Handmark Adds OXO and Subway Line to its Formidable App Arsenal
Handmark, publishers and developers of a wide variety of apps for mobile devices, including a bunch for the App Store, have a pair of new games out to add to their massive library of apps under their name.
OXO Extreme: Best Tic Tac Toe is an adaptation of a pen and paper game, where you and another person draw Xs and Os on a piece of paper. That's what I call misdirection, as I'm not talking about tic-tac-toe, instead you're trying to create as many O-X-O combinations as you can on an 8 by 8 grid. You may think that O has the advantage here, as X-O-X means nothing, but O has to be careful not to place Os in positions where X can take advantage of Os laying around the board. The game kind of plays like Go in the turn-based nature, though you can't surround more than one X with Os. The game comes in both an ad-supported free version and a paid ad-free version for $0.99.
Their other new release, Subway Line, is developed by veteran iOS developer Fishing Cactus. The game is a take on path and time management games, where you have to switch around train tracks as subways cross the paths. If a train has to wait at a crossroads, then people get cranky and your general happiness bar drops, and when it drops all the way, then it's game over. The game comes in both an ad-supported Lite version and a $1.99 paid version. As well, the full version comes with Game Center support for leaderboards.
While both games are continuing the Lite/Paid split, it's unlikely that the model will disappear any time soon, still. Android users who are somehow reading this article on an iOS site (Android Rundown is that way, folks) and wishing they could play these games will find themselves in luck, as both are available on Android as well. That says something about the gaming market - it may not be such an iOS-focused market as publishers look for new revenue streams and for ways to exploit the additional users on non-iOS platforms.
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