One Proud EatWillGrow User Tells Us His Achievement
For better or for worse, Twitter is seemingly being integrated into everything. That's both the pleasure and pain of making a service which does one thing well, and pretty much only that one thing. A new iPhone game called EatWillGrow has taken an interesting step of not only displaying global high scores, but letting you broadcast your score to Twitter, and see how other players are doing. The high scores list even features their Twitter nicknames and avatars, making the microblogging service the central database for the game!
The game itself is fairly simple. On your iPhone or iPod Touch, you guide "Blob" through a perilous space, plagued with deadly mines. You gain points by eating food, which makes you larger, and therefore, a bigger target for said mines. There are power ups that make you go faster or slower, making food eating harder or easier, as you flick your finger left or right on the iPhone's surface, navigating the gauntlet.
Playing EatWilGrow Shows Your Rank vs. Other Twitter Users
As you rack up points, a system at the bottom of the screen tells you your overall position in the scoreboard, or alternatively how many points you need to get to position #100. When you lose, and you will no doubt lose, you are informed of your position, and given the option to tweet your score via Twitter, after you have entered your user name and password.
(You can see score reports from Twitter users here.)
To prevent users from cheating and claiming ridiculous scores, EatWillGrow only counts reports from the game itself, which registers as a unique Twitter client, and even posts a screenshot of your score to TwitPic on your behalf. You can learn more about EatWillGrow on the official Web site. The author, @kode80, can of course be found on Twitter when he's not playing the game. Just don't expect to see me tweeting my score. I'm not that good.
EatWillGrow is on the iTunes Store for $.99.