The Week(s) That Was: 7/11/09 – 20/11/09

Posted on November 21st, 2009. Written by Damon.

Proudly sponsored by Chillingo Ltd.

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Ravensword: The Fallen King  by Chillingo is Out Now! – $6.99

Intro

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Week 1:This week has been quite quiet, with rumors of many games coming out, but it seems they are being kept in hibernation until a christmas splurge in the last week or two of the year. While we all count down the days to the speculated release of Assassin’s Creed 2 on the iPhone we have some titles to play around with.

Week 2:This week has been pretty much the opposite to last week with a truck load of huge releases being made and more rumoured yet didn’t deliver (Grr Assassin’s Creed II). The biggest release would have to be a tie between Call of Duty: World At War: Zombies and Ravensword, but because Ravensword hooked me for so long I didn’t have time to squeeze both in unfortunately. But instead we found some more great titles for it.

Touch Pet Dogs – Free, $0.99, $1.99, $9.99, $29.99

After the huge response to Ngmoco’s Eliminate Pro they decided to let Touch Pet Dogs go worldwide. This is another free game that lets you buy DLC energy in the way of dog food. This game is as good if not better than Eliminate, yet hasn’t had the success of Eliminate due to a few key factors. The main reason is that this isn’t a game suited to DLC and rather a game made free because the devs are getting greedy. Touch Pet Dogs should be a $4.99 or $9.99 game with food bought with in game virtual money.

Looking past that this is a great game that is as close as we can get to Nintendogs or similar. You can feed, play with, teach tricks, wash, clothe and much more. There are heaps of dogs to choose from with different personalities and an online environment where you can go on playdates with other dogs. Your dog can also choose one of eight careers to pursue. This is a super fun game wrecked by the fact you have to pay to play, which is greedy and an outrageous proposition for a game like this. Get this, but not any DLC.

Auditorium – $2.99

This week would have been the first for a long time without a release by one of the big two developers, but Electronic Arts slid out this previously announced flash game for us to play. This game is a different sort of music game than we are used to, with it having a more Zen like feel instead of a rocking Metallica game. The game is all about getting noise to filter through hoops into certain noise amplifiers, kind of like Enigmo but with sound waves as such. It’s a bit of a different game but certainly a good one.

This game has over 20 levels for you to play with more levels available for purchase via DLC. The levels get challenging very quickly and require much thought and experimenting to get the waves to work. I found the game peaceful, especially with the background music that slowly raises in volume as you fill the various bars. This is the type of game that obviously won’t appeal to all members of the gaming community, but if these peaceful and challenging games are your thing, definitely try this game out.

Jet Car Stunts – $1.99

Jet Car Stunts is the first game well known game at least by Australian developers True Axis. This is a great racing game that takes more of an arcade feel, with the tracks all about insane jumps and trying to get to the finish line. There is no actual racing other games involved, with it more being about just making it out alive. As you can see from the screenshots this isn’t your average racer game, but the fun factor is still there. This game will surprise you with how good it actually is, because to me it looks quite basic.

Jet Car Stunts lets you take on two nice and challenging modes, Platforming and Time Trial. These are played on 4 difficulty levels with over 25 levels in total to zoom around on. This game is surprisingly addictive, and you find yourself wanting to keep playing the levels over and over again until you reach that incredibly hard to achieve gold medal. This is a nice cheap game that can provide you with hours of fun filled death defying leaps and tricks. Just an all around good game that will appeal to basically anyone at all.

Ravensword: The Fallen King - $6.99

Ravensword has been sought after by many in the iPhone gaming world for a long long time. Featuring some sweet ass graphics to go with a fully featured RPG, this is one of the best games to come onto the App Store. Chillingo managed to snipe this game by publishing it, a great move by both parties. The game takes RPG’s like Dungeon Hunter a step further, having a full blown world to run around in instead of partially connected levels. Really this is the direction where the premier iPhone games should be headed.

This game is absolutely amazing, and runs perfectly on all devices, with cut down graphics for those 1st Gen owners and some pimped up graphics for those lucky 3rd Gen owners. There is a good 6-8 hours of gameplay here with all the features of a good RPG including different clothing, weapons etc. levelling up and a strong storyline. With such a strong line-up of RPG’s in the App Store including Zenonia and Dungeon Hunter, this one comes out trumps purely for the fact that it’s just so DAMN amazing! Just get this already.

Surviving High School – $2.99

Surviving High School is a fairly unheard of title by Electronic Arts. I didn’t know to expect from this title with it being a text based adventure. After selecting my character and getting bashed up by Adam, I was instantly hooked. This game lets you go through the first semester of High School, creating your own pathway with every option you choose.  The game also features extra DLC packs with more stories and free weekly packs for you to come back and play each and every week.

There are literally hours of gameplay in the original episode, being the most in depth of them all. The game gives you eight weeks to juggle girls, the homecoming, being popular, having a good GPA and doing well on the Football team, if you choose to. Along with that you have to keep relationships with friends happening otherwise it could end on one bad sentence. This game is a lot of fun and has promised replayability for months to come. I dare you to try the lite version, as it will instantly hook you onto the full version.

Chuck Norris: Bring on the Pain! – $1.99

When life gives Chuck Norris lemons, Chuck kicks life in the groin. Chuck Norris is everyone’s most loved hero. There is nothing Chuck Norris can’t do, he even counted to infinity, twice. This time Chuck Norris has given the people Chuck Norris on an iPhone, in a game full of the Chuck Norris awesomeness that we all know. This game is the best racing, action, shooting, RPG, MMORPG, text, video, adventure, arcade, music and castle defense game ever known to man, and we can buy it for only $1.99.

All Chuck Norris jokes aside this is still a pretty fun game. There are 13 levels of Chuck vs Everyone else action, as you have to save the day. The graphics are pretty good and work well for a side scrolling game like this. While this isn’t the most exciting shooter you will ever play, I feel that it is worth it just having the game on your iDevice just to show your friends how good you are. So please, I beg you, just buy this game, you really don’t want to meet Chuck’s friends Broken and Face do you?

Other Notable Releases this week Include:

GUTS by Tag Games

Worms Express by Team 17

The Quest – Hero of Lukomorye II by Chillingo Ltd.

Meowcenaries by Adult Swim

Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies by Vivendi Games Mobile

Harry Potter: Spells by Warner Bros

Star Wars: Trench Run by THQ Wireless

DJ Nights: Global Tour by Clickgamer

Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? 2010 by Capcom

Castle Frenzy by Gameloft

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs by Chillingo

Monopoly: Classic by Electronic Arts

Stay tuned next week for the eleventh installment of ‘The Week That Was’. If you have any suggestions to improve the segment please either email me at damon@razorianfly.com or submit a comment below. Thanks!