‘Asphalt Overdrive’ for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone review

The Asphalt series of games has been around since pretty much smartphones themselves. I still remember playing the excellent Asphalt: Urban GT and its sequel, Urban GT 2 on the N-Gage. In portrait mode, no less, cause that’s how the screen on those phones were

Since then the series has gone through a lot of changes and as with most Gameloft games are now some of the most visually impressive games available on the mobile platform. But before we head from last year’s Asphalt 8: Airborne to Asphalt 9: Whatever, Gameloft has a little spin-off called Asphalt Overdrive to keep us busy. Let’s take a look.

Gameplay

Asphalt Overdrive is a departure from traditional Asphalt games, in which you don’t race against other drivers on a circuit. This is more long the lines of runner games, where the car drives itself and you just have to slide left or right and jump to perform stunts.

Every race begins with cops chasing you. There is a button on screen that you have to press at just the right moment, which gives you a temporary boost of speed. If you miss that you have cops snapping at your heels from the beginning.

Once you do that, you basically have to swipe left or right to avoid cars in your lanes or any other obstructions. You can ram into cars from the side, which gives you points. There are also ramps on the street that you can jump from and perform stunts in air. These are fairly simple, and can be executed by swiping up or sideways when you are about to jump. Actually, you kinda have to do that, because if you don’t, you lose some speed and the cops are right back on your tail again.

Pulling all these stunts gets you some nitro boost that you can use to evade the cops. You can also collect the nitro while driving. It’s important to save the nitro for later because in later levels the cops just seem to come out from nowhere near the end and unless you can nitro your way out you are bound to get busted.

Despite being a fairly simple game, there are a lot of excellent licensed cars to unlock and play. You can also spend in-game currency to customize and upgrade the cars, which become sort of necessary for later levels. Overdrive has several ‘turfs’ for different ‘villains’, where there are a handful of race categories, such as simply escaping the cops, or performing stunts, or causing mayhem, etc.

Annoyingly, you get a limited set of points you can use to play the game. Every race you start uses one point and even if you restart a race you use another point. There are very few of these and if you run out, you have to wait some time before the points get refilled or pay real money to continue.

As you’d expect, there is a lot of IAP in the game, since this is a free-to-play title. You can spend money to get in-game cash or gold, which can be used to buy more cars, upgrades, or unlock levels. The game is still playable without paying a single dime but you won’t go too far without hitting the paywall, and then your only options are to either wait and come back later or pay upfront.

Oh, and Asphalt Overdrive doesn’t work offline.

Graphics & Sound

Gameloft decided on a retro theme for Asphalt Overdrive, with an 80′s California setting, retro supercars instead of the modern ones, and a cheesy menu design that is reminiscent of GTA: Vice City. While I appreciate the setting and the retro cars, the pink menus really are ugly.

The graphics don’t seem particularly great in this version, so it’s not just the gameplay where Overdrive departs from the main Asphalt series. The game looks positively blurry on the iPad’s Retina display, as if it’s running at a lower resolution. Even on Android devices, it doesn’t look that great. The 3D models for the cards are good, though.

The sound is just about okay. The music is decent and reminds me of older Asphalt games but the shouty voice clips with the tacky lines of the co-passenger or whoever, who cheers every time you pull off a stunt or asks you to go faster, are absolutely annoying. Even weirder is the game actually speaking the function of every button you press. So as you’re in the menu pressing ‘Upgrades’, ‘Customize’, ‘Next’, etc, the game is going “Upgrades, “Customize”, “Next” in an auto-tuned voice, that just sounds silly.

Verdict

As a spin-off title, Asphalt Overdrive isn’t really asking itself to be taken too seriously as the other games in the series, which themselves are arcadey mobile games. The gameplay is temporarily interesting but gets boring quickly. Even if you try to play it for a while, the game will stop you and ask you to come back later when you run out of points, unless you choose to pay, of course. The visuals aren’t great and the sound is annoying at times. There is not much to like here but it’s a free game so install it, play it for a few minutes, and when you run out of points, uninstall it like I did.

Rating: 5/10
Pros: A running game, but with cars, good number of licensed vehicles to play with
Cons: Literally stops you from playing after a while and tells you to come back later, unimpressive graphics and sound

Download: iOS | Android • Windows Phone

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Apple stops allowing iOS 7 firmware installations

Apple iOS 8 was released to all compatible devices on September 17, but it wasn’t a smooth launch at all. The iOS 8 was plagued by lots of bugs, Apple even removed all Health-related apps due to a bug in its HealthKit. This is where the iOS 8.0.1 update came to help, but while it may fixed the Health app issues, it broke the cell reception and Touch ID on quite a few phones.

So, the iOS 8.0.1 update was quickly taken down and iOS 8.0.2 appeared two days later to fix the Heath app and what the 8.0.1 update broke. Many users disappointed by the iOS 8 behavior decided to revert back to iOS 7.1.2, but this option now no longer available.

Apple has stopped signing the iOS 7 firmware since Friday afternoon so no one will be able to revert back to iOS 7 if they upgraded to iOS 8. This probably means Apple already considers the iOS 8 bug-free or at least smooth enough to be ready for mass adoption.

The adoption rate is indeed great, as every other previous iOS rollout, and Apple has done nothing unexpected. It always wants the majority of its users to run on the latest version because all those new services, security patches, etc. But it could have waited a month or two before it took this aggressive approach, just to be safe.

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HealthKit-integrated Apps start surfacing in the App Store

With iOS 8.0.2 now seeding, apps using the Apple HealthKit suite have started appearing in the App Store.

The first of the apps to appear in the App Store is FitPort, which gives you all available health information to you while syncing with HealthKit. The new health-related framework also allows you to be very picky on what information you share with third-party apps.

The issues that were reported a bit over a week ago, were originally supposed to be fixed with iOS 8.0.1. Since the update’s life was short due to bugs breaking the cellular and Touch ID functionality, it was pulled by Apple.

Expect more health-related apps to appear on the App Store in the coming days and weeks.

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Asus joins #bendgate fun, mocks Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus

After Samsung, LG, HTC, and even KitKat, Asus has joined the #bendgate fun party by mocking the iPhone 6 Plus too. The Taiwanese company is also promoting two of its products while it’s at it. First up, theZenfone 6, as you can see.

But the Transformer Book Flip gets compared to Apple’s bendy phablet too, in the next image.

Mocking the iPhone 6 Plus for how prone it is to bending has become all the rage in the mobile world over the past few days. At this rate, in a few more days there won’t be a smartphone maker under the sun that hasn’t hit Apple’s phablet where it hurts – or rather, where it bends.

Asus says “the best way to bend is to flip” in one of its Facebook posts accompanying these pictures. Apple may have recently boasted about how well it tests its devices, but this meme shows no signs of dying down just yet, so the company will just have to put up with such mockery.

Thanks for sending this in, Arjunsinh Jadeja!

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redditor explains why the aluminum iPhone 6 bends and the plastic Note 3 doesn’t

We have all had our fun with the BendGate jokes. But sometimes it’s important to set the jokes aside and ask why is it that it’s happening and how come some of the other devices don’t share the same problem.

Most people have blamed the aluminum shell on the iPhone 6 for being the culprit here, because aluminum is a soft metal. However, one redditor has explained that it doesn’t really have anything to do with the shell but how the internal geometry of the phone is.

What follows below is his comment on reddit:

This isn’t right. iPhone’s bending problem has nothing to do with aluminum. It has everything to do with geometry.

((Edit: Material choice matters, always. But material has to work together with the geometry it’s been shaped into. The choice of aluminum here isn’t the limiting factor. The geometric design of the aluminum chassis is.))

Nobody uses pure aluminum for general purpose manufacturing. They use aluminum alloys instead. And the alloys themselves are incredibly diverse.
You can get extremely rigid alloys that will be incredibly difficult to bend even in thin structures prone to bending (such as 7075), but the disadvantage of that is difficulty of machining (and often welding too). This type is dominantly used in transportation industry (automotive, marine, aircraft, etc). Manufacturers take the additional manufacturing costs in order to reap the great strength-to-density ratio.

And then there are buttery soft alloys that are extremely easy to machine (3031 for instance), even manually, but they’re also way too deformable to be useful for any load bearing purposes. I don’t have too much experience with these, but they’re cheap, and generally a good choice for decorative uses.
Apple uses anodized 6000 series aluminum (most likely 6061, possibly a tempered variant like -T4 edit: apparently it’s 6003, which is similar to 6061 in properties). This is a good compromise between the extremes, and is the most ubiquitous aluminum alloy out there. It’s got good mechanical properties, easy to machine, easy to weld. Their choice of material was correct in this case.

The problem with the iPhone 6 chassis comes from something we call “stress concentration” in engineering and this phenomenon is related to the geometry of an object. More specifically, it has to do with the cross section profile that is being bent.

If you watch the bending test video, you’ll notice that iPhone 6 bent exactly at the root of the volume buttons. And if you look even more closely, you’ll notice that the bending is actually on just one side — the side of the volume buttons. The opposite side is actually mostly unscathed.

This is because the cross section area of the bending profile decreases dramatically right at that point. They have cut out a hole to accommodate the volume buttons, and when under loading, the internal stresses of the structure are being concentrated at the base of this cutout. So when the structure fails, it fails at that point. The lower cross section area decreases the resistance to bending, and makes it possible to bend the chassis at a lower applied force than what it would take otherwise, had the volume buttons not been there (but of course they have to be there).

The result here wouldn’t have changed if Apple had used plastic in place of aluminum. In fact, it probably would have been worse. Typically phone manufacturers use brittle plastic in their devices (ductile plastic is the kind that feels really cheap and terrible), so the chassis would have broken entirely at the same point. They could have avoided the issue, maybe, if they opted for steel or a tougher aluminum alloy but then you run into other problems and have to retool essentially your entire product line.

The reason why Galaxy Note 3 passes the bending test doesn’t have anything to do with the material it’s made out of. It has everything to do with the internal geometry of the chassis. The internal magnesium alloy chassis (which isn’t any better than aluminum as a material) has an I-beam cross section that is great against bending, and it’s further sandwiched between two shells, which are in this case plastic. It’s reinforced very thoroughly, to the point where human-applied forces cannot bend the device beyond its “elastic range” (this is the deformation range within which the device can recover to its original state when loads are removed).

Apple could have designed the aluminum chassis in a way that would accomplish the exact same thing, and if they had, people wouldn’t be mistakenly criticizing the aluminum here. They would just be talking about how nice the material feels to the touch (because it does, and yes, it is “premium” much more so than plastic). Unfortunately, they fucked it up. Again, it’s all in the geometry.

So to be clear, Apple is at fault here, and the company’s obsession with making its products thinner has once again resulted in design compromises being made elsewhere. It’s not the aluminum to blame, however, (the HTC One M8 doesn’t bend) but rather the internal geometry.

Should this be a cause for concern, though? Considering how few actual people have reported the problem, I would say no. Not unless you put your phone in your pocket and do yoga. It takes a lot of force for the phone to bend like that and merely having it in your pocket won’t bend it like that. But it’s something to keep in mind and consider as a trade-off for having such a thin metal phone.

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