iPhone App Zealot

Consider yourselves warned: Eliminate Pro delivers addictive first-person shooter (FPS) game-play on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The energy recharge cycle ensures plenty of time to eat and take bio breaks. If it wasn’t for the recharge cycle, you would be a slave to ngmoco‘s wildly successful game. The game itself is free. Buying power cells to replenish energy occurs through in-game purchase.  Without energy, you can play but you cannot earn credits. Fortunately, ngmoco and Plus+ provide a number of cross-promotional opportunities for credits and power cells.

Credits drive both your level advancement and your ability to buy better armor and weapons. Credits are also used to upgrade them. Each time you kill an opponent, they drop credits and health power up that can be picked up by anyone. Taunting (shaking your iPhone or Touch) over a dead body adds to the credit score at the end.

Energy drives your ability to stay in the game. Each round takes a third of your energy bar. Four power cells replenish a third of your bar. You can wait to recharge naturally on a two hour cycle, or you can spend 4-12 power cells to replenish your energy bar. While energy is zero, you can play but not earn credits. You an also increase your ranking, not level, which is used by the matchmaking system to usually get a roughly equal four-way death match. I tried to lower my ranking by getting killed as much as possible and not killing anyone. No luck. Rank only advanced or stayed equal on zero energy. There may be other ways to manipulate the ranking system, but this is one they covered. A quick check of GamePro does not list any cheats. I find that gratifying. Nothing tanks a FPS than easy cheats that destroy fair-play.

This app plays best over WiFi, and I have had good-luck over 3G. YMMV on 3G. Some report not fairing as well as WiFi. I claim they are whiners.

Touch Arcade has a great info-post on what you need to know to get started quickly in Eliminate Pro and not was your precious credits going down dead-end paths.

Eliminate Pro Wiki provides a great buying guide comparing relative merits of the weapons and armor.

Eliminate Pro (Free)

Flick Fishing went on sale for $.99 on 13 November, dropping from $1.99. Flick Fishing uses the accelerometer to simulate casting as well as setting the hook. Track tension and fish strength on top while you reel in the fish. Seven locations provide a variety of scenery and challenging levels of difficulty. Additionally, Freeverse’s fish are celebrating too. Apparently too much birthday cake for the entire month of November yields higher than normal weight. Recently Flick Fishing incorporated Plus+ social networking, high score tracking functionality. Smooth game-play and beautiful graphics earn this app high marks.