Some traditional family board games translate well into the modern era in digital format, some simply don’t. Monopoly was one of the first traditional table games to make it to a computer and it’s done fairly well over the various platforms it’s graced, let alone the iPhone. There’s always been a game that I used to love playing but have never before seen move into a digital format and that’s Connect 4. Now thanks to EA, Connect 4 has graced the iPhone with all it’s chip dropping goodness.

For those who aren’t familiar with Connect 4, it’s a game with a simple premise, make a four chip line. Against a good competitor it can be a true battle of tactics and whit to get that four in a row. It’s a two player game where you’re presented with a board of holes with slots at the top for coloured chips, red or yellow, that you drop down down the board into place. When you begin a match you’re even presented with a 3D representation of the classic box which opens whilst spinning to provide you with the board ready for play. It’s a nice touch and brings just a hint of nostalgia every time you start the game.

EA have done a decent job of replicating the look and feel of the board game, tap on a lane to drop a chip in it. Simple. You can chose to play against a friend locally or wirelessly or against a rather efficient computer controlled opponent. The gameplay, especially against the computer is nice and rapid meaning games can be polished off pretty quickly, something that really suits the break-filling style of mobile game play. In the Classic game it’s you versus the computer, which is quite challenging to beat and often ends in a draw if you’re not a seasoned player. Advanced Games enables single player with Challenge Mode, Power Chips, Max Score and Pop Out game types. Each mode builds on the classic game with additions. For instance Max Score plays like Tetris with four-in-a-row chips scoring you points and being removed from the board. Power Chips plays like Max Score but some chips have special abilities like Blocker, 2x, Bomb, Heavy and Newton chips. The Pop out play mode plays just like the Classic game type but you can remove your colour chips from the bottom by sliding your finger across them. Challenge mode is pretty self explanatory with challenges such as ‘reach 20 points in a Max Score game with only 30 chips’. Each of these modes adds another interesting element to the Classic Connect 4 game play giving the game a lot more longevity than just playing and drawing frequently against the computer. Achievements are also included in the game which are unlocked as you play through the various game modes, a nice little added extra that might give you something to work for.

Advanced Modes also allows you to take on your mates in Classic, Pop Out, Max Score or Power Chips gameplay modes in either side-by-side (pass the device between two people), Face-to-Face (playing facing each other), over a WiFi network or Bluetooth. Connect 4 is particularly fun with mates, so it’s nice to see that EA has covered basically every multiplayer scenario you’re likely to want. With the simple gameplay and rapid games, Connect 4 makes a great car journey filler.

Graphically there’s not much you can do with a simple chip based board game, but as mentioned before EA have put in a few nice touches including the 3D representation of the board and the original box it used to come in. Other nice touches are all the menu icons and UI made out of the Connect 4 chips. The camera pans can be turned off if they become annoying or you want to get through the game faster. The computer player difficulty can also be adjusted through Easy, Normal and Expert, if you find besting the computer a little too easy. The play timer can also be changed from 60 seconds through to 3 minutes depending on the length of game you fancy in the advanced modes. You can also specify whether you want red or yellow tiles, depending on whether red is your lucky colour or you have a penchant for yellow. The game feedback by vibrations can also be switched off should you want and of course the audio volume for music and sound effects can also be adjusted to suit. Speaking of audio, the sound effects for the game are pretty good with loads of chip chinks and rattles. The in-game music, electro-synth swing, is quite good for about a minute, thankfully turning off the music volume lets you play your own music in the background to serenade your gaming session. Of course, EA is a seasoned player in the mobile gaming field and all the iPhone-like refinements are there including simple to navigate menus and auto-saving of your gaming progress should someone ruddily interrupt your game by calling.

Overall Connect 4 is a very refined port of an old-school board game that really suits the gaming experience made available by the touch screen. 3D rendering of the play area and board along with the additional playing modes for the single player really inject a little more longevity into what would be a pretty short game. If you’re a fan of the original board game you won’t be disappointed by this mobile version. However at $2.99/£1.79 it’s quite expensive as simple board games go, even though it’s well presented and expands on the Classic game. If you’re after a game you can play with family and friends in the car, something simple and quick for all ages, Connect 4 certainly fits the bill, but there are many other games priced much cheaper that you might want to consider. Would I spend my money on it? Probably not. Priced at 99c/59p it would be a must buy, but although I was a massive fan of the original board game, £1.79 is just too much for me for something that would only play every now and again.

Connect 4 (App Store Link) is available from the App Store for $2.99/£1.79.

Have you played EA’s ‘Monopoly Here and Now’ and thought, that’s not the Monopoly I remember? Well, EA have now released the original Monopoly for iPhone and iPod touch, so you can relive your childhood days as ruler of the London property market on the go.

If you’re not familiar with Monopoly by now, you must have been living under a rock or had no childhood what so ever, but just in case you need a recap here’s the basic premise. Essentially, Monopoly is a property board game where you have to buy properties in sets of three and build houses and hotels on successfully completed sets to collect rent from other players. Players can only buy a property they’ve landed on if it’s not currently owned or when the property is put up for auction by another player. When an opposing player lands on a property you currently own they must pay you rent based on the market value of the property and whether you have any houses or hotels built on the site. A relatively simple premise which has been the basis of many a family night in playing board games for decades.

EA have brought Monopoly to virtually every platform available. PC, consoles, handhelds and PDAs, they’ve all had a version of Monopoly in one form or another, some better than others. On the iPhone and iPod touch, EA have decided to use the power of the device to embellish the game with 3D graphics and scenery as seen in Monopoly Here & Now, which has the effect of making a simple board game become pretty resource intensive. If you’re like me and have lots of email accounts, push notification clients and like to play background music, you might find the game crying out for more memory or running rather sluggishly on an iPhone 3G or original.

Monopoly on the iPhone plays as you would expect Monopoly to play for the most part. The controls are easy to use and pretty intuitive if a little sluggish at times. The dice can be rolled by a quick shake of your device, which is something of a novelty but became pretty tedious after a couple of rounds. Thankfully EA have had the thought to put in a switch to deactivate shake rolling and have you roll the dice with a simple tap, which for a long game like Monopoly is much preferable. The ‘house rules’ can also be adjusted including earning 400 for landing on GO and winning all the collected cash from the Chance and Community Chest penalties when you land on Free Parking.

Property buying, building houses, mortgaging a property and checking ownership is all done through a zoomed in view of the board in sections which are moved between by swiping left and right. It’s an effective and simple to use interface but at times it can be a little slow to move through all the properties and options due to all the animations that can’t be skipped. The same can be said for the general play of the game, like rolling dice, collecting rent and landing on Chance and Community Chest, all the controls are simple to use but the animations for each action are often a second or so and can’t be skipped. This has the effect of slowing down the game, making it longer to play than absolutely necessary on a portable device that you often just want to pick up and play for a few minutes at a time.

Of course Monopoly isn’t really a single player game and so there are four player slots available that can either be taken up by humans or the AI. I say AI, there isn’t much in the way of ‘intelligence’ programmed into the computer controlled characters as they often make very stupid trade and property decisions that a human simply wouldn’t make. In truth, they make up the numbers and I haven’t found a problem besting them even with three of them to beat.They also have three difficulty options that simply effects the amount of times you land on their properties and they land on yours, introducing bias to the game play which can be quite irritating. It gets a little more interesting when you get your friends to play along with you, either by passing the device between you or over WiFi on the same network or Bluetooth. It can certainly make long car journeys a little more interesting, just make sure you’ve got a charger with you or you might find your iPhone out of juice before you know it.

Visually the game is pretty impressive with fully rendered 3D environments, such as the inside of a spaceship or a 60s style living room. The original board, playing pieces and dice are all rendered in 3D also, complete with two decks of cards, one for Chance and one for Community Chest. The dice have pretty realistic physics, bouncing around all over the place, and the animations for the movements of the playing pieces are pretty smooth. It’s quite fun to watch the Racing Car hurtle round the board complete with tire squeals.

The game includes a plethora of sound effects for pretty much every animation. Even the dice have a satisfying scattering sound when you roll them. On the in-game music front you’ve got several options to choose from. The game includes three music ‘Playlists’, Swing, Smooth and lounge as well as All, or you can choose User Music and as the name might suggest you can use the music from the iPod app to create a playlist to play in the game. If you find the in-game music is distracting you from your property conquest you can of course turn it off. For those of you who like to play at night or in a public place, Monopoly is a game that doesn’t really require sound effects, afterall you don’t get them in real life unless someone is being a little obnoxious.

So what’s the game like overall? Well it’s a pretty polished version of the classic game, and while it does take a while to play a game, the ability to save your progress and pick it up again means you can play in smaller chunks. The game is certainly not perfect however, with a few annoyances which might be a deal breaker for a few of you. The AI is simply woeful, but to be honest I haven’t played a portable port of the game which hasn’t included awful AI, so maybe I’m just used to it by now. The animations, although pretty and well realised, aren’t skippable and it makes the game pace slower than I would like. There is an accelerate button that can be used to speed through the movement of the playing pieces after a dice roll but it doesn’t speed up anything else. If you’re on an iPhone 3G the game is likely to demand that you ‘restart your device by holding down the power and home buttons until the Apple logo appears’, but thankfully you can just dismiss this error message and play on, even if the game behaves a little sluggish when you receive and email or text message. Another really annoying and rather cheeky thing that EA have put into Monopoly is a series of adverts for other EA games. When you win a game it pops up a message asking whether you’d like to see other EA games, an advert in a $5/£3 game! You can just dismiss it but it smacks of money grabbing on EAs behalf, something that really irritates me.

I guess the most important decision is whether the game is worth the rather expensive $4.99/£2.99, which is the same price as the Monopoly Here and Now game. The answer is, it’s probably the best Monopoly port on the iPhone and if you’re a fan of Monopoly there’s something in there to love. Whether everyone will think it’s worth the dosh, I’m not sure. It’s slow pace might really put people off but it’s visual style and 3D rendered graphics are still pretty impressive. In the end I think if you’re a fan of Monopoly, get it, you might be annoyed by somethings but it’s certainly fun to play with mates on a long journey or you’ve got some time to kill whilst watching TV or some other activity that doesn’t require your full attention. My verdict? Good, but could be better, EA really needs to address the AI issues, but it’s still fun to play. I don’t know why you would ever buy the Here and Now edition over the classic Monopoly, but then again I’m a bit biased living in London.

Monopoly is available now in the App Store for $4.99/£2.99 (App Store Link).

Remember all that time and all those quarters you spent at your local arcade playing that Simpsons arcade game? Remember how much fun it was mashing that attack button to kill endless enemies just to get Maggie back? Well, EA is bringing that experience back on the iPod Touch and iPhone. Minus the quarters. In this new Simpsons game, you play as and only Homer in a plot that doesn’t make sense. Something about doughnuts. mmmm…. doughnuts…

For key features and screenshots, go past the break. The game should be out sometime this month. (That’s what the PDF said.)

Next up, some big dev company brings Uncanny X-Men to the iPhone, XBLA, PSN or All 3. Someone? Please? Please?

“DOUGHNUTS. IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO?”

Play as Homer to help him avoid catastrophe and achieve his doughnut- driven destiny. Use touchscreen controls to punch, grab and flip, kick, butt slam, jump, pick up and throw objects, belly flop, and dodge enemies. And Homer’s not alone!

WOOHOO! REAL VOICES & SOUNDS

Authentic sound effects and famous character voices by the real, live actors from “The Simpsons” give the gameplay a true Springfield accent. And if the combined talents of artists, writers and actors doesn’t do it for you… then who needs you, get bent!    Or, simply add your own personal touch.

OUR FAVORITE FAMILY FRENZY

Earn and activate “Family Frenzy” power-ups to summon help from Marge, Maggie, Lisa and Bart, who can come to Homer’s rescue. He’s gonna need it!

A MULTI-LEVEL GLAZE OF GLORY

A hungry fat guy’s work is never done. Help Homer race through 25+ levels
in 6 different environments including Krusty Land, Channel 6, and Downtown Springfield, and run into favorite characters like Krusty,Bumblebee Man, Chief Wiggum, Squeaky Voiced Teen and The Rich Texan before the sinister plan is exposed… or EATEN.    All this and fancy-named doohickeys too!

MINI-GAMES ADD A TOUCH MORE DELICIOUSNESS

Use touch and accelerometer controls to “Slap Homer” back to life, indulge in “Doughnut Dreams,” or engage in a hilarious “Inflato-Head” balloon blowing up contest. Can all this be real? Of course not, jerk, it’s a video game played on a cell phone. But it’s pretty close!

SPRINKLE IN YOUR OWN TUNES

Listen to your own music as you play this daring and sugary arcade adventure.    Suuure. Your music is much better than ours. We only do this for a living.

EA has released a trailer for The Mirror’s Edge iPhone game that is due out next month. From the looks of it, it seems like a pretty fun game to play while either waiting for your dentist, doctor, or fecal matter to come out.

So, here’s the deal. A couple of days ago on twitter, @EA gave away 50 beta codes for the US beta on the PS3 of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I jumped on it and got one for my friend, but he wasn’t interested in it. Most of my other friends don’t use PS3, so I’ll give it out here. Following EA’s method, first to comment on this post gets it. :)

Promoted from PixelatedGeek Unfiltered (Congratulations Link)
UPDATE: It’s gone, thanks for entering. Don’t forget to drop by and let us know how BC2 handles.

EA is porting Mirror’s Edge into the iPhone.  But in this version of the game, it won’t be a first person (hardcore) pakour game.  It’ll be a side scrolling platform with some fighting. The game comes out next month, January 2010. Check out three more screenshots past the break.

Obligatory video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new in depth look into the world of Dragon Age Origin. I’m sure you heard us talking about the game on the last Pixelated Podcast. In short the game is solid. A kinda cross between KOTR and Oblivion. A full review will be live next week. Until then enjoy the video.

In an unusual cross-promotion, Old Navy is giving away free copies of Lego Rock Band during Black Friday. The only catch is that you must spend at least $20 on clothes. Also, Old Navy will be selling Rock Band 2 with a free extra Rock Band guitar.  Hmm… a clothing store selling video games. Interesting…. More info and deals on BlackFriday.info

With today being the official release date of Dragon Age Origins what better way to celebrate then with a trailer.

Leading video game developer BioWare™, a division of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), announced today that award-winning rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars will headline the in-game soundtrack for the new epic RPG, Dragon Age™: Origins. The title song from the band’s new album “THIS IS WAR” will make its world debut in Dragon Age: Origins before the highly-anticipated album (EMI’s Virgin Records) drops on December 8th. Available in the game today, fans and press can also get a first-listen of “THIS IS WAR” in an exclusive game trailer co-produced by Thirty Seconds to Mars front-man, Jared Leto.

The Beatles, "Live" on the Ed Sullivan Show

There’s not much that can go wrong with the Rock Band formula. Thus far, Harmonix has done a great job with the whole “take songs from various rock genres, invite a couple of friends and rock the night away” approach to rhythm games. Still, single band games tend to be somewhat of a mixed bag unless you’re really into those specific bands. Games like Guitar Hero: Metallica were never all that appealing to me. I like Metallica, but not to the point I would buy a whole game based around them. Plus, since Rock Band peripherals don’t work for the Guitar Hero series, I wasn’t about to shell out $200 just to play a set list of Metallica classics. Still, The Beatles: Rock Band was something I was excited about for quite some time. I’m a big fan of the Beatles, and after getting a chance to try the game hands-on at E3, I have to say I was hooked. Unfortunately, even after receiving an advanced copy from Harmonix, a series of unfortunate events made it so that I wouldn’t be able to play upon release. With my Xbox 360 dying on me and schoolwork piling up, I had very little opportunity to play the game. But now that I have played it, I have to say, I was thoroughly satisfied with the experience. The Beatles: Rock Band managed to incorporate that core Rock Band gameplay, while adding a few additions to make it an enjoyable and somewhat different experience.

Gameplay

If you’ve played a Rock Band game in the past, then you know the deal: take plastic, undersized versions of a guitar/bass and drums, and add someone on the microphone to complete your ensemble, playing along to the music track according to the onscreen instructions. There isn’t anything too different here, except for the ability to add up to three vocal parts. 3-part harmony was one of the big selling points for the game, and something that set it apart from previous entries in the series. After all, the Beatles wouldn’t be the Beatles without 3-part harmony. However, while fun and interesting, 3-part harmony isn’t as big of a thing. A good chunk of the songs offer 3-part harmony, but not all of them. There a few 2-part harmony songs and songs that have no harmony at all, so for those people looking to play the game with 5 of their friends, the set-list is slightly limited. In addition, the harmonies can get quite boring at times, with a lot of downtime in between parts where players would be singing, While fun for people playing an instrument while singing harmony, players simply singing along to harmony might be disappointed.

Another first for the series is the ability to play any of the songs right from the start, without the need to unlock everything in Story Mode. The reason for this is due to the Story Mode’s structure, which takes you through the Beatles’ performance history in chronological order. Given the format of previous Rock Band games, this would have meant that only the Beatles’ earlier hits would be available from the start, with some of their more interesting songs being unavailable until a lot later in Story Mode. And while we’re on the subject, since Story Mode is in chronological order, there’s an odd difficulty curve, with some songs being quite simple, while others are rather difficult. However, going through Beatles history, from The Cavern club in Liverpool where they got their start, to the rooftop of the Apple Corps Studio where they performed their final show, the Story Mode is such a big treat for fans. Also, there are unlockable photographs that are awarded to the player for their performance. Collecting photographs also unlocks secret prizes, such as an edited version of the 1963 Beatles Christmas album, which was sent to the Beatles’ American Fan Club.

There are also a few minor changes within gameplay. Previous games had the ability to alter the sound of a sustained note using the whammy bar. However, in order to preserve the sound of the Beatles’ music, that option was removed, along with the ability to change the type of sound filter used. While you can still use the whammy bar to collect more energy in order to use “Overdrive” (which is referred to as Beatlemania in this game) the whammy does nothing else. Also, to activate Beatlemania using the drums, there is no longer a drum fill segment necessary to complete (which was removed for the same reasons as the sound filter and whammy bar uses for guitar). Instead, after sufficiently filling the Beatlemania bar, the player must hit a successive series of notes perfectly before being prompted to hit a certain note to activate Beatlemania. Overall, the gameplay is as solid as ever with the new features being welcome addition.

Visuals

Dreamscape Sequence for "Hello, Goodbye"

Again, unlike previous entries in the series, not all songs are played before a screaming crowd. Studio sessions, as opposed to songs played in a performance venue, are performed against a colorful, expressive, and sometimes trippy dreamscape sequence representative of their music during their “studio-exclusive” era in their history. In keeping with historical accuracy, playing these studio songs in front of a live crowd would go against that, and the incorporation of the dreamscapes adds such strikingly beautiful imagery to the already colorful history of the Beatles, that it would be really hard not to enjoy it. In addition, the slightly cartoonish character designs for the Beatles band members work extremely well, also adding to the game’s colorful presentation.

Overall

The game is highly enjoyable, but only if you’re a fan of both the Rock Band series and The Beatles. While there are many of the Beatles’ well known songs in the game’s library, this is a game more tailored to fans of The Beatles than anyone else. The game’s original soundtrack, which is again completely unlocked right from the start, is highly varied, enjoyable and very representative of the band’s evolving style over the course of their career. In addition, with entire Abbey Road album (minus the songs already packaged with the game) available as DLC and more on the way in the coming months, the game is sure to keep Beatles fans entertained.