PixlBit

Drifting off...

Games Beaten

News broke this week that Nintendo will shut down its Wi-Fi Connection for the Wii and DS on May 20. That means no more online Animal Crossing or Mario Kart or Smash Bros. There's a full list here of affected games. It's not the lack of online play that bothers me. I didn't play online much anyway. No, it's the disappearance of the additional downloadable content that bothers me. Take the Professor Layton series, for instance. I haven't played any of those games—heck, I don't even own any of them—but I want to, and while I'm sure the main games offer more than enough puzzles to keep anyone busy, all those games offer downloadable puzzles. Gobs of them, I hear. They'll all be gone. Same thing with the two Picross games for DS, another couple I've always wanted but never gotten around to buying. What about all the extra content for Dragon Quest IX? I actually own that game, thanks to my wife getting it a couple years ago. Should I drop everything and try to play through that? I can't decide.

Everybody always talked up Tiny Wings so much that I jumped at the chance to get it when it went free for a brief time. But then it sat on my phone for months and months and that, my friends, was a sad mistake on my part. Tiny Wings is indeed awesome.

Well, BaD is almost over and so I thought I'd wind things down with a relaxing solo piano remix from A Link to the Past. This is of the credits music, technically, so it incorporates a couple different themes. I think it lives up to its name fairly well. So kick back and relax for a few minutes.

Sometimes the simplest ideas can prove the most difficult but also the most satisfying. Take the iOS puzzle game Cyro, for instance. There’s some story about little creatures trying to build a bridge to the moon but what it all really comes down to is guiding a plank through a maze. Of course, the mazes are extremely intricate and, oh yeah, the plank is constantly rotating. You can bump the wall once and keep going but twice and it’s back to the beginning or the most recent checkpoint. Checkpoints are a godsend because they also restore your one hit point. The developer, thankfully, made it easy to control the plank. A circular d-pad on the left lets you easily move in any direction while a button on the right will restrict your movements to the four cardinal directions. And though the graphics are very minimalistic (nothing wrong with that), I love how much fun the developer had making the mazes. I’ve played the first two “worlds” and rarely has anything been abstract. One maze looked like wine being poured into a glass. Another was shaped like a human heart, complete with working valves! The dynamic mazes can be pretty tricky. I was stuck for a while on one that had moving gears that left little space to get through. Still, it’s very satisfying to best a tricky level. Cyro is a strange game but certainly a fun one.

Touch Force, a vertical scrolling shmup, is a really cool idea. Instead of touching the screen with your finger to simply control your ship, you touch the screen to create your ship. Better yet, the more fingers you can fit on the screen (up to five), the more ships you can have at once. Lift your finger(s) and your ship(s) disappear, but you’ll start to lose life if you stay off the screen for more than three seconds. It’s a neat twist on a genre that seems so played out at this point. The first level is free to try, so give it a shot!

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Flappy Bird phenomenon that has swept through the internet in recent days. The success of Flappy Bird has spawned many imitators trying to make a quick buck but also a lot of tongue-in-cheek fun. Case in point: the Flappy Jam! Game jams are where indie devs come together and make little games around a theme. Flappy Bird is the inspiration in this case and so far 479 games have been submitted (Monday is the deadline) and though I’ve hardly had a chance to look at any of them, one of the coolest—and available on the App Store as of today—has got to be FlapThulhu, a Lovecraftian Flappy clone. It plays very similarly to Flappy Bird (fly through the openings in the columns) but has a much cooler aesthetic. It’s free and less than half a megabyte, so if you have an iOS device or a Windows PC, there’s no reason not to give it a try.

When we started BaD, I had some blogs written ahead of time to help me not fall behind. Well, those are all used up and I'd much rather go to bed than put real effort into this post, so here's a funny cat picture!