Stories By Conor Egan

Developing a game that mixes elements from a variety of genres is an attractive idea. Rather than having to squeeze innovation from within a specific genre, a developer can instead take tried-and-true mechanics from disparate games and mash them together into an experience that feels new and exciting. The developers of Sword and Poker managed to combine a poker-based puzzle game and a dungeon crawler with a sprinkling of RPG elements into a cohesive and fiercely addictive game that delivers more than the sum of its parts.

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At Slide To Play, we like to be as informed as possible when we write our reviews. To this end we did a little Googling on the illustrious sport of Hippo High Diving. As it turns out, it is not actually a real sport at all! In fact, all we found was a YouTube clip of King Hippo diving down a shark infested waterfall. Unfortunately, the iPhone game Hippo High Dive does not quite live up to the excitement of that clip, and will probably entertain you for about as long.

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Next time you are stuck on the couch with a seasonal cold or a bout of H1N1 wouldn't it be nice to be able to jump into a ship and fly around your body, blasting all those viruses to bits? Well, that's the premise of TipCat Mobile's horizontally-scrolling shooter, Cell War.

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If we had to fight back a horde of zombies, we think we'd bring a tank. In fact, we would bring a tank that could fly. Obviously, someone out there shares our great taste in combat vehicles. In Ego City Invasion, you have to use such a device to defend your fort against wave after wave of filthy undead invaders. This makes for some fun gameplay that is unfortunately stretched thin by a lack of variety.

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Zombies have lurched their way past pirates, robots, and ninjas as the meme du jour in our culture today. Something about their undead wanderings both attract and repulse us. Some think that they represent our fight to rise above our most primal instincts. The hungry patrons in Zombie Pizza show us that we can't shake at least one basic instinct: a love of pizza.

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In the pantheon of awesome business cards it would be hard to top this one: Captain Galactic, "Super Space Hero". You could flash it around when you were not busy knocking out aliens and saving innocent civilians. In this game you will get to knock out plenty of aliens and save plenty of civilians. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a lot more monotonous and frustrating than it sounds.

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The hyper addictive game Flight Control has spawned a series of imitators. In addition to being a flight controller, you can take a turn being a harbor master or glob love doctor. That's all fine and good, but what about all of us little kids who wanted to grow up to be a bum fight promoter? Thankfully developer syncRage has answered our prayers with the tongue-in-cheek path-drawing game Fight Control.

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Stop me if you've heard this one. You get a frantic call from your wife to come to the hospital. When you arrive you find the place in shambles, populated by unspeakable terrors and babbling lunatics. The patients have turned into terrible monsters who fear only the light. Time to load up your shotgun, right? Not so fast. Unlike your typical survival horror game, you'll have to use your wits rather than your brawn if you plan to survive.

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They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If that's true, then Flight Control is the belle of the ball. First came the excellent adaptation Harbor Master, which exchanged landing planes for parking boats. Now we have Aqua Globs, a game where you must help wandering globs find their soulmates.

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We read somewhere that "A brand name is more than a word. It is the beginning of a conversation". As we sat downloading the game Pigeon Poo, we wondered why we were having this conversation in the first place. As it turns out, there's not even that much pooping in Pigeon Poo.

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Competition is as stiff as ever to get noticed on the App Store. Nowhere is this more true than among the sea of tower defense variants available. Many of these titles have added a novel take to the basic formula, or gussied them up with flashy animation. Very few titles have managed to deliver across the board, but Sentinel 2 is one of those few.

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Warpack: Grunts is a top-down shooter that takes place in a "generic South American jungle". It has a cartoon-like look and feel reminiscent of the tower defense game Fieldrunners. It will feel immediately familiar to anyone who played the Cannon Fodder series of games on the PC. Though it manages to dazzle with its intricate visuals, it handicaps itself a bit with some control and design decisions that detract from how fun the game should be.

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In our initial review of Flight Control, we expressed the hope that Firemint would release additional content for the game. As of version 1.2, Flight Control now has a bevy of new features and content that are more than enough to earn the game a coveted "Must Have" rating.

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As the App Store approaches its first birthday, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on some common missteps that we have seen over and over as we have been reviewing the first salvo of games for the iPhone. Developers, lend us your ears!

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Namco has been quite active in porting its library of arcade classics to the iPhone, but past titles such as Pole Position Remix and Time Crisis have been largely disappointing. Galaga Remix succeeds thanks to updates that make better use of the iPhone's graphics horsepower.

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Illusion Labs just let us know that Sway Lite has hit the App Store with 3 levels and 2 characters to play. Cool!

Just mentioning the words "The Oregon Trail" around any child of the 80's sets off a major burst of nostalgia. This early "edutainment" title acted as a duplicitous infiltrator, teaching us about Manifest Destiny while convincing us we had found a loophole to play games in the classroom. Gameloft's iPhone Oregon Trail sticks to its educational roots, but douses the graphics in coats of shiny paint and sprinkles on a bevy of new minigames; the Apple II roots of the experience are barely evident.

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Shoot 'em ups, or "shmups," are a staple in the history of videogames. From their early 8-bit origins to the more recent flashy predecessors, the top-down shooter has persisted thanks to its simple design and quick action. HotField employs 3D effects, anime stylings and intense bullet dodging that hearkens back to the second shmup renaissance of the late 1990's and early 2000's.

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All of us here at Slide To Play are fans of tabletop games. A really good board game can take complicated strategic decisions and boil them down to a few simple rules and game pieces, good for hours and hours of fun. Slay is a tabletop-style, turn-based territory grabbing game that was originally released on the PC. It looks and feels vaguely familiar, but is unique enough to have an engaging strategy all its own. Unfortunately, understanding how Slay works takes a long time, and its lack of options and customization will probably turn off most players.

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First Contact, the 3D 'Missile Command' remake from Glinkie Games, has been updated to version 1.0.1. This update polishes the graphics and adds a combo system and a basic upgrade system. In addition to the nuke that you are granted every fifth level, you also get to choose from a shield upgrade, base repair, or instant points every tenth level.

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