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Play: The simple, mesmerizing Impossible Road
You can now play anything from first-person shooters to role-playing epics on mobile devices, but there's still plenty of love out there for casual time-killers. Impossible Road has recently arrived on Android after a year-long residency in the iOS App Store, and it's one of those games you can splurge an hour on at home, or poke at for five minutes on the bus. Your mission: Guide a ball down a winding track for as long as possible -- kind of like a never-ending Super Monkey Ball level, but set on the Rainbow Road track of Mario Kart legend. Admittedly, there isn't much originality to the gameplay, but Impossible Road does have a quirky and compelling visual style. You're an all-white ball in an all-white world, with the only definition and sense of space given by a ribbon-like track of changing blues that stretches to infinity below. The almost tribal techno soundtrack is a little busier than what's on screen, and it manages to match the pace of the game well, while also being a constant reminder of your inevitable doom.
Daily iPhone App: Food Run wants you to play with your food
If the name Food Run sounds familiar, you've got a good memory. We featured it about a year ago (via the developer's blog post) as a gorgeous example of Retina display graphics. Now, a year later, the game is available from Pixels on Toast, and you can see those gigantic graphics in action. The game is a nonstop platformer, similar to (though less inventive than) the great Run Roo Run. You play as a piece of food running along the screen, and you simply tap to jump at the right times, with the game doing everything else for you. Along the way, you can grab stars, dodge obstacles and jump up to grab other food items, which will run along after you. The game's fairly simple, and the clean and clear graphics do make the whole affair very smooth. Personally, I prefer a little bit more action to my platformers (Mikey Shorts is another great iOS platformer, if you haven't played that one yet), but Food Run has a nice Zen quality, and of course all of those stars across the levels do well in pushing you to replay each one until you hit it perfectly. You can pick up Food Run on the App Store now for just US$0.99.
Potential screenshots from an iPad Retina Display look gorgeous
While we're sure that Apple is going to show off a new iPad at the announcement next week, it's not quite guaranteed yet that the iPad will have its own version of the Retina Display. Certainly there have been rumors to that effect, and it certainly would be cool, but we can't be sure just yet. Nevertheless, game developer Pixels on Toast has gone ahead and done the work anyway: They have screenshots over on this blog post that show what the company's next game, Food Run, would look like if it ran on a display with four times as many pixels as the current iPad's screen, or a resolution of 2048 x 1536. As you can see above (especially when compared with the images in the post of the current iPad's screen), it looks pretty amazing. I remember when I first was buying my iPad, I had used the iPhone 4's display for quite a while, and I went back to the iPad and was disappointed that I could still see pixelation and artifacts after getting so used to the iPhone's screen. But if the Retina Display really did come across, the iPad's big screen would be brighter and clearer than most computer displays, making for some really incredible interfaces. There are drawbacks, of course. In addition to the extra power required for such a display (both in terms of processing power and battery power), developers would have to deal with higher resolution graphics, in both 2D and 3D games. Devs have already gone through this process once, however, so most developers who already put iOS games together will have some idea of how to deal with the issue. Keep in mind, however, that bigger graphics means bigger files, so Apple may have to raise the limits on various app size requirements. At any rate, the display pictures for Food Run certainly look, well, delicious. This is all speculative, but if Apple has indeed upgraded the display on the new iPad, there could be more exciting times ahead. [via TechCrunch]
