Hey James, while you're at it, watch the Inazuma Eleven movie. :)
Sad to hear you didn't like Game Dev Story, Jonny. While I was listening to this episode on my iPhone I thought about writing in and recommend this game to you but then I saw the chapter art. :P: Maybe you should give some of the other Kairosoft-games a go? Wait for a lite version of "Oh! Edo Towns" or something. Bah... I'm a Kairosoft addict >.< Death Rally is a great game too, if you like racing games.

Sounds like Johnny is looking for iOS game recommendations? Solomon's Keep and the survival spinoff Solomon's Graveyard have occupied me the most on that system. The Kairosoft games are nice but kinda samey and tending towards the easy side (i.e. it's way too easy to be profitable). Robotek is great fun, not always balanced but hey, it's free if you don't want to buy energy with microtransactions (no need for that really, I bought a buck's worth to unlock the charger node and support the game but there's not much use for that energy). Robot Wants Kitty is a great game too, it's based on a metroidvania-style flash game but comes with several levels (each of which is a metroidvania style world) instead of the one that the original had.


If you enjoyed Total Annihilation on the PC back in the day then Land Air Sea Warfare is very close to that and if you want an RPGFPS and can tolerate bugs Mission Europa is fun (looks ugly but I find that the distorted graphics make stuff look appropriately hellish and considering this is a game where you can find armor pieces crafted from the corpses of the scientists and soldiers killed by the demons...).


Beware of Korean games, especially the RPGs. They're ports from some kind of non-smart cellphone and have crappy framerates and controls, often a ton of grind and incomprehensible item crafting systems. There are some good ones but generally they don't play very well because of the framerate. Also Gameloft's schtick is that they make C-grade knockoffs of popular AAA games and thrive because they're the only ones offering that kind of stuff at all.


P.S: Haven't listened yet, I'll do that tomorrow on the commute so apologies if any of these are redundant.

Jonny, I feel similar to you on the whole IOS games. I have bought a few, but feel that mostly I want very short pick up and play styled games, and I prefer the games with simple control methods.


There are a few games by one developer that are extremely awesome and fit my above preferences. I recommended trying either of the Blue Defence games first. Blue Defence second wave is a more advanced sequel, but they are both good starters. This dev also has a few other games that are quite good too, including some other entries in the Blue series.

http://catinaboxgames.com/

The online feature of Super Street Fighter II (Genesis) is confirmed.
(http://vc.sega.jp/vc_ssf2/)
There are two online modes: random match with a player in Japan and Friend match with a player with whom you have exchanged your friend code.

The game that came to mind when you talked so much about buying items without knowing what they did was Binding of Isaac. Granted, I've been playing so much of that lately (Steam says I've played 25 hours and this is a game without a save function!) that it would probably come to mind anyway but it's like a Zelda game thrown into the same meat grinder that produced Super Meat Boy (also called "Edmund McMillen"). There are over a hundred items to find and you never know what they'll do until you pick them up and use them. Especially when you see them in a store (or offered by the devil in exchange for heart containers) it cam be a huge gamble to pick something up that you've never seen before.

Hey James NHL Hitz is the kind of game your looking for:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-As0KVhuSqI


:cool;

...Fred Durst.


BAIL! BAIL!

I think the best smartphone game I've played is Plants vs. Zombies.  It's simple and arcadey, but it's really well done.  Angry Birds is OK; it's enjoyable and perfect for pick-up-and-play style gaming, but I've never understood why it's caught on like it has.

I have yet to play Infinity Blade, but I'd like to pick it up at some point.  On WP7, The Harvest is also very good (albeit a little too slowly-paced).  Tentacles is also good.

I thought about picking up Tentacle.
If a have a gap between Skylanders 3DS and SM3L I want to pick up the Fable Coin game thing.  It looks interesting.

Btw I would describe the blue defense games as a cross between space invaders and geometry wars.

Thanks for the shout out about RetroActive.  I love playing old games and I have quite a big collection so it's not that hard to participate. 

So for everyone's reference I will be out this week. You'll have to go on without me.

I'll confess that I payed the Square Enix tax to play Final Fantasy Tactics on my ipod; paying the $15 for a game on ios kind of hurt.  On the flipside, it's one of my favorite games of all time--I like being able to play it portable format; at least this way it's cheaper than buying a PSP to play it.


I'm also a fan of Plants vs. Zombies and Infinity Blade.  The only other categories of games that I've enjoyed is a version of the old laserdisc game Cobra Command.

hah I just watched professor layton and the eternal diva right before i decided to listen to RFN, I pretty much agree with what was said about it and even more of a coincidence is that I almost have exactly the same TV set up as James. I have a Desktop PC hooked up to my monitor and my HDTV (the computer just sees it as dual monitors) it has a bluray drive on it as well and i pretty much use it as my home theatre box. Anyways the Professor Layton movie has some pretty good animation so watch it in HD if you can, it looks pretty nice.

Tactics still has the $5 unusable controls tax? Christ, I thought they would've reconsidered considering it's on PSN for $10.

It did at least when I bought it.  I think I must have gotten used to them b/c I can cycle through the menus pretty quickly.  I do occasionally have a problem selecting the right square on the grid; when that happens, I usually zoom in a little and try again.  I don't find it too annoying because I only play in short bursts.  It's a battery-munching app, though.

Battery life is certainly something that mobile devices will need to solve before they really take off as more than a casual gaming platform.

Nuclear.

"Battery munching" is relative on iOS, even seemingly undemanding games make my iPod Touch run very hot and last maybe 2 hours on one charge.

The latest game I picked up is Ep0ch which some describe as Infinity Blade with cover shooting instead of swords, to me it feels more like a rather dumbed down PN03 with its strong focus on dodging and trading that off with shooting. The biggest drawback is how quickly it's over, my iPod was at 50% charge by the time I saw the credits which puts it at maybe one hour. It's meant to be replayed on higher difficulties but for 5€ that's still kinda low and it doesn't seem to have that much variety. For comparison I put 34 hours into Binding of Isaac so far and that was a fiver too while offering way more variety.

Battery technology is not advancing fast enough to satisfy the portable energy needs.

That's why making the electronics more efficient is a major part of advancing portable systems. You can always make a super-powered portable if you don't care about the battery life.