Think you're good at Flight Control?
Here I was, thinking our fine TUAW readership was pretty great at playing Flight Control. Yesterday, as part of a post about the new game Trains, I asked for everyone's high scores, and I thought we were doing well.
Commenter DJ won our informal competition (no prizes, sorry, beyond the satisfaction of a job well done) with a score of 1036. Dan came in second with 575. Rounding out the top three was Matthew with a high of 275.
Now, however, with the latest update, your high scores can be uploaded to cloudcell.com, home of high scores for not only Flight Control, but Real Racing and Fast & Furious. There, it's clear that TUAW readers have much better things to do than play Flight Control all day.
Just a few hours ago, a user named TommyRoissy landed 14,439 aircraft before two of them collided. Ridonkulous. Our own Mike Rose speculates that some are playing the game inside the iPhone SDK's simulator mode to gain higher scores. I agree -- pair simulator mode with a graphics tablet, and you've got yourself quite the landing machine. Update: Thanks to our commenters for correcting this; it's not technically possible to run purchased iPhone apps in the Xcode simulator, as it cannot emulate the iPhone's ARM processor.
Even so, that's a lot of time spent playing Flight Control. I mean, it's a good game, but let's say the average landing time is five seconds. 14,439 landings is over 72,000 seconds -- or 20 hours -- of playing time. I'm certain there's some pauses in there, but that's still a lot of landing.
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Here I was, thinking our fine TUAW readership was pretty great at playing Flight Control. Yesterday, as part of a post about the new game...
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after watching the youtube video that chip posted above, seeing the guy's technique I can believe his high score. impressive.
what I'd like to see is a video of these high score guys doing the carrier level!
I better go practice some more. oh well at least my 154 is top few in my cloudcell neighborhood.
It's really quite impressive, no? :)
And he mentioned somewhere that he just began tackling the beach level, and even he says the carrier level is hard. Good to hear I'm not the only one! (I think my record on the carrier is like 85 :P )
Damn, and I'm here thinking how good I am with about 55 planes landed!
June 12 2009 at 5:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI *know* I'm good at Flight Control! I've landed 152 planes before crashing!
When I thought I was REALLY good, I logged on and saw people in the 1000's, and then I just thought, "Well, I'm good in my own mind." I don't care that there's a whole world outside my mind...
Great game, though.
Likely people have jailbroken phones and hack some of the files inside the app to produce artificially high scores.
June 12 2009 at 4:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe iPhone simulator executes only x86 code, there is no emulator included with the iPhone simulator.
June 12 2009 at 3:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIn case I wasn't clear, that means you can't run the (ARM targeted) binaries purchased from the app store in the simulator. Perhaps people are using VNC and a tablet, although - that's an awful lot of effort - I suspect it's more likely that they're just that good (or cheating in how they're reporting the score)
June 12 2009 at 3:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyYeah, how do you play the iPhone in the SDK's Simulator Mode?
If I were going to spoof the high score, I'd have fun with it, always beating the top score by 1.
When Frenzic cam out (the Mac version, not the iPhone version) there were some ridiculously high scores appearing in the leader boards after a few days. I had always assumed people wrote a script to auto-track their mouse pointer based on what colors were showing up. I guess hacking the scores going to server would be easier. If they aren't using SSL it's probably pretty trivial.
Either way, no way are those high scores legitimate.
Oh they're quite legitimate, I assure you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8cNYHrzU5c
Probably easiest just to hack the data stream to the high score server. I haven't looked into how easy that would be, but probably not too difficult.
June 12 2009 at 2:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIt looks like binary.
June 12 2009 at 3:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHow can you play purchased apps inside the iPhone simulator???!!!
June 12 2009 at 2:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyNope. You pay an additional $10 for the line and another $30 for the data services on that line.
June 12 2009 at 2:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDAMMIT, it autofilled my last post.
Can you actually do that - run something inside the simulator? I thought it wasn't actually an emulator and wouldn't run real iPhone apps.
No, it's not possible to run something in the simulator unless you're the developer (or you just have access to the source code). That said, that's a feature I would LOVE to see, to be able to use iPhone apps in the simulator on my Mac.
June 12 2009 at 3:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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