ZIGGURAT, AND OTHER IPHONE GAMES THAT ARE ACTUALLY PRETTY NEAT

So did anyone hear that Tim Rogers and co., the infamous crew at love it or hate it video game gonzo analysis site Action Button, released a video game a while ago?



Old news, I know, but I bought it yesterday for a dollar and so far it's been pretty neat. It's very much an Action Button game in that the whole thing's designed around a single mechanic, and everything else is a logical extrapolation of that one's mechanic. A bit like Canabalt, with a bit less heart but more shooting and technical expertise. Supposedly there's an achievement for playing past the heat death of the universe but so far I'm nowhere near that limit.

Anyone played this game and liked it/hated it? Could this be the beginning of something great, or is it merely the next step in the expansion of Tim Rogers's cult of personality?

Alternatively, if nobody cares about Ziggurat, anyone else played an iphone game lately that took them by surprise by how good it was?

EDIT: changed Rodgers to Rogers, whoops!

Basically you are a soldier standing on a mountain. You may or may not be the last human alive. Alien robots attack you from below. You shoot them with your gun until you die.

There's more to it than that, obviously. You move your finger across the bottom of the screen to aim your gun in an arc. Hold down your finger and the gun charges, but hold it down too long and the charge reduces, forcing you to charge another shot. Charged shots go in a straight line, while weak shots are affected by gravity and fall in parabolas. Also, the heads of the robots are constantly growing and shrinking. If you hit a robot when it's head is at its largest with a charged shot, you set off a chain reaction that destroys many, many robots. Fail to do so and the robot is knocked away, but does not explode, forcing you to scramble for crowd control.

The review press has been treating it as an "infinite" game like Canabalt, but the creators claim that there's actually nine or so hours of content packed into the thing, with an actual ending and everything. Of course the game is hard enough that I will probably never see the ending in my lifetime, but whatever!

There are pretty good reviews of this game here and here. I dunno, I don't want to oversell it, but it's pretty cool, alright? The controls take a bit of getting used to, but once you figure everything out, it's like a light switch turns on in your head and it's awesome.