I recently met with Bob Borchard, an Apple executive who traveled north of the border to give Canadian journalists a tour of some of the more interesting games and applications available through the company's thriving App Store, which he said has now facilitated the download of well over half a billion programs since its launch seven months ago.
I appreciated the guidance. I've only been surfing through the Store's catalogue for about six weeks, and while I've managed to hone in on plenty of great games I've found the online shop's stock of more than 20,000 applications to be somewhat daunting.
The two games Mr. Borchard demonstrated that I found most fascinating were Touch Physics (pictured above) and Enigmo. Both are physics-based puzzle games that cost a ridiculously inexpensive 99 cents each and have the potential to offer plenty of hours of head-scratching entertainment.
Touch Physics, an independent game made by just one guy working under the name Gamez 4 Touch, has players pretending their fingers are crayons and that the device's screen is a brown paper canvas upon which drawings are governed by the laws of gravity. Each level is composed of a circle, a star, and various obstacles, all rendered in thick, colourful, virtual wax. Your goal is to draw simple shapes that will help move the circle toward the star.
For example: Draw a box at the top of the screen and it will fall and land on the circle, sending it skittering off to one side. To get over lower obstructions, draw a ramp and ensure your circle hits it with sufficient speed to climb up and over. Other impediments can be cleared by drawing a line over the obstacle to create a sort of teeter totter, then pushing the circle up onto one side and dropping a big shape on the other end to catapult the circle into the air.
There's no single solution to any problem in Touch Physics; the way forward is always up to the player. It's wonderfully original stuff.
Pangea Software's Enigmo, meanwhile, sees players controlling the flow of liquids as they drip from spouts and fall through girdered labyrinths. The goal is to make them end up flowing into small-mouthed pots. Carefuly manipulating a variety of objects, such as platforms, trampolines, and cannons, I often had hundreds of drips bouncing, rolling, and zipping through the game's complex mazes.
Now, the idea of tinkering with, say, a springboard's pitch one degree at a time and observing the consequences it has on the stream of water droplets striking its surface may not sound particularly compelling, but I felt immense satisfaction whenever I found a perfect angle and the drips started flowing exactly as intended. It's like the elation experienced when sifting through a box of random screws and finding one ideally suited to your needs.
I've probably spent more time with Enigmo than any other App Store game to date.
FerrariGT ($4.99, Gameloft) grabbed my attention, too, if only because it's a good showcase for the graphical capabilities and unique interface of the iPod Touch.
Players steer sparkling 3-D Italian sports cars through picturesque locales by pretending their handheld device is a steering wheel and tilting it left and right. If you're afraid of what the commuters sitting beside you might think of someone handling his or her phone like a steering wheel, you can just move your thumb around the screen to control your car's movement, or call up a virtual steering wheel on the bottom left corner of the screen, which creates the illusion of more traditional racing game controls.
The play is a bit shallow and the cars don't actually handle all that well, but, if nothing else, FerrariGT is proof that Apple's device offers plenty of neat new ways for players to interact with their games.
Even my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter has been getting in on the fun thanks to an independently developed learning game called ABC Animals ($2.99, Critical Matter) that lets her look at pictures of animals, then use her finger like a pencil to draw the upper- and lower-case letters that begin their names.
I've said before that I'm pretty excited about the iPod Touch and iPhone as platforms for interactive entertainment, and these games have only increased my enthusiasm. What's more, developers are just starting to exploit these devices as gaming machines. I can't wait to see what sort of innovative titles spring from the minds of the thousands of indie programmers and professional studios currently working on App Store games.
Who knew Apple had the potential to become such a boon to interactive entertainment?
