GadgetNewsBlog

In place of the roller ball, you have the capacitive touchscreen, of course, and this has both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the plus side, you can aim incredibly quickly, just in front of incoming missile tracks and spacecraft, whereas the old roller ball was large and had momentum – it took a lot of practice to use it to aim quickly and precisely, and it took time to move your aim from one point to another.

On the downside, there’s no way to control which of your three missile silos are used to fire missiles – the game’s logic simply chooses the closest. Although this might seem sensible, this system does away with one of the key expert strategies used in the original game – that of using a side silo to lay down a blanket of explosions while you used the centre silo to pick off ’smart’ bombs and anything else that got through. With the current game logic, the centre silo usually gets exhausted first and you’re then into fighting a rearguard action trying to pick off smart bombs low in the sky with just the left and rightmost silos. Read the rest of this entry »

Ballz! Pro — If you’ve played a mobile game in the last 5 years, chances are you’ve played some variation of the match-3 puzzle popularized by games like Bejeweled. Easy and addicting, match-3 games are a dime a dozen in the App Store. Often, it’s the same game with different icons.

Purplezoo Productions has changed the same-old, same-old with their new game Ballz! Pro Version for iPhone and iPod touch. Ballz (the original) was a traditional match-3 with smiley icons.

While loosely based on the original, Ballz Pro is a whole new game all together. Ballz Pro adds extra challenge with locking squares, extra help from the exploding bonus ball, large Ballz, 3 shuffles to extend gameplay when you run out of moves, and a localized and worldwide scoreboard. The whole game is wrapped in a sportier new theme that features animated sports Ballz similar the grimacing blocks in Topple 2. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s bound to be plenty of you who have no real recollection of Pong in its original form, but for those of you who do, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is an iPhone app designed to let you relive the experience of the classic paddle and ball game.

Even with its clean adaptation to iPhone and touch, if you have no interest in retro games Ball & Bat Retro won’t impress you much. Even for someone who appreciates the classic games, revisiting some of them on a device that can do all that the iPhone can do is a bit like baking a freezer pizza in a convection oven. Nonetheless, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is a set of four games – tennis, football, squash, and squash practice – for your iPhone or touch that is pretty much as retro as it gets. Read the rest of this entry »

In an age when the environment is garnering more attention and global warming seems to be an increasingly popular topic, it is no surprise that iPhone apps are taking cues and beginning to focus on beloved Mother Earth. One such app, which turns recycling into a game, is i-Dig: The Recycling Challenge. The game is based on an ecological adventure in which the goal is to help a worm collect (and properly recycle) as much trash as possible. There are obstacles to amp up the excitement of rummaging and recycling, and the game also offers single and multi-player modes. At the end of the day, though, i-Dig is just reinforcing some eco-friendly habits which, let’s face it, we all need to adopt.