BlokusHd
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App review: Blokus HD is shiny, way too shiny
The difference between a port of a tabletop board game to the iPad by someone like Gameloft – makers of games like James Cameron's Avatar for iPad and Asphalt 5 – and smaller, independent companies is pretty stunning. It's also quite pretty. Take a look at the flashy images in the Blokus HD screenshots below. The game, originally released in 2000 by a small game company and more recently published by Hasbro, is a beautiful, colorful plasticky thing in the real world. Gameloft has emphasized the bright look of the game with a lot of panache in the US$4.99 iPad version (Gameloft also makes an iPod/iPhone touch version of the Blokus app that looks about the same, just smaller. We didn't test that version). Are all of these fancy graphics a good thing? Well, it certainly shows that you can make a bubbly and light board game app that should appeal to the video game crowd (although, to be fair, this is ground that Zooloretto has already covered pretty well). It's also, for a traditional board gamer like myself, hard to criticize the push to get more tabletop games onto our iDevices, so I've got a soft spot for developers who try. But Blokus, while quite impressive, needs a little more time in the oven before it joins the ranks of great board game ports like Carcassonne or the Settlers of Catan on the iPhone. Read on to see if Blokus is a game you want to add to your digital collection. %Gallery-96810%
