Tentacles: Enter the dolphin is a crazy new platformer with very original controls and a bizarre title.  The game makes about as much sense as the company associated with the development of Tentacles, Microsoft.

Gameplay

You play as a…well, I’m not entirely sure what you play as.  An anomaly of nature, named Lemmy.  Lemmy has three tentacles and a claw used to eat eyeballs.  Lemmy adventures through the body of a professor, after getting there by a crazy accident in the first place. Tentacles, is difficult, very difficult.  The control scheme is one that is very easy to use, but also very hard to master.  You tap the screen once to send out one tentacle to where you tapped, again for the second and once again for the third tentacle.  The movement is very fluid and precise.

There are dozens of death traps just waiting for you to come along as well.  These obstacles are very annoying  and in order to avoid them you must tap in the exact spot you want Lemmy to move to, a centimeter in the wrong direction could mean certain death.  Part of the time I found myself just tapping three times rapidly to send Lemmy flying towards the wall or corridor I was trying to survive. In this aspect, Tentacles can be an extremely frustrating game,  I was already cursing it before I reached level 12.  On the other hand, after level 20 or so, I began to feel pretty comfortable with maneuvering Lemmy through the nightmarish hellscape of the professor’s body.

Each level has three objectives, get all the pickups, complete a challenge, and get to the end without dying (yeah right).  The challenge one I find to be the most fun, there are two different types of challenges found in the different areas, speed challenge and damage challenge.  The speed challenge requires you to blast through a section within a time limit, which is tons of fun.  The damage challenge asks you to survive an area without getting hurt even once.  This one is a bit tougher.  Speaking of tough, the bosses in Tentacles are quite difficult as well, they are well designed and made to make you suffer.

Seriously, I hate this guy.

As the levels progress, the difficulty does not steepen as much as I anticipated, while this could be considered a good thing, I found that the later levels were actually quite a bit easier than the mid 20 – 30 levels.

Graphics

The graphics are gorgeous, even if they are gross. The colors are vivid and the backgrounds are very detailed.  If you thought Lemmy was ugly, check out some of the creatures he has to face.  Some of the creatures are just eyes,  in order to defeat them, Lemmy grabs their eye with his claw and eats it.  Some pretty grotesque stuff.

Overall

Pros

• Fantastic fluid controls
• Good level design
• Plenty of gameplay to justify a one dollar price

Cons

• More difficult early on rather than towards the end
• No storyline really
• Repetitive

Tentacles is a very enjoyable adventure through a fictional body and well worth the 99 cents. Download Tentacles from iTunes.

The post Game Review: Tentacles: Enter the Dolphin appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

World of Warcraft may not be quite as hot a topic as it once was, but the MMORPG is still hugely popular and Blizzard is looking into expanding the franchise onto mobile platforms. Yes, you could playing WoW on your iPhone.

This comes by way of an interview with John Lagrave, Senior World of Warcraft developer at Blizzard. Understandably, he voices concerns about how to package the huge desktop game into the smaller screen of a handheld device like the iPhone. The graphics may not be as much of a problem these days, given the high calibre we’re seeing in some higher-end iOS games, but how would you map all the controls?

Yes, they could come out with a simplified version that still lets you get into WoW on the go, but Lagrave is quick to point out that they “won’t do it until it’s decent,” meaning that they don’t want to water down the experience. You would likely have to consider the data usage ramifications too, since the game has to be played online.

Instead of porting the full WoW game, Blizzard may entertain having WoW minigames that tap into the same universe. There are rumors that the “Mists of Pandaria” expansion could have a “pet battle system” and minigames that could then theoretically be played on your mobile device. Lagrave says that they “look at that, but we haven’t solved it.”

[Source]

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A teaser trailer has been released (embedded below), but it really doesn’t tell us much about how the newest pig-squishing mission is different from the others. Thankfully, we have found some of the changes that we should expect. For starters, we’re in space.

The biggest impact there is that we will now be treated to stages with zero gravity, completely altering the physics of loading and shooting our feathered friends into the air vast vacuum of outer space. They’re also mentioning slow motion and light speed destruction. In addition to the old cast, some new birds will be introduced with some new powers too. The expectation is that Angry Birds Space will launch on multiple mobile platforms on March 22.

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No, you don’t get that white plastic shell of a steering wheel like how you got in Mario Kart Wii, but the fundamental idea is the same. In fact, Real Racing 2 for OS X is pretty much a port of the iOS version, except this way you get a bigger view of the track in front of you without it tilting on every turn. There’s a 16 car grid, 15 tracks, and 30 officially licensed cars. These include the 2010 Nissan GT-R R35, the 2012 McLaren MP4-12C, and the 2010 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500.

Yes, a $600 iPad is probably the most expensive game controller you’ve ever purchased, but Real Racing 2 could point toward more iOS/OSX crossover support from other developers too. Pick it up for $12.99.

The post OSX’s Real Racing 2 Steered By iPhone And iPad appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Easily one of my favorite arcade games of all time is Time Crisis. There were other on-rails shooting games, to be sure, but Time Crisis revolutionized the genre by adding in that pedal for duck-and-cover action. Now, you can have a similar experience when you pair your iPhone with your iPad and make use of the new iGunCon app.

At least, that’s the idea. Unfortunately, the (free) iGunCon app really doesn’t convert your iPhone into a functional iGunCon, because it doesn’t seem to convert it into a light gun at all. Instead, your iPhone gets connected to your iPad (or Mac) and then the touchscreen controls are mapped to your handheld rather than the gaming screen.

You tap on the trigger to shoot and tap on the different icons to switch guns, but it’s not like you’re really pointing at the screen. From what I can gather, Time Crisis 2nd Strike HD offers touch and tilt controls. With the former, you’d tap on the target, but you can’t really do that with the iGunCon app. So, it seems that you move the crosshairs to tilt your way to your target. That’s not the same at all… it’s like playing Lethal Enforcers on your SNES with a gamepad. It’s just not the same.

That’s how I interpret today’s announcement. Anyone want to give this app combo a try and let us know through the comments below?

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If you really wanted to get a Nintendo-flavored hit of gaming on your Droid or iPhone, you could have already nabbed an SNES emulator and a few ROMs, but that’s hardly official. Well, that’s changing and I think some pigs may have just grown wings: Nintendo is finally developing for both Android and iOS.

This comes as quite the shocker, really, considering that Nintendo’s previous position had been an adamant avoidance of platforms that “competed” against its own DS line (and Game Boy before that). I guess the tides are changing. Maybe Shiggy, Iwata-san, and Reggie are finally seeing the smartphone-tinted light.

The official foray into Android and iOS for Nintendo is an app called Pokemon Say Tap?. As expected, it does the Pokemon thing, but it combines card game and rhythm game elements. I’m not so interested in seeing Pokemon on iOS and Android as I am in seeing Nintendo finally giving these platforms a shake. Should we expect to see Kirby, Mario, Samus, Link, Star Fox, and others soon?

Maybe not. Nintendo has officially iterated that while it has now jumped into iOS and Android, its overall strategy on developing games for smartphones, “hasn’t changed and won’t change.”

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First, you get true online multiplayer. You can’t seek out battles through a 3G connection, but hop onto that Wi-Fi and you can face off against other iCompetitors from around the world. That was the single greatest selling point for me when I bought Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix some years back on XBLA, so it’s good to see the same kind of thing showing up on the portable end of things too. You don’t need a 3DS and Street Fighter IV 3DS Edition to shoryuken on the go.

The other big update is the huge roster expansion. The first Street Fighter IV for iPhone launched with just eight characters, though Capcom added a few more as updates down the road. With Street Fighter IV Volt, you get 18 characters right out of the box. That’s pretty amazing, given that this is “just” an iOS game. Highlights include Sagat, Bison, and Vega, as well as Cody from the SSFIV update. No Oni, Evil Ryu, or Yun/Yang just yet.

If you pick up the game today through the App Store, you can get it for the bargain price of 99 cents. However, Capcom is upping the price a buck every day until it reaches its regular price of $6.99. So, if you’re on the fence, I suggest you make up your mind soon.

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Weee. Oink, oink, oink. Few games in recent memory have captured the same kind of mass market hysteria as Angry Birds. It started on the iPhone, but the franchise quickly expanded to all kinds of other platforms. So, what’s next for Rovio? NFC, it seems.

All of the Angry Birds games thus far have been fundamentally the same: use a slingshot to hurl some birds toward increasingly complex structures. Well, there’s the WIMA conference in Monaco next week and it looks like Rovio Marketing Manager Matthew Wilson has a keynote called, “Introducing Angry Birds Magic with NFC.” That happens on April 20 at 2pm.

And that’s all they’re telling us. The assumption is that Angry Birds Magic is yet another iteration of the Angry Birds franchise, not unlike what we’ve already received with Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio. The kicker, of course, is that “with NFC” that they tagged onto the end.

So, we’re left to speculate. How can NFC possibly integrate into a game like Angry Birds? Will we finally be seeing a multiplayer variant where you sling birds from one device to the other, battling it out to see who can destroy whose structure first? Is this how we bring a mechanic similar to Worms or even Battleship to the Angry Birds universe?

What do you think? What would Angry Birds with NFC look like?

[Read]

Photo: itsybitsyspidercrochet

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Angry Birds is a huge hit and Rovio has spun off a series of sequels. And then, you’ve got the knockoffs like Angry Turds. Well, there doesn’t much more turd-slinging than in the square circle of professional wrestling, so we somehow find ourselves looking at WWE Superstar Slingshot for the iPhone.

The app, as you can imagine, is pretty much Angry Birds, except the birds and pigs have been replaced with guys in tights. Developer Genera Interactive have included ten superstars from the WWE to feature in the game: Big Show, Edge, John Cena, Kane, Kofi Kingston, Randy Orton, Rey Mysterio, The Miz, Triple H and Undertaker.

There are 15 levels and 135 matches in all, including several that are named after popular WWE properties and pay-per-views. You can go to the Royal Rumble, for example, or participate in the Hell in a Cell. At least, that’s supposed to be the appeal.

But really, it’s Angry Birds with sweaty guys. Pick it up in the App Store for $1.99 if you really can’t wait for yet another Rovio stage pack.

[iTunes]

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As great as touchscreens may be, they rarely offer the same kind of visceral experience as you get with real buttons and real moving parts. That’s kind of the idea behind Pinball Magic, a mini pinball cabinet for your iDevice that goes along with the free app.

The net result is a portable pinball machine, complete with real buttons on the sides for the flippers and a real plunger in the front for launching the ball. You don’t get a real ball going around hitting real bumpers, but this is pretty close.

In fact, the free app for Pinball Magic even takes advantage of the tilt sensor in your iPod touch or iPhone, giving you that “warning” when you try to tilt the machine. It’s just like the real arcade, except smaller and digitized.

After seeing people convert iPad’s into Street Fighter cabinets, converting an iPhone to a pinball machine isn’t quite as impressive and I’m pretty sure it’s been done. Even so, the retro enthusiast in your life will surely appreciate this $20 gift.

[Read, Buy]

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