Super Twario is a revolutionary new way to experience Twitter in all its 140 character glory. Those of you who grew up in the eighties, or just have a general love for retro gaming, will instantly feel at home here. That’s because Super Twario takes Twitter and transforms it into a side-scrolling platformer, reminiscent of classic games such as Super Mario Bros.
Twario, the cute bunny protagonist, can be controlled by tilting your device from left to right and tapping the screen to jump. Tweeting is just as simple, and double-tapping on your character is enough to get you up and running. The game’s world is littered with numerous walkable platforms that take shape from your Twitter feed, as well as avatars which are suspended above their related tweet. Jumping and hitting a friends avatar will trigger a text field pre-loaded with their @username, allowing you to easily connect with them. Tapping on a platform will allow you to get an extended view of a tweet and to exercise usual Twitter protocol such as replying and retweeting. From here you can also gain access to additional information such as the total number of tweets a person has sent. Clicking on a link within an extended platform will open pictures, webpages and videos with exceptional performance, all inside the app.
To make Super Twario more game-centric and to increase its playability, Apple’s social gaming network Game Center has been fully integrated. This currently adds ten unlockable achievements such as ‘Tweet 100 times’, and global leaderboards which rank you based on Twitter activity. Throughout the application you’ll be awarded points relating to tweets, mentions, replies and follow fridays that will all contribute to your overall rank.
When you look past the cute graphics and innovative gameplay, you begin to see that Super Twario is missing a lot of key features for a Twitter application. The inability to send Direct Messages and the absence of a built-in address book, unfortunately leave Super Twario marred. The game’s controls, although useable, are somewhat fiddly and I’d much prefer to see the tilt input replaced by touch gestures. I tested this application on my second generation iPod and although it ran smoothly overall, it was prone to crashing in various situations. This shouldn’t be an issue on newer devices, and can be remedied on older ones by freeing up some of your device’s memory.
In Conclusion
Super Twario is a fun, clever and innovative outing which is unfortunately flawed, at least for the time being. With the developer constantly striving to drive down memory usage and implement various gameplay improvements, this app has huge potential. Super Twario will suit new and light users of Twitter alike, but heavier users will need to supplement this with other fuller-featured Twitter apps.
