Author Archives: Ray Merkler

The Incident is already, at the very least, the best physics based, retro styled action game in which random objects fall from the sky I’ve ever played. It’s rare that a game concept this bizarre pans out so well. Big Bucket sure has some magic fingers massaging those OpenGL muscles, …

One of the first games to emerge when the App Store hit the scene was a little gem called Blue Defense!, by John Kooistra. It gave us a perfect, simple game mechanic: You are a lone planet being attacked by hordes of red aliens. Your single gun always shoots straight …

If you’re not familiar with Tilt to Live on the iPhone, you may want to get out from under the smoking rubble of your ruined city (I am so sorry about that, by the way, I didn’t realize it was loaded) and get with the program. TtL ushered in a …

Sparrow is a new email client for OS X that takes a minimalist approach to managing your inbox. Out of the box, Sparrow resembles Tweetie for Mac. A single, narrow window displays your email threads. You can double click a thread to open it in a new window, or you …

BIT.TRIP is a series of six planned games from Gaijin Games, each featuring a different rhythm based gameplay mechanic set against retro graphics and chiptunes. The first four games in the series have already been released for the Nintendo Wii via the WiiWare service to considerable applause, and BIT.TRIP BEAT, …

One of my favorite games, and probably my wife’s absolute favorite game of all time ever, Sushi Cat, is today’s Free App A Day freebie! Sushi Cat is a physics puzzler in which you drop an amorphous ball of a cat down a Plinko-like game board to collect sushi, score …

Apple announced today a change in their policy on 3rd party development tools. Previously, use of tools like Unity and Corona, which can be used to develop iOS apps without XCode, was grounds for rejection from the App Store. As of today, such tools are now allowed, as long as …

1951  World War One is a top-down dogfight shooter set in an alternate history in which the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 failed due to a freak gun jam, preventing the onset of the Great War until 1951. Without the technological growth and global destabilization of two world wars, …

Fastar! is today’s Free App A Day freebie! We reviewed Fastar! a couple weeks ago and loved it. It’s a brilliant distillation of the Japanese RPG genre, an action game in which you kill enemies to make money to upgrade your skills to kill more enemies as quickly as you …

The Incident is a physics-driven, retro-styled arcade action game from Big Bucket for the iPhone and iPad. The titular Incident should be a familiar enough situation: You, the player, are hailing a cab, when, suddenly, the universe starts trying to play Tetris on your head. Over the course of the game, …

For the entirety of the iPhone’s life, tech heads have cried for one feature more loudly than any other: Background apps. And now, with iOS 4, we have it. And I hate it. Share this: