Rolando

Of The Big Three it's Microsoft that is best placed to take advantage of the future, reckons mobile gaming giant ngmoco.

Mobile game publisher ngmoco has slammed Sony's Next Generation Portable and Nintendo's 3DS.

ngmoco boss Neil Young has said that Rolando 3 won't appear until the company can make it work as a free-to-play game.

Simon Oliver is the embodiment of a dream. He represents what other developers, mining for glory in the wilds of the iTunes App Store, want to uncover; he's an aspirational example to the thunderous horde galloping their way proverbially West with their coding pix-axes held aloft.

Publisher ngmoco has reversed its decision to remove Rolando from the iTunes App Store so that Rolando 2 could launch without any competition from the original.

Neil Young of iPhone third-party publisher ngmoco has said he doesn't expect his company to start producing games that are exclusive to the new iPhone 3GS.

"I don't think so," he told MTV when asked about the possibility. "I think we'll continue to build games for [all of] the three classes of devices that are out there."

"Obviously they all share the same operating system and have some slight differences in hardware, but we'll build our software to span across those three," he clarified.

Read more

Rolando creator Simon Oliver reckons Apple's App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch is "so far ahead" that rivals Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will have to react quickly or risk being left behind.

Ngmoco founder Neil Young has confirmed that two sequels are on the way for iPhone game Rolando.

The first one will be released in June and titled Rolando 2: The Quest for the Golden Orchid. Young said it will be "a whole new game" complete with four worlds, 36 levels and "a bunch of new mechanics and features".

Free level updates will follow, as was the case with the first Rolando game. Then Rolando 3 is planned for release in November - followed by yet more free levels.

Read more

Touch Arcade reports that Rolando, the excellent iPhone platformer, has received a free update that includes five "secret" levels.

The new version of the game also improves its physics and rendering engine. The first level is unlocked when you finish the first world of the game's story; the rest are unlocked as you complete them in sequence.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail claims that Rolando has now been downloaded 700,000 times, and that creator Simon Oliver "is on track to make his first million".

Read more

Rolando publisher ngmoco has cut the price of the iPhone stunnah to GBP 2.99 / USD 4.99, and said that not only is a sequel in development, but free levels for the original will be released soon too.

Rolando developer HandCircus has said work on a sequel to the acclaimed iPhone game is already under way.

That's according to excellent website Offworld, which also reminds us that the free, Lite version of Rolando is on the App Store too.

There are no further details about the sequel.

Read more

Rolando developer Simon Oliver has hinted that we will see more of the cute little rolling-blobs platform-puzzler in 2009.

Owners of the sleek iPhone accounted for 14 per cent of all mobile gaming downloads across the US during November 2008, according to a comScore report.

No sooner do we get our accelerometers in a twist over ngmoco's excellent Rolando than the publisher cuts the price to GBP 3.49.

Rolando may have a lot in common with LocoRoco - simple, colourful graphics free from outlines and textures, smiling, charismatic blobs and tilt-based controls - but it's a forgivably cynical way to catch the attention of App Store browsers; a split-second sales-pitch in a market where pixels and prose are at a premium. As a strategy it's not without risk, either: LocoRoco is a fond memory, and tarnishing it would imperil the goodwill ngmoco has built up with its cheap and cheerful catalogue of early releases. Ultimately it's shrewd, if slightly disappointing, because Rolando is its own game, among the best the iPhone has to offer, and would still have been had the developer, HandCircus, come up with its own signature visuals.

The first and most obvious distinction between Rolando and LocoRoco is that rolandos only react to players tilting the screen once they have been selected, either individually with a tap or as a group with a drag-box. Otherwise they stand still, immune to your input. Once under your control, they can be made to jump by an upward flick of the thumb, or deselected with a quick tap on an empty part of the screen, and this brings them to a near-instant standstill. Immediately Rolando overcomes one of LocoRoco's biggest issues - regularly losing control of disparate blobs and suffering the consequences - and shows similar restraint in its economical use of the iPhone touch-screen.

The goal is still to transport as many of the creatures under your control to the end as possible, but levels are short, and split up further still by state-saving checkpoint balloons, while rolando-killing enemies are set on specific repeating movement paths, and don't roam off-course looking for a frustrating fight, like LocoRoco's Mojas. The tilt controls are also precisely calibrated: rolandos take a split second to speed up, and there's an appreciable deadzone to soften the initial lurch. Staying in control and out of trouble is in your hands, but supported by HandCircus, and it's hard not to conclude that Rolando's developers weren't just conscious of the tilt-and-touch control system's potential imprecision, but obsessed with it.

Read more