I’m starting a series of articles to go over the third party apps available using the “installer” tool. These all seem to work regardless of iPod Touch or iPhone, so I’ll probably write “iPhone” for everything with the understanding it applies to both. So, Let’s go:
Games I’ve got installed:
15 - this is the 4×4 sliding tile puzzle game where you need to arrange the numbers 1-15 in order by moving tiles into the open spot. Driven by tilting the iPhone to slide tiles around. Interesting use of the accelerometers but the tilting gets in the way of trying to actually play the game, in my opinion.
4Balls - “connect 4″ would be where you’ve seen this before, only that would have been with checkers in a vertical plastic frame. Same game; stack & block until you’ve got 4 in a row before the computer, or human opponent, does it. Level 1 is very much a training level, level 2 starts getting challenging.
BlockPuzzle - Sliding block puzzle that requires quite a bit of logic and planning. Large block at the top needs to get out the bottom outlet, but there’s other smaller blocks in the way. Re-arrange and shuffle them around by sliding with your finger (much better than the UI for “15″ above which uses tilting). Level 1 _is_ solveable, not sure yet about 2 and 3.
ContraSense - By tilting the phone, you drive a car into oncoming traffic (don’t try this at home, kids!). Points are scored by driving over jellybeans and by not crashing. The further forward you tilt it the faster you go and the higher your scores. Fun.
Domino - Classic dominos game, well implemented. My 9 year old daughter loves it.
FiveDice - Yahtzee, well rendered, good graphics and gameplay. Another favorite.
Garf - Remember “Simon”, the round electronic game with 4 colors and tones, where you’d watch/listen to the pattern and repeat it until you miss? Same thing. Well done, keeps high scores, and a favorite of my 3 year old son.
HuaRongDao - Same thing as “BlockPuzzle” but with Chinese-themed tiles. To me, the patterns are distracting and I prefer the solid candy-like tiles of BlockPuzzle but to each their own.
iBlackjack - Very well executed Blackjack game. Good graphics and gameplay, has had several updates each of which just keep making it better and better.
iSnake - Another classic - this time you tilt the iPhone to steer a snake around the screen. The more times you get the target (an Apple logo) the longer your snake gets. If you hit the Windows logo, game over.
iSolitaire - A very well executed Solitaire program, lots of options (1 or 3 cards, animations on or off, etc). Occasionally cards get “lost” on the screen but I’m sure that bug is being worked on. Fun victory sequence when you win.
Lights Off - Logic puzzle. 5×5 matrix on the screen of tiles that are either on or off. Touching a tile changes those around it in a predictable way. The puzzle is to turn all the lights off by getting the interactions right. Self-training game, the first several levels give you all the basics you need, and the levels get progressively harder and require more thinking the further you go up. Great game if you enjoy logic puzzles.
Mines - Minesweeper, well implemented.
Mobile Tetrominos - Like Tetris but with a different name. Down-arrow to drop the pieces isn’t implemented which is my only annoyance with it.
Othello - Othello. The AI seems reasonably smart, the graphics are as good as they need to be for this logic game.
PigShooter - So good as it is, but could be so much better. Don’t get me wrong, this should be mandatory for anyone to try. Opens with a maniacal laugh (perfect for voicemail messages), and then you’re steering a spaceship (by tilting the iPhone side to side), and shooting…pigs…at flying saucers… OK, sounds really stupid but it’s LOTS of fun. Especially the sound effects. Could be better if they’d actually keep score or if the levels would get faster once you clear the sky (you just get the laugh again and a new round of spaceships). But even without scorekeeping it’s a lot of fun and a great demo for the iPhone.
TicTacToe - This was the first third-party native app that I know of for the iPhone, and it’s at the same version. As a “Hey, look, I can add a new icon” it was a complete success. For gameplay, the AI is very primitive even by tic-tac-toe standards and can be beat every time with an unsurprising sequence. That said, I’m probably not the target audience; my 3 year old son will play it for a while before switching over to a different game.
Towers of Hanoi - Recursion / math game. Move the stack of disks from peg1 to peg3 without ever having a bigger one on top of a smaller one. Each level doubles the steps from the previous one. Good to demonstrate recursion but as a game, I never found it interesting. Graphics are as good as they need to be for what it is.
Games I don’t have installed but have tried out:
Aquarium - I dunno. There’s a fish, on the screen, that moves randomly.
Backgammon - If I knew how to play the game I could talk to the gameplay and all that but, looks nice, a coworker of mine enjoys it.
Balls - Another early proof of concept game. Move a ball around the screen by tilting your iPhone, and go through a crude maze. Labyrinth is all this and much more.
Butterfly - A butterfly randomly flies around your screen, you control a net by tilting the iPhone. My son liked it when he was 2.
Caissa - Chess game, looks well done.
Cave - Fly a spaceship through a cave. Which, as anyone who has flown spaceships can tell you, happens all the darn time. For whatever reason, I can’t get the thing to do anything but crash into the left wall in a graceful curve. I’m probably just doing it wrong but it doesn’t seem to have any intuitive controls, or even any non-intuitive control mechanism that I can find. Maybe next rev.
Chess - Another chess game, looks good.
Frotz - Plays z-machine titles. Not sure how to use this.
gpSPhone - GBA (Gameboy Advance) emulator. I don’t have any ROMs to try this with.
iDigger - Boulderdash clone. Fun logic puzzles, combines dig-dug with Sokoban. Very well done, good gameplay, and surprisingly well rendered considering how small the sprites need to be. Lots of fun.
iGo - Classic game of “Go”. It doesn’t seem to let either color capture pieces, maybe I’m doing it wrong?
iPong - Another early proof-of-concept game. Networkable but I find that controlling the paddles by tilting the phone is very imprecise, and the paddles are too unresponsive to get from one end of the screen to the other in the time required.
iSlots - Nicely executed Las Vegas slot machine. The new version has a top-5 scores website with display integrated onto the slot machine you’re playing with. Reasonably realistic gameplay (although I’ve never been able to go broke on it, which most certainly isn’t realistic!) Configurable options, and surprisingly entertaining.
Labyrinth - Roll your steel ball through a maze filled with strategically-placed holes, to get to the target hole. Tilting the iPhone gently gives you an amazing amount of control over the ball. Early versions had problems with screen flicker and with the physics model (ball bounced way too much before, and gravity was sticky somehow). They’ve got that worked out now and this is very enjoyable. Comes with demo levels, you can buy more.
NES - NES emulator - load your ROM files in, play the games. Great way to play your old favorites.
Oblique - flip-cards with saying that are probably brilliant in some way I’m just not seeing. Not sure why this is categorized as a “game”, more of a philosophy of business kind of thing or something?
Open TTD - “Transport Tycoon Deluxe” open-source game. Buttons are awfully small, but they’ve handled the mouse-pointer in a touchscreen issue in an interesting and effective way.
psx4all - psx emulator. Again I don’t have any ROMs so I couldn’t test this out.
Sudoku - Appears to be well-designed for the game, worked as expected. I’m not a fan of the game but if you are, try it out.
Tap Tap Revolution - Kind of like Guitar Hero for the iPhone. It will scan your music library and tell you which of them you can download TTR files for. These seem to vary highly in quality as far as timing and sync go, but the good ones are really good.
Zork Z-code - The classic 1980’s text based adventure game on your iPhone.
Zune2 - Shoot the zune. Kind of pointless and silly but worth trying out.