StarSmasher and TouchFighter 2

[rant]
I am so tired of people saying that StarSmasher is just a version of TouchFighter. For the record: I had already written about 80% of the first iteration of StarSmasher’s game engine before I had even heard of TouchFighter. I have since downloaded TouchFighter (why wouldn’t you want to learn from well written sample coe) but the only thing I used it for was to learn how to produce sound effects. I wrote SS because I love on-rails games and I thought the accelerometer would be a perfect control interface for one (oh, and because the Wii continues to disappoint me in its on-rails and flight-sim offerings).

For those of you who haven’t played TouchFighter, it’s pretty pointless as a game. It is a turret based game, which essentially means your ship never moves. You change your ships rotation by tilting the device but the only moving parts are the enemy ships that come screaming at you. In other words there is less gameplay value there than the Free Flight version of StarSmasher.

The StarSmasher game engine is 100% my coding, with thanks to the guys in the #iphonedev freenode rooms for helping me solve some particular OpenGL problems, and isn’t even the same style of game as TF. Yeah TF is a space shooter, but the similarities end there for the most part. SS is about dodging asteroids and flying with style while TF, which really has no “flying,” is about accurately aiming your iPhone at targets moving towards you on the screen.

I just can’t understand why people who have never played StarSmasher or TF would rate SS poorly on iTunes. I think people saw the TF video and thought it was amazing because it was really the first video demonstrating the iPhone’s accelerometer controls, but that is it, a demo.

Oh well, there is nothing I can do about it, people will continue to think that SS is TF.
[/rant]