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Daily iPhone App: Wizorb turns Breakout into an RPG
Wizorb is a title that originally came out on Steam, but it just recently arrived on iOS, and it's a nice one to have in our gigantic library. The game is a mix of breakout and the old 8/16-bit RPGs, and the combat is essentially the old Breakout game. You use a paddle at the bottom of the screen to knock a ball up into bricks and enemies above. Wizorb wisely never backs down from its 16-bit RPG style, so the graphics, the spells, and even the music are delightfully retro, and should be familiar to anyone who played similar RPGs during that era. The Breakout side of the game is solid as well. It can be a little unclear just what you're earning as you collect potions, coins or gems after breaking blocks, and the addition of spells like fireballs and an "alter" spell (which will push your ball in a different direction) can make things even more confusing. But as long as you keep the ball from falling offscreen, you'll be good. The controls on PC were probably a little better for this kind of gameplay. Swiping your finger across the screen constantly isn't the most fun thing to do. It's strange that the game doesn't have tilt controls, but that's probably a consequence of its PC heritage. All in all, Wizorb is a well-made retro game, and it combines these two seemingly disparate game genres in very interesting and fun ways. If you missed it on Steam, it's worth picking up on iOS, and there's plenty of content to bounce your way through. It's US$2.99 in a universal version, available right now. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Apple, others in talks to improve quality of music downloads
CNN reports that Apple is in touch with record labels to try and improve the quality of the downloadable music it sells on iTunes and elsewhere. Currently, the MP3s sold on iTunes are formatted as 16-bit files, but under the new proposal, they'd be upgraded to 24-bit files, which means the files would have more audio data included, and thus be able to play out at a higher resolution. As Chris Foresman at Ars argues, however, it may not matter. While higher quality is always nice to have (and there's no reason Apple shouldn't have it, unless the audio needs to be compressed further for streaming or other memory concerns), most people won't hear the full resolution anyway. You can have the highest quality audio files you want, but when you're playing them through a set of cheap speakers (or even the MacBook's default built-in speakers), you're not going to hear all of the highs and lows that you should. Still, it will be nice to have the higher resolution, and it'll give Apple and iTunes yet another selling point if the agreement can be made (not to mention sell a lot of higher-quality audio speakers and other products as well). So, I expect we'll see it happen before long. Remember way back in 2007 when Apple raised the encoding rate to 256 Kb/s? [via Electronista]
Look and listen: Lilt Line for WiiWare in motion
Gaijin Games (of Bit.Trip fame) announced during GDC that it is was bringing Different Cloth's award-winning inside music game, Lilt Line, to WiiWare. The first video of the port in action is out -- which looks and sounds just like the iPhone original (i.e, great.) Now all we need is a date!
