Bring on those undead bastards

First off, this app is a bargain and as of writing is priced at 59 pence (99 cents in the US) and I definitely urge you to download it.

I had seen iDracula’s app icon before and it didn’t really stun me or speak out to me, this may have been because I hadn’t seen any of the game-play. Thankfully to the joys of Twitter and Threevue (the much more efficient blogger than yours truly) I was informed of iDracula, so not having dropped some pennies for an app in a few days I chose to delve into vampire hunting.

iDracula is the iPod’s pleasant cousin to COD:WAW’s Nazi Zombies or GoW2 Horde mode, there is no back-story and really there shouldn’t be contrary to a lot of the reviews on the App Store. What you do have are two modes: Survival and Rush.

Survival is your typical start with few; end with thousands of monsters mauling your face off and using your entrails as a scarf deal (or that’s how it works out for me usually.) In Survival you begin with a pistol and several werewolves which can easily be fought off yet gradually more and more will appear, thankfully the dead beasts which you have slain will drop items in the form of ammo and weapons to help with your predicament. The aim of Survival is to obviously survive but you’ll find this easier said then done especially when the little head crab lookalikes start getting faster and the vampire pops up, prepare to run around screaming like a little girl. To aid you you’ll also gain perks which have special abilities such as running faster, weapons pushing monsters back further or more points per kill.

Rush however does not include the perks or different weapons, instead you are launched into a full on attack of werewolves armed with a Gatling gun with infinite ammo. Bitchin’

Now onto the more technical aspects. Considering that you’re going to have at least 25 – 35 monsters on screen at once it’s surprising that there isn’t any frame-rate slowdown and with the quality of the animation it is downright amazing what is on show, all this entwined with impressive sound effects really make this app stand out from the crowd. Graphical, iDracula is stunning with it’s own style of monsters instead of the typical generic cut-outs like many games on the market try to pass off and a good array of enemies keep it fresh.

You’ll be controlling your Vampire Hunter by two D-pad wheels in the lower corners of the screen, the left controlling your movement and the right aiming and firing your weapon. The controls work in a multitude of ways you can either spin them to where you want or use it like a standard D-pad and still get the desired effect.

The only gripes I have with iDracula is in Survival Mode there is no telling when you have advanced a level (not too sure if the perks are level ups) a simple change of music or subtle notification would really help to keep you aware of this, hopefully this will be rectified in any future updates. Also, with the control wheels on both sides it prohibits being able to see incoming enemies which then forces you to use the radar (kinda hard when your slaying like a mofo)

In terms of multiplayer, there is none and I’m thinking it would be pretty hard for a two-player session, but you never know. However in a future update I would very much like to see leader-boards or a challenge feature.

For 59 pence (99 cents) this is a worthwhile purchase, so grab it whilst you can before the update including a new mode, levels, creatures and a weapon, with the update comes a new and larger price tag. Grab it here

Keeping it short and sweet as I’m writing this from my iPod but in other news, Xbox LIVE will be free during the 17th-24th I believe to celebrate the GTA DLC. DLC Galore!

By the way if there is anyone out there who knows how to get the WordPress engine (or whatever it’s called) onto a Streamline.net host please let me know, for the better of the site.

EDIT: Some information about the expansion can be found here at Bungie.net

Now please keep in mind that I: A) live in the UK B) Am only a Silver Account C) My Xbox is never continuously hooked up to the Internet (the last two are due to lack of funds which should be rectified soon…hopefully)

In the early hours of the 19th I was constantly checking for the update when I began to give up and opted to go to sleep in hopes that when I woke up it would be there, and it was. Phew! I was notified that there was an update and the installation began which took around 5-6 minutes (I don’t have the greatest speed, Internet-wise but it apparently works well enough) I was then greetedby what I feared would be the feature lacking the most; the Avatars, yet over the time I’ve been using it I’ve grown quite attached to the little fellow and keep going back to tweak him or give him new outfits. The outfits however are what keep the Avatar from shining, you can’t change the colours and it lacks a lot of difference, hopefully to get people more excited that there will be FREE outfit packs or at least some which can come from games, the coolness of wearing a Gears armor or a WWII helmet from Call of Duty: WAW would definitely be a lot to ask for but most certainly would sweeten the deal.

Another thing which could be free and have a lot of people getting attached to their Avatar would be “A Kingdom for Keflings”, when the Wii was released you got WiiSports and seeing yourself as a little person sort of deep down inside got you attached to it, so how are we supposed to feel that if we can only play a trial game and then be told we have to pay the same price for it as Duke Nukem 3D, it does not bode well.

The design of everything now gives the Xbox a nice new image and greatly improves the speed of things a lot especially the old dashboard within the guide button, it just seems a lot more friendly although it took me about an extra five minutes than it should have to work out how to change the theme (it’s in “My Xbox” now) On release day you could see blatant hiccups which can be explained by the amount of people downloading the update which is acceptable; at least LIVE didn’t crash completely.

Now here are the gripes which I will condense because it’s mainly because I’m not hooked up constantly and I’m a Silver: I can’t use the party system, why not, what if I wanna chat with some people before they go off and play games, it just seems strange and when you’re not hooked up, you have nothing really to look at and everything looks empty whereas the old dashboard just looked like a menu and it didn’t bother you that you weren’t hooked up, now the Inside Xbox tab and the marketplace look empty and you want those sub-tabs with the fancy pictures and easy access (I do like how when you are hooked up and insert a game disk if you don’t play immediately you are treated to a picture within the game, not just the box art)

Now here are the location gripes: Community Games and Netflix are missed out in the UK, yeah we don’t have Netflix here but hopefully Microsoft and LoveFilm will team up to provide a similar service, it’s a killer feature and we can only sit and wait for the Community Games to arrive to other places than the US.

I think that wraps most of it up for now, If I feel or am told that I’ve left something out then expect a littler blog entry. (Don’t be afraid to comment on what I’ve missed)

Oh. and installing Gears of War to the hard drive takes approx. 12 mins

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