Looks like a nice surprise for european readers: the SteelSeries Stratus XL is now available from Apple’s online store, with next-day delivery! From what I can tell, availability seems limited to Germany at this time; not hugely surprising, as SteelSeries has a strong presence there.
It seems the Stratus XL just appeared for sale very recently, as SteelSeries themselves still are not listing this controller as officially available.
I’m not sure how availability for the rest of Europe works, or when this controller is likely to make it’s way to the rest of the world. My guess: expect it everywhere within the next few weeks. Let’s all just hope this new Stratus doesn’t suffer from the disconnect bugs and lag of the previous Stratus.
Update:
It looks like the Stratus XL is rolling out to other parts of Europe, with reports of availability in the Netherlands and France.
A great looking update is on the horizon for one of the best iOS games ever made.
It sounds like the bulk of this update will be in the form of major graphics and performance improvements for A8 class devices. In addition, some sort of competition is planned to cerebrate Oceanhorn’s first year on the App Store.
Oceanhorn was previously updated with a “Game of the Year Edition” patch which included additional content and gameplay. If you haven’t downloaded Oceanhorn yet, you’re missing out on one of the best RPGs available for iOS.
Stickman Ice Hockey, a new sports game in the long-running Stickman series, was just released with full MFi controller support.
The Stickman sports games combine casual, pick-up-and-play gameplay with excellent MFi controller integration. If that’s your thing, you should definitely give this Stickman Ice Hockey a download.
Monkey Racing enters an App Store which is absolutely loaded with racing games. Realistic simulators, casual drift racers, arcade combat racers, kart racers⦠no matter your preference, there is a racing game to fit it. Even better news for controller fans, a large selection of these games support game controllers. So against this landscape, where does Monkey Racing fit? Can it carve out enough of a niche for itself to justify a download, or is it destined to be lost behind a sea of Asphalts and Angry Birds?
Lets start with what this game is. Monkey Racing fits solidly in the causal racing department. The game auto-accelerates, braking doesnât really happen, forget about drifting and slipstreaming. Winning in Monkey Racing is about careful steering into pickup drops, intelligently timing attacks and abilities, executing pit-maneuver style takedowns of opponents, and making it through the end without letting your opponents do the same.
Use missiles, turbo, shields, and shocks to take down your opponents and reach the finish in first
To a hardcore racing gamer, this might seem a bit simplistic. Personally, Iâve always been a fan of this type of racer, though. Strip out all the gimmicks, licenses, and IAP of the modern racing game, and youâre left with gameplay that straightforward enough to pick up and play on the go, while offering a true âevery little bit countsâ challenge for those looking for perfection.
In a lot of ways, this stripping out of unnecessary gameplay complexity feels reminiscent to Angry Birds Go; Rovioâs MFi controller compatible casual kart racer. But Monkey Racing brings some significant differences to a similar foundation; some good, some not so good.
Graphically, Monkey Racing feels pretty much exactly like it is: an indie game. While thereâs nothing inherently bad with the graphics, itâs clear that graphic design isnât the strong suit of this developer. Textures are somewhat bland, environments lack distinction, the monkeys themselves feature some strange shaders that make them feel almost metallic or plastic. Itâs certainly serviceable, but it lacks personality. This is unfortunate, as personality is something the rest of the game oozes. With that said, on a technical level, there is nothing to complain about – everything flies at a solid 60fps at full resolution on any modern device. For a racing game, this is critical
The framerate is solid and the sky is nice, but there is general blandness to the textures which is disappointing
Sound design, much like the graphic design, is serviceable but lacking in personality. The monkeys make monkey noises, the cars make car noises. The soundtrack consists of one (admittedly good) rock style song, endlessly looping throughout every level. The monkeys make stereotypical monkey noises, but itâs a far cry from the personality imbued by the birds in Angry Birds – the benchmark in building a game with personality for a mobile audience.
While Monkey Racing may be lacking in personality in the graphics and sound department, one of Monkey Racingâs strongest suits is the the level of customization offered. Simply put, the options available are staggering. You can customize your vehicle with a variety of parts, each of which impart a different design to your vehicle. You can outfit your monkey with a variety of costumes and accessories. Everything can be painted to your liking. The extensive customization options available here allows you to imbue some personality of your own into the game, which goes a long ways towards making up for the lack of personality in the graphics and sound design.
Controller support is fully implemented, both in-game and in the menus, and all available MFi controllers are supported. The game automatically detects connected controllers, and the UI accommodates them both by removing virtual controls and by indicating which physical buttons to press to activate a given ability. Controls themselves are responsive and intelligently mapped – no complaints here. The only off note is the menus themselves, which feature a confusing highlight effect for where the cursor is located that is seemingly different than what the selected button is. But still, considering how many games donât feature menu control at all, I canât complain.
The customization options are impressive, though determining which icon is highlighted can be confusing
Ultimately, I find myself repeatedly comparing Monkey Racing with itâs closest competitor in the casual downhill racing front: Angry Birds Go. The two games are built upon similar mechanics, and feature similar gameplay. The points of divergence between the two enlighten much about who developed them: Angry Birds Go is an extremely polished, detailed, beautiful game with a catchy soundtrack, creative level design, and perfect texture work. It also full of spam ads, in-app purchases, wait timers, product placement⦠it even tries to make you buy physical toy racers to compete with. In every way, it is the work of a major game developer trying to squeeze out every inch of profit to placate VC investors.
Monkey Racing is the anti Angry Birds Go. While itâs fundamental gameplay is solid, this is a game obviously made by an indie studio. This is reflected in the graphics, music, and sound, all of which are repetitive and uninspired. At the same time, you are NEVER pressured to buy anything, you are NEVER force-fed ads. There are no sponsored products from State Farm. There are no plastic monkey toys for you to buy at your local department store and scan into the game. What you see is what you get: a competent racing game at a fair price.
Whether or not you should buy Monkey Racing depends largely on how you feel about these differences. If you donât mind being âmonetizedâ by large corporations who view games as a way to build a user-base to sell to advertisers, youâll probably be better served by Angry Birds Go. If this sounds like hell to you, buy Monkey Racing, and enjoy launching rockets from a monkey-powered go-kart with your conscience intact. Personally, Iâll take an unpolished monkey over ads and timers any day.
Monkey Racing, a casual kart racer from Crescent Moon Games, was recently released with full MFi controller support.
I’ll have a full review coming in the next day or so, but casual racing will want to give this one a download. It’s similar to Angry Birds Go!, but without the horrible monetization and aggressive advertisement. Sounds good to me.
I’ve been spending some more time researching and experimenting with the bluetooth MFi controller disconnect issue, and I’ve come away with some interesting conclusions.
First of all, to be clear, the problems I was describing are very real. If you use a MOGA Rebel on iOS 8, you will notice frequent disconnects in affected games, seemingly getting better or worse depending on the hardware you use. The SteelSeries Stratus disconnects significantly less frequently, but often was plagued by lag and “stickiness” to the analog sticks, severely impacting gameplay. These problems have been confirmed and tested by a variety of people on Twitter and on this site, and notably by MFiGamer, who runs a forum about these controllers.
What’s more, lightning-connected MFi controllers exhibited absolutely none of these issues, working as well under iOS 8 as they did under iOS 7.
From this testing, we all concluded (reasonably I think) that iOS 8 introduced some sort of bluetooth bug that was interfering with MFi controllers. Coupled with the fact that there are widespread reports of bluetooth incompatibilities on iOS 8, I chalked this one up to Apple screwing something up and started the long wait for a fix.
The thing is, I no longer believe that’s entirely true.
Enter Mad Catz
While I’m still awaiting review units of the C.T.R.L.i from Mad Catz (or for the thing to be available at all), I did manage to obtain a Micro C.T.R.L.i of my own. I quickly discovered that the controller doesn’t disconnect on iOS 8. Ever. No matter how hard I try – and believe me, I tried.
I ran the same test on an iPad Air 2, iPhone 6, iPhone 5, and even a first-gen iPad Mini: Connect the controller, enable Airplay and download a huge file (to tax the ram and CPU to the limit), launch a game with known BT incompatibilities, play for a bit, and switch to game controller tester app and see if anything lags or disconnects.
Thus far, I have not been able to get the controller to drop it’s connection or lag out a single time. Not once, not even with the first generation iPad Mini. I’m going to keep testing the heck out of it leading up to my review, and I’ll immediately report any issues I discover, but the fact is, I can’t make it disconnect on iOS 8 at this time.
Retesting the MOGA Rebel
This situation piqued my curiosity. I’d been using the Rebel regularly to play retroarch and Jet Set Radio on an iOS 7 device, and I’d never experienced any disconnects. But I also never tested it all THAT thoroughly on iOS 7. I decided to change that.
I ran through the test procedure listed above, this time on my old iPad 4, still running iOS 7, and the results were surprising: I was able to consistently get the Rebel to drop it’s connection. Not as frequently as on iOS 8, and mostly when taxing it hard with background tasks, but still – the BT disconnect bug is NOT exclusive to iOS 8.
Conclusions
This re-frames the situation somewhat, I think. Apple may still bear some blame for this – they changed something in iOS 8 that broke products they’re still selling on Apple Store shelves. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but I do know things got worse.
But at the same time, Mad Catz made their controller work. MOGA bears some responsibility here as well. They had access to iOS 8 betas like the rest of us, there is no reason for them not to be have been aware of this problem. Barring some sort of low-level incompatibility with their Bluetooth chips and Apple’s Bluetooth driver implementation, there should be nothing stopping Apple from patching this out in firmware. If Mad Catz can do it, I don’t know why MOGA can’t. The same goes for SteelSeries – they just pushed out an update today that doesn’t fix the controller lag, they certainly have a team working on updates. Let’s hope they make it happen.
SteelSeries has today released a firmware update for their Stratus MFi controller, bringing increased compatibility for iOS 8, and an “app match” feature that lists a handful of compatible games directly from the App Store.
This update follows a February firmware update that fixed a particularly unpleasant button-lag issue, where holding down the d-pad and pressing any other button would delay the button press by a half second.
Sadly, the Mac version of this update still unnecessarily installs a kernel extension to the system folder (/System/Library/Extensions/StratusDFU.kext), and includes no uninstaller. I recommend manually removing this extension after upgrading your controller.
Based on my testing, this does seem to improve compatibility with iOS 8 a little bit. There is still a noticeable “stickiness” to the analog sticks that didn’t exist on iOS 7, most apparent in games like Sonic or Monster Hunter, but I haven’t noticed any disconnects yet.
Type:Rider, a classic platforming game with an original and beautiful style, is on sale for $.99 to celebrate it’s first anniversary.
Personally, I think this is one of the most interesting platforming games on the App Store. It combines a beautiful visual aesthetic with solid level design and gameplay – all prerequisites for a good platformer – but it’s best feature has nothing to do with gameplay.
Gorgeous, original graphics
Typography is a fascinating subject. We stare at words and letters all day long, but few of us know the details behind the differences in the fonts we see. But there is a rich, detailed story behind every font we read – fonts have goals, they are designed to convey emotions – and we experience the results of that work every time we read text.
Type:Rider aims to educate about typography. It’s levels are themed around specific fonts. Throughout the course of a level, you’ll collect that font’s alphabet, as well as special characters. Doing so unlocks short “history pages” that explore the backstory behind the font. This is all presented tastefully, and in an understated and optional manner. Type:Rider is definitely NOT an “educational game” in the traditional sense, but I learned a lot from it, and more importantly, it makes the subject it explores interesting.
A rare beast: a legitimately fun way to learn
While Type:Rider is certainly a good platformer on it’s own, it’s combination of a beautiful silhouetted aesthetic with a legitimately interesting typographic theme is what really pushes it over the top. Controller support is solid, with support for both Standard and Extended layout controllers.
If you’re at all interested in typography, you need to own this. And if you’re a fan of platforming games, you might just come away from this with an expanded appreciation for the words you see around you. At $.99, this one is a steal.
GBA4iOS developer Riley Testut digs into some of the details about the methods GBA4iOS uses to work without jailbreaking today, and how security changes in the forthcoming iOS 8.1 update will break those methods. Definitely worth a read.
This is likely going to be a tough one for AfterPad visitors who want to run GBA games. On the one hand, iOS 8.1 hopefully will fix the bluetooth MFi controller connection issues that plague owners of the SteelSeries Stratus and Moga Rebel (wired controllers are unaffected) who are using iOS 8. On the other hand, GBA4iOS will likely be unusable until another major hack is discovered, or until iOS 8 versions are jailbroken.
My game uses both the connect and discount notifications along with the list of connected controllers. A single player game can just assume that the controller they want to reference is the first in the list but I need to show which player colour will represent which controller.
I was seeing that for each controller there were 2 players listed, this meant a single player game was impossible. I kept thinking it was an issue that would be resolved in the next beta so I did not look in to the cause or submit a Radar (Apples version of bug submission).
[…]
I had a few goes at disconnecting and reconnecting my MFi controller and eventually the app crashed. I hooked it up to Xcode to check the device logs and saw it crashed when trying to query the controllers property of âisAttachedToDeviceâ. This will return true for the case type controllers and false for Bluetooth controllers. Itâs useful to know this as you could rely on touch screen buttons also if you know they are near the device. I tried calling this code on my phantom forwarded controllers and rather than fail gracefully or report false it instead crashed, just like the Game Controller Tester. Sometimes the forwarded controller connects first, sometimes the real controller does.
This is something, I think, Apple are expecting developers to work around. Controller forwarding is a new feature and we will need to update our apps to support this.
If you’re a developer, you need to read the whole piece. It gets into some of the nitty gritty details about what could be causing the issue, and provides a work-around solution for fixing it.
Myself, I still have some questions about why this problem is occurring in the first place. This seems like a pretty serious bug on Apple’s end, not a deliberate change in how controller support works.
Controllers SHOULD show up as forwarded when they’re being forwarded from an iPhone to an iPad. When they’re not, they should show up exactly the same as they did in iOS7. Thats what I took away from watching Apple’s keynote on game controllers at this year’s WWDC. I have no idea why Bluetooth controllers are showing up twice, but I’d be shocked it if was an intentional change. If it WAS an intentional change, I have no idea why Bluetooth controllers are behaving any differently from Lightning controllers.
Anyways, this article provides a great workaround for developers, and is well worth a read. A patch for Aztec Antics that incorporates this workaround has already been submitted, and should be available soon.
