NimbleBit has quite a fan following on our forums, and tonight Fishtropolis [App Store] joins their existing lineup of fun and simple iPhone games. Fishtropolis is a sequel of sorts to Textropolis [App Store] which shares all the same mechanics and gameplay elements with a whole new set of words to find within the names of 15 different types of fish.
Textropolis was well-recieved in our review, and Fishtropolis is more of the same. Starting with the letters that make up "white carp" you search for words with four or more characters. As you find more words you earn stars and attract more fish and other aquatic life to your game until the screen is almost completely full when you've found most of the words. The first star you earn unlocks the next level, "blue platy," where you start the whole process over.
When you find a word, the definition scrolls across the screen and if you find yourself stuck you can shake your phone to sacrifice five of the fish you've earned finding words to get a hint. The thing most people liked about Textropolis originally was that there were no time limits of any kind, and you can take as long as you want instead of trying to beat a clock, and Fishtropolis works the same way.
At the end of the day, Fishtropolis is little more than a reskin of Textropolis with new words to find. If you were among the many people who enjoyed the original game in the series, you will also have a lot of fun with this one. However, if you're looking for something new, there isn't much to be found in Fishtropolis aside from a different graphical theme and a new catalog of words.
While this week has been filled with news and reviews of fast paced games, I've always had a weakness for word games on the iPhone, even though I'm fairly terrible at them. Here are three recently released or recently updated word games that are all worth checking out–
Guess the News [99¢ / Free] – Surprisingly enough, the news is good for more than material to auto-tune. Guess the News pulls news stories down from various RSS feeds, and turns them in to puzzles to be solved. You're given a brief description of the article, then need to guess the headline from the pile of letter tiles on the game board. Puzzles are broken out in to several categories such as health, sports, and even "odd stories". For instance, I recently played a few games in the technology category that had me guessing the titles of Engadget posts. Guess the News features three difficulty levels which control how much of the headline is already completed at the start of each puzzle, and with the dynamic content fetching provides infinite replay value.
Word Spin [$1.99] – As seen in the above trailer, this game has two parts to it, the first stage amounts to rotating and positioning the various wheels loaded with letters to line up as many words as possible. You then tap the top of the screen to lock the wheels in place, then find every word you possibly can as you rotate the locked set of word wheels searching for valid words. Once you get good enough, you can compete both against friends by sending email challenges where they will play against your exact configuration of the word wheels or by submitting your score to the global online leaderboard. The gameplay mechanic is solid and provides an interesting spin (See what I did there?) on the word hunting game formula.
Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] – Everyone who owns an iPhone or iPod Touch should have either the free or paid version of this game on their device. Words With Friends takes the game of Literati (a variant of Scrabble) and adds excellent asynchronous online multiplayer with recently added push notifications that alert you when it's your turn in any of your active games. The free version is ad supported, but otherwise fully featured, and according to a recent presentation by the developers at GDC Austin, Words With Friends and Chess With Friends [$2.99 / Free] has 50,000 active users daily.
I've had numerous Words With Friends games going for months now with nearly every friend of mine who owns an iPhone, a clever in-game search function will search the Words With Friends player database for friends of yours you want to start a game with, and if the game can't find them it will offer to send them an email invitation. Everything about the game is implemented so amazingly well that you owe it to yourself to at least try the free version if you're even remotely interested in word games, especially with the recent update adding push notifications. If you need people to play with, stop by the Words With Friends thread on our forums.
Self Aware Games recently released their free online multiplayer word game Word Ace [Free] into the App Store.
For those familiar withe Texas Hold'em Poker, the game carries the same basic structure with 5 community cards and 2 hole cards, but instead of traditional playing cards, you get dealt letters. Using the letters you have in your hand combined with the community cards, you try to form your highest scoring word. Like Hold'em, each round involves betting based on the strength of your hand or if you think you can just bluff someone off their hand. It's a nice concept and works out quite well.
The game is available for both the Palm Pre and iPhone/iPod Touch with the ability to play against others across platforms.
The developer video is being demoed on a Palm Pre, but the iPhone version plays the same:
Tournament game structure is said to be in the works as well as a Pro version that is meant to help support the developers. Self Aware has said that the free version remains fully featured:
The main thing, though, is that the game's free. Word Ace has ALL the content of Word Ace Pro EXCEPT In-App purchases, which are forbidden by Apple for free apps. WAP is for you if you want more chips, or if you simply want to help support the game's continued development! But if you don't want to pay, Word Ace (the free version) is a complete game, and you can play as much as you like.
Our forum thread has ongoing discussion with developer participation.
Alan Turoff invented Boggle [App Store] in 1972 and since then the game has seen numerous variants, computer games, and as of today, an iPhone game. The classic game of Boggle is played by shaking a covered tray of 16 dice, each with a different letter printed on each of its sides. The dice settle in to a 4×4 grid, you flip over the included hour glass and start writing out every word you find then tallying your score.
The iPhone version of the game, needless to say, takes care of most of these things for you. The game still starts with a vigorous shake, but finding words is done using a simple touch interface that works identically to other similar word games on the App Store. You drag your finger across tiles to spell a word, hit the green button that pops up to enter it, and repeat for three minutes. You can even rotate the letters by putting two fingers on screen at once and rotating them. At the end of the game, it shows you your total score along with the complete word list and the ability to challenge your friends via email.
Tapping the challenge button brings up an already filled out email ready to be addressed. When the person you're challenging receives the email, assuming they also own the game, tapping the included link fires up Boggle and allows them to play your exact letter set to beat your score. If you receive a challenge, you can access it at any time by tapping the "Challenges" button, so you don't need to play challenges from friends right away if you don't want to.
Also included is an "Advanced" mode that mixes things up a bit by allowing you to change the time limit as well as enable "portal cubes" and/or "panic flip". With portal cubes on, when you match a word the first and last letters swap positions on the grid and with panic flip at 20 seconds left a new configuration of the letters appear. If you're an old school Boggle player and prefer writing and scoring your own words, there's a self score mode that does nothing more than display the letter grid and a timer.
If achievements and stat tracking are your thing, Boggle keeps track of a ridiculous amount of data such as your total play time, most used letters, and even things like your favorite method of controlling the game among other equally silly statistics. Achievements range from word length to total games played, challenges beaten, and other things like that.
There's really not much to say about Boggle other than it's an excellent adaptation of the original. I can see the challenge feature being extremely popular among word nerds, and advanced mode will mix things up a bit for Boggle veterans. Also, at $2.99, the iPhone version seems well priced for a brand-name title, and only priced slightly higher than the generic Boogle-variants already found in the App Store.
The iPhone version Boggle was developed by Tricky Software who also developed Spore and Armado for the iPhone.
One of my favorite things about the App Store is the sheer amount of games that are based on a concept that is so far out there that you would sound like some kind of maniac pitching the idea to someone else. Dungeon Scroll [App Store] joins the ranks of really weird game ideas that just work, and work well, on the iPhone.
Created by Seth A. Robinson, an award winning game designer also responsible for the classic BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon, Dungeon Scroll is a role playing word game that resembles what I imagine the bastard video game son of Underworlds [App Store] and Textropolis [App Store] to be like.
In Dungeon Scroll, you fight the various monsters you come across in your dungeon crawl by forming words, or "casting spells", as the game puts it. Each dungeon has a set of foes you must vanquish to move on to the next, and each monster has their own set of hit points. Larger words do more damage, but you can only use each word once per dungeon. Because of this, there's a significant amount of strategy in the words you play in each fight. If the monster you're fighting only has a few hit points left, you want to use three letter words to finish them off, saving your bigger words for more powerful creatures.
When you slay a monster, they drop treasure in the form of various bonus tiles. The most common type of treasure tile is an additional single-use letter, but there are also tiles which add damage to words, multiplies the damage of words, or in the case of the oracle tile, show you the best word you can form with your current tile set. According to the game's help screen, these special tiles are twice as likely to appear when you aren't holding on to any, so it's in your best interest to use them to get more.
Each monster you fight comes with its own time limit, cleverly disguised as your hit points bar which gets refilled after every fight. Find enough words to kill a monster before it kills you or it's game over. There's even more to the game though, certain enemy types like turtles are heavily armored and only four (or more) letter words will hurt them and there apparently are some super difficult dragons that appear later in the game with tons of hit points. Also, as you make your way through dungeons you will find books which will give you a choice of a statistic to increase, such as +5 to your health bar or +1 damage to each word.
Wrap all this up with a global leaderboard (that I'm currently #9 on, although not for long I'm sure), and you've got a game which is way more fun than I was expecting it to be when I first downloaded it. If you like word games, Dungeon Scroll is one that you really need to add to your collection. The RPG elements create a really unique experience, and the individual monster battles will have you finding words and strategizing when to play them instead of just playing absolutely everything you find like most word games.
There isn't a lite version available, but there is a free demo of the Windows version of the game available on the Robinson Technologies web site. It's also worth mentioning the PC version of this game sells for $6.95, so the iPhone port at 99¢ is being sold at a substantial discount from the original.
PopCap's Bookworm [App Store] is on sale this week for 99¢. If you're unfamiliar with the game, here is a brief overview from our review:
Bookworm uses the same formula of most word games, offering a field of random tiles from A to Z, (with 'Qu' combined in to one tile) that players must search through to find words. The tiles are large enough that accurately tapping them with your finger isn’t an issue and you can then either select the rest of your word by tapping adjacent tiles or dragging your finger through them. Lex, the Bookworm mascot accompanies you throughout the game, showing you the score of the current word you have selected. Tapping the selected word removes the tiles from the board. Lex eats them, and sometimes offers a definition of the previous word as more tiles fall from the top.
Bookworm features often imitated but never duplicated gameplay, as well as art and sound design that give Bookworm an element of charm that is missing from the clones. Bookworm has stood the test of time, having been ported to nearly every platform imaginable since its original PC release six years ago. There isn't a lite version available, but you can play the flash game and download both Mac and PC demos on the Bookworm web site.
If you're interested in word games, Bookworm is definitely one you should already own. If you haven't picked it up yet, there's no time better than the present. At 99¢, Bookworm is an incredible value.
May 22 to May 31 is Wonderful Word Games Week. Fans of iPhone word games should take advantage of this week's $.99 sale on games from six independent developers:
Aji's iPhone word game Lexel [App Store] offers a nice and free (for now) variation of your standard word game.
Like all word games, the goal is to simply create words of 3 or more letters. Lexel, however, adds a twist by requiring you to move the letters around on a limited grid in order to form words.
Letters continue to appear randomly on the screen so you need to be quick to form words before the screen fills up. Tiles also can only "slide" around on a grid and must be moved around other pieces. This adds a spacial component to the game that actually works quite well.
Once the board is filled, the game shifts into the the "relaxed" (non-timed) phase where you can continue to form words (if you are able) and then subsequently slide tiles using the empty spaces that are left.
The game was originally released at $1.99 but dropped to Free at the end of April for a "limited time". A nicely produced game that's easily worth the download for word-game fans looking for something different.
NimbleBit has quite a fan following on our forums, and tonight Fishtropolis [App Store] joins their existing lineup of fun and simple iPhone games. Fishtropolis is a sequel of sorts to Textropolis [App Store] which shares all the same mechanics and gameplay elements with a whole new set of words to find within the names of 15 different types of fish.
Alan Turoff invented Boggle [
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