I went back to play the game tonight on both my ipad and iphone, and this game rocks. It is one of the first 2d platformers that I like with swipe controls, it takes a second to get used to them, but the developer did well to make them so smooth and efficient. I don't know too much about the difficulty since I havent played it all that much even though I bought it at release. Mutant storm, ballistic, gta3, and inferno have been keeping me busy as of late. The beginning levels seem relatively easy, but I do die quite a bit. The animation of death is kind of cool in this game. I like the looks of the hero, he looks cool kind of out of Nintendo land. And the way he shoots reminds me of Robotech, so it is fun to watch all the missiles fly. That to me is the funnest part of the game, how the shooting mechanics work. The game is a class act, and well worth downloading especially now that it is free.
Yep, I should certainly have phrased that better than I did. The point I meant to make there was that if this IAP isn't profitable (as opposed to simply examining the number of people taking advantage of it), it will decline in popularity. I'd be highly surprised if most games with IAP were raking in thousands of dollars from that, though, let alone amounts that could be considered "astronomical profits". However, if an app developer is making money through people taking advantage of IAP, there's nothing inherently wrong with that whatsoever, no more than there is something inherently wrong with a developer making money off the initial purchase price. However, what can be an issue is how this IAP is implemented: if it is a "pay wall" (e.g. the game gives the "option" of grinding for a week or paying $1 to skip that), that's pretty scummy. If, on the other hand, the game offers the very definition of unnecessary and optional IAP as this game does, there is absolutely no logical or fair reason to get up in arms about it. Gabrien's constant argument is that IAP is bad, full stop, and automatically makes the game unbalanced and the developer unethical, regardless of what that IAP actually is or how it has been implemented. This position is nonsensical and hugely biased, and people should just stop giving it credence until he can back up his viewpoint instead of just repeating it like a mantra. No, that's kind of the point of the game. ^_- I tend to find that most levels, at first glance anyway, seem almost impossible to finish without getting hit at least once; it's part of the gameplay to figure out the elegant combination of moves that will get you through unscathed. To be honest, I quickly gave up on striving for perfection and settled for just getting the Explorer badges on my first playthrough. Full completion comes later. This argument is a bit loaded, actually, for a couple of reasons. First, you have the option to buy or not buy a game; the developer is offering that game for sale, but nobody is forcing you to buy it. If you judge a product to be worth the dollar being asked for it, and pay that dollar, you're getting what you expected out of the deal, and what you agreed to pay for. What happens after that is largely irrelevant; unless the actual content and nature of the game changes markedly (which does happen, albeit rarely, as in the case of Dark Meadow), the developer can raise the price, lower it, or make it entirely free, and you still got exactly what you paid for. You cannot fairly claim to have been "screwed over" or "ripped off" just because a product dropped in price after you willingly paid what you believed that product was worth; if you hadn't thought it was worth the price, you wouldn't have paid for it. It doesn't matter at all that with the benefit of hindsight you would have waited, because you made your decision of your own free will at the time without the upcoming price drop being a factor. You saw a game you wanted, judged it worth paying for, bought it, and (hopefully) had fun with it. Second reason is, of course, that it is a fact of life that pretty much everything in the app store goes on sale or drops to free at some point - it's largely just a matter of when. Whether it is three days or three months, there's always going to be somebody who bought the game the very day before it dropped in price - they often post here to that effect, in fact. Somebody's always going to feel "screwed over" or "ripped off" - and it is absolutely natural to feel that way - but that doesn't mean they were. Of course, the fact that we're usually talking about games that sell for a dollar, and that the developer doesn't even see all of that dollar means that perspective actually does need to be a factor here. We're not talking $60-$100 games here, we're talking a limited market selling $1 games that often don't even let their authors break even on development costs; we've already seen that hoping a game sells well on its own merits is monumentally naive. In fact, if the only way to actually make a profit were to do exactly what you'd outlined above, then like it or not that'd become the norm, and it would have to be tolerated until the community/environment changed enough to let developers change also.
Probably better posted in the main thread, but I also didn't know it had been taken down. Off to check my download history to see if I can still redownload it.... Great game. Ashame if it truly has been removed permanently.
Yep, can't even pull it up in my purchase history. Posted in the main game thread for continued discussion.
I am saving the .IPA file off my hard drive... too bad that game was really entertaining. So this is the side effects of buying Apps off the App Store, when the App is no longer available there is no way to get it back is like trowing money away.
