Though no gaming platform has a shortage of “simulator” tycoon style games, few have enough engaging gameplay to really stand out among the crowd. Now Boarding, a tycoon style game revolving around routing passengers at an airport, is one of these little treasures and a great game to help you relax and escape from the real world.

The basic gist is that you are the owner of an airline and its home terminal, in charge of the amount and placement of seats, stores, and snacks (among other unlockable treasures). Your mission is simple. Ferry passengers from your airport to others. As your business grows, you can take on other destinations, more passengers and larger aircraft to handle the traffic.

The game is laid out as five “episodes” spanning various regions across the northern hemisphere. Individual cities within each episode have their own unique characteristics, such as Orlando being busier during the summer (due to its amusement parks). Strategy is essential as you grow your fleet of aircraft and choose which destinations to expand your airline service to next.

With unique graphics and an engaging soundtrack, gameplay is very upbeat and fun. Don’t be surprised to waste huge amounts of time as you play to unlock awards and achievements.

Inside your terminal, you are responsible for staffing appropriate positions (ticketing, gate attendant, customer service, docking) in addition to expanding your airline fleet, all while keeping within your budget. As traffic to your airline grows, you will be able to expand to offer more unique methods of transportation, including a helicopter, a 36 seat plane and a private jet.

As your airline business grows, so does the difficulty of keeping happy the hundreds of passengers that move throughout your terminal. As the pressure mounts and more passengers pile into your terminal than you can handle, they will start to get angry. When they have a melt down, the game is over.

Now Boarding started as a Flash-based game and, due to its nature, does require a pretty beefy system for decent gameplay. Users will need to have at least a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo or 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor or faster to play. On older Macs, performance may degrade as you progress higher into the game as your airline plays host to an increasing number of passengers. The game is built around the Adobe Air platform, so in addition to being compatible with Windows and Linux, it also runs just like any other standalone application, complete with its own icon.

Now Boarding is a great game that starts off simple and easy, but quickly scales in terms of difficulty and challenges. A demo version of Now Boarding is available at its website here. The full version costs $14.99. If you’ve had a chance to play, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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The people behind Oregon Trail’s most recent resurrection are none other than Gameloft, whose many gaming titles for the iPod touch and iPhone have made them one of the platform’s primary developers. Hopefully, that also means they know what they’re doing, since they’ve had enough practice. I’ve enjoyed their previous kicks at the can, so I was optimistic about my experience with the Trail.

Kudos to Gameloft for going for a look appropriate to the play of the game, instead of trying unnecessarily to stretch the graphics resources of the platform. It would of been easy to go for an angled top-down 3-D view or something else, but the 2-D side-scrolling cartoon look suits the game mechanics and keeps the spirit of the original intact.

Remember hunting? Well, it’s still here, and in the new version it takes full advantage of the iPhone’s touch screen interface. During hunting sequences, you’re given a target number of animals, and a time frame in which to reach that goal. The screen changes to a top-down view with you on a stretch of desert. Clicking anywhere on the ground will move your character to that spot, and arrows to either side of the screen show you where game will enter. Once an animal appears on screen, you tap it to shoot it, and then tap the ambiguous bouncing meat-leg icon that appears to move to and gather the resulting piece of food.

It’s basically a duck hunt interface where you have to pick up your own kills. Occasionally you’ll run across an event that is essentially a hunting game where the animals are after you. Larger animals take more shots to kill. It becomes more fun when you hunt larger game, since squirrels and bunny are very easy and present no real challenge.

You can also fish and gather berries for food. Fishing involves dropping your line by holding a finger to the touch screen to determine depth, and moving left and right to place the line horizontally, then you tap your character to draw the line back in, and it catches whatever happens to fall in its path between the original placement of the hook and the fisherman. I found this one much less straightforward and more aggravating than hunting, but more challenging, too, and possibly more fun as a result.

Picking berries is a response-and-reaction mini-game. The right side of the screen becomes a berry bush, where berries appear in predetermined locations. You have to press them as quickly as you can, or they disappear. Among the berries will appear a bad berry, which you have to try to avoid. Get all the good berries in a series, and you achieve a combo, which grants extra points.

Finding food isn’t the only source of mini-games. You’ll also have to cross rivers (accelerometer-based obstacle avoidance), send telegrams (a remember-the-pattern Simon clone) and repair your wagon (basically a simple rhythm game). For variety of play, you really couldn’t find a much better package than Oregon Trail. Not to mention the fact that it stays true to its educational origins and manages to teach you something, both in-game and during loading sequences.

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As someone who enjoys a decent roller coaster from time to time, I’m always intrigued by theme park and coaster applications. When I heard about SkyCoaster for the iPhone, I had to give it a try. It’s a simple roller coaster simulator, offering a variety of different modes, graphic options and speed settings.

The app has received mixed reviews in the iTunes Store, ranging from “Spectacular and brilliant, Download now!” to “This isn’t a game, it’s a short video clip that you pay for.” However, for the humble price of 99 cents I was game to download the app and give it a try. This review will outline my opinion of SkyCoaster, and explore the broader challenges surrounding the mobile simulator genre.

Settings and Configuration

Altering SkyCoaster Settings

Before you actually get started on the roller coaster, you need to customize how you’d like it to act. There are a number of options available, each of which effects how the simulator works:

• Max Height: Adjusts the distance you are from the ground
• Min Track Length: Used for altering the length of each trip around the track
• Loop-the-loop: Adjusts the number of loops present in the track
• Corkscrew: Adjusts the number of corkscrews present in the track
• Downward spiral: Again, adjusts this particular coaster feature’s occurrence
• Theme: A number of themes are available to recreate different environments
• Gravity: Adjust the speed and acceleration through messing with the gravity

If you’ve created a track that works really well, it’s possible to save it for revisiting at a later date. You can also adjust a quality setting, which doesn’t seem to make any noticeable improvement to the graphics but can be prone to cause a little ‘lag’ at times. It’s probably worth leaving this turned off at all times.

Gameplay

The first thing you notice when starting gameplay is that the roller coaster track is suspended above the ground, free of any structural support. The game starts with a fly-by overview of the track you’re about to ride — a nice touch, and good use of the iPhone graphics engine. Hitting the track icon will get the ride started.

The track overview

Once in motion, a few different options are available. The most notable is the ability to swap between a standard (on track) view and a suspended view, with the track above you. These change the feel of the simulator quite dramatically, and are worth messing around with.

Other menu options allow you to return to the settings screen, save the track as a favorite, toggle audio on/off, and start a new track with a set of completely random options. When flying round the track, you can look around by tapping and dragging on the iPhone screen. Your view is limited as it would be if you were actually sitting on a ride.

The suspended view

The graphics performance is actually very good, and the screenshots don’t really do it justice (looking a little jagged).

Conclusion

I expect that you’ll find SkyCoaster to be a novel simulator at first and probably enjoy messing around with the settings. However, after a few tracks it does get a little tiresome. It’s not a long-term attention holder, and while probably worth $1, won’t be one of the regularly used apps on your iPhone.

The main problem with SkyCoaster isn’t a lack of decent graphics or options; it’s the fact that the size of the iPhone screen makes it very difficult to feel immersed in a simulator experience. I’m sure that the actual graphics performance equals that of many physical simulator machines. Unfortunately, unless you have some crazy Myvu glasses, it simply doesn’t come near to recreating the experience of a roller coaster.

You might say that’s an obvious problem, but it isn’t always the case with other apps. There are plenty of smaller action games for the iPhone which cause you to feel immersed in the app. I think that the difference stems from the level of interactivity and concentration involved — there’s a direct correlation between concentrating on, and feeling immersed in, a mobile application. For a simulator-type game to succeed, I feel that you do need to have at least some control over what’s going on in real time.

Another issue is that of realism. The author has attempted to create a ‘perfect’ coaster experience, devoid of other riders, carriages, or structural supports. These missing elements would make for a fantastic ride in real life, but draw away from the realism of the game. I think I’d be far more interested if the ride simulated an actual roller coaster in a theme park, complete with other passengers and carriages.

In summary, SkyCoaster is a fun app to play around with. It’s worth $1 if you’re a roller coaster fan, but I feel there’s a long way to go before it offers any real, compelling gameplay. Do check it out in the App Store and let me know your thoughts on simulator-style games in general!

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Laminar Research has recently released two new versions of its X-Plane flight simulator for the iPhone and iPod touch; X-Plane Airliner and X-Plane Helicopter. Each can be purchased for $4.99 from the App Store — around half the price of the standard X-Plane game for iPhone.

X-Plane Background

X-Plane is an innovative application when compared to other flight simulators, as it uses a concept known as blade element theory. Rather than using lookup tables for determining the specific way an aircraft behaves, blade theory assigns independent values to every single element of an aircraft. This makes the software suitable for hardware such as the iPhone as it scales easily. Each download clocks in at under 10MB (incredibly small for a flight simulator).

X-Plane is capable of modeling complex aircraft designs easily, including helicopters, rockets, the Harrier Jump Jet, and the NASA Space Shuttle. There are three versions available for iPhone at present; the standard X-Plane release, X-Plane Airliner, and X-Plane Helicopter. This review will be focusing on the latter two versions which joined the line up in the last couple of days.

X-Plane Airliner Features

X-Plane Airliner lets you take control of four different jumbo jets. You can fly a Boeing 777, 747 or 787, or an Airbus A-380. Each of these aircraft have their differences and similarities, but the software does an excellent job of making it feel as though you really are in control of a powerful machine.

The controls for the Airliner edition take the form of a throttle, flaps, speed brakes and trim, and incorporating a full Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS). This full glass EFIS system, with airspeed, heading, altitude, vertical speed, Mach number, DME, and HSI is displayed in the same manner as real airliners.

While it is simple to get an aircraft off the ground, maneuvering it correctly and landing safely is somewhat more of a challenge. Tilting the iPhone controls the direction of the plane (banking left and right, or pushing the nose up and down).

You can fly between 98 airports spread over 60 x 180 miles of terrain, giving you plenty of scope for trying new areas and landing strips. The texture detail isn’t amazing, but for a 10MB download I was suitably impressed. It’s difficult to fault such an accurate flight simulator being ported to such a stripped down device.

X-Plane Helicopter Features

X-Plane Helicopter is, as the name suggests, a flight simulator for helicopters. You are able to control a lightweight Robinson R-22, the commercial Bell-206, the military Black Hawk, or the land and sea rescue ‘Sea King’. These encompass the majority of different styles of helicopter out there, providing a great range of machines to fly.

The flight-area centers around the Grand Canyon, giving you amazing views as you fly your across the various canyons and valleys. It’s a really visually appealing simulation and, according to Laminar, the software offers “the most challenging and realistic flight-models they have produced for iPhone so far.”

The controls for the helicopter version differ slightly, with the collective control being the only one to manually change. The throttle adjusts automatically, altering the engine power to maintain the desired rotor RPM as you increase the load on the rotor. As with the airliner version, tilting the iPhone controls the direction and pitch of the helicopter.

There’s no doubt that the helicopter edition offers a more challenging gameplay style, relying more on the iPhone tilt controls than the airliners. This arguably adds more depth and realism to the game and makes it my personal favorite of the two.

Future Possibilities

Laminar seem committed to improving and enhancing these miniature iPhone apps, stating:

As we update the graphics, flight, and interface technology, we will be periodically updating the various little ‘flavors’ of X-Plane for iPhone with that new technology. For example, we optimized the RAM and frame-rate for the airliner version, and those changes have been released in a standard X-Plane free-update as well. We may also import the advanced EFIS instrumentation from the airliner version to the regular version, and 2 more planes are planned for the regular version as well.

This horizontal system of innovation and change seems set to ensure that each of the small iPhone applications stay regularly updated with new features. Whichever you choose to purchase, you can be sure that you’ll benefit from the improvements to the other applications as well.

Comparable Apps

There are a number of other flight simulator applications for the iPhone which compete with X-Plane. Some examples of others to consider are:

• Armageddon Squadron – Fighter plane style missions
• Wings 2 – A flight simulator experience with slightly less realism than X-Plane
• Paper Airplane – Simple and cheesy, but fun

Please do let me know your thoughts on the new version of X-Plane. Do you feel that it provides enough entertainment for use on the iPhone, or would you prefer a flight application with more action and adventure?

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It lacks a few iPhone features, such as pinch and zoom, but will let you test while developing apps for iPhone (without using your iPhone). I think this is a great piece of software. Even though I have an iPhone, it’s inconvenient to try and view sites on it over and over while testing. It’s much easier to just keep iPhoney open and click refresh.

I tested the site with Digg (digg.com/iphone) and Leaflets (getleaflets.com), and they both worked well. I look forward to testing one of our iPhone optimized sites on iPhoney.

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