An old Flash favorite hangs in balance while a few word games keep your iPhone fingers busy this week, along with most excellent Skabooki, a game that's eaten many hours of my life away with its simple but elegant construction. That darn voodoo doll is just so cute!
Levers - One of the first Flash games reviewed at JIG, Levers is the latest release from Vector Park's animation and programming wizard, Patrick Smith. A beautiful and mesmerizing piece of interactive art and physics simulation, Levers will calm you while it challenges you to keep everything it throws as you in delicate balance. There's no save in this initial version, though, so you'll have to solve it all in one sitting.
Skabooki - A witch doctor created a voodoo doll to protect his daughter from pain. Now, both evil and good spirits are trying to undo the magic with puzzles that keep the doll separated from the girl. Guide the voodoo doll to the goal of each stage by carefully removing sets of blocks. Superb visuals and a large variety of puzzles make for an excellent game. And for some reason, I can't help but stare at the candle melting animation at the end of each level.
Word Solitaire - An intriguing mix of word construction and solitaire. Instead of playing card suits in descending order, your goal is to spell words using cards with letters on them. You can arrange individual and piles of cards as you like, provided you either spell or begin to spell words with them. For example, you can play the cards "H A" on a "T" because it could potentially spell "THAT". You can't, however, stick "Y Q" on the "T". Tyq? No. Just... no. A free Word Solitaire Lite is also available.
Bookworm - It's hard to resist a good word game, isn't it? Especially when it's as well-established as Bookworm. PopCap's famous word game takes its turn at the iPhone with a great port of its PC cousin. The dictionary sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, but otherwise it's smooth spelling. And speaking of portable Bookworm games, when will we get Bookworm Adventures for the iTunes App Store, PopCap?
NOTE: Games listed may not be available outside of North America. Prices are subject to change and are therefore unlisted. Please see the individual game pages for purchasing info.
BWA is about 65MB when installed on a PC, if I remember correctly. Good luck getting that onto the app store. (Obviously a lot of stuff could and would be trimmed out and also compressed, but still...)
An iPhone version would drop the art space requirements to about 30% the current size - figure the whole thing would be about 30M or so. That's over the 3G download limit but still a reasonable game size.
Plants vs. Zombies is coming to iPhone, it will probably be around that size. Size probably isn't an issue, though. Return to Mysterious Island is 318MB, and Myst is 533MB.
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