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Filed under: Gaming, Odds and ends, App Store

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.

Filed under: Gaming, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Zen Bound adding new tree in free update

Touch Arcade has a slew of new screenshots from an upcoming free update for a game I've been coming back to more and more lately on my iPhone: Zen Bound. When I first installed it, I thought of it as more of a tech demo than a game, but as you load it up more and more, you really do start uncovering layers of competition -- "if only I twisted the statue that way I could cover more ground, or maybe if I started from that leg I could wrap around closer on that side." It's pretty addictive, and it's one of those games that starts tugging at your mind even when you're not playing it.

The update probably won't help free my mind -- not only will it have a whole set of new objects to wrap up (featuring some fun retro-gaming themed pieces), but it's getting some bugfixes and some performance tweaks as well. The paint spread by the rope will be smoother, and the problem of the rope crossing through objects should be better (while that happened from time to time, it wasn't a huge complaint).

Still, especially for free, it sounds like the update will only make a great game better. Zen Bound is available right now in the App Store for $4.99 (with the free update available "soon"), and there's a lite version to try out as well.

Tip of the Day

To get an instant map to any address, just go to your Address Book and right click on the address field of any one of your contacts and select "Map Of." The address will then be revealed in Google Maps on Safari. You can do the same if a data detector determines there is an address in an e-mail in Mail.


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