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#Galcon com software#
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If you like sci-fi strategy, and don’t mind creating your own challenges by tweaking difficulty levels and stages, it’s worth checking out even in its current form. Though unstructured and in need of deeper backgrounds and real audio given its current $10 price tag-the amount being charged by major game companies for highly sophisticated titles-Galcon is one of the most memorable touchscreen-based iPhone games we’ve yet played. Something about its simplicity leaves room for the imagination to run wild we found ourselves picturing Galcon as the template for an even more sophisticated galactic war game with oversized touchscreens, sort of like Domination, the video game played in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again. In any case, as a demonstration of how the touchscreen can enable strategic gameplay, this is a powerful little game. Structure and multiplayer competitive modes could make this game an A title. As-is, Galcon basically dumps you into what feel like repetitive individual types of gameplay, at one skill level that can be rapidly mastered and tired of. A campaign mode that alternated between the five play modes, giving you levels of increasing difficulty spread across various types of missions, would be ideal to challenge a player for days or weeks. However, the game goes wrong in that it doesn’t offer any fully managed single-player experience on its own-or networked play. Where Galcon goes right is in offering 10 levels of difficulty and a total of five play modes to choose from as we continued to test the game, we realized that although the action is straightforward, moving from similar stage to similar stage, all it takes is turning up the difficulty to a level that’s challenging to your personal skill set and suddenly you won’t be winning so often.
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From level to level, the presentation is highly similar-the developer could, and should, create deeper and more varied background art, as well as sound effects that don’t sound like someone mouthing noises-but if you really get into the action, you mightn’t care that much. Act fast and your opponent will only need to be removed from one or two planets wait too long and you’ll need to fight it out across the entire array of formerly gray moons. Point 50 of your ships at a 25-unit gray planet and you conquer it, achieving a new base from which to launch ships at the opponent’s planet. The number on each planet says either how many spaceships are on it, or how many it will take to conquer. You touch your first green planet and point to another planet, gray or orange. Succeeding is a matter of moving quickly. These modes definitely make Galcon more exciting and challenging. Other modes permit you to play against two computer opponents at once, against an invisible computer opponent, or against the clock as you race to conquer all the on-screen planets yourself. Simply explained, you’re trying to conquer the on-screen galaxy by preventing your opponent from occupying even one home planet-the minute you succeed in wiping out all the orange or other opponent-colored planets on the screen, you win. In its most basic mode, Galcon presents you with a screen containing a collection of planets, one green and controlled by you, one in another color such as orange that’s controlled by a computerized opponent.
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