PixlBit

There’s a whole subgenre on the App Store of line-drawing-direction games, and the granddaddy of them all (or at least the one that made them popular) is Flight Control. Your screen shows an airfield with two different runways and a helipad. Various aircraft fly in from off screen and you must direct them to the appropriate place to land by drawing their flight path on the screen. It’s simple but things quickly get hectic as the screen fills up with planes and jets and helicopters and biplanes and probably other things I haven’t seen yet. When two of them crash into each other, it’s game over. It’s a lot of fun.  So far landing 65 aircraft is my high score. Oh, and that’s just the first airfield. There are five more that change things up, four of which I haven’t even tried yet! With perfect touch controls, quick play sessions, and plenty of maps, it’s an ideal mobile game that I’ll probably be playing for a long time to come.

What if Doctor Who had started as an American show? That's what one BuzzFeed community member asked himself and then tried to answer. Who might have played the Doctor? Click below to find out! I wouldn't give up my British Doctors but it is fun to imagine what might have been in some alternate universe 

It had been such a long time since I downloaded Palidin that I couldn’t remember what kind of game it was. Turned out to be a gamebook and a very text heavy one at that. The App Store has tons of great gamebooks (so I’m told) and I’ve always wanted to try one, so Palidin’s nature seemed a fortuitous discovery. Turned out to be a very conservative experience for a digital gamebook, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The developers really ran with the idea of a physical book. You swipe to turn pages that are usually filled with just text, though you’ll get a picture now and then, and sound effects enact the described action. To be honest, it’s really more of a choose your own adventure. Sure, you gain experience and levels and can get items but there’s no combat outside of choosing whether or not to fight. The game let’s you make plenty of choices but many of them lead to your death. Seems a little arbitrary. Still, the writing is decent and the story, while just a series of choices and encounters, remains intriguing throughout. I actually beat the game over the course of one day and discovered that it is but the first part of a larger story. A quick look at the developer’s website reveals that the remainder of the game is coming sometime in the next couple of months but I’m not sure if it will be a second app or an update to the existing one.  I’ll play it for sure if it’s an update but I’m not sure I’ll plop down money for the rest of it. We’ll see. I should probably just bite the bullet and download Sorcery! or one of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

This one is pretty cool. You might call it the runner RPG, though that’s certainly an oversimplification. Yes, your party of four characters does run from left to right automatically but you still have a ton of control, like jumping, forward slashes, special attacks, backward leaps, and ranged attacks. Each level lasts maybe a minute but the game packs a lot into that small amount of time. Townspeople along your path will give you quests, usually to kill certain monsters or collect something like fruit of gems, and then you’re off! Well, you never actually stopped. The quests are very repetitive but they’re so short that they don’t feel that way, and that makes a big difference. You also get gold and random loot at the end of each level. The loot is generally pieces you can use to upgrade your characters. The graphics look like a fantasy cartoon and the music fits the onscreen action well.

An oldie but goodie

Ninja Striker! is a fairly simple one-touch iOS game. Or so it seems. It doesn’t make the best first impression because it’s too simplistic. You just tap somewhere on the screen to send your little pixelly ninja flying in that direction, katana swinging. Anything in the way will get sliced and if you tap on an enemy specifically, you’ll fly to that enemy and stay there slashing it until it dies. Your ninja can also stick to walls and ceilings. Three hits and you’re dead but there’s nothing to worry about. The first couple levels are pretty boring because they’re so easy. Things start to change with the first boss though. He’s a little guy about your size and he jumps around shooting baby tornados at you. If you just sit there hitting him, you’ll die pretty fast. You have to jump around and make strategic swipes at the boss. Then the second set of levels are much more complicated with lots of bottomless pits and deadly spikes. It takes a lot more planning and attention to make it to the end of the level intact. I’ve now played through the second boss and Ninja Striker! has gone from a game that I was going to drop with a disinterested “meh” to a game I’m interested to see where it’ll go next.

We need more games based around heartbeats, right? Of course! Enter Lub vs Dub, an endless runner (‘natch) where the two sounds of the heartbeat duke it out. Well, you know, in a running sort of way. There are two ways to play: Single Player Sprint and Two Player Battle. In the sprint your little character (Lub, I believe) runs along a heart monitor line. It’s pretty static but there are little spikes you must jump and large ones that can be avoided only by flipping over to the other side of the line. Along the way you can collect power ups to increase your score and hearts to multiply it at the end. It gets pretty hectic as the speed increases and you try to keep straight when to jump and when to flip. It’s a fun little runner.

I have plenty more iOS games to cover but I wanted to take a break to cap this week. What a week it has been! I'm drowning in blogs to read. Of course, you're all in the same boat. But this week was especially stressful for my family because one of my wife's uncles passed away last Sunday night and we decided to go to the funeral. We packed up the car once I got home Tuesday night and set out on the road. We were able to stay with some friends we hadn't seen in a while, and though it took us only about six hours to get there (no traffic late at night during the week), it was still 2 in the morning. My 18-month-old son Link slept almost the whole way but woke up about 30 minutes before we got there and wouldn't go back to sleep. I finally got him down at 3:15 but it didn't last long. Needless to say, we woke up tired.

First of all, the name is misleading. This cat NEEDS a diet but he isn’t getting one. The goal of this game is to get the gluttonous feline into the cookie jar…so that he can devour the cookies. See? Not a diet. You do this by slashing ropes and wooden planks and whatnot in an attempt to direct the cat’s fall into the jar. It’s a physics puzzle. Tap and slide your finger on the screen to set up the perfect slice (as shown by a dotted line) and then let go to let it fly. You’ll often need to make additional slices after that first one but you won’t have time to be so precise. There is also the matter of collecting three cupcakes in each level. It’s optional, of course, but seems to unlock bonus content (levels or costumes or something) and as long as any of your flying pieces of wood hit a cupcake, you’ll get it, so you needn’t worry about flinging the cat all over the screen. It’s very silly but fun, though let me be honest and say that I’m not very good at it. I suppose I ought to just play Cut the Rope, the poster boy for this sort of game, because I have a copy of that too. But it’s funny to see that fluffy ball of fat bouncing around.

Mikey Shorts is a 2D platformer for iOS. It’s a simple game but plenty of fun. The virtual controls work extremely well, with arrows for running left and right and buttons for jumping and sliding. I never had any problems getting Mikey to do what I wanted.