The Great iOS Game Search: Tiny Wings

I am simply convinced that Apple’s iOS platform has a lot of potential for great gaming experiences. The powerful hardware, responsive touchscreens, and gorgeous displays of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are brimming with possibility. Unfortunately, the App Store is filled with shovelware and games that don’t do the OS justice. As such, I have decided to go on a search to find those digital diamonds in the rough that are not only great games, but are designed for the platform as well. 

Tiny Wings

Developer: Andreas Illiger

Current Price: $0.99

Platforms: iPhone/iPod Touch

I firmly believe that there is a place for games on iOS that attempt to challenge dedicated handhelds like the PSP and DS in terms of depth and quality. Why not aim for such lofty goals, after all?

Even I must admit, however, that the games that most often feel “right” for the platform, those that capture my attention and bring a smile to my face and leave me thinking to myself “Yes, this is what mobile gaming is all about” are those games that embrace the simplicity of the device. They find ways to build mechanics around minimalism while including enough depth to retain challenge and ensure practice is needed to master the game.

These games often require only one input, touching, tapping, or holding the screen at a certain time, but can have an addictive quality than can rival their more complex console brethren. They come in bite sizes with prices to match, costing as little as a dollar and are perfectly suited to gaming on a mobile device, able to give you a satisfying experience in just minutes.

They may be small, they may be disposable, but the best of the iOS crop is densely packed with creativity. It’s simply delightful to see how much experimentation is being done with graphics and gameplay in this sector and how much success it is bringing some developers. I’ve felt on more than one occasion that more creative thought has been put into a game I bought for $0.99 and thought would be a throwaway experience than a game I bought for $60 in a retail store.

Tiny Wings is one of these delightful little surprises. I bought it on a whim, having never heard of it before, after a writer I follow on Twitter recommended it. I didn’t even know what to expect, but for $0.99 I took the gamble and bought it sight unseen. When was the last time you did that with a console game?

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Movies Can Never Be Art - So Says Me

Author's note: If you read more than a couple lines of this and don't realize I'm being facetious, then please go away. This article is a deliberate parody wherein I try my damndest to sound and monumentally stupid as I think Roger Ebert does in his blog post where he argues that games can never be art. No, I'm not going to link to his article because he's a closed-minded, out-of-touch hack that doesn't deserve the meager traffic I wouldn't send his way because no one reads this website.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that I’m vastly more intelligent than everyone else I’ve ever met. 

I mean, obviously. 

So it stands to reason that my opinion is the only one that actually matters. You’re welcome to consider it pretty much the textbook that defines our world. I highly encourage you to compare your own opinions to mine and see where you’re wrong. There are bound to be plenty of areas in which your opinion needs correcting, and nobody wants you to look like a misguided fool by showing the public that you disagree with me.

Maybe I should provide a handy checklist.

Nah, that would probably take too long.

Anyhow, I have recently had an amazing revelation that I knew I just had to share with the world. It has changed the way I view both art and entertainment. It has altered how I perceive the world around me. It had added an entirely new category onto the list of things which I do not understand and therefore rightfully despise. 

More importantly, it has kept me from having to waste any of my precious time watching those blasted moving picture thingamajigs. Anyone who spends their time watching fake people do fake things in a fake world according to the whim of some poor joke of a “writer”, who probably spends most of his meager salary on brownies and marijuana that he consumes in rabid binges while pretending that he doesn’t need any of that “human contact” that he’s heard so much about, is clearly a moron.

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Best of 2009 - Honorable Mentions, Part Two

And now for the rest of those unfortunate games that just didn't quite cut the mustard. In some alternate universe these could be just as deserving of a slot in the top ten, but for some reason they got left behind. They are grouped here so they can at least get some shot at the recognition they so clearly deserve.

Borderlands

Borderlands nearly ended up in the main list, but was just barely edged out of the last slot by the more original, surprising Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

Still, to say Borderlands is less original is not to say it is less enjoyable. It doesn’t exactly rewrite the definition of what a modern shooter should be, but it doesn’t really need to. There’s plenty of room on my shelf for games like Borderlands, titles that don’t really try to do anything spectacularly new, but that take established conventions and make them feel fresh and fun. 

At the end of the day, if I’m having fun with a game, isn’t that what matters most? 

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Best of 2009 - Honorable Mentions, Part One

And now for those unfortunate games that just didn't quite cut the mustard. In some alternate universe these could be just as deserving of a slot in the top ten, but for some reason they got left behind. They are grouped here so they can at least get some shot at the recognition they so clearly deserve.

Fallout 3 DLC

The elusive definition of a “good value” in gaming is getting trickier and trickier to define in these times of inevitable downloadable content, dirt cheap iPhone games, and digital distribution that sometimes costs inexplicably as much as a physical product.

I have not lost sight of the fact that the downloadable expansions for Fallout 3 have cost me nearly as much as buying the game new in the first place. This on top of the fact that I paid extra for the Limited/Collector’s/Special/Suckers edition, which is an entirely different maddening variable in the value equation.

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Best of 2009 - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Putting this list together has truly made me realize what a good year this has been for gaming, which is surprising considering that my reaction otherwise might have been to suggest that 2009 was a mediocre year.

Nowhere was this proliferation of terrific games more obvious, and more troublesome, than when attempting to choose the candidate for this very entry. I reserved it for those games I played only at the tail end of the year. 

The problem was, I was hit with more last-minute awesomeness than I expected. Some truly deserving games were left behind, relegated, perhaps unfairly, to the Honorable Mentions category. 

The other two candidates, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Borderlands, are both safer choices. I picked both up expecting them to be fun and they were. There were no surprises with either, but they were both quite fun.

But Silent Hill: Shattered Memories ultimately stuck with me the most because, frankly, it surprised me. In a year of sure things, Shattered Memories was an unexpected pleasure; a nice, refreshing dose of unique. 

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