Overview
Are you ready to party? B-Boy Beats is a unique, all action, hip hop rhythm game set in 1980’s New York City. As the lead member of a new break-dance crew looking to gain respect, you’ll need to learn the latest moves and battle other crews to claim new turf across various city locations.

Game-play
Place your fingers on the screen and get ready to move! Simply tapping isn’t enough to succeed in B-Boy Beats. Players must hold their fingers on the screen – giving the feel of virtual legs moving across a virtual dance floor!!
Learn the latest dance moves in the fully interactive tutorial before heading out onto the city streets. There are 10 break-dance moves to learn with each one requiring ever greater skill, timing and confidence to pull off. You knew the city was a dangerous place when you left the safety of the suburbs but are you ready to be tested to the limit? There are 7 hardcore crews each breaking on their home turf to take on and ultimately beat down in your quest to be the best in the city.

Underground Hip Hop ft MC Frontalot
B-Boy Beats features 17 dope tracks from the rising stars of underground Hip Hop. Led by Nerdcore and Penny Arcade favourite MC Frontalot the game also includes awesome tracks from Optimus Rhyme, Id Obelus, Ultraklystron, Rai and Magitek.

Features
- The most original music game on iPhone today
- Face off against 7 NYC crews each with their own turf
- Awesome music talent from the hip hop underground
- Rhythm action game-play where your fingers become legs!
- 10 authentic break-dance moves to learn
- Easy and Hard difficulty levels for extra replay value
- Open Feint social network integration

Here is a gameplay video:

Very interesting game indeed – I wonder what sort of difficulty the moves will be. They say 10 authentic moves to learn, so I really doubt air flares, swipes, and windmills are even in the game. But that’s alright, I got a wicked toprock.

Check out the screenshots:

Description from Chillingo:

Guerrilla Bob supersedes the ordinary survival shooter experience by providing elements of depth and complexity never before met with any iPhone games of its genre.
It goes beyond circling endless waves of enemies, and adds structured level designs and various challenges.

Level by level, follow Bob to taste the thrill for the kill! You must help Bob make his way through the dangerous canyons, steep deserts and dreadful towns. To do this, he must not only survive the countless attacks, but also explore the land in search of new arsenal and secret items. To make things even more challenging, Bob gets some epic boss encounters.

Here is the extended gameplay video:

And a whole whack of screenshots of some of the enemies you will find in Guerrilla Bob:

The game looks so fun – we can’t wait to get our hands on it! Review soon.

STORY

Project 72 begun Tuesday January 5, when 4 boys from Venice CA aka Dogtown sat down for dinner and started to discuss what to do next. The idea of making a game in 72 hours started to take place. A few hours later at 8pm the project was officially on its way, deadline set to Friday January 8 at 8pm . Were they gonna finish it in time?

They did and this game is the result!

GAME

You guide your rocket through space avoiding running out of fuel and hitting all the obstacle.
When you collide with an obstacles you either slow down or get eliminated

* Asteroids and satellites will cause the ship to slow down.
* Black holes will pull you towards them until you run out of fuel and get stuck in space (GAME OVER!).
* UFO’s should be avoided at all cost as they will destroy you on the spot.

In order to travel far into space you need rocket fuel, there are fuel power-up’s that appear randomly throughout the game and you need to pick up as many as possible. There are also other power-up’s to help you on your mission such as a Shield and some Nitro.

Very polished looking game! Check out the screenshots:

And here are some screenshots:

Game looks fantastic – despite reports of its difficulty. Probably going to pick it up sometime later this week. Hope you all enjoy it!

Grab it while you can!

I imagine that the developer meeting where they came up with the premise for TxtBlaster went something like this:

Dev #1: okay, what’s a great arcade game that everyone loves?
Dev #2: Space Invaders!
Dev #1: yes! Now what’s a cool game that’s kind of obscure but awesome?
Dev #2: Typing of the Dead!
Dev #1: Perfect! Now by their powers combined, we have…  Typing of the Inva… I mean TxtBlaster!

Okay so maybe there was more to it than that but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s very little fresh material in TxtBlaster, and while it may not have the same level of reverence as its sources, its still a decent game on its own.

Get ready to thumbcercise!

If you haven’t yet mastered the use of your touch screen keyboard this game might just be the tool you need to practice without having to leave yourself endless notes full of gibberish.  Little pixelated aliens fall from the sky carrying convenient little signs that say exactly which letter makes them explode.  The goal is to blast away all of the invaders in each level to prevent them from landing and destroying your little moon base.  That’s about it though, the game never really gets more complex.  As you progress through the levels you’ll encounter some different enemy types who fall in different ways and the game will start getting faster.  Eventually you’ll hit that barrier where you can’t possibly type fast enough on a touch screen keyboard to keep up with the speed of the game.

The game has a very appropriate 8-bit art style that fits perfectly with the type of game.  The invaders themselves each have a unique look that allows you to quickly identify them and prioritize the types that fall more quickly.  There’s also a neat little chiptune to listen to while you play and while it adds to the retro feel it gets repetitive quickly.  There’s only one mode available for play and while you have 3 difficulty levels to choose from, the only thing that changes is that on a harder setting you’ll start at a later level.  To make matters worse, the point bonus they give you for jumping right into the harder levels is significantly less than the score you would have accumulated had you taken the two extra minutes to play from the beginning.

Damn you aliens! Get off my moon!

Overall, txtblaster is a game who’s only real flaw is a lack of depth.  Simply put, the game is solid, the graphics fit nicely and the sound does too, but in the end it just won’t hold your interest for long enough to make it really worth the money.

The Game

Gold Keeper is designed as an arcade style beat’em up that puts you in the shoes, er, hooves of a demon looking to keep his gold from the greedy hands of the local human village. Sounds backwards, doesn’t it? In this case it’s not, and that’s part of the charm of the game, but we’ll get to that later.

Don’t think you want to be standing there, little buddy.

After putting an emulated joystick and single button in the corners of your horizontal iPhone, the game begins. The entirety of the game takes place in a single square room with holes in each corner, and your gold in the middle. Your demon is free to roam wherever he pleases, and your single button executes his basic attack. From the corners of the screen, two types of villagers will enter: armored and unarmored. The unarmored villagers go straight for the gold and then attempt to leave from the hole they came in, and the armored villagers are in it for your blood. The object of the game is to kill the villagers before they can leave with any of your gold, or before they kill you themselves. Your health is dictated by a single bar on the left end of the screen, and another bar, your special attack gauge, is on the right. The latter is done by pressing a large orange button next to the special attack gauge once it fills up, and when performed your demon will unleash a single-hit kill move to all enemies in a certain radius of you. Villagers will occasionally drop one of two items which are only meant to refill those two meters. That’s it. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it should, because this game isn’t meant to be complicated – just mindless arcadey fun.

As the game progresses, things will gradually get more difficult. More villagers will spawn at a time, and every minute or so a message will appear stating that villagers have gotten stronger. By this, they mean that they’ll either be hitting you harder or be able to take more hits than before. This increase in difficulty is offset by the fact that your demon gets powered up over time, as well. After a few minutes he is equipped with a hammer – giving him more reach and more power – and a few minutes after that is given a hatchet. The hatchet is the final weapon you receive, and certainly makes killing villagers that much more bloody and satisfying. However, from that point on the difficulty will rise exponentially, as you aren’t given anymore power-ups to balance the rising power of the villagers.

As a game with such little depth, it’s apparent that it’s only goal is to supply the player with short time wasting sessions, and I can proudly say that the game achieves this gloriously. While you won’t come away from this gameplay reflecting on how great it was, it will certainly distract you from that short-but-smelly bus ride or final stretch of Philosophy 101.

Graphics

Oh snap, owned.

Gold Keeper goes the extra mile in terms of one dollar games and provides you with fully 3D polygonal visuals. This is a nice surprise, and the overall experience benefits greatly from it. Simple arcade games can suffer if what you’re looking at isn’t visually appealing. Fortunately, this isn’t the case with Gold Keeper. It’s color palette may not pack a punch (the colors you’ll be seeing are mostly gray and red), the art is inspired, and the visuals and movement are smooth. Blood spews from every villager you murder, and the special attack actually comes with a nice explosion effect. The terrain of the cave has a great texture that stands out and gives great realism to the otherwise comical demon endeavor. Another nice surprise was in the animation work of the demon. Even though he only has one basic attack, the developers put in multiple animations for this attack (each with their own range and hitbox properties) so that the game was just a little less repetitive. Little additions like this are much appreciated, as it shows that even though the price of the game is dirt cheap, there was some love and effort put into it that makes it feel like a more expensive one.

Sound

A single track fills up the game’s soundtrack, and while it’s not a stand-out piece of orchestral work, it’s simple, and works well with the tone and style of the gameplay. The ability to listen to your own music while slicing villagers for minutes on end would’ve been nice, but this feature unfortunately isn’t available (I still wait for the day that this becomes a common feature…grr). Sound effects do the job: slicing a villager with a hatchet sounds like slicing a villager with a hatchet. Unfortunately, the game’s biggest downfall is in the voice of the demon. I’ll keep this simple: I don’t want to hear my character reciting a famous Joker line from The Dark Knight every time I kill someone. There’s a lot of killing going on in this game, and hearing those words repeated over and over again almost made me turn my entire phone off. Fortunately, we have the option to turn just the sound effects or music off if we desire, so this drawback can be remedied at a cost.

Additional Comments

Simplicity never means perfection, and Gold Keeper is no different. The game does suffer from some frustrating flaws that give the game difficulty that I don’t believe was intended by the developers. One example of this is the fact that the player must always keep a keen eye on his health bar, as it’s very difficult to tell when your demon actually receives damage. There is no consistent sound or visual cue that represents health depletion aside from the meter itself, and this often left me surprised at how far down my health was without even being aware of it. The second and more concrete example is the useless special attack. The special attack is meant to work as a means of clearing large amounts of enemies that are close to you for tactical or desperate means, but it doesn’t work for either because the attack takes about 10 seconds to come out. All the while, the enemies that are close to you are hacking away at your health, and even if you manage to kill them before you die, you’ll be lucky to recover even a fraction of that from a health drop. On the bright side, if you manage to hold your own and believe you’ve accomplished a great feat, the game does offer worldwide leaderboards, so if you’re looking to turn this game into more than what it’s meant to be, you’ll at least be able to show off your talents.

Conclusion

Minor flaws aside, Gold Keeper is a pleasant (or should I say devilish) game which holds firm it’s arcade principles and uses them to deliver a solid experience that will easily kill time…and villagers. iPhone games are already in the thousands, and out of those thousands, it’s simple, casual games like Gold Keeper that show the virtues of mobile gaming. For your 99 cents, you could do a lot worse.