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TUAW's Daily iPhone App: Matchlings
Ah, match-3. It's now a tried and true form, and if you're like me, just the idea of matching three gems, shapes, or what have you is enough to keep you interested in a game. Enter Villian's Matchlings, a match-3 game where you're matching actual characters, of all things. The gimmick here is that (much like Snood, actually), the characters are alive even as you match them, which means that they'll not only make faces and react to you as you play, but you can also double-tap them for various special abilities and power-ups. There's nothing super new here -- it's match-3 through and through, and it'd be even nice if Villian, a company that really went out on a limb with their first game, the FPS for iOS Archetype, tried something a little different or new with this one. But you can't really go wrong with match-3, and that was probably their thinking with this one. If you want something original, you'll have to look elsewhere. But if you just can't get enough of match-3 (a genre that seems perfectly made for iOS and this platform), Matchlings is available on the iPhone for US 99 cents.
Archetype nets 160,000 players in first week, promises updates and features soon
We posted about Archetype the other day -- it's an impressively solid multiplayer first-person shooter for the iPhone that brings some hardcore gameplay to Apple's touchscreen platform. And apparently there are a lot of hardcore players out there -- in just one week of release, Archetype has picked up 160,000 players. There have been over 320,000 matches played so far, with over 2 million player kills between them -- that's over 20,000 an hour. Publisher Villian says that it's obviously thrilled with the response, and that "future updates, offerings and new game features" are being worked on. This is interesting for a few reasons: first, most iPhone offerings tend towards the casual. Little pick-up-and-play games often seem to be the norm on the iPhone, as the vast majority of developers seem to be searching for one little interesting gameplay idea and running with it. But Archetype seems to hint that if the experience is done well enough, there's definitely a large audience of "hardcore" gamers on the iPhone. And it's worth mentioning that Archetype doesn't have a lite version and sells for $2.99. Before this game, the most high profile FPS on the store was probably Ngmoco's Eliminate, which went with a free-to-play model in the hopes of garnering a larger audience. But Archetype's success seems to show that (again, if the experience is good enough), there's room at higher price points for a solid player base. We'll have to see where Villian goes with this in the future -- we've heard from other developers that quick and free updates can really make an app grow even bigger, so if they can pull that off with Archetype, they'll really have an iOS juggernaut.
TUAW's Daily App: Archetype
Well now, this one's interesting. Archetype is a brand new title on the App Store that's aiming to put what seems like a big budget experience on Apple's small screen. The game is made by MunkyFun (a company led by ex-LucasArts developer Nick Pavis) and published by Villian, "an independent producer and publisher of portable game titles" that seems to have a history in mobile gaming, but not much of a website. Basically, Archetype is purporting to be Eliminate without Ngmoco -- a full-featured multiplayer FPS without any of the microtransactions or other nonsense. And it lives up to the hype. The controls will take some getting used to, even if you're a WASD veteran. In just 30 seconds on Wi-Fi, I was loaded up and playing a 5v5 deathmatch FPS game. Even on an Edge connection, I was able to play smoothly, and even pull off a kill -- I don't know what kind of code witchery makes that possible, but it works. The graphics don't really compare to modern console shooters, but I think the multiplayer gameplay easily beats Metroid: Prime Hunters and the current crop of iPhone shooters. Of course, the game still has to deal with the issues of the genre -- if you're not a twitch gamer, you'll likely get murdered very quickly, and while there are plenty of high-ping people to play with now, it's not clear what will happen if the servers get overloaded or, conversely, if the crowd thins out. You're still playing a FPS on an iPhone, and I'd much rather play a shooter on my PC or a console than this. But given the limitations of the genre and the device, Archetype is certainly an impressive title. You're still kind of going in blind at US$2.99 -- Archetype doesn't have a free version to try yet. But if you can expect to put three bucks of your time into playing this surprisingly solid multiplayer FPS, by all means, jump on in.
Best of 2006 nominations: Friend, Enemy, Instance
I have to thank everybody for their nominations yesterday in our progressing Best of 2006 feature. All this week, we're asking for your nominations for our WoW Insider Best of 2006 awards-- this week we're getting your opinions, over the weekend, the trusty WoW Insider staff will crunch numbers and argue with each other, and next week, we'll announce the Best of 2006 in ten different categories throughout the World of Warcraft.Today, we're asking for your nominations in the categories of Friend of the Year, Enemy of the Year, and Instance of the Year. For Friend, we're talking about a Friendly *NPC* (we don't mean your real-life friends that play the game with you) of either faction that stood out to you in your travels around the world. Choose one NPC in the game this year that helped you out the most, or made you enjoy the game during their interaction. For Enemy, we're asking the opposite-- choose one mob in the game (raid boss or otherwise) that gave you the most grief, you had the most fun killing, or that just made you appreciate the game more.And for Instance-- well, you can guess that one. Choose one Instance from the game that really shined for players this year, someplace you really enjoyed running or couldn't wait to go get loot from. It doesn't have to have been introduced this year, but if one of the new instances is a place you spent a lot of time this year, feel free to nominate that.Again, just place your nominations for these three in the comments below, and we'll take care of the rest. Keep checking back every day this week for more nominations posts (we've got a few more categories to go through, including one where we recognize the Worst of something), and then come by all next week to see what we eventually choose as the Best of 2006 in the World of Warcraft.Previously: Nominations for Server, Class, and Guild.
