What We’re Playing – June ’11

Adam the Artist

I recently completed yet another playthrough of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of my very favorite games of all time (available now on Steam, currently being revamped for PS3). It’s a first-person shooter with a sci-fi western theme, where the main character acts as his own horse. Plus it’s not set in the Middle East, which is incredibly novel by today’s standards.

On the iOS all I’ve been playing recently is Velocispider (Universal, 99¢), a nifty arcade game by our friends at Retro Dreamer. It’s kinda like Space Invaders or Galaga, if that’s your cup of tea. You can tap and hold to charge your shots in this game. I was ready to quit at like stage three until someone told me that, so now I pass the knowledge on to you.

Alex the Codesmith

Not much has changed on the non-iOS front for me. I’m still neck-deep into Starcraft 2. With a game this deep and with such a high skill cap, I don’t see myself getting ‘tired of it’ for an extremely long time. I have *intentions* on finishing up Uncharted 2 after seeing the E3 footage and I still want to check out L.A. Noire.

On the iOS front, the game I’m playing at the moment is Match Panic by Chaotic Box. I tend to have a soft spot for extremely simple game concepts executed well on the iOS, and this one’s no exception. The difficulty ramps up nicely for my tastes as well, but given what I know about *my* tastes it’s probably a bit on the hard side for the average player. The concept of the game is to tap the left or right side of the screen that has the matching symbol of the one that is in the middle of the screen. The faster you go, the more points you get, and there’s an actual time limit for getting through a ‘stack’ of symbols. Getting a match wrong penalizes you by slowing you down. The game’s responsiveness is definitely appreciated, as I don’t ever feel like I missed a symbol because the UI was lagging or delayed.