Jenga Now Contains The Much Anticipated Gyroscope Support
February 24, 2011
NaturalMotion has been doing maintenance and fine tuning updates to their board game gone digital version of Jenga since its release late last year. Today's update includes a bigger enhancement, the highly requested gyroscope support for viewing navigation.
This request was made by users, including our review team, because panning the camera with your finger could lead to accidental play. Of course, your Jenga tower could be highly compromised with an accidental wrong block move.
When enabled, which is by default on supported devices, simply shift your iDevice left, right, up, or down to navigate around the tower. You can twist or tilt your iDevice as well, but it really doesn't work because the tower will just return to the previous position as the screen is turned back towards you. The game still requires you to swipe up or down to navigate from the top to bottom, and vice-versa. The feature can be quickly enabled or disabled by just tapping on the gyro icon in the bottom-right of the gameplay area.
Jenga's complete features include realistic physics processing, high quality graphics with Retina display support, 3-D environments, score sharing via email and Facebook, single-device multiplayer with Pass'n'Play, Game Center leaderboards and achievements, two game modes, and full sounds effects and music.
Classic mode works like the old-fashioned physical version. It's the casual gameplay where a person slowly removes blocks using tap and pull gestures before carefully placing them on the top of the tower. Arcade mode brings more competition to the party. Match colors to gain bonus points and play as quickly as you can to increase the score multiplier. However, if the tower topples, that's game over as usual.
Jenga is designed for iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 3.2 or later, and is currently on sale in the App Store for just $.99. Gyroscope support is only available when played on an iDevice with gyroscope hardware, currently iPhone 4 and fourth generation iPod touch. As one final reminder, this feature and update is not relevant to Jenga HD for iPad.
