PixlBit

An oldie but goodie

Ninja Striker! is a fairly simple one-touch iOS game. Or so it seems. It doesn’t make the best first impression because it’s too simplistic. You just tap somewhere on the screen to send your little pixelly ninja flying in that direction, katana swinging. Anything in the way will get sliced and if you tap on an enemy specifically, you’ll fly to that enemy and stay there slashing it until it dies. Your ninja can also stick to walls and ceilings. Three hits and you’re dead but there’s nothing to worry about. The first couple levels are pretty boring because they’re so easy. Things start to change with the first boss though. He’s a little guy about your size and he jumps around shooting baby tornados at you. If you just sit there hitting him, you’ll die pretty fast. You have to jump around and make strategic swipes at the boss. Then the second set of levels are much more complicated with lots of bottomless pits and deadly spikes. It takes a lot more planning and attention to make it to the end of the level intact. I’ve now played through the second boss and Ninja Striker! has gone from a game that I was going to drop with a disinterested “meh” to a game I’m interested to see where it’ll go next.

We need more games based around heartbeats, right? Of course! Enter Lub vs Dub, an endless runner (‘natch) where the two sounds of the heartbeat duke it out. Well, you know, in a running sort of way. There are two ways to play: Single Player Sprint and Two Player Battle. In the sprint your little character (Lub, I believe) runs along a heart monitor line. It’s pretty static but there are little spikes you must jump and large ones that can be avoided only by flipping over to the other side of the line. Along the way you can collect power ups to increase your score and hearts to multiply it at the end. It gets pretty hectic as the speed increases and you try to keep straight when to jump and when to flip. It’s a fun little runner.

I have plenty more iOS games to cover but I wanted to take a break to cap this week. What a week it has been! I'm drowning in blogs to read. Of course, you're all in the same boat. But this week was especially stressful for my family because one of my wife's uncles passed away last Sunday night and we decided to go to the funeral. We packed up the car once I got home Tuesday night and set out on the road. We were able to stay with some friends we hadn't seen in a while, and though it took us only about six hours to get there (no traffic late at night during the week), it was still 2 in the morning. My 18-month-old son Link slept almost the whole way but woke up about 30 minutes before we got there and wouldn't go back to sleep. I finally got him down at 3:15 but it didn't last long. Needless to say, we woke up tired.

First of all, the name is misleading. This cat NEEDS a diet but he isn’t getting one. The goal of this game is to get the gluttonous feline into the cookie jar…so that he can devour the cookies. See? Not a diet. You do this by slashing ropes and wooden planks and whatnot in an attempt to direct the cat’s fall into the jar. It’s a physics puzzle. Tap and slide your finger on the screen to set up the perfect slice (as shown by a dotted line) and then let go to let it fly. You’ll often need to make additional slices after that first one but you won’t have time to be so precise. There is also the matter of collecting three cupcakes in each level. It’s optional, of course, but seems to unlock bonus content (levels or costumes or something) and as long as any of your flying pieces of wood hit a cupcake, you’ll get it, so you needn’t worry about flinging the cat all over the screen. It’s very silly but fun, though let me be honest and say that I’m not very good at it. I suppose I ought to just play Cut the Rope, the poster boy for this sort of game, because I have a copy of that too. But it’s funny to see that fluffy ball of fat bouncing around.

Mikey Shorts is a 2D platformer for iOS. It’s a simple game but plenty of fun. The virtual controls work extremely well, with arrows for running left and right and buttons for jumping and sliding. I never had any problems getting Mikey to do what I wanted.

So here we are, BaD 2014. I never participated in Blog a Day on 1UP because I didn’t have the time, and busyness has reared its ugly head again. Blogs can take so long to write and put together. What could I possibly say each day? Then it hit me: I have a boatload of iOS games sitting on my iPhone (and more on my App Store account) that I’ve never touched. Most of them are paid games that I got during free promotions but I certainly don’t know if I’ll like all of them. So to fill out my BaD roster, I’ll spend 20 to 30 minutes with one and write up what I think. This way I can be a BaD blogger and clear up some room on my over-stuffed phone. Let's start with Ms. Pac-Man.

Here we are, Blog a Day 2014! I have a series of things to talk about, but for today it's a wrap up of last month. I'm at the mercy of tradition!

I've decided to do Blog a Day but BaD doesn't count the weekends (right? Right...right), so my first official BaD blog will be Monday but I did want to give a shout out to Pirate Code, the indie game I wrote the soundtrack for, because it's on Mac now. That means I actually get to play through it now (woot!) and YOU, dear reader, should too! I also put up a blog on the Circuit Hive website a while back about writing the soundtrack for the game. It covers things like how I got involved in the project as well as how I addressed the question of what makes a song sound piratey. It gets a little bit into nitty gritty music stuff and I try to relay my thought process behind some of the songs. Here's a preview:

Enough happiness to make you explode