Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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iOS Game Review: Forget-Me-Not

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 01:55 PM PDT


After seeing this interesting-looking game on Indie Games, I thought I’d give it a shot. The colorful, 80s-arcade graphics, minimal controls, and randomly generated gameplay suggested a retro-themed good time. And I wasn’t disappointed — it’s a lo-fi retro delight.

Forget-Me-Not is a bit like Pac-Man in that you are, as you can see, traveling through a maze (new every time), trying to collect all the flowers, find the key, then get to the door out. Enemies of various types (I haven’t encountered them all yet) spawn and wander the maze, occasionally attacking you or each other. You get more points for collecting flowers in a row without missing one, which produces a pleasant rising blip noise. You’re always firing straight ahead, and you can shoot yourself if they go through one of the screen wrap tunnels. The gameplay starts tame, but gets frantic quickly, as multiple enemy types are shooting, biting, and exploding each other all over the map.

The only controls are swiping in the direction you want to go (or grind, a skill I haven’t mastered that lets you run down enemies); there’s no onscreen joystick, you can touch anywhere. It’s a bit weird at first, but once you get a feel for how far you have to swipe, they’re perfectly serviceable. There’s a simultaneous two-player mode that gets complicated real fast, but is a great way to waste 10 or 15 minutes with a friend.

The fun comes from the old-school aesthetic and ramping difficulty. Easy to learn, impossible to beat, just like the best arcade games of the period: Robotron 2084, Joust, Tempest. The simplicity of the controls makes the gameplay surprisingly cerebral, as you strategize against the dangerous shooting enemies, plan out the key-carrying route so it doesn’t get nicked by a monster, and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the graphics are clear, colorful, and smooth. I liked the attract-mode style instruction screens:

The sound is also absolutely wonderful. The “blip blip blip” that accompanies your movement, the “tink-tink” of your shots against the key, the level end noise, all are classic arcade fare of the squarest wave. Listen and check out the gameplay here:

I did not get to test this out on an iPhone; it looks great on the iPad but I can see how some of the graphical details might be more difficult to discern on an iPhone screen. I’d advise caution in iPhone users’ case, unless you’re really struck by the game.

Conclusion:

I’ve had a great time playing this game, and anyone who enjoys the arcade classics, or is maybe just looking for something different from the usual casual fare, will probably find it worth the two bucks.

The game will also be coming out on PC and Mac some time in the next two weeks.

Forget-Me-Not: $1.99 in the App Store, for iPad and iPhone.

Tethered Jailbreak for iOS 4.3.1 Now Available (But Probably Not A Good Idea)

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Just a few days ago, Apple released iOS 4.3.1 — and already, the endlessly ingenious jailbreaking crowd has found their way in. However, let it be known: these early hacks tend to have a caveat or two, and this one’s certainly not the exception.

First and foremost, the 4.3.1 jailbreak is currently “tethered” — which is a fancy way of saying that it’s temporary. Reset your iPhone (say, if the battery runs dry, or if some app is acting funny), and the jailbreak is gone. The process involved here is also a bit more strenuous than usual; thanks to a few bugs that snuck their way into the release (namely, the “RAMDisk Fixer” tool bundled with the jailbreak app is broken, and needs to be swapped out for a working build), there are a few extra points along the way where things can go wrong.

Ready to dive in, regardless of the risks and rocky route? Check out the tutorial over at Redmond Pie.

Rumor: No new iPhone at WWDC this year?

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:41 AM PDT

When you do things the same way each and every year, people start to expect it. Take the iPhone, for example; after the first iPhone was announced at the now mostly perished MacWorld conference, every subsequent iPhone announcement (3G, 3GS, 4) came at Apple’s own WWDC. After 3 years of back-to-back-to-back WWDC iPhone releases, people have started to look at WWDC as the iPhone announcement that also happens to have a developer conference built in.

This year, though, things might be a–changin’ — we might not see a new iPhone at WWDC. While Apple’s making it quite clear that WWDC 2011 (June 6th – June 10th) will have some announcements regarding the future of OS X and iOS (iOS 5! iOS 5!), AllThingsD is hearing that it’s strictly a software show.

So, does that mean no new iPhone in 2011 at all? Certainly not. First of all, these are just rumors; even if they’re totally correct right now, June is still a long way away. More importantly, that leaves 6 months (3, if they try and slam it out before the Holiday rush) for Apple to launch the iPhone 5 without breaking their thus-far-annual pattern.

So, why break from the norm? I can think of a few reasons. First, and most obvious: the Verizon iPhone 4. This thing just launched back in February. Apple’s known for their tendency to make their own toys obsolete pretty quick, but only giving Verizon iPhone owners 4 months before suckerpunching’em with a new model seems a bit harsh. Second: launching at the same time every year might actually be a bad thing. Once the public expects a new iPhone each and every June, it more or less forces Apple’s hands into an insanely rigid and intense development cycle — not to mention, it shortens the lifespan of each iPhone considerably, as the foresight that a new iPhone is coming around June likely hinders sales in the months leading up to it.

Finally: LTE. There’s still no rock solid reason to believe that the iPhone 5 will have support for 4G (LTE) — but if it does, it wouldn’t be much use until later this year, when Verizon’s 4G footprint is of a reasonable size, and AT&T’s 4G network is actually, you know, existent.


AmEx Gets Into Mobile Payments And Takes On PayPal With Serve

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:28 AM PDT

Uh oh, Paypal; looks like you’ve got a new challenger in the person-to-person payments space.

American Express has just announced the launch of their new money spendin’ service, Serve. At its foundation, it’s just a fancied up PayPal, allowing users to send one another money via e-mail address (as long as both users have Serve accounts.) Past that point, however, it’s got a few cool twists; you can pull funds from your account into a refillable pre-paid card, or you can create “subaccounts” that let other users (say, your kids) spend monies from your account while you limit and monitor everything that goes down.

With today’s launch, they’re already offering up payment applications for both iPhone and Android.

Given PayPal’s almost exclusive dominance of this market, there is by all means room for competition — but it’s certainly not as if others haven’t tried. Remember Obopay? Yeah — bet you didn’t know that still exists.
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