Inside iPhone - We Love Touch We Love iPhone

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Posted Wed, Nov 19, 2008 4:00 PM by Sam Gwilym
Today there are two notable entries in games section of the App store, with the first of them being Frenzic ($4.99, App Store), by the Iconfactory. Frenzic, originally released for OS X, is a game that supposedly "makes Tetris and Bejeweled look like child's play".

Frenzic

Frenzic is noted for its highly addictive gameplay, which has you filling up empty circles with coloured pie pieces, with fully filled pies giving extra lives and points - and failure to fill empty circles costing you precious lives.

The online component to the game allows you to add friends, track stats, and look at high scores (with the added bonus of being able to compare high scores to people in your area using Location Services).Frenzic also has all the visual polish that the Iconfactory usually lavishes on its Apps, giving the game a consistently professional feel.

Cube

The other big release today was Cube (Free, App Store), by fernLighting. Cube is a first person shooter that features single and multiplayer and "fast oldskool gameplay". Cube is an open source effort, built on an entirely new and apparently unconventional engine, which features "very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail". Right on.



According to the developer, the game has had no features removed for the iPhone, keeping features such as in-game editing, cooperative editing, and demo recording, though they mention that some of these features are entirely impractical on the iPhone.

Having tried it, we can say it's quite impressive technically - it looks very good for a 3D game on the iPhone and has an acceptable framerate. However, there are big problems with the interface and controls, which cannot be reconfigured, the tiny menus, and the slightly grating music that you cannot seem to turn off. The most frustrating part is that its clear to see that if the interface was redone, there would be a really good multiplayer FPS for the iPhone existing this very moment. That day is sure to come, but not just yet.

Article by AppleInsider.