brave [little] meme

Mini-Review: My Brute for iPhone

If you’re into social “MMO” type games, the iPhone or iPod Touch are about as good a platform as you’ll find for your genre. Unfortunately, the kind of social games the App Store is awash with tend to be poorly-concealed clones of old staples like iMob, iMafia, iKnights, Vampires, Zombies and so on - barely more than re-skinnings of bug ridden leveling games based on barely more than HTML layouts.

My Brute is not one of those games. As a well executed iPhone adaptation of the popular Flash arena fighting game, My Brute brings with it a level of polish and adorability not commonly found in many of its peers.

The concept is simple: You start a martial arts dojo, choose your main fighting style, and create between one and three fighters, or ‘brutes.’ Then you pit these against others and watch them fight with an ever increasing variety of weapons and perks. You only get six fights a day per brute though, so choose wisely! 

The novel thing about My Brute is that there is no actual fighting involved - the skill is in choosing the right opponents based on your own statistics, then sit back and watch the fight play out. The more you win, the better your fighter gets.

This simple premise is greatly enhanced by the game’s social aspect, which entails recruiting pupils into your dojo as well as finding a master for yourself. Interestingly, both the master and pupil gain greatly from this union, encouraging more widespread use of the social networking features. 

The game’s social side runs on top of the increasingly popular Feint social gaming platform, which requires no upfront registration and provides gamers with lobbies, chat, and the ability to find each other. If you’re a Facebook or Twitter user, you can also log in with your existing credentials.

In a nutshell, the ability to maintain a dojo full of deeply customisable - yet always adorable - little fighters and compete against your friends for the most powerful dojo makes My Brute well worth the £2.99 (UK App Store) price of admission. 

Give it a try, and if you’re looking for a dojo, our Angry Kitteh Dojo will welcome you with open arms - just enter the master code IFDIGHFE and you’re good to go.

My Brute for the iPhone and iPod Touch can be found here [iTunes link].

Monday Fail Roundup

I’m not sure what’s wrong with the interwebs today, but I couldn’t help detecting a higher and usual fail ratio in the ebb and flow of today’s news inanity. I will therefore take up the role of grumpy old man, and list them here for your perusal.

HipHopGamer finds a way to use the term “Killzone” to boost views to a completely pointless article which can be summed up with the words “Brink is Pretty.” Note to bloggers: provide a source and context for your article, and use actual grammar if at all possible.

Ars Technica fails to remember that games are meant to be fun, and gives the rather enjoyable Prototype (Xbox360, PC, PS3) an abysmal review on the grounds that you play a morally dubious character. I hadn’t realised a moral choice component had become a necessary part of all new game releases.

Wired graces us with an utterly inane article on buyer’s remorse, listing gems along the lines of  ”Sucks to be you is you have an iPhone 3G because the 3GS is now out, so you should have waited.” Boggles the mind.

Finally, a perfect example that you just can’t trust any one source anymore. Here’s a report on how analysts say the iPhone’s just not ready for the enterprise, and here’s another saying the exact opposite. 

Oh, what fun.

Follow E3 ‘09 Live

This year’s E3 holds many a promise. Secret Microsoft demos, unexplained early starts hinting at groundbreaking announcements (or possibly an expectation of bad time keeping), leaks galore for some of our favourite gaming franchises and a massive, towering pile of garbage.

With so much going on, it’s important for the clued-up gentleman gamer to have at hand the latest sources of information, so as not to appear misinformed at the next gaming-related chat over brandy and cigars at the Gentlemen’s Club.

You might therefore want to keep an eye on TeamXbox, who will be twittering E3, as well as 1up’s liveblog and twitter feed here. Either way, you’re sure to be a hit when next talking to the ladies about the latest developments in gaming entertainment.