Review by Christopher Dambroso

One of my favorite internet memes to date is the “om nom nom” phrase, not sure exactly why but I just get a kick out of it. So when I came across the game MUST.EAT.BIRDS. and read that your character’s name is Nomster I decided to throw cation to the wind and download it solely due to the nom innuendo.

MUST.EAT.BIRDS is hailed per its iTunes store description as “the worlds first ever picnic defense simulator” and basically delivers as a casual, defense genre game. You “play” as the quirky, ball shaped monster appropriately named Nomster. The object is to defend Nomster’s delicious picnic deserts from parachuting birds of differing sizes. The game not only has a Mission Mode where you have to unlock stages one by one, but also has 4 unlockable Challenge stages too. Also, which I thought was a nice touch was that the developers added a “reset” button, which erases all scores and any achievements. I haven’t seen this feature on every game I’ve played, I do think it is an incremental positive to the replay factor.

Gameplay has you firing Nomster (technically multiple Nomsters) from a crude slingshot made from two giant forks and a rubber band. When one of your Nomsters flys into any of the incoming birds the cute little Nomster eats or shall I say noms up each bird, thus protecting the treats below. If you’re still confused or aren’t hip enough to wrap your mind around the Nom meme, gameplay for MUST.EAT.BIRDS. in it’s simplest form is Missle Command….on LSD. In Mission mode you have to either nom a certain amount of birds or score a certain amount of points, possibly both I’m still working through this mode. You can greatly increase your score by throwing two or more Nomsters into each other creating a bigger, fatter, and funnier Nomster which provides you with a score multiplier. My absolute favorite part of the gameplay is when you nom enough birds in a row without any misses, you reach a level of gaming zen called Maximum Bake. When Maximum Bake occurs every
Nomster you fire stays on the screen, usually creating a giant, hilarious Nomster that scores you a boat load of points. BUT, BUT…when you reach Maximum Bake did I forget to mention that your iPhone (in what sounds like a Japanese guy’s voice) screams “MAXIMUM BAKERY!” at you? Just building up to hear this phrase is a big hook that keeps me playing the game again and again.

The music and FX sounds are great and surprisingly fun to listen to. Once you play the game enough you find depth where some stages have only a certain number of Nomsters you are able to fire off, so timing & aiming is definitely important. I can only explain the feeling of achieving Maximum Bake to comparing it to the childhood feeling of stepping off the school bus
to start summer vacation off, yes it’s that fun and exciting.

Final thoughts…I present you with the titles of the first 2 stages in Mission Mode “To Nom a Mocking Bird” & “Close Encounters of the Nom Kind”. For that level of humor IMO MUST.EAT.BIRDS. is WORTH IT alone, along with the fun gameplay and great gaming music. So do yourself a favor if you’re on the fence about spending $0.99 for this game…put down the pack of gum or snack size bag of chips you were going to nom on and BUY THIS GAME. You can thank me in the comments section under this review later.

nom, nom, nom…WORTH IT.

*MUST.EAT.BIRDS. *was created by Mediatronic Ltd. Photos, videos, and iTunes Store link can be found by following this address: http://www.musteatbirds.com

Review by: Christopher Dambroso

Casual games for the iPhone/iPodTouch generally get a bad rap IMO, mostly due to the hampered control scheme. With the control layout constraining the game play of most genres, these casual games need to present themselves as being fresh or intuitive up front to stave off being deleted after the first run. I feel that Shift Lite by Armor Games has done a great job and is the very first game I downloaded for my iPhone months ago that I still play.

In the game your character is a test subject (#32763) or a secret agency recruit, which somewhat reminds me of the Flash based Portal game for the PC that came out a few years ago. Music for the game is all instrumental and reminds me of a LA Noire or SPY vs SPY mood.

It’s a “puzzle platformer” wherein your character begins at one side of the screen and needs to reach a doorway, usually located at the other side. The controls are simple and well laid out, there is a left direction button along with a right direction button and you press both at the same time to jump. All you need is two solid gaming thumbs and your set to go. The twist to the game is in the name itself, which is the “SHIFT” button. Pressing this button vertically flips your character into the platform below, causing the screen to rotate presenting your character standing up right. Think of it as if you were standing on water in the middle of your backyard pool, hit the “SHIFT” button and now the bottom of the pool is your ceiling and your feet are on the opposite side of the surface edge.

Shift Lite makes use of the accelerometer and engages by taking over the “SHIFT” mechanic which to me seems like a cheap thrill, but it’s still an extra effort by the developers so they get a bonus point on that.

Game play for Shift: I enjoy this video since it actually shows the gamer using his thumbs during the preview.

Download Shift Lite from iTunes. The full version is only $0.99 that grants you an additional 25 levels of SHIFT greatness, which I would strongly recommend you purchasing. Coming from a seasoned, hardcore, gaming veteran…that’s a good things folks.

Head over to ArmorGames website for more info on Shift and their other iPhone games.

Review by: Kevin Watson

Vampires Live is part of the emerging Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) niche on the iPhone/iTouch. It is a free app (read Why it’s “free” below). For all you WoWers, recovering EverCrack addicts, and FF XI fanfolks, now you can get your MMORPG fix on the iPhone/iTouch, and you can get it in the flavor of your choice! While I am writing about Vampires Live, the other games from Storm8 are virtually identical, with a different theme laid over the same game play and general concepts.

The game sets the tone with this opening message:
In the darkness under a starry sky, you awake to find a whole new world around you. The night, previously scary and mysterious now seems familiar and comforting. The vampire ho turned you is trying to get you to join his underground vampire clan. You, however, have other plans…

Vampires Live is great at appealing to the vampire lover. Build your pool of blood donors (stray dogs on up the food chain to humans, demons, and beyond) which you get blood from hourly. Then use this blood to upgrade abilities, heal from attacking other players, or save it for later in the Blood Bank. At any time (whether you are online or not) people can attack you and steal small amounts of your unbanked blood or you can pillage other vampire clans and increase your bloody coffers. As you complete missions and attack other clans you level up and increase your power, unlocking new creatures to enslave, abilities to master, and missions to complete. It is also important to collect allies and increase your clan’s size both for survival and offensive prowess.

Many gauges other than blood donations are also on set timers which keeps you coming back throughout the day to complete missions, attack clans, even put out hits on particularly annoying stronger vamps, and enslaving more beings to donate their blood. While you check in with your Vampire Clan periodically, you don’t need to spend huge amounts of time online at any given time to keep things going. Comment on clan member’s profiles, heckle enemies, or invite others to join your clan. Slip online and do a quick mission, or go through and invest some blood into new abilities. You can spend 5 minutes or a half hour. Very easy to play with minimal hand movement, a great feature for the school-going and work-avoiding crowd!

Storm8 is trying out many different things and I’m enjoying most of their ideas and having fun seeing the game interface get updated and new features appearing periodically. All in all, this is a great RPG game made even better because it’s a free download.

Why it’s “free”
This is a “free” app. Yes, you can download it and play with all the features in tact completely free. However, if you want to do extra things like change class, name, add NPC members to your clan you need Loyalty Points (LPs).

You can get these LPs in two ways, buy them (60 LPs for $4.99) OR you can download the other free apps from Storm8 LLC. Now this is really clever on Storm8’s part because this way you download all their other products. Additionally, they put out free apps where you simply download them and get extra abilities/spells or more LPs. You can then delete the app or play one of their other games. This keeps people constantly downloading SOMETHING of Storm8’s which keeps them visible in the top downloads sections of iTunes. I think this is a fair price to pay, you download a random free app of theirs, get rewarded in-game, and they reap advertising.

All in all, I feel this is a great balance for a company to provide their content for free, offer a quick way that you can progress if you are willing to pay, and a slower way if you want to help them advertise with download numbers.

Download Vampires Live from iTunes

As of this post, Storm8 is still working on their website.

Review by: Bronwyn Lewis

I have a confession: I’m a SimCity addict. And when I saw that EA came out with a version for the iPhone, I knew I had to give it a spin.

At $4.99, I was skeptical. I expected a game dumbed down and stripped of what made it SimCity, or one that was so clunky and overwhelming that I’d give up after 15 minutes. What I found instead was a fairly intuitive and comprehensive version of the game I loved.

They’ve skipped over some of the menu controls, and removed the ability to landscape — though you do have some say over your piece of land when starting a game — but that seems to help in streamlining the game. You still have a ton of control over budget, ordinances, and a cadre of advisors to help you along in the game. Building city infrastructure is not as difficult as I thought it would be, since they force your to build roads, rail, pipes, and power lines in straight lines.

Unfortunately, since you are dealing with a small screen, it can sometimes be hard to see if you’ve missed a plot of land or laid something down exactly where you want it, especially when a large building is in the way — yes, there’s only one angle for your view of the city, though you can zoom in/out at a surprising number of levels.

My biggest concern was saving my game — what would happen after I poured hours into a city, and got a phone call? Thankfully, SimCity handles that seamlessly with autosave, and can also handle multiple save files (one per city, not including autosave).

So if you’re a SimCity fan, or just like the idea of a city living in your pocket, this is a steal — you definitely get your money’s worth.

Jump over to EA’s website for more info about the game.
Download SimCity from iTunes.

Review by: Tara Brown

There’s a picture of me when I was about 5 or 6 standing on a stool playing PAC-MAN at the Arcade. I have played that game on sit down consoles, on the PC, you name it, any time I see that game I have to play. I don’t know why it took me this long to find it for the iPhone, I guess because I think of it as an arcade game requiring a joystick, it didn’t cross my mind.

I played this free version of PAC-MAN for about 30 minutes because that’s about as long as it takes. With only 1 level (I can’t tell the difference between the modes of easy, normal, and original) it doesn’t take long to get bored. I am glad they have the music though, I had a shiver run down my spine when it started playing.

PAC-MAN Lite is a brilliant marketing lure, because once you want more levels, you simply throw down $5.99 for the full version of PAC-MAN or Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s pretty hard to resist wanting to gobble up Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde and all that yummy fruit level after level.

I will say that without a joystick, the iPhone will never feel like playing in real arcade mode. There are 3 options for controlling PAC-MAN: Swipe, D-Pad, and Accelerometer. After trying all three a bunch of times, I like Swipe the most because that is what I am most used to doing on my iPhone with other applications, and I like D-Pad the least. It was too easy to miss pressing the arrows exactly. Using the Accelerometer was fun and I think it’s a great way to practice before laying down money for more games that use it.

If you like PAC-MAN and like free, it’s a quick game to play when you have a few minutes to spend on nostalgia.

Download PAC-MAN Lite here.