Quick Glance: Squaresville by Rusty Ross

Posted on October 24th, 2008. Written by Arron.

Keeping in line with the overall UI of the iPhone, Squaresville developed by indie dev Rusty Ross (rustyross.com) aims to bring that retro picture puzzle you all know and love, to iPhone and iPod touch …

Reviewed at: Version 1.0
Released on: October 15th 2008
Retails for: £0.59/$0.99

“It’s a touchscreen take on the classic square tiles puzzle game. I have paid real attention to the look & feel and keeping consistency with the iPhone aesthetic. You can use your own photos, or one of the beautiful images I have included with the game. Finally, I have localized the application into 16 languages.”

- Rusty

With it’s no quirks interface and easy to use navigation, I found myself pretty involved in Squaresville. When you first open up the application you’ll be presented with a grid of 11 squares. These are movable tiles. The app will then rapidly (and automatically) shuffle these tiles around to make a mess of your once perfect photo. The aim of the game is to slide the tiles around, tactically, to finish up with the photo in all of it’s glory once again.

Further Options
What would a photo puzzle be without the ability to add your own images into the mix? There are two main buttons within the application. The one in the bottom left shuffles your puzzle’s pieces, and the one in the bottom right, Settings, brings up two further options; Change Picture and Solve Puzzle. Clicking ‘change picture’ calls the (slightly modified) native image picker API, allowing you to choose an existing photo from your. Alternatively, you can select the tab ‘Game Images’ to choose one of the 8 built-in photos Rusty has bundled with the app.

Layout and Visuals
We can’t really comment on the visuals, as … well … it’s up to you to make them! I did however digg the way this game uses the space available, effectively. I like that fact that even though it’s another ’59p’ game, it’s well-designed and it some-what has a respectable amount of reply-value. The reason for this is, the interface consists of your content! – if your one of these people who loads billions of photos onto these devices, daily or even weekly, I can see Squaresville passing a train journey for you. It’s slick sliding animation and sound present on solving each puzzle round the game off.

Listen and Slide
Adding to the very limited list of applications which are including support for this (and to me, it’s a no-brainer on an iPod-capable device), Squaresville allows the continuation of music playback during operating the app – meaning your music won’t fade out on launch. Rock on Rusty!

Improvements

• The option to take and apply a photo from iPhone’s camera

The Verdict?
It’s ok, and at 59p it’s pretty damn affordable.
If you need to pass some time, maybe you’ll pick this up.

• Quite fun

• Reasonable reply revalue

• Simple, Clean UI

Grab your Copy: Squaresville

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