankly, it isn’t, but after I started playing I had a hard time putting it down. I attribute this partly to the fact that you just want to keep going until you beat your high score and partly to the fact that by time the game has ended, you’ve already put in a lot of work to get that far. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this game will remain addictive to me for very long. I’ve been playing for a few days and it’s still fun, but it starts the same way every time and I don’t know if there’s enough variation to keep me interested. If this game follows the path of some other games and introduces updates with new ways to play, it will renew my excitement.
Everything Else
The graphics are done about as well as I might expect for a game this simple and I actually prefer that they’re not over the top. This is like playing pool, in a sense, so I’m happy to not be distracted with too much while I’m angling my shot. It starts and runs smoothly, but has a bug that prevents you from continuing an interrupted game. If you exit the game for any reason, it will crash right after you re-enter the game, forcing you to start it again from scratch.
All things considered, I like the simplicity of Just Pop It, but I think it needs some variations in levels to justify the cost for the full version. Grab the Lite version and generate your own conclusions.
In September, I posted an article about Secrets, Hints, Tips, and Tricks to Succeed in FarmVille on Facebook. Having only played the now amazingly popular Facebook farming game for less than two weeks, I had already gathered lots of helpful tips. I’ve been asked so many times for more tips that I thought it was time for Part 2.
Get More Eggs And Other Special Items
Even if you’ve never used Twitter before, I’m sure you’re aware of what it is by now. Even if you don’t have a Twitter account, you should grab a Twitter client because it’s very useful in helping you snatch up those coveted lost animals and chicken eggs. Chicken eggs go especially fast because they hatch to reveal gold, brown, black, and white chickens as well as other cool stuff like hot tubs, pink flamingos, or even fuel. The problem is that people grab lost animals and eggs so fast you almost have to be on Facebook all day for a chance at one. I have to work all day, but I have a secret weapon. I use a program called TweetDeck for my Twitter accounts, but I also added Facebook, and that includes all those freebies that go by. I keep it minimized while I work or browse the web and when updates are found, it pops up a little notification with a preview. If I see an egg, I just click on it and it opens in a new tab in FireFox while I continue to work. More often than not, if eggs are made available by one of my FarmVille friends, I’ll get one, and I barely have to be on Facebook at all during the day.
This works almost as well with another program called Seesmic, which I use at home. As you can see in the image above, I have Seesmic in single-column mode, just showing Facebook. This way, it takes up a small portion of the screen, leaving the rest for what I’m working on. You may notice that while I was starting this very article, I snagged an egg and some free coins.
Get More Out Of Your Chicken Coops
Generally, you’ll wait a day for a chicken to lay an egg. This means you’ll wait about a day for a coop to be ready to harvest. You can, however, speed up the process. Drop in a chicken that is already ready to harvest. Make sure the coop is then ready to harvest. Now drop in 19 more chickens that are not ready to harvest and then harvest the coop. Empty your coop and do it again and again. It’s a lot of work, but your friends will love all the eggs produced.
Get Multiple Chicken Coops
So many FarmVille players have been asking, “How do I get multiple chicken coops in FarmVille?” and the answer is pretty simple, actually. First, if you have a chicken coop, move all your chickens out of it and then sell it. Now, with no coops on your farm, take advantage of one of the tools mentioned above to snatch up eggs. You’ll get a chicken coop every time because FarmVille doesn’t see one on your farm. Don’t hit OK on the page that gives you the coop. Just keep collecting them until your gift box is full. I got 14 of them before I decided to stop (not enough room on my farm). When you’ve decided you have enough coops, just start placing them on your farm from the gift box and filling them with chickens to hatch eggs.
Level Up Faster
Sometimes the only thing holding you back from the next crop in the marketplace is your Level. Often, I would harvest my whole farm of crops and be wishing I could buy the next crop, but not having the XP to level up and not wanting to wait a day for the next harvest to get those needed XP. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait. I noticed all the XP floating around for sale in the marketplace.
While you can’t just buy XP, you can buy items that give you a lot of XP. Take a look at the image above. My favorite is the windmill, because it gives me 1,000 XP and takes up hardly any room on my farm. It’s not cheap, but if you don’t want to wait, this is a good way to level up past your friends while they wonder how you did it.
Make More Money
Now that I’ve just told you a sure-fire way to blow through a lot of your coins, I’m sure you’d love to find out how to get more of those coins back faster. The fastest way to get coins is typically by just farming the more expensive crops. Pay attention to the harvest times and plant according to your ability to later harvest before anything withers. Remember, every crop that withers is just money (and time) down the drain, so don’t plant strawberries (4 hours) and then go out all night.
You can also make more money with gifts. The more friends you have that play FarmVille, the more gifts you end up with. I get easily 100 gifts a day and have no room for all of them, but I certainly won’t turn them down. Now that FarmVille has the “Sell All” feature in your gift box, you can just pick the items you want and put them on your farm and then just “Sell All” the rest. A lot of times, it’s an easy 6,000+ coins per day.
Finally, celebrate the achievements of friends and use TweetDeck or Seesmic to celebrate every achievement. You’ll get 50 to 500 coins each time and that adds up. The achievements of others often leave me with an extra 10,000 or so coins a day.
Get The Real Deal
You may have noticed a lot of pictures of eggs or gifts popping up on your wall, in friends’ updates, or with your regular FarmVille gift request notifications. Unfortunately, many of these are worthless in as much as they can’t be used in the game at all. While they may be fun to pass back and forth, they won’t contribute to your FarmVille play at all. Personally, I ignore all of them.
Take A Break Once In A While
Hi. My name is Joe and I’m an addict. No, really. This game is a lot of fun, but you can get burned out on it if you play too much. Once in a while, plant a three+ day crop and then just don’t log in for a couple days. And even more important to note is the opportunities for a break that are all but forced on you. Like many fast-growing games, FarmVille has its bugs. When you see people complaining that it wiped out their friends or you try to get the game to come up and it won’t, just find something else to do for a while. When you come back, you’ll be far less frustrated than others and will have more fun.
Experiment
FarmVille is software and software is prone to glitches. The methods to get multiple coops or generate eggs faster are based on glitches that someone found through experimentation. Drag a cow to a neighbor’s farm. Pet your horse every day for a week. Just try doing something in a different way and see if something new happens. If you find out a new tip, be sure to come back and post it here.
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