Before getting my iPhone this past January, I had a Palm Treo 680, and before that I had a Treo 600, and before that I had a Palm III that I would carry along with my Nokia brick phone with the interchangeable face plate (mine was made of 100 dollar bills). All of those Palm’s had one game in common across all of them: SFCave.
SFCave Courtesy www.sfcave.com
The concept has been done before (Java version here), you are this ribbon floating down a cave that gets progressively more narrow as your score increases. It had one simple button, go up. The longer you held it, the higher the ribbon went up. When you let go of the button, the ribbon would sink. Try to get as far as you can before you hit either the ceiling, the ground or one of the things floating in the middle of the screen. It was mind numbingly simple and and easy time killer.
I finally had to send my trusty Palm OS off to greener pastures of a more modern cell phone operating system (I see you WebOS and I will give you a call in a year and a half when my AT&T contract is up). You would think that I would find joy in color versions of some SFCave clone using the touch screen. But I didn’t. Sure there are clones of Cave out there on the vast App Store and I even tried a few. But I felt with a new phone, I should have a new mind numbingly simple game that can grace my home screen.
Early on, I found a lot of joy with the challenges provided by the excellent Flight Control (iTunes Link). In it, you use your finger to navigate a flight path for a variety of different planes to a variety of different landing strips, all at the same time while trying to avoid having them collide. It was simple fun that didn’t get frustrating at higher levels even though I knew I was going to lose. For this reason, I still keep Flight Control on my home screen. But it is only a fallback in the very rare times I don’t want to play my absolute favorite iPhone game in the world… Rope ‘n Fly.
Rope ‘n Fly 2 (iTunes Link) just came out which i have been loving currently but more or less the game remains the same. Any words I write on the game from this point on though are based on the fun I am having with the sequel.
Rope ‘N Fly 2 (heretofore referred to as RNF2) puts you in the roll of a superhero like character who throws ropes to swing between buildings. It is totally side scrolling and to jump from building to building you tap the building you want to throw your “rope” onto. It’s so simple I can play an easy game on the subway, on the bus into the city, in line for the bathroom at the bar, whenever.
I think the way the game plays out is where I draw my entertainment from it. The way the character swings across the screen, the way that you get into a zone of learning just where to hit the rope to get that extra long swing, or a large number of spins before connecting to another building. Every time I play, I try to get my character that extra few feet further than last time and if I miss, it is satisfyingly frustrating to have to start all over again.
For 99 cents, the game is a total bargain. Especially the new 2.0 sequel. Sure it has “3-D” buildings and weather, but that is the least of it. It has OpenFeint integration to track your game online through achievements and leaderboards, even better physics of a stick figure character swinging across the screen and the ability to skim the ground and lose your legs but still keep going. In the previous title when you hit the ground, no matter how tiny a part, it was lights out. Thankfully though, the concept and the gameplay stay the same.
I really can’t think of any complaints for this game right now. And I really tried to find some. I tried to stretch issues like how at some points my iPhone slows to a crawl, but with the phone doubling in processor and graphics power every year, I have a feeling that the complaint is going to be prevalent in more and more games. The sequel isn’t that monumental an update to warrant a 2.0 revision and the developer charges for a new game. But the game is 99 cents. And the original game is 99 cents. Two dollars lost. I have spent hundreds of dollars on horrible computer and video games. 2 dollars spent on two entertaining titles is not bad at all.
Alright how much more do i have to say about the game. Just go spend the buck and get it. Or try the somewhat limited demo (iTunes Link) for free and decide on it later on to buy the game. Hopefully this will tide me over until SFCave Deluxe is out for WebOS in a year and a half or so.
