In the jungle the Sectoid sleeps tonight.
When folks talk about the App Store “closing” for the holidays, they don’t mean that it shuts the way your local pizza place does at Christmas, forcing you to forage for food in little-used cupboards. They just mean that new apps don’t get approved for a couple of weeks. Presumably this is so the App Store approval elves can be temporarily unchained from their Approval Wheels in the Certification Mines deep below Cupertino, but who knows? Maybe Apple grinds them into a stew and then clones a new batch of approvers over the holiday. What it means for us though, is that instead of the elegant, orderly Wednesday night March of the New Apps, the week before Christmas becomes a hectic scramble — an every-app-for-himself rush to launch before the Christmas curtain falls.
Five apps of particular interest to us appeared while we were on holiday last week. Let’s chat about them after the jump.
The biggest news here is surely the release of Galaxy Trucker Pocket for iPhone. The original iPad-only release of GT swallowed up praise like an insecure black hole around here, being proclaimed both the Multiplayer Game of the Year Runner-up and the Board Game of the Year. This is news that iPhone-only types will love and iPad owners will hate: GT Pocket isn’t a Universal update to the existing app, but rather a stand-alone iPhone app at a significantly reduced price. That sort of bifurcation was commonplace back around 2010 when iPads were new but it’s pretty rare these days.
Galaxy Trucker Pocket is $3 and iPhone-only. Read Neumann’s Galaxy Trucker review from September to see why we got so lathered up about it.
The PR & marketing people working on Santiago de Cuba didn’t make anywhere near as much noise as I would have given the game’s coincidental release alongside the biggest Cuba-related news story in decades. Based on a well-liked economic strategy board game from 2011, Santiago is apparently a very literal translation from the cardboard, and the buzz is that it’s missing some basic features that video games have enjoyed since the early 1980s, like saved games. That aside. I’m hearing generally cheerful stuff from PT readers about it and hopefully we’ll review it in the new year. (Hat tip to Alan Newman.)
Santiago de Cuba is $5 and iPad-only. There’s no trailer for the digital version so here’s Tom Vasel playing the cardboard version.
Aliens vs Humans is newly available on Android. Long-time readers may recall the iOS version which is a couple of years old now. Now I’m clearly not among them, but for some Ultra-orthodox X-Com purists, Firaxis’ reboot of that legendary strategy game was just too iconoclastic. If you were one of those who thought FiraXCOM deviated too far from the gospel truth of Julian Gollop’s strategy classic, then Aliens vs Humans is your game. AvH is the most slavishly reverential remake of the original X-Com you’re liable to find, preserving almost every aspect of the old game mechanics while introducing new original aliens and such. That does mean that it also preserves a bit of the UI tedium from 1994, but if you want a turn-based squad tactical game about blowing up E.T. on your mobile device, this is a fine choice.
Aliens vs Humans is about $2 on Android, and it’s still on iOS for $3.
PT reader Tim W. wrote in to tell us about Free Trader — not exactly a new release but it’s one that completely slipped under our radar way back at the beginning of October. This one’s based on a little-known solitaire card game from 2008 — it’s thematically like Elite or Freelancer in that you’re one of those space buccaneers with too much free time and firepower (the future really needs better after-school programs for underprivileged swashbucklers) so you go around looting cargo and ducking the space police. Mechanically, though, it’s a card game.
No video of this one, I’m afraid, so here’s a (pretty funny) tutorial video from 2010 for the original card game. Attention Game Developers: it is the year 2014. We have video phone computers in our pockets at all times. We live in a world where there’s trailers for books, trailers for cars, and even trailers for other trailers. If you release a video (!) game, make a damn trailer for it.
Free Trader is $2 on iOS (Universal) and about the same on Android.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a Pocket Tactics new release round-up without something weird, and boy does this post deliver. The dev’s description of Entertainment Software for Lonely Children was so boss that I’m going to just use it straight from his email to me.
It’s a game about me growing up as a single child and playing multiplayer games by myself. I tried to simulate that experience by creating a take on Pong where the goal is to keep a rally going for as long as possible using utterly frustrating controls (they’re inverted so that moving down with the left paddle will make the right paddle go up, and vice versa). I really wanted to convey the feeling of suffering through suffering through something in order to feel less alone.
When the player loses, instead of the usual game over message, a face appears and relays a brief message. These messages are all things I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self. Anything from telling myself why certain parts of my personality work a certain way, to reassurances, to call-outs to my flaws.
That is just rad.
Entertainment Software for Lonely Children is a buck on iOS, so spare a thought for only children everywhere and get this.
Playing Clue by yourself was the worst.
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