These days, it seems like everyone is getting into the high-difficulty smartphone arcade game genre, and Bart Bonte's tap tap tap, free for iOS and Android, takes things in a very Bop It! direction with all the quirky, clean style you've come to expect. All you have to do is follow the directions of the voice... tap on some circles, double-tap others, drag coloured circles to matching outlines, and more. The twist, of course, is that the game keeps adding new elements and speeding up as you play, and you have a narrower and narrower window of time to execute each action before you lose. It's a simple concept that sounds easy, but can you keep your eyes, brain, and hands all working together long enough to beat your high score?
tap tap tap, like others in the growing and popular "do this deceptively easy thing over and over until it gets so hard you want to smash your phone" genre, feels like a return to simpler arcade days, where reflexes are key and you soon stop thinking about how few elements there are to it because you're having enough trouble juggling what already exists. The minimalistic presentation makes for a clean and tidy interfaces that still manages to be stylish, but tap tap tap is more concerned with being difficult than it is being pretty. While it's slow to start in a way that may frustrate you if you've already played it several times, it introduces and intermingles new actions at a steady clip before really cranking up the speed. When I mentioned Bop It!, I was making a serious comparison as well as seriously dating myself, though rather than confusing you, tap tap tap typically ends up overwhelming you with piles of actions all appearing and disappearing on the screen at once in a very narrow window of time. It's addictive and catchy, though it also feels like it could have done with a sort of "turbo" mode to speed things up a bit once you know the "tutorial" minute or so. I only ever managed a 193 by the skin of my teeth, but I'm sure you can do much better, and I look forward to you telling me how far you blew past that number in the comments. No. Really. It would make my day.
tap tap tap (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)
Android:
Get tap tap tap
Gah... I swear I swiped left when I was told to! (Score 127)
Fun times, I suppose. Reminds me of Klikwerk, one of Bonte's older works.
203 aaaand now I need a valium.
Dude, Bop-It RULED. Do you remember the "extreme" one with flick-it, spin-it, and all that? Good times.
195, dear me that got hectic! I can see myself playing this one on trains and buses for a long time to come.
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