PixlBit

If you've been on Pixlbit for a while, you probably know that I like hippos. And today I have a silly hippo game to tell you about! Hippo High Dive is a very simple game. Your purple hippo, wearing a pink leotard, dives off a high board and must try to fall through a series of flaming hoops before landing in a little pool of water. You have three lives. Missing a ring costs one life, though you can get burned twice per live. Use up all three before making it to the pool at the bottom and you lose. And that's all there is to it. Beat a level—that is, a height—and a higher one unlocks. I'm at 450m right now. It has 45 flaming hoops! Thankfully, there is a little indicator at the bottom of the screen to show where the next hoop is coming. Otherwise, this really would be impossible. A few more tries and I'll get it for sure!

Party like a...yeah, I got nothin'

Another kind of game that has flourished on the App Store is the super hard high score chaser. A lot of credit there goes to Super Hexagon, in my opinion, which is one of my favorite iPhone games (I wrote about it way back in 2013). But today I'm here to talk about Unpossible, a game that definitely reminds me of Super Hexagon. In this one, though, you're traveling along a curving cylinder way up in the air trying to avoid obstacles. Have you played F-Zero GX? It's like the cylinder level in that game but with lots of stuff in the way and played from a first-person perspective. Since it's a high score game, you just go for as long as you can without messing up. That length of time is your score.

Mobile is great for little puzzle games that you can pick and put down at any time. TanZen, a collection of tangram puzzles, is a great example. Tangram puzzles consist of seven geometric shapes cut from one large square (as you can see in the app icon to the left) that are rearranged into other various shapes. It's a Chinese thing lol. In TanZen there is a solid dark outline that you try to completely fill with the seven shapes. It's a simple concept but can be difficult to figure out. Some nice, relaxing new agey/Oriental music should help you keep your cool. I've done quite a few of these now and there have been a few so far I haven't figured out. That's no problem, though, because there are plenty more puzzles to move onto. Over 550 in total! I have a feeling this game will be on my phone for a long time.

 There are a lot of endless runners on the App Store. I mean, there's a frickin' ton of them and Worm Run falls into that group, technically. But a few things set it apart from similar games. First of all, your character doesn't run automatically. Swiping left or right sends your little guy in that direction and swiping up (including diagonals) makes him jump. You also have a little boost you can do several times in the air that recharches when you touch the ground or a wall.

There are only so many kinds of things and eventually everything falls into an established category (barring a game changer, of course). The physics puzzler on the App Store has proven very popular and a good fit for mobile, and Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage falls firmly in that category. It's similar to Cut the Rope but instead of trying to get a piece of candy into the mouth of an adorable monster, you're getting one or more Vikings into a little Viking barge (whatever those are called) with the power of slicing with your finger. While you do cut ropes sometimes, you mostly cut through giant blocks of ice, hence the name.

Games Beaten

Another year down! Which one was this? 2007? 12? Oh yeah, 2014. I still have a hard time believing it was 2014, let alone that it's over. But let's get on with this, shall we? First up are all the games I beat this year and then how many I bought or somehow acquired (don't worry, I don't list those specifically). Be sure to stick around for the Golden Hippo Awards after that!

First of all, Happy New Year! But let's talk about last year. December was a super busy month. Between December 1 and Christmas Day, I worked about 200 hours...which is really pretty crazy. Nice paychecks though  So I didn't do a lot of gaming, though I did finish one thing...

Hey, everybody. I know I've been pretty much MIA except for the odd comment. November was a busy month and December is even crazier. I just finished a 60-hour week at work and have two more of those to look forward to. That's why we're nearly done with the first week of December and I'm just now posting the November recap. Let's get to it!