IPHONE SPECIAL
This week the Games Corner is taking an in-depth look at some high selling games for the Iphone.
Flight Control
The simplest ideas are the best. Never a truer word spoken, flight control puts you in the radio tower of a busy airport, five busy airports to be precise. You touch on the plane and drag it to its colour aligned landing strip, nothing could be simpler, but wait! The problem emerges when different planes with different speeds start coming in greater frequency, and you have to designate each one of them a strip before they crash into each other. The game is amazing fun, and quite acclaimed from all parts of the digital world, the new generation’s “Snake” if you will, and at €0.79, it makes it quite affordable.
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
The pint sized version of C & C: Red Alert packs all the firepower of its bigger brother and just as much as the brains too. The game is beautifully animated and rendered to the point that you forget you are playing a mobile game. There are 16 missions, 8 allied, 8 soviet, while it’s true they get progressively hard, the learning curve is rather unforgiving. The skirmish and multiplayer modes are also present and accounted for. The game grabs your attention (and time!) brilliantly, playing it for only a little while I’ve really began to notice the complete underlying dictator in me. I found myself beginning to turn into one of the monsters ever present on the History Channel. The game isn’t cheap by iPhone standards (€4.50) but there is a lot of replay value.
So what are the downsides? First up, when you run out of ore (the money making material that feeds your army) it’s damn hard to find a new source. Naturally, the game does not contain the wide range of weaponry and technology present in its Playstation 3 variant. Finally, the skirmishes are ridiculously easy and they just don’t get that much harder.
All in all a solid purchase and a great friend of the lonely traveller on the train.
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
This game prompts a lot of nostalgia for me. I suppose for the younger generation (of which I have just left, that’s right I’m still pretty young, you just take it easy there, I could still pull off being in the younger generation, I’m just slightly slightly older) they won’t remember the top down view GTA, but for the rest of us who enjoyed the series this will be a step back to the black and white days. Chinatown Wars moves the 3rd person perspective to a helicopter view of the action. The game is criminally addictive (see what I did there? Clever? No?) you work for the Triads in Liberty City as you once again start from the bottom and try to work your way up to top.
The gameplay is great craic, there is no denying. However, the game does have some faults for one thing the sensitive handling of the cars compiled with their seemingly futuristic speed makes it almost impossible to make a simple turn without nearly flying into a building. Nostalgia aside, the top down view has the limitation of making it fairly hard to aim your gun, as you are never entirely sure which side your character is facing.
Aside from these flaws the graphics are subtly beautiful, whether it’s the comic style story scenes, the little side profiles of the car when you zoom in and really appreciate the 3d nature of the game, or even the way the fire smoulders, it is a wonderful looking game. The gameplay is also fun the missions keep you going and are invented despite the limitations of the platform. The story is hokum but engrossing. Overall, at €4.50 you wonder how they made a profit developing this game, it’s a big game and a great buy.
Well that’s it our first round up of Iphone games I hope it was helpful, till next time.
This article was originally published in:
Fountain News Digital – May 2011 (Issue 4)
We are re-publishing all articles from our past newsletter, Fountain News Digital, and you can view all completed newsletters here. There were nine issues published in total between 2010 and 2012.
Timeline of our local news services (1994-2013)
Hashtags: #GamesReviews 
