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TUAW's Daily App: Plates!
A while back, we featured a game in this space called White Lines, a sort of Simon Says-style gesture drawing game. The game's creator, Kyle Webster, recently released his second app on the App Store, and this one is a little different -- much more frantic, and much more colorful. It's called Plates!, and you can pick it up right now for an "introductory price" of US$0.99. The idea is simple -- you have three conveyor belts on screen, and each one funnels plates of food past you. There are four different sauces on the four different corners of the iPhone, and your goal is to tap a certain sauce, then tap the appropriate plate, squirting the correct sauce on each dish as it goes past. Hitting combos will get you a bonus score, and eventually there are even non-food items sprinkled in among the mix that you have to avoid to keep going. The game gets pretty fast quickly, and when combo plates show up, you'll have to squirt fast to keep the food moving ("squirt" is an appropriate word -- the game isn't all that appetizing, despite the colorful graphics). Add in OpenFeint functionality, and you've got a pretty addictive little reflex tester. Plates! is good, simple fun for just a buck.
TUAW's Daily App: White Lines
This iPhone game borrows its title from Grandmaster Flash, but rather than a game about the perils of drug addiction, it's actually a memory game. Kyle Webster is an illustrator who made this Simon-like drawing challenge. The game offers up a series of white strokes on the screen, and its your job to replicate them exactly. Get them right to earn a higher score, but get three wrong and your game is over. The game's simplicity is outweighed by its speed. As with the traditional Simon game, things can get overwhelming very fast. There are quite a few difficulty levels for all kinds of gamers, and the experience of drawing with a purpose on the multitouch screen does keep it interesting. OpenFeint integration means you can challenge friends for high scores, too, which increases the replayability. The one drawback I found (and maybe it's just because I was playing the game on my 1G) was that, at times, registering the strokes was wonky. I would draw it correctly, but because the game was chugging along, it would miss one of my marks or think I lifted a finger when I didn't. The recent update to the game fixes some error strokes, though, so maybe the author will smooth that out in the future. Still, for US$0.99, White Lines is a fun touchscreen twist on the memory game, and the stark style is compelling. It's definitely worth a download, and it might even be good for keeping young ones busy while waiting in line or driving around town.
