Ramp Champ Review: Go to the Carnival on your iPhone
- Simplistic
- Easy to Play
- Few Bugs
- Addictive
If you are a listener of our podcast, you’ve probably heard us (mainly me) getting all excited about the latest iPhone game , Ramp Champ, from the design geniuses at the Iconfactory and the code gurus at DS Media Labs. Well, today is the day we have been waiting for, the app finally released into the app store late last night and I have been playing it pretty much ever since.
Ramp Champ takes the classic game of Skee-Ball and puts it on its head. The game play is pretty much as simple as it gets on the iPhone, you simply slide your finger from the bottom of the screen up to roll your ball at the various targets. Out of the box, Ramp Champ includes 4 different styles of Skee-Ball: Clown Town, Breakwater Bay, Space Spin, and the Icon Garden. But using the in-app purchasing you can get two add-ons, both costing $.99 and including 2 new themes as well as various new prizes.
By far the most impressive of Ramp Champ’s features is it’s design. The Iconfactory is known for it’s superb design and this game is no exception.Immediately upon launching the app you become immersed in the carnival atmosphere through the impressive typography and phenomenal use of texture. The user interface is simple and clean but does not stray away from the overall feel, the tab bar the garnishes the bottom of 99% of iPhone apps, for example, is still there in spirit but it’s face is replaced with various carnival style posters. If the design alone doesn’t put you in the midway spirit, the music and sounds will certainly get you there. They are so good, in fact, that I don’t think you should play the game without them.
The gameplay is as addictive as an iPhone game can be. Each individual ramp theme has a separate set of 3 goals, which are surprisingly motivating and I’ve found they actually give you some hint on how you should play the ramp. For every 500 points you receive you get a ticket, just like you would get at a carnival, with these tickets you can get various virtual prizes, including Ollie, the Twitterrific bird. Unfortunately, the game has a tendency to crash occasionally when “printing your tickets” and at some other times during gameplay. I’ve also found that on occasion the ball will get stuck on the dividers between the various levels of targets. Luckily, the ball disappears after a few seconds and the game play resumes. If it weren’t for the crashing and few bugs, this could be the perfect iPhone game.
Overall, I’ve found Iconfactory and DS Media Lab’s Ramp Champ to be absolutely deserving of it’s $1.99 price tag even with the bugs. For more coverage on Ramp Champ be sure to listen to the next episode of the MacApper Podcast, releasing Monday morning.
The game looks absolutely fantastic. But it’s just as aggravating as it is beautiful. It seems to crash literally every 3-5 rounds. I’ve also spent a bunch of tickets on prizes, and it crashes, so it doesn’t save them. Driving me nuts because it’s so beautiful and addictive when it’s actually working.
We’ve pinned down what’s causing the crashing and are testing fixes now. Hopefully we’ll be submitting the update to the App Store within the next few days. Hang in there and thanks for your great feedback!
Ged, I don’t mean to slam you or anything, but I do wonder – these constant crashes really can’t have surfaced just now, can they? I bought the game last night and just as it has been reported here, it really does crash in regular intervals. Why did you decided to release it despite the crashes? Or did you just test the game on an iPhone 3G S?
We tested Ramp Champ on a host of devices with over 50 testers over a period of a month and a half. None of them reported the problems that users are seeing now. We suspect it’s because of the release of the 3GS near the end of the beta and around that same time that’s when some code changes were made to the game. By the end of the cycle, beta testers either were simply not playing it anymore, or had upgraded their devices.
Also, we did extensive testing on the iPod touch 1st gen because we thought that would be the slowest / lowest memory device, but that assumption was wrong. It is in fact the iPhone 3G that is causing the most problems because of the fact that the telephony app hogs device memory. So we ended up looking for trouble in the wrong place. Lesson learned.
All of these problems are corrected in 1.0.1. Hopefully Apple will release it soon.
A quick note to let you all know that Ramp Champ 1.0.1 has been released in the App Store. This update fixes problems with the application crashing associated with high memory use as well as improves performance on old devices. We recommend everyone upgrade to the new version.
Thanks!
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