Ready Steady Bang (iOS)

It's a funny old world, the iOS game/app market. Seemingly innocuous little games can become blockbuster gaming juggernauts, crushing all in their path with their simplistic, easy-to-grasp concepts. And yet, others which are similarly polished and possibly even more fun can fall by the wayside, looking terribly forlorn when you check your Game Center leaderboard and find you're "#23 of 978". There are 250 million+ iOS owners out there... surely every app should be picked up by more than 978 by default?


Come on, old-timer. Put that thing away.

Over the next few weeks, I'd like to give a shout out to a few iOS games that might not get as many mentions as the behemoths that have become part of pop culture. They might not have the profile, but they're irrefutably enjoyable, and all for less than the price of a Mastertronic budget game. And the first game I'd like to pimp to the "masses" is a terribly simple affair called Ready Steady Bang.

If you've ever wanted to be a cowboy or a sheriff in the Wild West, dispensing bullets one at a time in a life-or-death draw against a deadly foe, then Ready Steady Bang is the game for you. What? You question me?


No? Well, if you insist...

Ooohhh, alright... it's a reaction test. In the single player game you take on ten increasingly dead-eyed opponents. You shouldn't have many problems against the first or second, but once you start moving on you'll encounter goes that even The Waco Kid would have trouble dispatching.

That's all well and good, and it's great fun going up against these daftly-named adversaries. It's very satisfying to see your slightly-bigger-than-a-stick-man opponent fall to the ground, clutching his chest after you've beaten him to the draw. And the over-the-top winner's screen is great, displaying your average reaction time in huge numbers. But it's the two-player mode where this game really comes into its own.


Yee-haw! Take that, pardner!

Beating your mates is always fun, but never more so than when defeat comes in an instant. In the last couple of weeks, I've played Ready Steady Bang down the pub a couple of times with mates, and it's an instant winner. Just ramp up the sound on your iDevice, plonk it in the middle of the table with a mate sitting opposite, and away you go. It's like a two-player version of the shootout at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The pair of you sit there, hunched at opposite ends of the table, fingers hovering and twitching above the screen... the announcer shouts out "Ready.... Steady.............. Bang!" Your fingers race to be the first to tap the screen. The loser falls, a broken and defeated man. The winner jumps for joy, being careful not to spill his pint over the iPhone...


Quick Draw McMoz prevails again!

It's fantastic. You could actually imagine this being an arcade cocktail table in a bar. It could rake in a fortune. Everybody has that competitive edge, and playing Ready Steady Bang amongst mates really brings that out. I love this game, and I've brought in a few sales purely on the evidence of a quick session at the bar. For 69p, it's a little gem that should be impossible to refuse.

Ready Steady Bang at the iTunes App Store