Manufacturing Content today released Tractor Beam 1.0 for iPhone and iPod Touch. The retro arcade title is part of the wave of lo-fi games released for the high tech multitouch platform. Tractor Beam combines the popular “swinging games” style of gameplay with the look of Atari’s ‘Asteroids’, adding modern features like a dynamic ambient soundtrack. It is among the new wave of games embracing the latest technology but with a nod to the classic games of eras gone by.
The game itself could be said to be a part of the popular “Swinging Games” genre recently highlighted by Apple on the App Store, along with favorites like ‘Hook Champ.’ This gameplay is then transposed to the world of arcade games circa 1979, with the player instead swinging a spaceship through an increasingly dense asteroid field.
Inspired by endless nights playing Atari’s ‘Asteroids’ and a fascination with the latest in Apple technology, Tractor Beam’s developers aimed to create an intuitive game with broad appeal that would recapture some of the glory of classic arcade games while offering the benefits of Apple’s platform, not the least of which is the ability to choose your own background music from the iPod application. Its own evolving loop-based soundtrack is something that would not have been possible in the games it emulates while the music itself is reminescent of classic science fiction movies. Continued…
ATC Pro is a realistic sim application that puts users in control of the flow of aircraft in and out of airports. Planes arrive from a map edge location, announced by an audio ding. It is up to the user to clear aircraft for takeoffs and guide each plane to its intended destination, which may be an airport or fly-over to another map edge. Any traffic coming into the simulated air traffic controller’s airspace must also be landed safely.
Byte Squared today is proud to announce the release of Doc2 3.0, an update to its word processor application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Doc2 now includes support for the Microsoft Word .doc format and integration with Google Docs. Doc2 features easy character and paragraph formatting, copy and paste, with up to 100 levels of undo/redo. There is support for tables, as well as images. Auto-correction and auto-completion and searching of text within documents is also included.
Kabuki Vision today released NoteMaster 2.3, an update to their popular note-taking app for iPhone and iPod Touch. NoteMaster makes it easy to create great-looking notes by inserting images, photos, and headers right inside the text. Fonts can be selected for each note for a customized look. Other features include categories, password-protection, hyperlink detection, full-text search, e-mail, and syncing with Google Docs. Version 2.3 allows font selection and supports hyperlinks.