Though we seem to be through the worst of Diablo III‘s humiliating server outages at launch this week, who knows when those things will need to be worked on again. Logging in to Battle.net and waiting for the credential verification to time out is a long and stupid way of being told you can’t play the game.
I’ve become so jaded by mobile gaming’s endless pleading for my attention that I recently removed every game from my iPhone except for three that I deeply admire. Today, I’m glad to add a fourth to that group: This Could Hurt by Orange Agenda.
The idea of rolling a virtual ball around the screen is not new. Nor is the idea of a physics-emulating puzzler. What I’m looking for, when I try a mobile app fitting that description, is execution and charm. Amazeballs provides.
Spare me your criticisms. I hate FarmVille and its kin for the same reasons you do. Games like that are manipulative, reliant on spamming and barely constitute being called games at all.
Kotaku readers might be familiar with Defiant Development, the Australian studio working on Warco, the first person “shooter” where a video camera is your only weapon. Before Warco, Defiant pushed out a casual mobile title called Rocket Bunnies, which saw moderate success, but I doubt it prepared the studio for the heights its latest game, Ski Safari, has reached in Apple’s App Store.
After two years of playing console ports with virtual control pads on my iPhone, I think I’m starting to grasp the future of team sports video games on mobile devices. And it is nothing like what I play in my living room.
Word Off is, well, a face-off… with words. It’s an asynchronous Scrabble-scored Boggle fight, played on a strategy game’s grid and covered in a Roy Lichtenstein touch.
