Me on the App Store, regarding Shaun Inman’s new iOS game The Last Rocket:

This game has a lot of potential. There are cool gameplay mechanics, interesting puzzles, and great 8-bit graphics and music.

Unfortunately, the responsiveness of the touch controls is terrible. The game tends to drop a significant portion of your touches when they are done in quick succession, for no good reason at all. Try it! While airborne, tap at a constant rate of about 6 times a second, and the rocket doesn’t hover in the same place… instead, it kind of schizophrenically moves randomly in either direction, indicating that your touches aren’t being recognized at the proper rate.

This manifests itself in a number of different ways, primarily making it hard to time a quick reverse when there is no room or when you’re heading toward a death. So many times I’ve been rocketing towards some spikes and clearly tap the screen well before the spikes, yet I run into them anyway. Also, if you need to do a quick reverse after turning, forget about it — you basically have to double-tap to ensure the game registers your intentions. Level 6-8 is maddening with this defect, because you have to make quick turnarounds in very little space, and it’s almost impossible to do this correctly.

An otherwise awesome and fun game is made infuriatingly frustrating by this one problem.

For the dev only: simX [at] mac [dawt] com to respond.

Some guy, posting a pic of my review on Twitter:

The guy who called MacHeist customers cheap fucking bastards, turns out he’s a cheap bastard of an App Store customer.

and, after me being pointed out on Twitter:

dear @simx you’re a piece of shit and your controls blow. 1 star as a person.

Then he says:

the guy’s just a troll, he runs his mouth off to get attention. hence him leaving his email address. I guess I’m feeding… it.

and

if you as a customer leave an exaggerated review or rating in an effort to extort changes in a $2 or $3 app you’re a cheap bastard

and

I seem to see most customer reviews raving about the controls in this game, so I must be totally, retardedly wrong.

and a bit later:

everyone rants, not everyone has over 20% of their blog posts filed under the rant category. as I said, it’s his schtick.

and

I’ve looked through @SimX’s App Store reviews and I’ve decided he wasn’t trolling TLR, he’s just a hyper-critical dick. I can be that too.

and

What really got me was his 2/5 star rating equating to an F

So let’s see…

1. I actually bought the game at $3 and I didn’t mention the price at all. Clearly I’m cheap.

2. I leave my e-mail address, which is how he managed to connect my App Store review and my weblog post, but that somehow makes me a troll, instead of someone not wanting to leave an anonymous review. (Amusingly, he couldn’t even find me on Twitter before having it pointed out to him, despite my nickname on the App Store being exactly the same as mine on Twitter.)

3. The app has 71 5-star ratings, and mine is one of three 1- or 2-star ratings. Clearly my review was to extort changes out of Shaun Inman, because I’m totally hurting his sales.

4. Everybody else says something isn’t wrong, so it must be so.

5. It’s someone’s “shtick” if they do it 20% of the time. Not the majority of the time, just 20%.

6. I left a detailed review outlining my one issue with the game, and have done so with other apps as well, but that classifies me as a “dick”.

7. 2-star ratings are classified as F’s. Assuming he’s using the American system where anything less than 60% is an F, then 3-star ratings barely qualify as D-minuses. And 4-star ratings qualify as B-minuses. That makes so much more sense than 1-star being “hate it” and 2-star being “dislike it”.

By the way:

I’ve played it through four times. I stand by my review.