App of the Day: Pandemic 2.5

While I'd never stoop to the old "games cause violence" argument, there's little doubt that games teach us to treat death as a numbers game. Each individual demise isn't important: what matters is the body count, the chain reaction, the comforting tick of small numbers getting bigger.

Pandemic, a morbidly fascinating disease simulator from Dark Realm Studios, is a game that, played successfully, trades in enormous numbers. Get things right and billions of people will die, yet it's always that first death that feels the most exciting and special. It means you're on the right track. The counter will rise.

Pandemic started life as a Flash game on the Newgrounds website that went appropriately viral, but it's been heavily redesigned for its first paid outing as a 69p app. Not all the changes have been for the better, but the ghoulish core of the game has survived intact. If you ever wanted to exterminate mankind, here's your chance.

Read more…

App of the Day: Social Chess

One of the beauties of smartphones, and especially tablets, is how beautifully they fit traditional board games. The daddy of them all is chess. It's been rather brutalised by technology in the past, one of computing's pre-emininent challenges being a program that could defeat a human grandmaster, until, in 1997, Deep Blue finally felled Kasparov. It's a mighty achievement, tinged with tragedy.

15 years later, supercomputers seem like relics and you can buy a chess app called HIARCS Chess that wins real-world tournaments, dispatching grandmasters as a matter of course. There's a bewildering range of tutorial programs, problem-setting, and multiplayer-focused apps. Some even do all three. But if you just want to play the king of games against other people, then the best of the bunch is Social Chess.

The thing about Social Chess is that it isn't rammed with features: just all the ones you need. It incorporates the ELO rating system and lets you search for similarly ranked or random players. Finished games can be saved or emailed. Players can chat, there are no ads, and you can have five games on the go for free. If you want to play more games simultaneously then it's £3 for a year's sub, which I handed over after the generous month's trial without hesitation.

Read more…

App of the Day: Ballistic SE

The human immune system is one mad marvel. It monitors our physical well-being through a series of rigid precautionary and at-the-ready defence systems. It's governed by an army of cellular bodies carrying out their respective duties, in order to repel invasion from hostile viral and bacterial agents.

With that in mind it's no stretch to imagine your role in Ballistic SE as that of a renegade code hacker who must break into a totalitarian empire's sophisticated online immune system. You are a single invading aggressor in a wild, Gibson-esque digital grid; a lone orb versus a seemingly never-ending barrage of swarming enemy sentries. You'll want to take down as many as possible - it's just the staying alive part that isn't easy.

Viewing Ballistic as a sort of digital ecosystem under attack (you can still pretend you're Neuromancer's Case or Neo if you feel the need to justify your assault) may seem like an odd comparison, but it makes sense when you see this dual-stick shooter in action. Since each level's set number of enemies can be cleared in a matter of minutes, you'll quickly learn to tell the behavioural characteristics inherent to each of your colour-coded opponents.

Read more…

Mario Tennis Open Review

I hope you weren't holding your breath. Save for the New Play Control Wii remix of GameCube's Mario Power Tennis in 2009, we've been left hanging on for a proper update to the series since 2005's Mario Tennis: Power Tour on Game Boy Advance. Quite why this solidly successful formula skipped the entirety of the DS generation has been something of a mystery - at least, it was until I'd spent several days thwacking my way across the courts of the series' 3DS debut.

Mario Tennis Open is as mechanically robust and colourfully compelling as you'd expect from Camelot, Nintendo's unfailingly reliable doubles partner. But where could it all go after GameCube? As undeniably enjoyable as 2012's take is, the studio still seems to be searching for a clear answer.

The game offers hyperactive arcade action over sober simulation, perfectly observing the fundamentals of the sport while sexing it all up (in Uncle Nintendo's wholesome way) with special moves that cause balls to explode away at ridiculous angles.

Read more…

HTC One S/One V Reviews

When you're gunning for commercial success in the mobile phone arena it often pays to cover all of your bases, and that seems to be part of HTC's battle plan for this year. Bruised and bloodied by disappointing financial results of 2011, the Taiwanese manufacturer is on the resurgence, keen to claw back market share lost to the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. We've already seen the blisteringly fast HTC One X - powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 quad-core CPU - and now it's time to cast a furtive eye over the remaining two members of the brood: the One S and One V, both of which are running the latest version of Google's mobile OS.

It seems almost disingenuous to refer to the One S as a mid-range challenger, as it comes with the kind of features that many rival companies are putting into their flagship handsets. Boasting a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen and 16GB of internal storage, the One S compares very favourably with the likes of the Sony Xperia S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Unlike arch-rival Samsung - which seems obsessed with using plastic as much as possible these days - HTC has dabbled extensively with metallic case designs over the past few years. Although the One X features a polycarbonate shell, the One S is fashioned from a single piece of aluminium - rather like the HTC Desire S and HTC Legend before it. This makes for a truly beautiful handset, and the sleek metalwork is only broken by two pieces of plastic (one housing the SIM card slot, the other the microphone and speaker) and the screen itself.

Read more…

Velocity Review

Sometimes, what looks like a frame turns out to be part of the picture. So it is with Velocity, which starts off as a scrolling shooter but soon blooms into something more akin to a puzzler. And following on from Floating Cloud God Saves the Pilgrims, it's another great PlayStation Mini - at last, that rather flat marketplace is gaining some momentum.

And speeding up is what the splendidly-named Quarp Jet, your dinky spaceship, is all about. Velocity's more complex abilities are kept back for a while, with the early stages built around the ability to speed up how fast the screen's scrolling - holding R roughly doubles the ship's pace, with a neon exhaust trail for the kids. Rapid-fire shooting and high speeds are all well and good, but you also have to be constantly hoovering up the survivor pods that dot each stage. Then things start to get trickier.

Velocity's first twist is a teleport. Hold the square button and control is switched from the ship to a reticule; put it where you want to go and release for an insta-switch. This wouldn't work nearly so well if the Quarp Jet wasn't able to bash off the side of walls (though being crushed at the bottom of the screen still means death), as the switch between controls often left me overshooting after popping out at the other end. As it is, the short hops are quickly mastered and you're soon materialising in the middle of enemy swarms with guns blazing, blinking out of certain-death situations, and navigating through sealed sections of the level like a pro.

Read more…

App of the Day: New Star Soccer

Football games on handhelds can usually be divided into two camps: those that offer a cut-down version of a PC or home console game, and those that fixate on a single element, like shooting, and try to make a high-score game out of it. There are some fine examples of both on iOS and Android already, but New Star Soccer is something else: it's a football career built from the ground up for mobiles and tablets, a mixture of Flick Kicks and Football Managers that may even represent a greater threat to your free time than its inspirations.

There's a free Arcade mode where you just flick the ball into the goal in increasingly difficult scenarios - you pull back from the ball with your finger to measure power, then another screen pops up with the ball bouncing or rolling across it and you have to tap to indicate where you want to strike it. But the Career mode - free for your first 10 matches on iOS - is where you'll spend the bulk of your time, gradually levelling up your skills, dividing your focus between training, gadgets, girls and gambling, and making a name for yourself.

Initially you're signed up for a non-league team in a country of your choosing and paid very little for your services. Using canny judgement and a bit of experimentation, you quickly learn how to make more money out of football: investing your earnings in energy drinks that allow you to take part in more mini-games to upgrade your skills between matches, and then taking advantage of your increasing proficiency to make your mark on the pitch and earn performance bonuses and catch the eye of sponsors and bigger teams.

Read more…

App of the Day: LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias

As much as I enjoy iOS gaming, I have to admit that a vast majority of games on the platform feel rather slight. Many have novel mechanics or neat art styles, but do little more than help fill the two minute gaps when the person we're hanging out with goes to the bathroom.

There are few that I find comparable to the sort of fully-fledged experience you get on a console, and LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias is one of those exceptions. This shouldn't come as a surprise, being a port of a WiiWare game, but the new mobile version is a splendid translation of an already excellent title.

LostWinds 2 is a semi-linear 2D Metroidvania-style adventure, with a hint of Okami's gesture-based environment manipulation set in a lovely storybook world. I fear the "2" in the title will scare off newcomers, and that would be a shame as it's not necessary to have played the original LostWinds to appreciate this one. You'll miss a crumb or two of backstory, but all you need to know is that a young boy, Toku, has befriended a wind spirit, Enril. Aside from this very basic premise, LostWinds 2 is an entirely self-contained tale.

Read more…

Max Payne 3 Review

Time hasn't been kind to Max Payne, the New York cop who used to woo us - or perhaps 'Woo' us - by diving around in slow motion blasting organised crime to pieces. In one of the bleakest game intros I've ever seen, Max begins his latest adventure by arriving at his new Sao Paolo apartment, getting the shakes, then draining a bottle of bourbon, chain-smoking and smashing a photograph of his dead family against a wall in his torment. Press Start.

If Max Payne 2 was The Fall of Max Payne, then Max Payne 3 is Max at rock bottom. He starts the game in a purgatorial funk, bodyguard to a Brazilian industrialist and his family of rich playboys and politicians, drinking his way through the days - the end of chapter one sees him lurching around his apartment, throwing up in the kitchen sink and then crying himself to sleep - while we listen along to his internal monologue. Poor old Max.

For a while though, it seems as though time has been surprisingly kind to Max Payne, the third-person shooter with Bullet Time that first graced our screens in 2001. It hasn't changed much since then, even with the transition from Remedy to new developer Rockstar Vancouver, and when paramilitaries start violently abducting Max's employers that turns out to be just fine. Max may have piled on the pounds and lost his self-respect, but his iconic Shoot Dodge hasn't aged badly at all.

Read more…

App of the Day: Spellsword

At first glance, Spellsword might seem like a clone of Vlambeer's Super Crate Box. It's got that game's arena-based combat, endless waves of enemies, and a steady stream of power-ups you're encouraged to collect. But rather than settle for a "me-too" copy, developer Everplay has taken the structure and infused it with its own magical spin.

Each of Spellsword's missions tasks you with surviving throngs of monsters pouring out from the edges of a handful of single-screen stages. Your weedy attack combined with rudimentary virtual buttons might sound like an uninspired tap-and-slash, but a series of elemental power-ups bring a spark to this rusty template.

At any given time, an enchanted card appears somewhere on-screen. Snatch it and you'll release an area attack as well as infuse your blade with the appropriate magical properties for a short while. For example, grabbing a fire card launches homing fireballs at foes and sets your sword ablaze, while the poison card infects all enemies on-screen, causing them to explode after a few seconds.

Read more…

App of the Day: Skylanders: Cloud Patrol

Skylanders, eh? What a cracking wheeze. Take a game, gate off much of its content (including several levels, a clutch of power-ups and all but three of its playable characters), and release a bunch of toys at seven quid a pop to act as glorified unlock keys. Then drip-feed supplies to stores over six months and watch the cash roll in. You can almost picture Bobby Kotick skipping around his boudoir, casually flicking piles of loose banknotes into the air in slow motion. Just me?

But here's the kicker: Skylanders is actually brilliant. You're not paying for crappy plastic bits of nothing, but genuinely well-made and characterful figurines. And you're not merely unlocking fresh content, but buying into a world. Quite apart from the NFC-driven wizardry of the Portal of Power (it's kind of magical the first time even for an adult; the effect lasts much longer if you're six), you've got a Top Trumps-style card game, a substantial browser-based multiplayer universe, and now a perfectly enjoyable iOS spin-off.

Cloud Patrol is a shooter of sorts, tasking you with firing cannonballs at trolls who've taken up residence on a series of floating islands. Tapping them individually is the easiest and safest way to get rid of them, or you can draw a continuous line between them all to earn a combo bonus. The trouble with this latter method is that it's all too easy to drag your finger into the spiked bombs that bob and swirl around each archipelago, and which result in instant death.

Read more…

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Review

Silicon chip production is not an exact art - no two chips that come off the production line are exactly alike. Some are capable of running at faster speeds than others, while sometimes defects manifest when the transistors aren't fabricated entirely as they should be, owing to microscopic imperfections in the material. So what happens to these less-than-perfect chips? Well, a process called "binning" sorts the processors into various quality levels, each destined for different end-products.

In the case of the NVIDIA graphics cards based on the new "Kepler" line, the best processors are reserved for the top-end product - the GTX 680, which received a rapturous review from Digital Foundry last month. Now, with the debut of the newer, cheaper GTX 670, we begin to see what happens with the rest of the production run.

The usual form for NVIDIA's tier-two product is to cut down the design of the flagship in every meaningful way: fewer active processor cores running at a slower speed, a more restricted memory bus, and slower RAM. In this way, more of the processors produced at the production facility become viable. In the past, enthusiasts and hackers alike have been successful in reactivating some of the disabled features - though often they don't work, since the chips are not of the highest quality.

Read more…

App of the Day: 774 Deaths

The first thing you see when you boot up 774 Deaths is a black loading screen with a tiny brown dog running in the corner. "Oh no!" I thought, considering the game's ominous title and stark monochrome title screen. "Don't kill the puppy!"

Well, I got news for you, kiddo; that puppy will die a horrible gruesome death a thousand times over. Fortunately, you'll likely never reach that point, as you don't unlock the pooch sprite until very late in the game. For most, he'll exist only as a spirit haunting the load screen, or a proud symbol of triumph starring in extraordinary YouTube videos by insane people who conquer the final stages.

Saying 774 Deaths is hard is an understatement on par with saying Hitler had some unpleasant qualities. The untamed brutality of the game makes Super Meat Boy's dark world look like My Little Pony. It's so hard that single stages will likely take well over 774 tries alone. In the fatalistic world of 774 Deaths, you have the life expectancy of a mayfly caught in a spider web.

Read more…

App of the Day: Ski Solitaire

Solitaire has been pre-installed on home computers since the early '90s, so why everyone's decided to remake it all of a sudden is a bit of a mystery. If the timing seems unusual, however, it's easier to see why it's ripe for a makeover: it's a game that everyone's familiar with, that barely requires any instructions to play, and it has that all-important element of luck that adds just enough frustration to keep you wriggling away on the end of its hook.

And it turns out Solitaire's a pretty difficult game to screw up. Big Fish's smartly-presented Fairway Solitaire took it out on the links, forcing players to chip out of bunkers and clear water hazards to progress. Then PopCap's browser-based productivity killer Solitaire Blitz introduced power-ups and time limits, producing a game so dangerously addictive that I genuinely spent 20 pounds of real money to keep playing rather than wait an hour for the game's energy meter to refill.

Thankfully, Greenfly Studios doesn't plan on nickel-and-diming its players; the initial £1.99 outlay is all you'll ever need to play its game. It's closer to Big Fish's take on Solitaire than to PopCap's, trading fairways for powdery slopes populated by characters seemingly lifted from a long-forgotten wintry comic strip in the Beano.

Read more…

VVVVVV Review

Editor's note: This review originally appeared in January, when VVVVVV was made available on the North American 3DS eShop. We present it today to mark the game's release on the eShop in Europe.

Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV is a game in love with being a game. The sci-fi tale of six space-dwelling scientists (whose names all begin with the letter V) getting displaced in another dimension is silly, but the bare-bones premise is fitting for the 8-bit retro aesthetic. This nostalgic presentation allows Cavanagh to look at common conventions with a deadpan sense of wide-eyed wonder.

When it's discovered that walking to one end of the screen causes you to emerge out the other side it's explained as "inter-dimensional interference". The first time a scientist sees a checkpoint he suggests it be brought back to the ship to be analysed. Where Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede seemed embarrassed by their stories, Cavanagh builds one to complement the medium's preposterous designs. These analytic musings and low-fi visuals brings to mind classic sci-fi yarns like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, from an era when computers were the size of apartments and even the most basic video games were the stuff of dreams.

Read more…

Starhawk Review

In a genre where momentum is built in an avalanche of annual iterations and regular DLC updates, the five-year gap between Warhawk and Starhawk, its spiritual sci-fi successor, might as well be measured in decades. Consider this: when Warhawk was released, Modern Warfare was still an unknown quantity.

How to adapt to a landscape so irrevocably changed? Developer LightBox Interactive has opted for the softly-softly approach. Starhawk is still a large-scale third-person combat game with a heavy emphasis on vehicles, more Battlefront than Battlefield. What has changed is the context. As the name suggests, this game takes the science-fiction brush strokes of its predecessor and expands them to fill the canvas.

The setting is now the cosmic frontier, where a gold rush of sorts has kicked off over a new power source known as Rift Energy. There's a downside, however. Exposure to Rift Energy corrupts and mutates, and early prospectors have turned into Outcasts, mangled monstrosities that crave more energy and will fight to keep it for themselves.

Read more…

App of the Day: Jelly Defense

Some genres are so saturated with class, and so large in the first place, that a new contender needs something special. A name as unimaginative as Jelly Defense doesn't help. Although, to be fair to its developers, the bleed of SEO tactics into the App Store's line-up makes such blandness almost a pre-requisite for success. What's that thing about judging a book by its cover?

Jelly Defense makes a good first impression by virtue of its gorgeously gloopy world - looping monochrome backgrounds dotted with bright, bouncy jellies and skittering enemies. It serves a purpose, too, as the key twist to the usual tower defence ruleset is in the form of colour-coded enemies. Red towers attack red enemies, blue towers attack blue enemies, and certain towers are half-and-half. Which sounds manageable, but is the reason behind almost every restart and failed level. It can hurt bad.

The goo-goo eyes and cute touches are there to distract attention from the fact that Jelly Defense is a monster. Things start off simply enough with a few levels featuring long curves and plenty of time to bosh the clueless jellies. Perhaps a little bit of over-confidence settles in - who knows? Then things turn ugly. Jelly Defense has balls of pure steel, and intends to take a hammer and test yours.

Read more…

Datura Review

You remember the launch of Kinect, of course. That half-a-billion-dollars marketing orgy during which America got formation pretend-gaming in Times Square, we got Leona Lewis wailing beside an ice rink and everyone bought one just to shut Microsoft up.

Remember the Move launch? Me neither. Like a strange form of anti-marketing, the PS3 motion controller arrived on the high street with all the fanfare of an underwater brass band. This was disheartening because Sony's device always struck me as having the greater gaming potential, certainly beyond what was on offer in the box-ticking, mini-game-heavy launch line-up.

Subsequently, we've seen Move support added to big first-party titles like Killzone 3, Heavy Rain and LittleBigPlanet 2; but what about games designed for Move?

Read more…

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition Review

I can't say that Minecraft passed me by - how could it? It's a full-blown 21st century sensation, a hit indie game that changed all the rules, a perfect storm of internet fame. It's been pretty hard to ignore.

But Minecraft did happen without me. Somehow I never played it - perhaps because I was foolishly waiting for it to come out of its endless alpha test - and all of a sudden it was a thing that I wasn't part of and didn't get, even though I understood it. Like so many of the great online PC games, from Counter-Strike to League of Legends, it became a cult that I didn't know how to join.

Well happy day, because this excellent new version for Xbox Live Arcade is made just for me. Mojang, the company formed by Minecraft's affable creator Markus "Notch" Persson, has worked with Microsoft and port specialist 4J Studios to build a Minecraft that's slightly less advanced, much easier to get to grips with and perfectly tuned for its slick and friendly platform, while preserving almost all of the original game's unquestioned genius.

Read more…

App of the Day: Tweet Land

Let's talk about social networking and driving. Chances are if you've got wheels and a smartphone it's likely you've been tempted. When bored and caught in traffic or waiting for a signal change there's no harm in a quickie status update or tweet, right? Even if you don't have a vehicle you probably know someone that does, and I'm pretty sure they're guilty. Despite the potential risks of such a silly thing to do, I know I've certainly been there.

It's funny then that Tweet Land conceptualises Twitter-bred vehicular calamity in such a literal way, materialising tweeted keywords from real users (who could very well be driving) as obstacles on a side-scrolling racetrack. Your aim is to survive from one stage to the next, avoiding collisions and increasingly ridiculous hazards as you rack up points by smashing into as many other drivers as possible.

In turn, objects or items are procedurally generated by whatever algorithmic magic the app employs to pick up certain phrases being used on Twitter. (Meanwhile, originating tweets are archived at the bottom of the screen.) It's kind of like a social media-driven Spy Hunter, only instead of Cold War automotive sabotage and Peter Gunn you have zombie hordes and Rebecca Black.

Read more…