fish out of water
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The crapification of great iOS apps
I love physics-based games, and Fish Out Of Water by Halfbrick Studios is one of the best. Well, I should say it was one of the best, and for well over a year it brought a smile to my face on a daily basis. Today, it's simply not the same game it was, and despite having paid a buck for it shortly after its App Store debut, the game is now free and absolutely littered with crap. Let's rewind a bit to April of 2013: Fish Out Of Water launched on iOS and, having adored past Halfbrick games, I picked it up without a second thought. It's a fantastic physics game where you throw some cute little fish and attempt to amass the most distance and the highest number of skips. You can compete against other players on the leaderboard or just try to outdo yourself while completing the seemingly endless number of in-game challenges. When I had a free moment or two to burn I'd play the game every time. A few tosses, a couple good scores, a handful of minutes of enjoyment, and back in my pocket it would go. I even spent some money on "gem" packs that gave you some in-game perks. You didn't need these perks to have fun, but it was a bit of variety that I didn't mind. All told, Halfbrick probably made about US$15 off of me -- $1 for the game and probably $20 in in-app purchases, minus Apple's cut, yada yada yada -- and I couldn't possibly have been happier with the game. When I upgraded to the iPhone 5s in late 2013 I simply never got around to re-downloading the app and spent my spare minutes each day playing a variety of other games. Today, thanks to a random tweet that caught my eye, I remembered how much I loved that game and decided to download it once again. Big mistake. To my dismay I discovered that Fish Out Of Water -- along with all of Halfbrick's apps -- has jumped between free-to-play, $1, and $2 pricing since June of this year. After over a year as a paid app, Halfbrick sacrificed the experience that paying customers had been enjoying in order to monetize the new users who downloaded the app without paying. This is the way free-to-play games work, of course. You can't give a game away for free, so you have to try to make your money back somewhere else. You have to taint the flow of the game from one round to the next by pushing ads for other games in front of everyone's eyes: You have to litter the gameplay itself with distracting ads that dirty the game's lighthearted nature (and actually cause the game to lag and appear choppy until they leave the screen): And you have to beg users for reviews in order to stay competitive on the free-to-play App Store charts: In short, you have to ruin the game, and that's just what has happened to Fish Out Of Water. Congrats, free-to-play demons, you have successfully turned a fantastic iOS game into an app that I have deleted and will never again bother with. You win.
Halfbrick giving away its iOS games for a limited time, even Fruit Ninja
The game developers at Halfbrick have created a large catalog of fun, quirky iOS games over the last four years that span a wide range of genres and tastes. You want to kill waves of zombies in adorable fashion? Age of Zombies is right there for you. Fantasize about destroying fruit like a martial arts master? Fruit Ninja turns your fingers into swords. Maybe you're a casual gamer who just wants to help jumping fish fight against an ever-changing climate? Fish Out of Water! is ready to fill that need. And now, for a limited time, you can fill those needs for free. Normally Halfbrick's game's are $0.99, meaning you'd need $10 to try them all, but for a limited time the company is giving away all their titles for free. Age of Zombies, Band Stars, Birzzle Fever, Colossatron: Massive World Threat, Fish Out of Water!, Fruit Ninja (even HD), Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots, Jetpack Joyride, and Monster Dash. You can download the whole collection here. While the sale is just short term, it would make sense for Halfbrick to make this their standard pricing. Each title features in-app purchases for new weapons, costumes, and bonuses; purchases that make sense once you've found yourself addicted to a title. Thankfully each of these games is a blast to play even if you never lay down any extra coin to buy power ups, so head over to the App Store and download these titles before you have to pay for them. Here's a video Halfbrick released to promote the sale. This sale is only for iOS, but maybe if your friends who use Android ask nicely, you'll let them play on your iPhone.
Daily iPhone App: Fish Out of Water! makes a gorgeous splash in a shallow pool
Halfbrick Studios is one of the most popular developers on the App Store, so much so that I can guarantee you've played their work before: Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride are their two biggest titles. And now, the Australian developer has released a brand-new iOS game, called Fish Out of Water, available on the App Store now for US$0.99 cents. Jetpack Joyride is one of my favorite iOS games of all time, and one of the main reasons for that is just how polished it is. It just oozes quality, and Fish Out of Water has that same feeling. The game runs perfectly, looks great and just bubbles over with well-crafted art and design work. Unfortunately, Fish Out of Water's weakness is that it's simple, almost too simple to stay interesting for long. Here's the game's core: You throw fish. That's it, really -- the goal is to try and throw fish and earn both "skips" (where your fish tap across the water) and "distance", which you're then rated on by a panel of cartoony crabs. Your rating is placed up against a daily leaderboard for the world and your own league, and that's the game. There are six fish to toss in total, and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and the game boasts an excellent weather system that's set to the clock every single day. But even with those complications, this game doesn't change all that much: You just toss fish, as hard as you can, at the right angle. Once you've tossed a fish, you can hit a boost button to try and speed it up at certain times, but in my experience, it doesn't matter much. Even when you rate high or low, the game doesn't do a great job of telling you what you did wrong or right, leaving the whole contest to what basically seems like chance. The game's fun for a few throws, and it does do a solid job of keeping you interested -- you level up by performing various missions, and there are tons of social elements in there, so much so that you're notified as you play on how your friends are doing and whether you're beating them or vice versa. Halfbrick can't really make a bad game, as far as I'm concerned, and Fish Out of Water is good. It's just a little boring, is all -- the company opted for casual here, and they certainly hit that target. Hopefully we'll see something a little more involving, with the same amount of quality, from Halfbrick in the future.
Portabliss: Fish Out of Water (iOS)
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Halfbrick's Fish Out of Water launches on iOS today and it's unlike any of the studio's previous games. It's a much more casual experience with a far more simple premise that is, by all appearances, aimed at capturing a younger audience.The goal of Fish Out of Water is to see how far you can fling a fish across the ocean. Your score is calculated across three tosses, factoring in both distance and the number of times your fish skipped across the water.%Gallery-183894%
Halfbrick tries for a 10 with Fish Out of Water
Halfbrick Studios held a media lunch at GDC to show off its brand-new original title, Fish Out of Water. It's the company's first since the very popular Jetpack Joyride arrived a few years ago (the Australia-based studio is also known for making Fruit Ninja). As we'd previously heard, Fish Out of Water is more casual than Jetpack, and it boasts the same great polish and beautiful work that fans expect from Halfbrick. In Fish Out of Water, the main mechanic simply has you throwing fish. You're presented with a school of various creatures, all with different shapes and sizes (and all adorably named -- the big whale is called "Micro" and the fastest one is called "Rocket"). To play, you grab one with a finger, pull it out of the water, and fling it off to the right as fast as you can. That fish flies through the air, and the game tracks number of skips on the water and total distance traveled. A high toss will likely earn more skips, and the type of fish you throw affects that as well. For example, Rocket is big on skipping, but the dolphin simply jumps in and out of the water rather than skipping across it. Distance is affected by fish type as well, and both stats are also affected by the weather. The game runs on a clock up in the left corner which ties in to your real local time wherever you play the game, and different weather conditions, like sun or rain, will affect your skips and jumps as well. During the course of a round, you can throw three different fish, and then you're judged on your throws by a line of crabs, who are also very adorable. They put up numbers (and each crab is also named and has a favorite piece of the game: Skippy Steve really enjoys it when you score a lot of skips), and the average out of 10 is your final score for the round. That's the game: Throw fish, try to score as best you can during the three throws, and then the crabs will boil down your score into one number out of 10. It's not super-hard: Even in my first few throws, I was able to pick up an 8.5 and an 8.7. But to score a perfect 10, you'll need to put a little bit of strategy into the game, picking exactly the right fish for the right weather conditions, and even choosing fish based on which throw you're doing. You can use a big whale for the first throw for distance, for example, and then choose a fish that splits into multiple fishies to ramp up your skip score. As you skip along the water, you also score coins that both give you a speed boost to use (with a strangely placed button along the top of the screen) and also allow you to buy various upgrades and cosmetic items for your fish. And finally, you can collect gems as you play, which can be assembled together into crystals that give you various abilities like double skips or an automatic 10 from one of the crabs. The crystals system is actually pretty complex: You can pair up two colors to try and form a specific crystal, or experiment a bit. One of the most powerful crystals is a black crystal, which sends a huge school of fish out to join the one that you throw. Just like Jetpack Joyride, the game is very social as well. Players can join "leagues," which award trophies every single day for the highest scorers in each league. Leagues also win prizes on their own, so there are lots of rewards to go around for all players involved. Fish Out of Water will launch at a price of US$0.99, which feels a little fishy on Halfbrick's part: The company has had a lot of success at turning their Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride games into freemium titles, and it's a bit surprising that they're not embracing freemium right away with this one. Still, as good as the game looks and plays, you can't blame them at all for charging a little bit out of the gate -- even at a buck, this looks like a terrific game. It is more casual than Jetpack Joyride even. After you throw the fish, the game is more or less hands-off, as you sit there and watch your fish skip along to victory or defeat. And that casual approach may leave a few hardcore players out of the boat on this one. But not to worry, Halfbrick told us at GDC this week. The company has quite a few more titles in progress, including some games that are a little more complicated and deeper than this one. So if Fish Out of Water doesn't quite float your boat, just wait a bit and we'll see what else the company is working on soon. Meanwhile, you can get ready to go swimming with this one fairly soon.
Halfbrick's Fish Out of Water coming to iOS soon
Halfbrick's next mobile game is ready to hit the iOS App store "very soon." That's according to Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen, who handed me an iPad running Fish Out of Water, a new game which expects you to fling some fish as far as you can.That's really all it is: you touch a fish to snag it, then swipe to fling. The further your fish goes, and the number of skips it makes on the surface of the ocean, both factor into your overall score, which is calculated from three separate tosses.The fish are not only aesthetically different, they're functionally unique. Pointy fish tend to dive down more depending on the arc of your fling, while the puffy blow fish fella is more prone to skipping across the surface.Fish Out of Water features the same mission system found in Jetpack Joyride, and it's one of the many systems included to fuel replay. The game also has competitive leaderboards through Google+ and Facebook, hourly weather changes and unlockable treasures.Fish Out of Water will debut on iOS devices first for $.99, and though there aren't any ports in the works right now, Larsen said "it's only logical to think it'll be on other platforms later."%Gallery-183894%
Halfbrick teases a new game called Fish Out of Water, more coming at GDC
Halfbrick Studios has posted a quick teaser for a brand-new game on its website, but here's all we know. It's got something to do with fishing. As you can see above, the creators of Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja have something wet and colorful planned for their next title, but outside of a fishy pun (and a title, "Fish Out of Water"), they're keeping the title submerged for now. The buoy floating by says the game will be fully revealed in six days, which means the company will be telling us all about the game at a meeting during next week's Game Developers' Conference. Which is convenient, since TUAW's already got a meeting with them all planned and ready. It's hard to believe it, but Halfbrick hasn't released a completely new game since Jetpack Joyride, which originally appeared on the App Store way back in 2011. So Fish Out of Water, whatever it is, should be exciting to see.
