Killing Monsters

Well, now that I've given a boring description of a bad game, it's time to write an exciting review about a good game.

Ever felt like your life is too boring? Wouldn't it be great if you were to walk out into the street and suddenly be surrounded by hordes and waves of monsters? And you were armed only with a single shot musket? Well it ain't gonna happen. Not in real life anyway.

But for the absolute bargain price of $0.99US(at the time of this writing) you can pick up the iPhone/iPod touch game iDracula and live your dream.

Built around blood-boiling metal-type music and Diablo II-style graphics, iDracula is described as a "survival shooter." You play as a Van Helsing type dude who must fight off endless waves of werewolves, vampires, and other mythical creatures. Two "virtual directional pads (D-pads)" are shown on screen; the lower left one is for moving your character around and the lower right one is for aiming the gun and firing.

The two game modes as of this writing are Survival and Rush. First, survival. At the beginning the enemies come in small groups and kind of move slowly so you can easily pick them off. As you kill more, they slowly get stronger, faster, and more numerous. To help you out, the game has the enemies randomly drop items, including health recovery potions, stronger weapons including a crossbow, flamethrower, shotgun, and a BFG, as well as ammo and "omens". Omens are the only items that stay with you between play sessions, and determine your rank as an iDracula player. You gain points by killing monsters, and after gaining certain amounts of points you earn a "perk" which allows you to choose from a variety of permanent (e.g. increase max health) or temporary (e.g. increased damage) upgrades.

Once you get to a certain point the game gets really frantic with enemies coming at you from all over the place. This where the game shines. Even with so much activity, the beautiful graphics engine doesn't hiccup, doesn't skip a beat. And there is a certain great sense of satisfaction in taking out hordes of ugly monsters in your spare time.

Oh yeah, real quick note on Rush mode. In this mode, you are equipped with a really powerful weapon from the get-go (the chaingun when I played) and they just throw tons and tons of werewolves at you right off the bat. Quick and intense.

I'll try to post some screenshots later, but in the meantime get this game before it goes up to $2.99 at some unspecified point in the future.

iDracula: iTunes Store, AppShopper

EDIT: here's a sneak preview video of the upcoming Free update to owners of iDracula

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

Not Impressed

When the iPhone Standard Developer Kit (SDK) was announced, many companies and individual developers got really excited. Longtime gaming company Sega saw this as a great opportunity to create a game that's perfectly suited to the tilt controls included in the iPhone's feature list.

Before the iPhone Application Store even debuted in July 2008, a working demo of Sega's Super Monkey Ball was shown at an Apple event, and it was said to have been created in about a week.

Let's take a step back. In 2001 the Nintendo Gamecube received a game called Super Monkey Ball, which was a port of a Japanese arcade game by the name of Monkey Ball, released in 2000. You played as a monkey in a ball (go figure) and the goal was to control the ball as you navigate around a twisting platform suspended in the air while collecting banana icons and trying to get to the goal. It was supposedly a ton of fun, but I never played that version.

Sega was right to recognize the iPhone as a perfect platform to port Super Monkey Ball to, since the concept lent itself greatly to being controlled by tilting the phone right to move the ball right, tilting left to move it left, and tilting it forward to accelerate. Super Monkey Ball debuted on the App Store on August 27 at $9.99 to much hype and fanfare. It even reached #1 on the top 10 paid apps list and stayed there for quite a while.

At the time, there still were not very many games to choose from, and there was no "norm" price for this type of game, or any app for that matter. People were a little annoyed by the controls in Super Monkey Ball for iPhone, but since it was one of the only games out there, they took it in stride because no standard had been set yet. This and the hype surrounding it for weeks prior kept it at the top spot on the app store.

Two updates, five months, and a $2 price drop later, I actually became curious about whether it had improved, but I didn't want to spend the $7.99 just to test it out. By then I'd played many great games on my iPod Touch, and wasn't sure it would be worth the $8 for this previously imperfect game.

Well, thanks to the free Lite version released in January 2008, I've been able to find out what the deal is. I'll give you the bottom line now: Don't get this game. Unfortunately, if you were going to get this game, you've probably already gotten it. And I am sorry that you did. And you are probably sorry as well. I don't know what they fixed between the 1.0 and the 1.0.2 versions, but it doesn't seem like anything.

The game is not fun and it feels like a slight little tilt in any direction sends your freaking monkey spinning in a circle. Somehow, for a game that took a week to finish and has had months to perfect, Super Monkey Ball for iPhone is terribly broken, and boy am I glad I was able to try it for free. I gave it a shot. I really, really did. But in the end, I can't recommend this at all.

In the future, my negative reviews will be much shorter. But history lessons are so much fun, aren't they?


Super Monkey Ball: Wikipedia link, AppShopper Link

Beejive Sale and Free Kindle App

Here's a quick one. There's a multi-service IM app for the iPhone and iPod Touch called BeejiveIM. Out of all the IM apps, it is my opinion that Beejive is far and away the best. Despite the fact that the others are mostly free and BeeJive is regularly $16, if you're going to send and receive a lot of IMs, I would totally recommend Beejive. I will try to do a review of it later, but my point here is to mention that it's currently on sale for $10 for this week only. This is the price I got it for (Black Friday sale, I believe) and it's back down to it now. That's a whole 33% off for what I feel is the most useful app I own.

Now on the other side of the spectrum is the Kindle App. The Kindle is a two-part product from Amazon. One part is a handheld "eBook" reading device (the Kindle itself), and the other is the Kindle Store, where you can purchase books and periodicals that get wirelessly beamed to your Kindle. However, today Amazon released the free Kindle app for iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing those users to buy books and periodicals from the Kindle Store and view them on their iPhones/iPods; no Kindle required. If you like or are interested in reading books on your iPhone or iPod, check out the free Kindle app. Disclaimer: the books are not free.


Beejive Links: iTunes Store, AppShopper

Kindle Links: iTunes Store, AppShopper

Tripped

So I went on a driving trip to Northern California, which we typically call Norcal. Rain was initially a concern but luckily, it only rained the morning of our return trip home and only for a very short time. Spending some time with the bro for the first time in two months was a highlight, and it's unfortunate that the trip had to be three days, two of which were mostly spent driving. The other highlight of the trip was going to my first ever away game. Yeah, my first ever UCLA basketball game on the road.

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken, so we'll have to rely on the photos residing in my mind's eye. So it's a good thing I'm writing this now and not a week from now. UC Berkeley's (known better in sports as Cal) Haas Pavilion is very different from UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. Where Pauley has a wide, gradual bowl-shaped seating structure, Haas's is much more narrow and steep. Fans get to their seats via narrow, circuitous, crowded indoor hallways, sort of like Staples Center or any other big arena, but without the spacious corridors. The other rather sharp contrast was the fans. I love my Bruins, but Cal fans really seem to be much more into it as far as cheering went. Whereas the home crowd at Pauley was liable to fall asleep for long stretches of play, the Cal fans were always cheering and always making noise. I finally understand what a home court advantage is like - except we weren't at home. There was literally so much buzz that I couldn't hear the P.A. or the band.

I could, however, hear the Cal fan to my right very clearly. He wasn't behaving obnoxiously per se, but his yell of "GO BEARS!" about every twenty seconds really began to get on my nerves as the game wore on. And sometimes it was more like "GoBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARS!" Geez man, I'm surprised I'm not deaf yet. It was really an intense game, and the hostile crowd really made for a fantastic and memorable atmosphere. But the best thing was that the Bruins won. Don Maclean frequently likes to say that the home crowd is good for about 4-6 points and the visiting team needs to play well enough to overcome not only their opponent but also that crowd advantage. To me it was more like 10 points from the crowd. At least that's what my ears were telling me after the game.

I really wanted to tell the guy next to me "Go BRUINS!" after the game, but thought better of it. Hey, I'm a classy guy.

The Pac-10 regular season is winding down, with only two more games left for UCLA. Oregon State is on the menu for Thursday, followed by Oregon on Saturday. Two not very great teams, but not to be overlooked, since a loss means no chance to share in the Pac-10 title. We'll see how it shakes out.

Oh, and if you want the best egg custards ever, go to Golden Gate Bakery in San Francisco.

Alive

No updates lately, but yes I'm still alive. I can't say I've been unbelievably busy, but sometimes mustering up the will to do a real post with real content is hard, especially when I know that my audience is really somewhere between 0 and 1, probably rounded down. I have some great ideas in the pipeline, but execution is the problem. I'll try to get back into my routine, since I've been playing some great iPod Touch games, watching some bball games, and had some interesting ideas about random stuff. Hopefully another update soon. Comment on this if you have a comment.

Testing iBlogger

Since the LifeCast app for my iPod proved unreliable and inflexible, I've decided to try out this new one, called iBlogger, from IllumineX. It seems to work fine and it saves my drafts offline so I can work on the go with no Internet connection.
Now I'm testing to see how HTML tags are handled. This sentence should be bold. This sentence should be italicized.

Edit: let's see if iBlogger can make edits.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

Palouse Pressure, Seattle Showdown

So the Bruins had another nailbiter. They blew another 15 point lead to make it an extremely tight game at the end. But this time they managed to avoid overtime and avoid a loss. Behind Nikola Dragovic's third career game of the year (20 points), UCLA beat Washington State in Pullman 61-59.

Quick thoughts and facts:
-This was UCLA's 9th straight win against Washington State, and UCLA leads the all-time series 94-13.
-Nikola keeps getting better, and the team continued to shoot pretty well from the perimeter. That's good, because we weren't really getting much interior production.
-After last week's loss to ASU, Coach Howland said he needed to play the reserves more. They did play a little more this time, but not much. Jerime Anderson and Malcolm Lee need more playing time.
-Alfred was his usual intense self on defense, but he started out shooting 0/3 from the field on some tremendously questionable shots. He did step up to the challenge when needed at the free throw line, however.
-Darren didn't do much for most of the game, but really made a difference in the last few minutes when it was dangerously close.
-Josh Lazy Dog Shipp didn't do much.
-Despite the departure of Derrick Low and Robbie Cowgill, WSU still posed a great challenge to UCLA. This is likely a combination of the tough crowd in Pullman and UCLA's frontline, which still needs some work.

Tomorrow UCLA meets Washington at Washington, and surprisingly, it's an early battle for 1st place in the Pac-10. UCLA and the Huskies are tied for 1st, after Cal dropped out of the 3-way tie losing to Oregon State last night.

UCLA vs Washington is at 1p.m. PT on... surprise, surprise, FSN Prime Ticket.