The announcement of Super Mario Run for iOS was a big surprise during Apple’s September 7th iPhone event. It feels like hardly a week has gone by since then without some sort of news about the game.
The wait is finally over. As of a short time ago, Super Mario Run began rolling out worldwide on the App Store. The game features three modes, an endless runner-style mode in which you tap the screen to help Mario reach platforms, collect coins, and avoid enemies, a head-to-head competition mode called Toad Rally, and a building mode called Kingdom Builder. This gameplay video posted by Nintendo last week walks through each part of the game:
Super Mario Run requires a constant connection to the Internet. Nintendo says it implemented the feature to combat piracy of the game – a decision that has been roundly criticized as user-hostile in the days since the requirement was revealed.
There are a lot of pixel art platformers on the App Store. The hard part if finding the good ones. Too many are shallow imitations of classics like Super Mario Bros. that lack their own personality and challenges. Le Parker – Sous Chef Extraordinaire by Play Pretend is different. There are superficial similarities to the classics, like the save-the-princess storyline, but Le Parker brings together bright, colorful pixel art, fun sound effects, a great soundtrack, and challenging gameplay in a way that puts it head and shoulders above other App Store platformers.
The storyline is simple. You are Le Parker, a chef and the creator of a meringue so light it floats on air. Only the princess has the recipe until one day, the king and his men capture her and banish you from the kingdom. Your goal is to save the princess and recover your magical meringue.
The controls of Le Parker are simple. You run forward and back by dragging a finger left and right across a button in the lower, left-hand corner of the screen. In the opposite corner is an ‘A’ button for jumping. Single tap for one jump and double tap to double jump. How high you jump depends on how long you press the ‘A’ button.
Along your journey, there are macaroons to collect instead of coins. Every 100 macaroons you collect gives you an extra life, which you’ll need. There are also special items scattered throughout the level, including chef hats that give you an extra life and hidden kitchen utensils. Enemies roam Le Parker’s world inflicting damage that can be healed by finding hearts.
I’ve played many iOS games that look better than they play. What’s special about Le Parker is that there’s substance behind the polished artwork. Each of the 32 levels is deep and designed to keep you coming back to find hidden collectibles or beat the clock with Time Attack challenges. That said, this game is also great to look at. It’s colorful, detailed, and creates a real sense of continuity and presence in Le Parker’s world. Add to that a soundtrack with over twenty songs and the result is a delightful and engaging experience.
Le Parker is a universal app that works equally well on iPhones and iPads, though the iPad’s larger screen helps bring the game to life. Unlike many games, Le Parker syncs your progress among multiple devices. Le Parker also supports the Apple TV. I have found precious few games that are worth playing on the Apple TV, but Le Parker stands out from the crowd. The levels look great on a big screen, but the clincher is that if you have a third-party controller, the controls work better than most games. Mashing a physical ‘A’ button and controlling Le Parker with a thumbstick makes the game feel more like a classic platformer than touchscreen buttons ever could.
If you’re a fan of platform games and especially if you want a challenging game that looks and sounds great, give Le Parker a try this weekend.
The Super Mario Run marketing blitz has begun. With the launch of Super Mario Run on iOS just one week away, Shigeru Miyamoto was interviewed by The Verge and BuzzFeed News. The creator of Mario spoke at length with both publications about the game, Nintendo’s goals for it, and how it was made.
Miyamoto discussed the thought process behind Super Mario Run’s gameplay with The Verge:
“We felt that by having this simple tap interaction to make Mario jump, we’d be able to make a game that the broadest audience of people could play.”
“Kids are playing on devices that they’re getting from their parents when their parents are upgrading,” Miyamoto said. “We wanted to take an approach of how can we bring Nintendo IP to smart devices and give kids the opportunity to interact with our characters and our games.”
It’s a strategy that makes a lot of sense given the dominance of smartphones and rise of casual gaming.
Nintendo’s goal to make Super Mario Run a one-handed game necessitated designing it for portrait mode, which led to new opportunities for Nintendo’s creative team. Miyamoto told The Verge that:
“Once we did start to focus on the vertical gameplay and one-handed play, we were surprised at how much having that vertical space in a Mario game could add to the verticality of the game itself and how that added a new element of fun to Mario,” Miyamoto explains. “They’re all brand new levels that we created for this game, but because of the vertical orientation, it gave us a lot of new ideas for how to stretch the game vertically. I think it’s been maybe since the Ice Climbers days that we’ve had a game where you’re trying to climb a tower.”
Miyamoto also shared with BuzzFeed News that the inspiration for creating an “endless runner” style Mario game was influenced by fans who do speed runs through Mario and other games. You may have seen videos of speed runs; there is no shortage of them on YouTube. BuzzFeed explains that:
Watching online videos of these gamers’ astounding speed runs and other feats of gaming skill, Nintendo employees noticed that the gamers never let up on the D-Pad. Mario always kept running, and all of the skill came down to the incredible precision of the jumping. What if, the Nintendo braintrust reasoned, all players could have that experience?
In addition, Nintendo executive Reggie Fils-Aimé and Shigeru Miyamoto paid a visit to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night, demoing Super Mario Run and the Nintendo Switch console that is slated for release in March. If anyone wasn’t sure before, there is no doubt that Jimmy Fallon is a huge Nintendo fan and geek. This video is wonderful:
Reuters reports that Sony’s PlayStation division is working on ten mobile games, six of which will be released next year for iOS and Android. The games, which include Everybody’s Golf, will debut in Japan followed by other Asian countries. The Reuters report doesn’t indicate what plans, if any, Sony has for the games outside Asia.
According to Reuters the other games in the works for mobile release include PaRappa the Rapper and Arc The Lad. Kotaku also reports that Wild Arms is in development for mobile platforms. Kotaku’s coverage includes this preview video of Arc the Lad and Wild Arms from ForwardWorks:
Competition from mobile gaming continues to increase, so its not surprising that console vendors like Sony are following Nintendo’s lead by testing the smartphone waters.
Apollo Justice is the fourth game in the Ace Attorney series. In the earlier games, which are available as a single iOS app, you play as attorney Phoenix Wright, but in Apollo Justice, Wright has been disbarred and accused of murder. Your job as Apollo Justice is to defend Wright at his trial.
Facing Apollo across the courtroom is the highly talented and flamboyant prosecutor Klavier Gavin who, in addition to being a legal genius, is also lead singer with Gavinners, a highly successful rock band with a string of hits to their name.
As odd as the backstory is at times, it’s a quirkiness that works, adding a level of humor and intrigue that held my interest.
The story of the murder plays out in and out of the courtroom as you tap through the dialogue among the characters. At numerous points during the trial, you have the opportunity to press witnesses for additional information. Along the way, evidence is also gathered that you can examine. When you discover a contradiction between the testimony and evidence, you present it to the judge who decides whether you have advanced your client’s case.
This isn’t a realistic courtroom simulation game and the story is better for it. Instead, the trial is the conceit for exploring a mystery. You’re challenged to think and examine details in a sort of interactive mystery novel. It’s a format that you can play through in a leisurely, self-paced way that I enjoyed.
I didn’t play the original Apollo Justice on the Nintendo DS. This is my first encounter with the game and the Phoenix Wright series. Comparing the iOS version to screenshots of the original, Capcom has done a great job updating Apollo for iOS, which should make the game a no-brainer for fans of the original series. But even if you are new to the franchise as I was, Apollo is worth a try at just $0.99 for the first half of episode 1 if you enjoy mysteries and puzzle-solving.
Part 80s arcade game, part rogue-style dungeon crawler, and part pinball, Treasure Buster is a strange combination of game genres that work surprisingly well together. The result is an entertaining game that’s hard to put down.
You play as one of six heroes who must defeat a series of enemies. Each hero has different traits that affect their performance in battle. When you enter a room in a dungeon, you start a battle by pulling back with a swipe on the screen Angry Birds-style to launch yourself at your enemies. When you let go, you bounce around like a pinball slamming into enemies and obstacles, shaking loose treasure from your foes, and collecting the loot.
Periodically, the enemies will stage their own attack, which causes damage to your hero. Clear a room of enemies and you can move to the next part of the dungeon to face new challenges and the occasional boss. Treasure you collect can be traded for new abilities, helping you survive the more difficult later stages. The game ends when you run out of health.
Treasure Buster has two modes of play – Arcade and Endless. In Arcade
mode you move around a map exploring each room of the dungeon. Endless mode eliminates exploration of the map, moving you from one room to another automatically and setting the difficulty level based on a coin flip. Of the two modes, I prefer Arcade where I feel more in control of the part of the game I try next.
The art of Treasure Buster has a retro-pixel style reminiscent of old arcade games. There is a lot of attention to detail at each stage of the game, including a wide variety of enemies, treasure and other elements that keeps the game entertaining.
Treasure Buster is Universal and equally playable on an iPhone or iPad. The mechanics are simple enough to play one-handed on an iPhone and the game is enjoyable in short bursts, though I’ve found it hard to play just one round. If you play Treasure Buster long enough, it can start to feel a little repetitive given the simplicity of the mechanics, but as a way to kill time and take short breaks from something else, Treasure Buster is a good choice.
It’s Thanksgiving Day in the US and there are games to play. Sure, those celebrating Thanksgiving should probably put their iPhones away and spend time with their families. But not everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, and even if you do, who doesn’t need a break at some point over a long weekend?
Don’t Grind by Laser Dog Games is the perfect game for just such a break. It’s easy to get the hang of, playable in short bursts, and a whole lot of fun. The goal of Don’t Grind is to keep a character bouncing in the air above two rotating blades. You do that by tapping and swiping on the screen. How high you bounce with each tap depends on the length of the tap. Swiping sends your character in the direction of the swipe. Fail to stay aloft and you are ground up by the blades ending the game.
As you bounce around in the air above two blades, you collect stars, which are converted into medals when the round ends with your character’s inevitable death. While you collect the stars though, you also need to avoid lasers, rockets, blades, and other obstacles that can hasten your demise. After collecting a certain number of medals you unlock additional characters to use in the game. There are dozens to collect.
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A game where your character is inevitably ground up between saw blades sounds gruesome, but it isn’t. Laser Dog has kept the tone light and fun. That’s accomplished through a bouncy, pop soundtrack and using silly inanimate objects as characters like a donut, banana, and boot. Each character has googly eyes that do a remarkable job of conveying dread and fear as the characters approach the blades. There are other nice touches such as the background scenery that matches the time of day you are playing, haptic feedback on the iPhone 7, and the ability to record and share gameplay.
Casual games that can be played one-handed are great for short breaks that can easily become long breaks as you try to beat your high score and climb the Game Center leaderboard. Don’t Grind succeeds with a challenging game that immediately endears itself to you with its quirky sensibilities and cute characters that have kept me coming back try to collect them all.
RunGunJumpGun, by Canadian indie studio ThirtyThree Games, may be the hardest game I’ve played so far this year. The game requires precise timing and quick reflexes, which is something I’m not great at, but it balances the difficulty and gameplay so well, it’s more fun than frustrating. Instead of quitting the game exasperated, I found myself trying segments again and again each time my character died.
RunGunJumpGun has a crazy, colorful pixel art style straight out of a 90s platformer. You can tell that a lot of care has gone into every detail of each of the 120 levels. Everything around you is in constant, colorful motion, which adds to RunGunJumpGun’s complexity.
The game is an interesting synthesis of genres. Like an endless runner, your character moves to the right automatically. Get hung up on a wall and the scene overtakes you and you die. But RunGunJumpGun is more involved than a typical endless runner, adding elements of classic platformer games. Instead of just avoiding obstacles, you have to collect items to advance through the three worlds, fly to avoid things, and shoot your way through others.
You tap the left side of the screen to fly and the right side to shoot. It’s simple, but the fact that you can’t fly and shoot at the same time makes it hard to master the controls. Fly up avoid spikes and you can’t shoot. Start shooting at a barrier while you’re flying and you begin to fall. It requires a careful balance of both controls to make it through each level.
If you do hit a barrier, you die immediately. There is no concept of health, but dying doesn’t take you back to the beginning, just the last checkpoint you reached. That happens with a cool rewind animation that is so fast that it hardly feels like you died at all. You’re immediately thrown back into the game to try to advance further. The process is so seamless that I found I wasn’t bothered by having to repeat segments over and over until I made it to the next checkpoint or the end of the level.
“We weren’t out to just make an infinite runner mobile game that’s run-of-the-mill,” said programmer Logan Gilmour. “We were hoping it would stand more among PC games than mobile games, but then play equally well on mobile.”
I haven’t played RunGunJumpGun on my Mac, but having played on my iPhone and iPad, ThirtyThree Games has definitely succeeded on mobile. I particularly liked playing on my iPad where I could tap on the far lower edges of the screen making it easier to see what was happening in the game.
RunGunJumpGun stands out among recent iOS game releases for its attention to detail and frantic pace. The game is undeniably hard, but also easy to get lost in for long periods. Even if twitchy, fast-paced games are not your thing, RunGunJumpGun is worth trying because it’s an example of one of the best games of its genre.
From time to time, a game comes along that is designed to test iOS hardware and see just how far it can be pushed. In the past, we’ve seen that with games like the Infinity Blade series. In September, the torch was passed to F1 2016 by Codemasters, a racing game that got stage time during Apple’s iPhone 7 event.
F1 wasn’t demoed on stage in September, but Phil Schiller’s comments about the game caught my attention. He specifically called out F1’s use of wide color gamut, haptic feedback, and the iPhone 7’s new stereo speakers, claiming that with the iPhone 7’s new A10 chip and GPU, F1 would bring console-level gaming to iOS. He was right.
F1 was released this week and it’s impressive on every level. I played F1 on my iPhone 7 Plus, iPad Pro, and Apple TV and it was great on each, but it was fantastic on the iPhone 7. The combination of hardware-stretching performance and integration of iPhone 7-only features sets F1 as a benchmark against which other triple-A iOS games will be measured.
