Welcome to this week’s gaming edition of iPhone Gems. Today, we’re looking at four different but very interesting new games: a number puzzler, a bowling game, an update to a Skee-Ball title, and a cartoony...]]>

Welcome to this week’s gaming edition of iPhone Gems. Today, we’re looking at four different but very interesting new games: a number puzzler, a bowling game, an update to a Skee-Ball title, and a cartoony boxer.

Our top pick of the week is Super K.O. Boxing 2 by GLU Games, and if you already have Ramp Champ, there’s a very compelling new In-App Download level pack for that title called the Halloween Pack. Read on for all the details.

CountDown: DownToZero

It has been touted by some as the spiritual sequel to Drop7, a stylish, number-focused puzzler that has remained a low-key iLounge favorite for months. CountDown: DownToZero ($2) by Hondune Games isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s a good enough title to merit some attention. The idea: there’s an eight-block-wide well that numbers fall into from the sky. You touch numbers in sequence to remove them from the well before it fills completely with blocks.

What’s novel is the matching process: you need to touch one number and then continue to swipe in the direction of additional numbers that subtract from the first one to equal zero. Any two matching numbers will thus work—4 minus 4, 2 minus 2—but you’ll only score in the thousand-point range making such simple matches. It’s in longer matches, such as 4 minus 3 minus 1, or 6 minus 2 minus 1 minus 1 minus 2, and combinations of quick 2- and 3-matches that you can rack up points and survive. In Endless Mode, the game starts you with only 1, 2, 3, and 4 number blocks, but additional numbers are added as time goes on, and a Clear the Board mode begins with a full well and higher numbers right away.

We liked CountDown’s relatively clean presentation. Three skins are offered, the best of which has nice, modern-looking glowing blocks with small particle effects as they fall and match, but sound effects are minimal and music is non-existent. The chief problem is that the pacing’s not quite right for all players yet, as the game starts at a fast clip and doesn’t give novice players a chance to master the strokes before they’re swimming in the pool. Adding higher numbers as the game continues is a great idea, but the initially brisk speed of falling blocks prevents the challenge from becoming as intellectual as it could be; fast swiping quickly takes the place of deliberate thought. With additional development work—more and more stylish skins, better audio, and a more gradual progression of the game’s speed—this could be a truly great number and block puzzler. As-is, it’s fun for those who want something that’s mentally stimulating, and are willing to learn by making mistakes. iLounge Rating: B.

Galactic Bowling

Of the thousands of iPhone and iPod touch games now in the App Store, the vast majority aren’t direct hits or near-misses, but rather big misses—the equivalent of throwing a dart at a dartboard and watching it disappear into thin air rather than even hitting the wall or floor. Galactic Bowling ($5) by Perpetual FX Creative is a near-miss, the product of an apparently creative and talented art and design team that lacked for only one thing: a really good bowling user interface.

What Perpetual FX has come up with is an interesting premise: 11 completely 3-D polygonal characters and 11 different bowling lanes set on Earth and on various imaginary planets in outer space. The characters aren’t fantastic, but they’re diverse in appearance, with two male and two female humans, then seven weird-looking aliens, some with oddball items that they carry around for whatever reason while they’re bowling. Shaniqua from New York carries a boom box. Max from Australia has a surfboard. The Jar-Jar Binks-like Cest has a rocket launcher or something. They add nothing to the game, but they’re there. By comparison, the lanes—particularly the off-Earth ones—are designed with cool obstacles, such as flames and vortexes that appear at times from holes in the lanes, destroying or changing the location of your ball mid-roll. Corkscrews and even multi-path courses such as three-line lanes are, if not brilliant, really smart little additions to the bowling concept, making good use of the iPhone’s wide display. Notably, the game’s one-on-one Campaign mode takes you from level to level in a split-screen simultaneous mode so that you don’t have to watch passively as your opponent takes turns, another nice touch.

Though the graphics engine runs at a fluid frame rate and looks pretty good by iPhone 3-D standards, alongside decent to good stage-specific music, there’s a problem: the gameplay feels really off from moment one and never gets better. You’re supposed to tap repeatedly on a right-bottom power meter, then tap on your character to roll the ball, with tilting and other adjustments that can impact the ball’s direction while it’s in motion. For a variety of reasons, this interface never feels good or right; Perpetual could have just cloned the power meters from earlier iPhone bowling titles we’ve reviewed and been just fine. The weak controls contribute to a sense that you’re never totally in command of what happens on the lanes, so even though there are those corkscrews, vortexes, and flames, they too often feel like eye candy or nearly random elements inserted just to mess up your game. That’s a shame, as having lanes with obstacles is a great idea—there has to be a way to preserve these smart new additions to the bowling lanes while making them feel fun. The developer tries to throw in other elements, such as a laser gun to zap extra pins off the lane, but they don’t really work.

Ultimately, Galactic Bowling is at least a B+ caliber game visually, and an A in ambition for the price, let down by C-quality gameplay. We feel strongly that the developer should spend the necessary time to completely fix the control interface for this title, as it has all of the other elements necessary to be a truly novel bowling game. Only after those fixes are complete should it consider releasing a sequel; with even better characters and backgrounds, plus an improved control interface, it could have a huge hit on its hands. iLounge Rating: B-.

Ramp Champ: Halloween Pack and Voyage Pack

Non-trivial issues aside—the reasons it missed our high recommendation when we reviewed it in August—the Iconfactory’s Ramp Champ is amongst the very best games released for the iPhone and iPod touch this year. Rather than using the 3-D graphics found in earlier, competing titles, this rendition of Skee-Ball-style “arcade bowling” uses impressively drawn 2-D artwork and offers a diverse collection of themed “ramps” with amusingly rendered still and moving targets. Ramp Champ ships with four themed ramps, and now offers eight additional ramps in packs of two via In-App Purchase, Apple’s tool to let developers charge extra fees for new levels. We covered the first two-packs called “Adventure Pack” and “Challenge Pack” in our initial review; now Iconfactory has added “Halloween Pack” and “Voyage Pack” for $1 a piece.

Halloween Pack is the more impressive of the two new offerings, bringing ramps called Trick-or-Treat and Grave Danger to the mix. Trick-or-Treat presents you with a house that initially looks abandoned but can be hit with balls to open its windows, triggering costumed kids to walk around in front. Besides hitting a high score, your goals are to hit challenging skeleton targets and/or enough other objects to produce an elite type of candy treat. Grave Danger presents a static graveyard with what initially appears to be a plain collection of gravestones; as you play, you learn which stones release white ghosts, who can be hit to make blue ghost targets appear, or skeletal hands, which make an organist target appear. Both of these ramp designs use fixed background graphics, but funny evolving targets that reminded us of the better moments in Iconfactory’s prior Happy Place and Ninja Attack add-ons; their spooky music is also spot-on. Collectively, they’re a great additional purchase.

By comparison, Voyage Pack is somewhat less impressive. Plunderin’ Pirates is a pirate ship-themed level that has the requisite seafaring music and a multi-level wooden boat with both stationary and moving targets. Its objectives are clear—reveal a mermaid and a skeleton—but achieving them through a combination of shots on the boat and into the water below is more an exercise in precision than fun. The unrelated other ramp, Star Struck, consists of a series of three changing backgrounds that depict a retro-styled rocketship journey to Mars. Here, the targets—people running around and flying—are relatively boring, and both the dreamy music and backdrops are fairly bland, but the fact that the art changes is enough to keep the ramp from being forgettable.

All four of these new ramps offer new challenges that fans of this game will appreciate, and to the extent that you’re looking for a way to extend the life of this already good title, purchasing either or both packs is a simple, cheap way to do so. That said, Halloween Pack strikes us as the best of the packs yet released—worthy of our high recommendation—with Voyage as the least appealing, and our underlying concerns about Ramp Champ’s controls still remain unresolved. With greater precision in the swiping mechanism, this could be a mandatory purchase for all iPhone and iPod touch gamers; as-is, it’s very, very close. iLounge Rating (Halloween Pack): A-. iLounge Rating (Voyage Pack): B.

Super K.O. Boxing 2

Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! is the de facto standard for cartoony boxing games, and we’ve already reviewed quite a few iPhone titles that have attempted to emulate it both figuratively and literally. Super K.O. Boxing 2 ($5) from Glu Games is the latest and best Punch-Out!! wannabe to date, a hand-drawn 2-D title that does so much visually and sonically to create its own novel spin on Nintendo’s series that it can almost—almost—be forgiven for delivering less in the gameplay department.

You control KO Kid, who unlike Nintendo’s Little Mac actually has the physical build to look like a real boxer, and generally occupies the same place at the bottom center of the screen. Glu has simplified the controls to give you one combined left dodge/up button, one right dodge button, and one block button as a joystick alternative, plus left and right punch buttons and a super, powered-up punch. We never warmed to the loss of the joystick, but really liked a couple of other control tweaks: best is a ten-count mechanism where you only get up if you succeed in touching an on-screen number as many times as you have stars floating around your head; also notable are punches that are thrown coming out of defensive dodges. Super K.O. Boxing 2 mightn’t feel as smooth and responsive as Punch-Out!!—the only reason the game falls short of our high recommendation—but it has its own appeal. A three-circuit set of challenges contains 17 up-to-three-round fights, spread across 12 sometimes repeating boxers.

Where this game succeeds in an almost staggering way is in aesthetics. GLU’s boxers are nearly as cool as the ones from Punch-Out!! titles, with a notable 50 Cent parody character called 15 Cent, a fat cowboy named Big Gip, and the Indian Chief as just some of the game’s early opponents. El Bulli, a Spanish matador-type, and the Japanese Shogun look almost good enough to be Nintendo character designs, while others—including the primitive, hairy giant Ka-Rak Ubones—are different and original. They’re animated simply, without the cel-shaded polygonal art that we’ve seen in other console and handheld boxers in recent months, but look pretty good; each has his own background, as well. In-game sound effects and music aren’t memorable, with a little crowd noise, simple punching sounds, and a simple beat as you’re fighting, but they’re good enough.

The overall audio and visual experience GLU has assembled is so strong that we were on the edge of A- and B+ ratings for Super K.O. Boxing 2. Accustomed as iPhone owners are to comparatively mediocre boxing experiences, most will be very impressed by this title, and have at least some fun playing through the challenges of the fights; starting with the second circuit, the boxers actually become difficult to beat, and their Punch-Out!!-like strengths and weaknesses become more pronounced. But there’s no question that the magic balance of gameplay Nintendo has delivered in its titles is not quite here, as GLU needs to actually interrupt fights on occasion with dialog boxes to teach you skills, and other fights feel like they should be interrupted because your opponents’ weaknesses aren’t telegraphed enough by their animations. For the $5 asking price, and given the quality of the art and characters in particular, this is a game that boxing fans will really enjoy—the best boxing game in the App Store today. Were it not for the higher water marks set years ago by Nintendo in controls and gameplay, Super K.O. Boxing 2 would be more than just an aesthetic standout. iLounge Rating: B+.

Hundreds of additional iPhone app and game reviews are available here.

Although iPhone OS 3.0 introduced MMS and tethering capabilities to the iPhone, support for these features has not yet been made available on all carriers in all countries. Notably, Apple’s original iPhone partner,...]]>

Although iPhone OS 3.0 introduced MMS and tethering capabilities to the iPhone, support for these features has not yet been made available on all carriers in all countries. Notably, Apple’s original iPhone partner, AT&T was one of the few iPhone carriers in the world to not provide MMS support at the time of the iPhone 3.0 launch, and remains one of the few major carriers not providing any kind of tethering support.

Note that you can find a list of the various iPhone carriers around the world and which features they provide in Apple’s Support Knowledgebase article, Locating iPhone Wireless Carriers

With AT&T finally beginning their rollout of MMS support, we hope that tethering will not be too far behind. To this end, we offer some tips and insights for our readers on what to expect from these features and how to get the most out of them.

MMS

MMS, short for Multimedia Messaging Service is an expansion of the SMS text messaging service to allow multimedia content such as pictures, video clips and audio to be sent over the cellular network between compatible devices. Although the iPhone itself provides a number of methods such as e-mail support for sending content, the advantage of MMS is that messages can be sent to many other non-smartphone devices—phones that may not even be capable of receiving e-mail or accessing the Internet.

1. MMS is an extension of the normal Messages app

You won’t see a separate MMS app. The existing Messages app is also used to send MMS messages once the feature is enabled. The quickest way to determine if MMS is supported is to look for the little camera button to the left of the text entry field. This button is used to browse your photo library to send pictures and videos via MMS.

2. A carrier settings update is required to enable MMS

The iPhone hides all MMS-related features unless MMS has actually been enabled in the carrier settings file. These files are specific to each carrier, and the MMS settings are not enabled for carriers that don’t support that feature. This means that when a carrier adds support for MMS they must also send out an update to their carrier settings file. These updates are distributed through iTunes, so you will need to connect your iPhone to iTunes in order to receive the updated carrier settings.

iTunes checks for carrier updates for the iPhone in the same way that it checks for firmware updates. If the carrier settings update is not detected automatically, you can force iTunes to check for it by clicking the “Check for Updates” button on the iPhone Summary screen in iTunes. Note that since the carrier settings update process is the same as the iPhone OS update process, you will also need to have already downloaded and installed the latest iPhone OS update, otherwise you will be prompted to install that first before receiving the carrier update.

Also keep in mind that once MMS is enabled by your carrier, MMS support can be toggled on or off in the iPhone Settings app, under Messages. If you’ve received the carrier update and still aren’t seeing MMS options appear, be sure to check these settings.

You can confirm that you have the actual carrier update installed on your iPhone by going into your Settings app and choosing General, About. The “Carrier” information will show the version of the carrier settings file that is in use. For the AT&T MMS carrier update, it should read “AT&T 5.5”

3. The original iPhone will not support MMS

Unfortunately, users who are still toting the original first-generation iPhone will be left out of the MMS club. The exact reasons for this limitation are unclear, but the bottom line is that MMS support requires an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, and there’s no reason to expect that Apple is ever going to introduce this capability to the original iPhone.

4. Sending video is still limited to the iPhone 3GS

Even though iPhone OS 3.1 provides the ability to store video files in your photo library on all iPhone and iPod touch models, the ability to actually send video files out via MMS is still restricted to the iPhone 3GS. If you’re using an iPhone 3G, you’ll find that the “Sharing” button that normally appears in the bottom-left corner for photos is conspicuously absent when viewing videos, and videos are simply omitted when browsing the photo library from the Messages application.

5. MMS is not just for pictures and video

Although photos and videos are the primary content of MMS for most users, the MMS specification actually supports just about any file type. On the iPhone, you can also send voice memos and contact information via MMS by tapping the sharing button in the respective application.

6. MMS messages will scale down content

MMS was not designed with the intention of transmitting large files over the cellular network. Further, many of the cell phones which support MMS have much lower-resolution screens and lower memory capacity than the iPhone. As a result of both of these factors, the content you send via MMS may need to be resized and trimmed to fit within these constraints.

Specifically, expect photos to be resized to a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 and videos to be scaled down to 176 x 144 with a frame rate of 10fps and an 8khz audio track.

Further, longer videos and audio recordings may need to be trimmed prior to sending. The iPhone will notify you if this is the case and give you an opportunity to trim the video or audio-clip on-the-fly. The maximum length of an audio or video clip to be sent over MMS appears to be approximately one minute.

7. You can send MMS messages to e-mail recipients

Sending of MMS messages is not limited only to phone numbers. Once MMS is enabled, you can enter an e-mail address in the TO: field to send an MMS message to an e-mail recipient.

On most carrier networks, the recipient will receive an e-mail with a web link to view the received MMS content.

Since the iPhone includes a built-in e-mail client, and MMS content is significantly scaled down when compared to e-mail attachments, we can’t see too many reasons to use this capability, but it’s there nonetheless.

8. You can send MMS messages to non-MMS users

If you’re sending an MMS message to a phone or subscriber that does not support MMS, the recipient will simply receive an SMS message with a web link to view the received MMS content, similar to how sending an MMS via e-mail works.

9. Check your plan

Different carriers bill for MMS messages differently. Some carriers simply count MMS messages as text messages and include them in your text messaging plan, while other carriers charge for MMS messages separately and may offer MMS-specific plans and packages. Further, many carriers will happily allow you to send MMS messages even if you’re not subscribed to the appropriate plan and just bill you a per-message charge for any MMS messages you send or receive.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t assume that MMS messages will be included in your text messaging plan. Be sure to check with your carrier to confirm how they handle billing for MMS messages and whether you need to add any additional plans or features for MMS support.

Note also that if your carrier charges separately for received MMS messages and you don’t wish to subscribe to an MMS plan, then you may wish to disable MMS support entirely by going into Settings, Messages on the iPhone and toggling MMS messaging off. Depending on your carrier, disabling MMS will result either in received MMS messages being ignored entirely or being received instead as text messages with a link to a web page where the MMS content may be viewed.

Tethering

iPhone OS 3.0 also introduced the ability to use your iPhone as a wireless “modem” to access the Internet from a computer. While AT&T has yet to introduce support for tethering, carriers in several other countries, including Canada and most of Europe have already been providing tethering support for some time. Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re interested in setting up tethering.

10. The original iPhone does not support tethering

As with MMS, the original first-generation iPhone does not provide tethering support either. Since the original iPhone is limited to GPRS/EDGE network speeds, tethering performance would likely be so slow on the original iPhone as to be a source of frustration for many users.

11. Enabling Tethering

As with MMS, a carrier settings update is required to enable tethering from your provider. Tethering options will not appear unless they have been enabled by your carrier. Note that unlike MMS, tethering is disabled by default on your iPhone, and you will need to turn it on if you plan to use it. This is done from the Settings app, under General, Network, Internet Tethering. The option will appear here either as “Set Up Internet Tethering” or simply an option to access the tethering settings and switch tethering on or off.

Note that when enabling tethering, the iPhone may check with your carrier to see if you have a tethering package. In this case you may need to contact your carrier to have your account provisioned for tethering.

12. You’ll need iTunes for USB tethering

If you’re tethering via USB, you will need to have iTunes 8.2 or later installed on any computers that you want to tether from, as the Windows or Mac OS X drivers for tethering are included in the iTunes installation. With iTunes installed and tethering enabled on your iPhone, it should appear as an Ethernet network device and immediately go into tethering mode as soon as you connect it to your USB port.

13. Bluetooth tethering

Tethering over Bluetooth does not require iTunes. Instead, the iPhone uses the standard Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN) profile. This requires that your computer hardware use at least Bluetooth v2.0 and support the PAN profile. All recent Mac computers provide PAN support, as should most recent mainstream Windows computers, although actual Bluetooth capabilities may vary widely with the wide diversity of Windows configurations available.

14. Check your plan before tethering

As with MMS, tethering may or may not require subscription to a separate tethering plan, and may or may not be billed separately from normal iPhone data usage. As out-of-plan data usage can get frighteningly expensive, be sure to check with your carrier as to their tethering policies before enabling and using tethering.

AT&T’s plans for tethering in the U.S. are not entirely clear as they have not as of yet announced the availability of tethering support. In Canada, Rogers and Fido are currently providing tethering data usage included in any iPhone data plan over 1GB per month until the end of 2009, at which point they may begin charging separately for it. In the UK, O2 requires that you add a tethering “bolt-on” package for an additional cost.

15. Keeping track of your tethering usage

If you’re using iPhone OS 3.0, you should note that your tethering data usage may not be included in your normal data usage screen, particularly if you’re with a carrier which tracks tethering usage separately from normal iPhone data usage. In this case, the “Cellular Data Usage” only includes data usage from the iPhone itself, and not data used while tethering.

iPhone OS 3.1 adds an additional section below the normal data usage summary to track your tethering usage separately.

16. Your tethering speeds may vary

Your maximum Internet connection speed while tethering depends on a number of factors. The most obvious of these is your carrier’s 3G network speed in your area, which can range from 1.8 mbps through to 7.2 mbps or even higher. Most AT&T areas are limited to 3.6 mbps, although AT&T has begun rolling out 7.2 mbps service in some areas. In Canada, Rogers and Fido provide 7.2 mbps speeds on most of their 3G network.

The next consideration is your iPhone model. The iPhone 3G provides a maximum 3G throughput of 3.6 mbps, while the iPhone 3GS provides a 7.2 mbps maximum.

Whether you are using a USB or Bluetooth connection for tethering will also make a difference. USB is significantly faster than even the fastest 3G network speeds, whereas even the fastest Bluetooth implementation is limited to 2.1 mbps.

Of course keep in mind that all of these are maximum speeds, and real-world usage scenarios may result in significantly lower speeds based on network congestion and other factors. Time of day can also make a noticeable difference, since network speeds are affected by the number of users who are currently using the network.

Since the same 3G hardware in the iPhone is used both for internal data and tethering data, you can get an estimate of what kind of performance you can expect from tethering simply by downloading an iPhone app such as Speedtest.net (iTunes link) and running a test over your 3G connection.

Welcome to iPhone Gems. This week, we look at four recent App Store releases spanning several different genres: strategy, puzzle, cards, and sports. Each of the titles is inexpensive, with a single $3 game—augmented...]]>

Welcome to iPhone Gems. This week, we look at four recent App Store releases spanning several different genres: strategy, puzzle, cards, and sports. Each of the titles is inexpensive, with a single $3 game—augmented by additional $2 In-App Purchasing levels—sitting at the top of the pricing pile.

The standout title of the week is Geo-Defense Swarm by Critical Thought Games, a strategy game with impressively implemented vector graphics; the disappointment of the week is Q Entertainment’s Lumines, a puzzle game that has been widely admired on other platforms, but is a mess on the iPhone and iPod touch. Read on for all the details.

Backbreaker Football

Though two full-fledged football games appeared for the iPhone and iPod touch over the past couple of months, NaturalMotion decided to take a different angle in its representation of the sport with Backbreaker Tackle Alley ($1), also known as Backbreaker Football. Whereas Gameloft and Electronic Arts used the iPhone’s limited 3-D polygons to represent entire football teams and parts of stadiums simultaneously, Ideaworks instead focuses only on the art of dodging tackles, and created an engine that only a handful of player models at a time. This limitation allowed it to spend its limited polygons on fewer but more detailed and fluid character models, as well as a great-looking football stadium.

All you do in Backbreaker, over and over, is run the ball from the moment of receipt to try and score a touchdown, dodging however many defensemen the game places in your way. Your player can be customized in skin color, number, and jersey—no real teams or people here—and starts the game running forward. You just need to tilt the device to move left or right, hit left or right arrow buttons to dodge quickly to either side, use left or right twist buttons to spin, and hit boost and showboat buttons for a burst of speed or a slowed-down hotstep to the goal line. At first, the challenge is simple: avoid one defenseman. You continue through wave after wave, the number and quality of tackling attempts increases, and you score points for juking, comboing with the buttons, and extended showboating, obviously with the risk that someone comes from behind and knocks you down. Later levels add red “out of bounds” zones to the field, requiring you to run more towards the left or right at a given moment.

Is Backbreaker a great football game? No. But it is a fun title for brief challenge sessions, offering great-looking graphics, including completely smooth animations, stadium lighting lens flares, and slow-motion replays; crowd noise fills the gaps between player grunt and footstep sounds. To the extent that it has much less going on as you play than other football games, it’s hard to think of it as an ambitious title, but it is one of the best-looking sports releases yet for the iPod touch and iPhone. For the low price, it’s worth checking out if you’re a football fan. iLounge Rating: B+.

Eric Snider’s Solitaire: Klondike

Though we don’t have a lot to say about Sniderware’s card game Eric Snider’s Solitaire: Klondike ($1), given that we’ve played dozens of different solitaire titles at this point on the iPhone and iPod touch, we can say this: it has an interesting pedigree. Snider wrote the iPod game iQuiz, as well as the Eric’s Solitaire and Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire games for Macs and PCs, so he’s hardly a novice at making such titles; the iPhone OS game is relatively simple, but easy to enjoy.

It’s played either in horizontal or vertical screen mode, with relatively few frills—everything’s in 2-D, with your choice of three tables, no different cards, and only a handful of rule options: Casino Klondike with dollar bonuses, standard Klondike, and Klondike Revealed with all cards dealt face up, each offering 1 or 3 card deals, and Casino also with a No Redeal feature. Rather than offering much in the way of music or sound effects, the game includes very soft tones or chimes, and eschews flashy graphics for relatively subtle ones—cards float above the table’s surface and wag when you drag them, casting shadows, and clues as to next moves are offered with gentle swaying or glowing effects. Eric’s version of the game also includes an Autoplay feature to pull cards automatically from your stacks as they become unnecessary, which makes the game a little bit more fun than the free Apple Klondike rendition that has been included with iPods for a while. We’d call this title a flat B release overall, good enough on the basis of its controls and clean presentation to consider for a buck, but not the best value in terms of rules, customization, or audiovisual frills that we’ve seen. iLounge Rating: B.

Geodefense Swarm

Due to what seemed like a fittingly never-ending stream of all but identical tower defense games, we all but tired of the genre a few months ago, and haven’t had the desire to keep trying all the permutations out there. That said, we loved GeoDefense Swarm ($1) from Critical Thought Games. Strictly speaking, it is “more of the same” given the genre—you are given various offensive weapons that need to be positioned on a grid to stop waves of enemies that emerge from point A and try to survive until they get to point B—but the execution, diversity, and challenge here are all great.

Thirty levels are all individually selectable from the start, and divided amongst easy, medium, and hard difficulty. All are “open field” in the sense that the waves of attackers have multiple paths that can be used to get to each stage’s exit(s), and your task is to add towers to try and limit their paths, destroying everything before they get to the exit. You’re limited in building towers only to the extent that you completely close off the exit; virtually anything shy of that is permissible.

The graphics engine continues the retro vector theme of games such as Geometry Wars, combining brightly-colored towers and enemies with line-based grids and cool visual effects—most notably line-warping wave-like pulses and linear particle motions for explosions, plus bright-line lasers and circular blips, all impressive in subtle ways. As with most such games in the genre, you can use cash from destroyed enemies to power up your towers through increasingly stronger levels of attack strength, and the visual effects they create become more striking. Semi-robotic voice samples and metallic sound effects are sparing—too sparing unless you provide your own music—one of only two issues with the game.

More important though certainly unobjectionable given the $1 price is its depth. The thirty stages aren’t pushovers, but they will leave serious players hungering for more, and though the developer changes up the levels enough to keep the towers and enemies interesting, they could stand to be even more diverse. Critical Thought would have no problem selling additional level packs for $1 each should it decide to do so. We’d also hope to see additional towers and other sorts of twists added to the title; as-is, it is a fantastic value for the price and impressive in all ways except sonics. iLounge Rating: A-.

Lumines – Touch Fusion

Normally, we would devote a lengthy review—perhaps even a dedicated one—solely to the puzzle game Lumines – Touch Fusion ($3) from Q Entertainment. We love the work of Q Entertainment’s chief Tetsuya Mizuguchi, loved Lumines on Sony’s PSP, and seriously looked forward to playing the charmingly music- and rave-inspired puzzler on the iPhone and iPod touch. Unfortunately, a game that worked perfectly on the PSP was let down by almost idiotically broken controls and a less than completely fluid presentation; Lumines – Touch Fusion is at best a mobile phone-quality port of a fun little puzzler.

The premise is simple: drop square blocks into a wide well, matching four or more of the same-colored block into squares or rectangular boxes to remove them from the screen. A line runs from left to right through the well, queuing the elimination of matched blocks to help you accrue bonus points. Make lots of matches and the “skin”—the background, blocks, and even the sound effects—change dramatically; seeing the game’s skins change as the blocks speed up is a substantial part of Lumines’ appeal. Players who want to see even more skins can buy them in packs via In-App Purchasing for $2, a fact which has some fans up in arms; frankly the low initial price of this title doesn’t have us quite as angry.

But Lumines is ruined for other reasons, specifically by Q Entertainment’s decision to use a truly awful flick-based control scheme to position the blocks. Flick left or right to move the pieces left or right, and down to make them fall quickly downwards. Simple enough, right? Unfortunately, the block rotates almost every time you tap the screen, so all sense of precision is lost as you try to touch the display to move the block and instead turn it around. Worse yet, you can only rotate blocks in one direction, setting that direction in an options menu. Anything—dual control zones or an on-screen joypad and buttons—would have been smarter than this. We suspect that Q Entertainment will eventually fix the title and make the controls better; hopefully it will smooth out the game’s animation a little to bring it up to par with the PSP original. For now, this is a huge disappointment, and not even worth trying in its free Lite version. iLounge Ratings (Both): C-.

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When you try to publish an image to your MobileMe Gallery from your iPhone, you may receive an "Unable to connect to MobileMe" alert message.

This can occur if you enter your MobileMe member name in mixed case, such as "MemberName" or "MEMBERname,"...]]> Symptoms

When you try to publish an image to your MobileMe Gallery from your iPhone, you may receive an "Unable to connect to MobileMe" alert message.

This can occur if you enter your MobileMe member name in mixed case, such as "MemberName" or "MEMBERname," or with all capital letters. When setting up your iPhone for MobileMe, your MobileMe member name must be entered in all lowercase letters.

Note: This issue does not apply to your account password which can be a mix of upper and lowercase characters.

Products Affected

iPhone, MobileMe

Resolution

To check your member name on your iPhone, tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Tap your MobileMe account entry, then tap the Account Info section. Verify whether or not your member name contains uppercase letters.

If your member name uses any uppercase letters, update to iPhone OS 3.1 and then try publishing again. 

If you still receive an alert when publishing to MobileMe Gallery from your iPhone, contact MobileMe Support for further assistance.

When sending a meeting invitation (via an Exchange account) from an iPhone with iPhone OS 3.0 or later to someone using who uses an email application (such as Microsoft Outlook 2007) and a different Exchange Server than the sender, the recipient may accept the meeting invitation,...]]> Symptoms

When sending a meeting invitation (via an Exchange account) from an iPhone with iPhone OS 3.0 or later to someone using who uses an email application (such as Microsoft Outlook 2007) and a different Exchange Server than the sender, the recipient may accept the meeting invitation, yet appear to not be marked as having done so on the iPhone which sent the invitation.

In other words, this issue is not likely to occur if the sender and recipient are both within a company that uses a single Exchange server, but may occur when someone from one company sends an invitation to someone from a different company.

Products Affected

iPhone, Mac OS X 10.5, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, Microsoft Outlook

Resolution

With a compatible web browser, use Outlook Web Access Premium to change a setting: By default, the option for "Automatically process requests and responses from external senders" is disabled. Activate this setting to allow meeting attendee’s to properly show as having accepted a meeting proposal.

To activate the "Automatically process requests and responses from external senders" setting, log in to Outlook Web Access (with the affected Exchange account) using a web browser and navigate to Options, followed by Calendar Options.

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Sometimes after opening an audio file from your multitrack project in the file editor and adding a realtime effect, you may not be able to save the multitrack project.

Products Affected

Soundtrack Pro 3.0, Final Cut Studio (2009), Logic Studio (2009)

Resolution

Apply...]]> Symptoms

Sometimes after opening an audio file from your multitrack project in the file editor and adding a realtime effect, you may not be able to save the multitrack project.

Products Affected

Soundtrack Pro 3.0, Final Cut Studio (2009), Logic Studio (2009)

Resolution

Apply the effect as an action from the Process menu instead of as a realtime effect.

When troubleshooting Soundtrack Pro 3, removing Audio Unit plug-ins may help isolate the issue. Also, some plug-ins may not appear and thus are unavailable in Soundtrack Pro 3.

Products Affected

Soundtrack Pro 3.0, Final Cut Studio (2009), Logic Studio (2009)

Resolution

Most...]]> Symptoms

When troubleshooting Soundtrack Pro 3, removing Audio Unit plug-ins may help isolate the issue. Also, some plug-ins may not appear and thus are unavailable in Soundtrack Pro 3.

Products Affected

Soundtrack Pro 3.0, Final Cut Studio (2009), Logic Studio (2009)

Resolution

Most Audio Units install to this location:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components

Some Audio Units install to:

~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components

To disable any Audio Unit for troubleshooting purposes, simply move the file from one of the above locations to another location, such as the desktop, before opening Soundtrack Pro 3.

If Soundtrack Pro 3 behaves correctly without your Audio Unit plug-ins, you need to find out which one is causing the erratic behavior. To do so, put them back into their original folders one after the other, or a few at a time, and quit and reopen Soundtrack Pro 3 to see if it still behaves correctly. As soon as the issue recurs, you’ve identified the plug-in at issue.

If an installed third party Audio Unit plug-in is not listed on the Effects tab or the Effects menu under the Process menu, it may not have been able to be verified. If this happens, the plug-in will be unavailable in Soundtrack Pro 3. Check with the plug-in manufacturer for an updated version.

iPhone Software 3.0 allows you to see if Call Forwarding is enabled by displaying  in the status bar:

Symptoms

iPhone Software 3.0 allows you to see if Call Forwarding is enabled by displaying  in the status bar:

In rare instances, this icon may not appear after turning your iPhone off and on, even though Call Forwarding is still enabled.

Products Affected

iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS

Resolution

Try turning iPhone off and then on again.

To check if Call Forwarding is enabled, tap Settings > Phone, and then tap the Call Forwarding option.

 When updating or restoring iPhone, iTunes presents a message saying that the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.

Products Affected

iPhone

Resolution

If you see this message when attempting to update iPhone OS, the...]]> Symptoms

 When updating or restoring iPhone, iTunes presents a message saying that the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.

Products Affected

iPhone

Resolution

If you see this message when attempting to update iPhone OS, the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable, and iTunes has not yet updated your iPhone.

You can disconnect iPhone from your computer and continue using it with the currently installed iPhone OS, and then try again at a later date.

Additional Information

In rare instances, you may experience an error -4 message in iTunes, and on iPhone you may see a Connect to iTunes screen. If this occurs, make sure iPhone is connected to your computer. If the Connect to iTunes screen does not go away, try the following:

1. Disconnect iPhone from your computer.
2. Wait five minutes.
3. Reconnect iPhone to your computer.
4. Open iTunes if it doesn’t automatically open.

If the issue persists, follow these troubleshooting steps.

Customers with multiple email aliases defined in Exchange will see all of their aliases listed in the From field if they tap the From field when composing a message:

Note, however,...]]> Symptoms

Customers with multiple email aliases defined in Exchange will see all of their aliases listed in the From field if they tap the From field when composing a message:

Note, however, that although customers can select a different alias from the list, only the default alias is used for messages sent via Exchange.

Products Affected

iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS

Resolution

Using the default mail alias for all sent messages is expected behavior for Exchange. Customers can ignore the additional mail aliases; by default Mail will display the default From alias.