PixlBit

I already touched on the physics puzzler once this month but here's another one, and quite different to boot. In Cling Thing you control the titular Thing. By touching the screen you can make your little guy shoot out gooey tendrils and grab walls and platforms—any that are covered in purple goop, at least. The main goal in any level is to reach the exit pipe. Along the way you can collect up to three stars, which are used to unlock later worlds. You can also earn a gold, silver, or bronze medal for each level depending on how fast you complete it but I haven't figured out the point of those yet.

 Don't expect any realistic simulation here! Train Conductor tasks you with getting numbered trains onto the watching numbered tracks by drawing tracks to connect the two. It's a simple concept but executed very well and things can get really hectic once a bunch of trains are going at once. It starts with just three tracks but I'm up to five now. You can tap a train to stop it, with another tap sending it on again, but you have to watch for anything coming behind it. Keeping the trains from crashing into each other can be difficult! That's an instant game over. If a train makes it across but is on the wrong track, you merely lose points. You don't have to "beat" a level to move on though. That just nets you an achievement for getting through your shift at that city without any crashes. The game is set in Australia (Blake should appreciate that lol) and the different levels are different cities. You have to achieve a certain cumulative score to move on, and it's visualized by laying track to the next city.

Most of us older folks have good memories of games like Wing Commander, and Strike Wing scratches that space dogfighting itch. It's harder to get a feeling for a game like this in the short time I spent with it than with some quick twitchy game, but there seems to be an interesting story here, some nice graphics and music, and, most importantly, fun dogfights. You can control your ship using the built-in accelerometer, though I prefer the virtual joystick (it floats so that you can touch anywhere on the left half of the screen). The missions seem to be mostly "kill all the bad guys," but maybe there is more variety later on. You can unlock better ships and play challenge missions for extra experience. There seems to be a lot of content, too, with both free and paid paid DLC available to download. Sure, it's not Wing Commander but for a game on my phone, it's pretty good.

You know how to do a folksy dance, right?

One of the unequivical facts of gaming today is that there are not enough new Mega Man games. Heck, there are no new Mega Man games! So when I came across a game on the App Store that is an obviously love letter to the blue bomber, I really want to love it. Steam Punks wears its inspiration pretty blatantly. Sure, it has a...wait for it...steampunk setting instead of some time in the near-ish future but it's totally Mega Man. You can choose what order to play the levels in, the bosses have funny names, and you get their weapons when you beat them. The main character even jumps the same way as Mega Man, lifting his front leg. You know what I'm talking about 

 I've never been into racing games very much, other than things like Mario Kart and F-Zero, but I loved Hydro Thunder in the arcade. That was an awesome game! Riptide GP 2 reminds me of it. Oh, it's not the same, of course, but the racing-on-water thing is and it provided me a great burst of nostalgia. The game stands on its own, at least so far, as a great racing game in its own right.

Even though tower defense games are a dime a dozen on the App Store, I haven't played very many. Kingdom Rush is one of the more well known of the genre, though, and it's easy to see why after playing some. First of all the characters are really small, so you can actually see everything that's going on (very important!). There are four main types of towers—barracks to put out troops and slow down the enemy; archer towers for long-range; artillery towers for heavy firepower; and mage towers for enemies resistant to physical damage—which can be specialized once they're upgraded enough. It provides enough variety to keep things interesting. And there are a lot of different kinds of enemies and I'm sure there are more to come. You also get a hero character that you can move around the level to help out and a couple special powers that recharge after you use them. The graphics and music fit the medieval theme perfectly.

If you've been on Pixlbit for a while, you probably know that I like hippos. And today I have a silly hippo game to tell you about! Hippo High Dive is a very simple game. Your purple hippo, wearing a pink leotard, dives off a high board and must try to fall through a series of flaming hoops before landing in a little pool of water. You have three lives. Missing a ring costs one life, though you can get burned twice per live. Use up all three before making it to the pool at the bottom and you lose. And that's all there is to it. Beat a level—that is, a height—and a higher one unlocks. I'm at 450m right now. It has 45 flaming hoops! Thankfully, there is a little indicator at the bottom of the screen to show where the next hoop is coming. Otherwise, this really would be impossible. A few more tries and I'll get it for sure!

Party like a...yeah, I got nothin'

Another kind of game that has flourished on the App Store is the super hard high score chaser. A lot of credit there goes to Super Hexagon, in my opinion, which is one of my favorite iPhone games (I wrote about it way back in 2013). But today I'm here to talk about Unpossible, a game that definitely reminds me of Super Hexagon. In this one, though, you're traveling along a curving cylinder way up in the air trying to avoid obstacles. Have you played F-Zero GX? It's like the cylinder level in that game but with lots of stuff in the way and played from a first-person perspective. Since it's a high score game, you just go for as long as you can without messing up. That length of time is your score.