ActionChess for the iPhone

It’s been a long uphill struggle, but ActionChess should be appearing in iTunes or in the app store on your device anytime now. I wrote about this over at chesstris.com, but I’ve already submitted the first update.

It’s weird, but now that it’s been approved, I almost feel more nervous about it than I did before it was approved, while I was waiting for it to get approved. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I definitely want to get puzzle mode in there sometime in the near future, along with a new game mode that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last week or so. I have so many game mode ideas that I don’t know when I’ll find time to implement them all.

I have plans to get together with a new friend and iPhone developer on tuesday, and we’re probably going to collaborate on another game in the near-ish future also. We’re thinking about doing some kind of match-3 game, and in prep for that, I’ve made a list of all the ones I know about already on the iPhone. Let me know if you see any missing from this list (there have to be more, I’m sure of it).

Match 3 games I have or have some experience with:

  • ChocChocPop – florence’s favorite (adds powerups)
  • Gem Spinner (add “shape constraints”, background “clearing”, rotation)
  • Mix-A-Dot (adds color mixing)
  • Gemmed (adds cool “critter” mechanism and different piece types)
  • Puzzle Quest (adds RPG elements)
  • Jewel Quest II (added background “clearing”)
  • Bejewled II (played original Bejeweled, haven’t played the iPhone version)
  • Aurora Feint (like Tetris Attack)
  • Crazy Sushi (uses the Yoshi’s Cookie “slide a row” game mechanic)
  • Trism (trianges!)
  • ScribBall / CrayonBall (adds gravity, not sure if these should count)
  • Pinch ‘n Pop (also stretching the definition, but it is sort of a match-3)
  • Quadrix (“slide a row” not so much match-3 as making various shapes.)

…and the ones I haven’t (yet) played:

  • Chain3 (no movement constraints — apparently this has been out since app store launch)
  • Samurai Puzzle Battle (Puzzle Quest knockoff?)
  • Smiles (on my wishlist)
  • Diamond Twister
  • Popcorn!
  • Campaign Trail
  • Chocolate Shop Frenzy
  • Sliders (also uses “slide a row” game mechanic)
  • Slida (also uses “slide a row” game mechanic)
  • Gemlogic
  • Gems
  • Big Booty
  • Bling: Touch Fever
  • Glyph (looks to be a lot like Jewel Quest)

anyway, check out ActionChess if you have an iPhone, when you get a chance!

30 Podcasts and Geekdom

This last weekend, over at readcomics.org, we posted our 30th podcast. We were talking about the second Geek Girl’s Guide podcast at lunch, and I mentioned this milestone with the realization that I’m rather proud of it, and thought I’d share it here also. Next month it’ll have been a whole year since our first Read Comics podcast. We let the year anniversary of the blog’s inauguration pass without much fanfare, in part because I haven’t been writing nearly as much over there as I did last summer, and probably also in part because we have these few beginning posts from even a year before that. (They don’t count though.)

Anyway, I do all the editing for the podcast, which is to say, hardly any at all. Normally, I’ll just make sure the beginning and ending don’t sound terribly stupid, and trim any extraordinarily long dead-space. We’ve recorded almost every episode right from my MacBookPro’s built in microphone, which does an astoundingly good job.

I was joking with everyone on Saturday after the podcast that I really only do it for geek-cred. Yeah, I have a podcast. Yeah, it’s about comic books. What’s geekier than that?

Tangentially related, Florence pointed me this weekend to Wired’s 10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse. Number four is dissecting movies, something we do a great deal of at Read Comics. Florence thought that she is as guilty of the things on this list as I am, and furthermore that she finds some of them endearing. Yet more reasons I married the perfect geek girl for me.