Hard Wares: Star Wars/Pac-Man iPad Back Cover

Hey, you got Star Wars in my Pac-Man!

Hey, you got Pac-Man in my Star Wars!

Hey, I have a cool iPad back cover!

You can pick them up at Redbubble.  May the force be absorbed by your iPad cover.

Source: a_man_oxford via Reddit

Pinball Resurrected

Someone who grew up during the birth and golden age of video games would also have to be at least passingly familiar with the electronic pastime it replaced... pinball.  In practically every arcade there would be at least a few pinball machines vying for the attention of someone looking for something a bit more physical than Pac-Man.  I remember one of the troika of video game palaces here in downtown Toronto being the Pinball Spot.  After carefully traversing down the slick-tiled steep and dark stairway, one would be greeted by a huge square basement of video delights, as well as a long line of pinball machines stretched back along the left wall.  It was a pinballer's paradise to be sure.

Hoping to recapture that sultry allure is FarSight Studio's Pinball Arcade for iOS devices.  There is no shortage of pinball game simulations for game devices these days, so how does Pinball Arcade shape up against the competition?  PA's main hook is the painstaking detail that has gone into the recreation of the featured tables.  Tales of the Arabian Nights is unlocked when the game is installed, with The Black Hole, Ripley's Believe It or Not and Theatre of Magic available for paid download in-game.  These games range from between $1.99 to $3.99, and you can pick up all three in a pack for $8.99.  The app itself is 99 cents.  Other classic tables are promised in future updates.

The tables are great to play, lovingly constructed with no detail overlooked.  Each table also features a tutorial to take you through the scoring system, as well as an interesting text screen outlining the history of the machine.  Problems arise, however, with the game's physics.  Pinball games are the epitome of 'feel' in coin-op amusement.  How the ball interacts with the flippers, the speed it travels around the board, and the player's ability to influence these events are all critical elements to a pinball game's success.  There is a tangible connection between player and pinball.  I believe it is possible to recreate this connection and 'feel' in a computer simulation, but Pinball Arcade doesn't quite feel like it.  For all the love and care that the creators obviously poured into the tables, they skimped a bit on ball physics.  It moves wonkily quite often, changing speed or direction for no good reason.  The ball's movement off the flippers feels a bit strange too, all of which equals a bit of frustration on the player's part and failure to close that gap between the physicality of pinball and the cold calculations of computer simulation.

Wacky ball movement notwithstanding, I would still heartily recommend this app to all you Pinball Wizards out there.  Pinball Arcade sure plays a mean pinball.  

Paperboy Delivers to the iPhone

If you hung around video game arcades in 1984, you most likely gave Atari Game's Paperboy a spin. In it, you are the titular newsie, given a route on a street with certain houses that are your customers. Then you pedal madly down the street throwing newspapers as close to people's stoops as possible, all the while avoiding speeding cars, angry dogs and bullies fighting in the streets.

Well, Paperboy has hit the iPhone in a very faithful adaptation. While it may lack the astonishing handle-bar controller that made the game in the arcade so unique and enjoyable, developer Glu Games tries its best to recreate the feel with tilt controls that take advantage of the iPhone's positional sensors.

It's 99 cents on the app store. Spread the news.

Have You Played Atari On iOS Today?

Atari and Vancouver developer Code Mystics have dropped a metric tonne of retro joy onto the Apple App Store with Atari's Greatest Hits, for iOS devices. The app allows you to play up to 100 classic Atari games; a few of their most famous arcade entries, but the majority of games come from the catalog of games released for the VCS/2600 home console. Only a small sampling of games are available for free, with 4-pack game downloads available for .99 cents, or you can get the whole 100 game enchilada for 15 bucks.

The app is universal, and I'd recommend playing it on the iPad, as the arcade games feature a representation of the original screen bezel, which shrinks down the playfield a bit too much on the iPhone. The games offer both landscape and profile mode, but not every one has that option to switch. The control methods on offer vary as well, and some work decidedly better than others. On the whole, however, I find the sliding controls that invariably represent dials or trackballs to be too sluggish, and their speed is not configurable. This definitely needs to be addressed by a patch to make these games workable. As for joysticks, the small virtual button that stands in for the stick is small, and I find my thumb constantly sliding off of it, or worse: pressing a different direction or multiple directions as once, deadly for games like Asteroids that put different, drastic actions like thrust or hyperspace on the up and down joystick positions.  Classic video game emulation is often slagged for missing that intrinsic satisfaction that comes from holding a joystick in your hand while playing. Since precise control is sometimes the only thing going for these games, in particular those for the VCS/2600, the sluggishness on offer here is pretty close to a deal-breaker.

Sometimes the controls work, however, as evidenced by the sliders that control the paddles in PONG.  But if you really want to capture that arcade feeling, the iCADE, set for release in June, will scratch that itch.  Originally a clever 2010 April Fool's joke perpetrated by Think Geek, intense user demand has actually made the crazy idea reality.  Greatest Hits has support for the iCADE built right in, and makers ION will be releasing an API that will allow other games to support the mini-cabinet.

Even without the iCADE, however, Greatest Hits is a wonderful app for classic video game aficionados.  They will also be jazzed about the extras that come with some games, such as game artwork, scanned colour manuals, and more.  Some, however, are concerned that the package is infringing on iTune rules about apps downloading and running external code, represented by the ROM code downloaded in the game packs in order to play these classic gems.  A double-standard does seem to have been set with the acceptance of Atari's Greatest Hits into the app store.  So perhaps games looking for a little nostalgia had better grab this baby fast.