Thursday 19 June 2014

Battleheart Legacy Review

When the mostly text-based Wizardry was released in September 1981 for the Apple II, it sparked a revolution in computer role-playing games (RPG), not because it was the first to cover this genre but because its complexity coupled with ease of use, and highly versatile adventure, sparked the imagination of hundreds of thousands of players.

Fast forward to January 2011 and a host of imitators and innovators later, Mika Mobile released their own interpretation of an RPG for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Battleheart. Again, they weren't the first to market, not by a long shot, but their lovely cartoon-like environment, original animation, and easy to master yet engrossing combat, made that game a highly enjoyable experience, well geared for mobile gaming.

Tuesday 10 June 2014

Puppet Pals - Interview with Polished Play

Stop motion animation can be a lot of fun; there’s always something magical about seeing inanimate objects move seemingly by themselves. But there’s one major inherent problem with this creative endeavour: it’s a painfully slow process - assuming you work in PAL, you must move your objects and characters a little bit at a time, recording the process twenty-five time just to produce one second of video. The results are often worth it, of course, but it’s definitely an exercise in patience. This is where Lance Harris and Heber Sheffield, the founders of Polished Play come in; they created a set of apps for iPad to turn this process upside down and enable anyone to create animated scenes in minutes, rather than days.