iLounge

Company: Random5

Website: www.Random5.net

Title: iTiltPinball

Players: One

Price: $2

Compatible: iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G

Random5 iTiltPinball

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By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008
Category: Games - iPod and iPhone

On July 25, 2008, iLounge published iPhone Gems: Action Puzzlers, Table + Pinball Games, a feature article looking at eight assorted games developed for the iPhone OS. This review focuses on only one title from the collection; you can read the full article, with screenshots of all of the games together, through the link above.

Some games just shouldn’t have been released on the App Store at all. Random5’s iTiltPinball ($2) is one of them. As one of only a couple of pinball games to appear around the time of the iPhone 2.0 software’s launch, iTiltPinball is basically a poorly-drawn pinball table with the questionable addition of iPhone accelerometer-enhanced physics.

What is there to do here? Fire the poorly animated ball and then tilt the iPhone around to make it move through sparse targets, racking up meaningless points; you can use the flippers at the bottom to try to keep the ball in play.

We could go further in describing iTiltPinball, but in summary, the physics suck, the collision detection sucks, the audio sucks, and overall, the whole game sucks—simply put, the original pinball machines released in 1931 were more impressive than this, and in 25 years of playing games, we haven’t ever played a console or handheld rendition of pinball as terrible as this one. To its partial credit, Random5 has posted a note to the App Store saying that an improved version 1.1 “should be available soon,” but we’re not going to sit around and wait for updates from any company that would release something this poor and attempt to charge for it. Developers, take note: demo-quality games rate Ds in our book, so make them worth playing before releasing them, not afterwards.