When Life Hands You A Lemon…

This idea is reflected in the ability to totally skip the animated selling section of the game and move straight to the end of day profit and loss sheet. The game won’t appeal to those wanting a pure, all out video game experience but for those of you like to analyse stats, predict consumer trends or just dream that you own your own business then this is the game for you. There are two basic options: career mode and challenge mode. Career mode sees you set out on your capitalist adventure with a small working capital and an unlimited amount of time to build up your business. This will be the natural starting point for most players as it allows you to find your feet in the game and understand what works and what doesn’t in the cut throat world of lemonade sales.

Once you start to make a decent profit you can increase the efficiency of your business with new equipment and better stands. In essence the main aim of the game is to buy every item available and become a lemonade selling dynamo. This is the main draw of the game and something that will keep you coming back until you’ve established a solid reputation and a healthy profit margin. On the downside, once you’ve made your business a success the game begins to lose its appeal as there is nothing else left to achieve and while your bank balance gets bigger there is nothing left to spend it on.

The challenge mode helps combat this as it is a scaled down version of the game and gives you exactly one month to build up as much profit as you can. This section of the game can be re-visited over and over because it always resets and the desire to beat your previous score is always there. However, this only maintains a flicker of interest in the game and after a while you will find yourself making only fleeting visits to play the game. Lemonade Tycoon starts off as a sweet game that will quench your thirst for entertainment but after a while, like all fruits, the lemons begin to spoil and the taste becomes a little bitter. The game is certainly more than a 5 minute wonder and it is definitely a well made but you’ll find it hard to gather any enthusiasm for it after you’ve made it to the top of the lemon tree.

Who Gives A Toss?

Thankfully, Paper Toss gives you all the realism of the game without any of the drawbacks which means you can wile away the hours in the office without disturbing your more industrious colleagues. The game has three difficulty settings: easy, medium and hard, which basically means that the bin is a further distance away. To throw your paper ball all you have to do is flick you finger in the desired direction and the watch it hurtle towards the centre of the hole or bounce agonisingly off the rim. Each shot requires you to judge the wind speed (actually a fan) correctly in order to get the right trajectory to the target.

Paper Toss won’t win any awards for its innovation or game play but the graphics are well constructed and the actions are slick and precise. The sound effects create a realistic ambience and an ego boosting round of applause each time you set a new record will certainly raise a smile. Overall, this is a game that you’ll keep coming back to every time you’ve got a few minutes (or hours) to kill. Beating your own scores as well as those of players around the world provides enough motivation to keep that throwing arm loose and for pure mindless entertainment this game can rival any top end game available.

However, the majority of the gaming environment isn’t accessible and your character is only capable of walking predefined paths much like the old 2D platform beat ‘em up games. In one sense this is a saving grace because although manipulating your character’s movements is simple enough it would be a nightmare trying to avoid falling off every ledge and cliff face. Not being able to fully explore the full terrain though does leave the game lacking a little and at times it does feel like a glorified 2D platform game with a fancy background. The fight controls are simple and the special “focus” attacks allow you to kill larger creatures with ease.

There are three difficulty settings: easy, normal and heroic (only available after completing the game once) and players can choose to set the action levels to soft or explicit. For those players who aren’t keen on seeing a few barely noticeable drops of claret spray from their enemies then opt for the soft mode but if you can stomach “uncensored gore” (more than a little hint of sarcasm there) then leave it on explicit mode.

Hidden items and weapon upgrades give the game a sense of progression and with each end boss having to be killed with a special sequence there is enough to keep even the most serious gamers occupied. Hero of Sparta is definitely a battery killer, once you start playing you’ll want to keep piling up the demonic bodies until you reach the final quest. Whether the game can survive past one or two completions is a matter of opinion but my thoughts are that while it stays fresh it is a top game; after that it will likely become part of your gaming history.

Killing Time

The community surrounding the game is huge and the dedicated forums are filled with the latest news, strategy advice and forth coming updates. Much of the game’s new features are a result of the users’ feedback and this is one of the main reasons that the game has become so popular. The appeal of Mark of Mafia comes from its simplicity and once you start to see you empire expand you’ll become obsessed with when you can next bank a buck or rough up some rivals. The rolling nature of the game makes it great to dip in and out of but with no real end it can become slightly repetitive overt time. Unless you’re willing to take the game seriously you’re never going to become top of the mafia family tree. However, if you’re content plodding along and ruling your own little empire you’ll be more than happy with this game. Mark of Mafia won’t keep you gaming for hours on end but there is no doubt it will keep the touch screen warm as you check back every couple of hours to make sure your rivals haven’t put too many bullet holes in your new Aston Martin.

In Dead Man’s Dungeon your a prison guard at one of the most creepy prisons in the world. One night, all dead inmates have returned to collect some of their lost jewels. Your job is to get rid of all skeletons and to steal their precious diamonds. Here’s a feature list of this nice looking 3D first person shooter for iPhone and iPod Touch:

-Big guns
-Flashy jewels
-Awesome FPS action
-Creepy ambient music
-Online high scores
-Probably some other cool stuff too!
-Skeletons with attitude problems

Developer Vector Box Games is planning to do an update for the game with multiplayer death match and bigger guns to kill the skeletons in the game even faster. The game is now available at the App Store.

We’re giving iPhone game developers of all sizes the opportunity to do a developers diary blog on iPwnGames every now and then. We know that most iPhone game developers have their own personal and corporate blogs, but by posting something about their iPhone developers experiences on our site they could reach some new gamers and lead traffic to their own personal blogs as well. It would also help us to give our site the content it deserves and to get some hardcore iPhone gamers to the site that might be interested in writing for us!

I’ve sent out emails to a large part of the iPhone game developers community, but I’m sure I missed a whole lot of good iPhone game developers so shoot me an email at info [at] ipwngames [d.ot] com if you’re an iPhone developer who’s interested in doing some sort of developers diary at iPwnGames!

The kind folks over at Tag Games have sent us four new exclusive screenshots of Car Jack Streets for iPhone and iPod Touch. In this GTA-style game you play as Randal Meyers, a small time palyer in a big city with loads of gambling debts with some big Italian mob boss called Frankie. Your mission is to get your weekly $50,000 payment or you’re a dead man. Here’s a feature list of the game:

* Play in real time
* Over 80 minutes of music from the hottest unsigned acts
* Online ranking for the biggest earners
* Infinite number of criminal and legitimate jobs
* Big, heavy-hitting weapons
* Detailed 3D city to explore
* Lots of vehicles to steal and smash
* Unlockable achievements and hidden stuff

Firemint, the developer of cool mobile games such as The Fast & the Furious: Pink Slip and FIA World Rally Championship, has announced some released new details on its upcoming iPhone racegame Real Racing. The game is currently in pre-beta and is looking awesome:

Features

* Up to 6 cars on screen
* Animated cockpit with driver and instruments showing race data
* Touch on right to accelerate. on Left to brake
* Licensed songs, different types of vehicle types
* Realistic physics and collision response
* Camera button to switch views
* Different AI personalities

Source: Touch Arcade

Paramount’s iPhone and iPod Touch games have been very succesful so far, so they decided to develop another game based on their movie Shooter. SHOOTER! The Official Movie Game is a sniper-like game with tilt controls and touch screen controls. Paramount is releasing Shooter for iPhone and iPod Touch next week in the App Store.

• Over 30 High Stakes Sniping Levels: Earn medals and rewards through the successful completion of dangerous assignments while progressing through training sessions and multiple missions that feature challenging bosses.
• First Person Sniper Perspective – Use the accelerometer to zero in on your targets with your binoculars and scope. Distance and wind must also be factored into your shot.