Mac Reviews

Geneforge 5: Overthrow is the final installment in Spiderweb Software’s Geneforge saga, a series of fantasy-themed role-playing games. The Geneforge saga features enriched story lines, open-ended gameplay, and multiple endings, but lacks graphical sophistication or a quality soundtrack. With Geneforge 5, the developers have crafted a strong ending note to the series, but the game’s main problem is also its main selling point: it looks and plays like a game released 15 years ago.

The Geneforge saga revolves around the rise and fall of an extremely powerful race of magicians known as Shapers who have the power to create sentient beings to do their bidding. The earlier games in the series deal with the subsequent rebellion as some of the sentient beings were pissed off about the whole being-controlled-by-the-Shapers thing. Geneforge 5 allows you to play as part of the rebellion or an ally of the Shapers. Through your journey, you’ll work with different sects, go on quests, choose sides, as well as learn close-combat, magic, and creature-creating abilities.

Geneforge 5 reminds me of Blizzard’s Diablo series, which divides characters into different class types, features a distant third person isometric perspective, and also tasks the character with hoarding lots of dropped loot in their pursuit of some goal. Of course, holding certain items will encumber you in combat, so you also have to choose what loot you grab carefully.

Real-time adventure mode switches to turn-based combat mode when you encounter enemies, something that happens constantly unless you opt to avoid them. The combat uses a classic system involving items, spells, and creations as your tools of destruction. In a repetitive pattern, you’ll encounter the same poorly animated worms and troll-like creatures in the various dungeons you explore. The AI in the game is challenging and you’ll want to quicksave often because you’ll likely die several times the first time through an area.

The game allows you to use diplomacy and stealth in certain situations, but as any RPG-fan will tell you, the easiest way to gain experience is to level up through combat and quests. That means you’ll get used to seeing that same firebolt animation hundreds of times in a given session playing Geneforge 5.

Various maps let you see which of the dozens of areas you’ve visited in the game’s progress, and a green outline denotes if you’ve cleared an area. The journal feature is also helpful to keep track of your quests, and the item, spell, and weapon menus are easy to use.

Since the mythology of Geneforge is built around the magical Shapers, when selecting a class you’ll want to pick something that has strong shaping abilities. But the Shaper creatures aren’t particularly innovative in terms of gameplay—the pets that you create are similar to ones you’d find in other RPGs. So despite all the in-game text about evolving creatures and perfecting control, the shaped creatures look and feel worn. “Evolving” your creatures involves maxing out their stats as you gain experience, much like you would enhance your spells and weapons. Their appearance, actions, and use don’t alter save on a superficial level. Your “shaping” skills are limited to cookie-cutter creatures like dinosaurs and trolls, and then watch them change color as they get stronger.

I’m new to the Geneforge series, and the story and gameplay took a while for me to get into, as my character kept on going in an out of amnesia and my guide didn’t speak in complete sentences (which was intended to convey she too was just waking up from control by the Shapers). There are multiple paths, sects, and ways to solve a problem and the lack of a linear plot may turn off some players. Simply, there are so many plots, subplots, and characters to keep track of that only dedicated RPG fans won’t be turned off. While the lack of graphical sophistication lends the game to an old school feel, the monotonous environments and unidentifiable characters make it hard to feel attachment to the world. There is plenty of text to get through to get the full experience, so the game feels sluggish coming out of the gates, but rewards players who stick with it.

The game will take you many hours to play, and that’s only with one character. With nine classes, differing sects that open up different maps, and dozens of endings, the complete experience requires an investment not in hours, but days.

Macworld’s buying advice You have to give Spiderweb credit—the Geneforge series goes toe-to-toe with bigger publishers and humbly, but adeptly delivers quality gameplay and story. At $28, it won’t cost you much to check out. The hint book costs an additional $7 through Spiderweb’s online store, which is quite helpful for some of the more difficult puzzles and if you want to learn how to unlock some of the different endings. Geneforge 5: Overthrow is definitely a niche game, and therefore hard to recommend to a wide audience. If you enjoy deep, long RPGs with a complex storyline and love old-school turn-based combat then Geneforge 5 will make you nostalgically satisfied, like watching an old 80s movie would. If you’re a casual gamer, not an RPG fan, or don’t have several days to invest to understanding the Shaper society, then you’ve probably stopped reading this review paragraphs ago.
[via Macworld]

One newly excavated ribcage to go please, hold the glass shards and nails.

Imagine that you’re living on the tough streets of the big city, just trying to liberate someone from their hard-earned cash when you accidentally “fall on some bullets.” A visit to a regular hospital is out of the question. That’s where an amateur surgeon comes in.

You play a pizza boy with a penchant for surgery in the first 17+ rated game to appear in the App Store–mostly for violence and profanity and a lot of references to drugs and drinking. It’s also the first game from Adult Swim, a more complete version of the short, web-based freebie.

The game starts as you accidentally run over a hobo who turns out to be a disgraced doctor. He urges you to slice him open with your pizza cutter and do a little tinkering, and before you know it, you’re on-call for drunks, vagrants, lowlifes, and people who generally aren’t seen in the surgical ward.

You’ll be using your faithful pizza-cutter as a scalpel, your stapler to make stitches, your cigarette lighter to cauterize wounds, along with plenty of other makeshift medical tools. You’ll find out how to use these through trial and error, although there is a rudimentary help screen to give you a few tips. With the pizza-cutter, you’ll trace your finger along a dotted line to make an incision, with the tongs you’ll gently tug out foreign items by slowly dragging your finger across the screen.

However, sometimes the game doesn’t clearly explain how to use complicated items. For instance, you’re supposed to use a corkscrew by gesturing in a circle… but it seems to rarely work. Your patient’s screams will let you know you’re doing something wrong, but you’ll have to point and drag until you find the correct way to advance.

The first few medical tasks include removing bullets, broken glass, and porcupine quills from internal organs with your tongs, but soon you’ll be delving deeper into someone’s innards with a chainsaw in an effort to discover what’s wrong. With 30 different patients to operate on, it provides plenty of gameplay and gets more challenging with each new surgery.

The dialogue is funny, and things like using an Etch-a-Sketch as an x-ray make DIY surgery fun. You’ll find yourself eager to get the next victim, er… patient on the table as quickly as possible.

THE BOTTOM LINE Amateur Surgeon full of the Adult Swim brand of adult humor. It’s a rare entertainment release; comedy and gameplay are equally good. COMPANY: Adult Swim CONTACT: www.adultswim.com PRICE: $4.99 REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod Touch with 2.0 software update.
[via MacLife]

Some day very soon, all of us are going to have to sit down and figure out just what constitutes the perfect iPhone app. I mean, setting aside such trivialities like what genre an app belongs to or how much it costs, we can certainly agree that there are certain attributes that set apart an ideal iPhone app from some of the more standard fare that litters the App Store. Can’t we?

For starters, the app would need to be designed specifically for the iPhone—there’s no room for half-hearted ports in our pantheon of great iPhone apps. And that app would also have to take advantage of the things that make Apple’s mobile devices special—that means exploiting the touch screen, the accelerometer, the whole ball of wax. The graphics would have to measure up, of course, and the sound would have to be superb. Finally, the perfect app would be simple to use—you should be able to tap it and get down to business without too much reflecting about what it was exactly that the developer had in mind when the app was still on the drawing board.

I’m not sure that the perfect iPhone app exists just yet. But the above paragraph comes perilously close to describing Rolando, the alarmingly addictive iPhone and iPod touch game from app-making powerhouse Ngmoco.

Roll On, You Rolandos: In Rolando, you’ve got to get the circular, fun-loving Rolandos from Point A to Point B without losing them to the clutches of Shadow creatures. Using finger gestures on the iPhone’s touch screen helps control the action.

In many ways, Rolando is a classic side-scrolling platform game, in which you move your pieces from Point A to Point B, overcoming obstacles, gathering up items, and avoiding menacing bad guys as you try to reach the finish line. Knock off one level, and you move on to the next challenge.
In the case of Rolando, that means you’re responsible for the safety of the Rolandos, little round guys who just want to roll around, jump, and otherwise enjoy the verdant splendor of Rolandoland. Unfortunately, their gambols have been interrupted by invading Shadow creatures—sinister dark boxes whose very touch proves deadly to Rolandos. Your mission is to roll and jump the Rolandos to safety, picking up gems and rescuing drowsy members of the Rolandoland royal family along the way, all while avoiding Shadow Boxes that lumber, fly, and otherwise impede your path.

Fortunately, you have a whole arsenal of finger commands and the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer at your disposal. You can tap on a particular Rolando to control it (or better still, use your finger to draw a box around multiple Rolandos to control all of them at once). Tilting your iPhone or iPod touch causes the Rolandos to roll in that direction. (Except for the decadent members of the Rolando Royal Family, apparently — the King Rolando must be shoved around by other Rolandos, and the Prince Rolando ping-pongs back and forth every time he hits an object, amping up the difficulty of solving levels when royalty is involved.) Drag a finger upwards, and the selected Rolandos will jump. You’ll also come across assorted buttons, wheels, elevators, and other doodads, that you can press, drag, or push with a finger to help your Rolandos reach their final destination.

Because Rolandos are usually scattered throughout a given level, you’re not bound to only pay attention to the balls you have in your sights. Tiny icons let you know where other Rolandos are scattered on the screen; tap one, and you’ll jump to that area. Or you can always use two fingers to drag yourself to a new part of the level so that you can get the lay of the land.

You get points for each Rolando you deliver to safety as well as any diamonds you happen to pick up along the way. You score bonus points if you can complete a level in the allotted time limit (though you suffer no penalty if you go over time). In a week’s worth of playing Rolando, I have never delivered any of the Rolandos to safety in time to receive a bonus—not even close. I imagine that this is because I am terrifically unskilled.

The only time you suffer any sort of consequences in Rolando is when you’ve gotten enough of your Rolandos killed—either by the cruel hand of the Shadow creatures or by driving them into some equally deadly obstacle—so that you’re unable to complete the level. Even then, the game lets you start from the beginning of that level—or a balloon-festooned checkpoint if there’s one of those—instead of hurling you back to square one. Completing a level opens up new ones—there’s 36 in all, spread across four lands (which unfold in map form whenever you launch the game). So things never get too old.

Help Is On the Way: While challenging, Rolando also helps explain things with in-game tutorials.

Gameplay is challenging without being frustrating. It took me several tries to get past the Mount Rollmore stage in Honeycup Meadows, but when I finally did, the satisfaction equaled most every professional achievement I’ve tallied in my working career. Ngmoco includes helpful tutorials in each stage, with tips on how to bend the Rolandos’ movements to your will. Even better, you can opt to skip these tutorials if, like me, you find yourself repeating a stage frequently enough to commit the dialogue to memory.
We also tested Rolando with the seven-year-old daughter of one of Macworld’s editors. The game’s music and visual style—those Rolandos are just so cute—wowed her, and she got the hang of controlling the Rolandos almost immediately. But the levels require enough problem-solving ability that really young kids won’t be able to do much more than watch their Rolandos bop around aimlessly.

In some ways, Rolando is just about the perfect casual game. If you’re interrupted in the middle of a game, just hit the iPhone’s button and your exact place will be saved. (A little number will even appear by the Rolando icon on your home screen reminding you just how many Rolandos you still have alive.) I was on the subway headed home from work, trying to figure my way through Altitude Adventure when I noticed I was about to miss my stop—by hitting the home button I was able to save my exact place in the game without losing a single Rolando to those hideous Shadow creatures.

The music that accompanies Rolando is peppy without being annoying. The sound effects are clever, and the game is filled with the sort of little touches that are rapidly becoming the hallmark of Ngmoco games. As with Topple, another Ngmoco offering where the expressions on the playing pieces reflect the action taking places, the Rolandos become visibly nervous if they get to close to the shadow creatures. They grimace when you have them exert themselves. And they look bored if you spend too much time concentrating on other pieces.

The game is not without its flaws. I find the Royal Spikey Commandos—Rolandos who can stick to and climb up walls—a little difficult to control. And sometimes when I’m swiping my thumb upwards to make a Rolando jump, I inadvertently activate another Rolando. This could just be my special burden—I am notoriously ham-handed—but I suspect other players might share my occasional frustration.

Still, it’s clear after just a few minutes playing around with Rolando, that Ngmoco has clearly thought through this game and how to make the most out of the iPhone’s unique features. Even at a premium price, Rolando is a must-have game and a stellar example of what you can do with the iPhone platform if you just put your mind to it.

Rolando is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.1 software update. (Buy it on the App Store.)

[via Macwordl]

Battle for Wesnoth 1.5.7 is a free, fantasy based strategy game designed for OS X, that has been downloaded over 2.9 Million times! Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host. You can choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight on different terrains. You can also create your own custom units, compose your own maps or create your own full blown campaigns.

There are also versions available for Windows, GNU, Linux and Solaris.

Note: This is a beta release.

FEATURES

• 3 Bug Fixes Corrected (New)
• Translations Updated (New)
• Play With Up To 8 Friends
• Over 200 Unit Types
• Custom Designed Maps
• Unlimited Random Maps
• Hundreds Of Campaign Scenarios Available For Download
• Make Your Own Maps, Factions Or Campaigns
• Supports 42 Languages
• Much More

More information and downloads the game at developer’s website

Reversi is brought to life in full 3D with this free game for the Mac. Features include:

- Play against the computer or a friend.
- Five difficulty levels for the computer opponent: from novice to expert.
- Unlimited undo of your moves.
- Highlighting of legal moves (optional).
- Highlighting of the last piece placed (optional).
- Move suggestions.
- Automatic saving of the current game when you quit.

Reversi requires OS X 10.3.9 or later, and works on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

New in Version 1.1.0:
– Added a menu item to immediately start a new game with unchanged settings.
- The position of the board (spin and tilt) can be locked in place.
- The spin and tilt settings are now saved between sessions, so you can position the board how you like it, and it will stay that way.
- Added a preference for faster piece flipping animation.
- The board is drawn larger to better fill the window.

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