Thursday, July 31, 2014

Review: J-Fizo for iPhone and iPad

In what I hope will be the first of a long series, I'm delighted to host a review written by Roberto Canogar, one of the authors of Sky Scramble. Roberto is a mathematician and we have frequent email exchanges about our future games and puzzles in general. I can't wait to read what he has to say about this game. — Nicola

First of all, this is my first post here and I am really happy to contribute.

J-Fizo (Free) was developed by Adam Błaszkiewicz. A couple of weeks ago, Nicola tweeted about this game and compared it to my game Sky Scramble, so I had to try it! Indeed, there is some resemblance but there is a big difference: while my game is geometrical (the distances are important), in J-Fizo the game is topological (distances are not important).

Let's get into business, J-Fizo (Free) was developed by Adam Blaszkiewicz. The game presents us with a network (or graph in mathematics), and on each node of the network we have a black token or nothing at all. The links of the network are colored, and for each color there is a button.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Review: Stroke! for iPhone and iPad

It's become very difficult to browse through the daily new releases on the App Store: there are just too many apps released every day. For me, the reward is discovering, every once in a while, an indie game made with very limited resources but a good idea behind. Stroke! is one of those.
Developed by the Japanese Ryo Takanezawa, a puzzle lover who has many other puzzle apps under his belt, is one of those games that Tom Cutrofello calls "topology puzzles", and which I'd like to call "weakly constrained mazes". By that I mean that the goal of the game is to find a way through a maze where your movements are not limited by walls, but by other, less strict, rules.