By NMT | No Comments
Last updated: Tuesday, July 21, 2009

  The rules of the ‘Game’ are simple, though not presented in the Help screen within the title, rather curiously. Essentially, if a cell has more than three neighbours, it dies through overpopulation, if less then two then it dies through loneliness. With two or three neighbours, it hangs around and reproduces. Add in colour assignments for each cell and the initial impetus from being able to tap to set where on the playing grid you’d like cells to start and you have the recipe for some fascinating, mesmerising, fractal-like patterns. Additional variety comes from extra options: ‘Destabilize’, which acts to avoid equilibrium situations, ‘Pulse’, which helps keep the action going by periodically exciting the remaining cells, and two new tap techniques, ‘Crazy’ and ‘Cannon’, each of which spreads cells in a different way. Each time you come back to Conway’s Life, you’ll experiment in a different way and end up with new patterns and effects. Which, if not addictive in the same way as a genuine game, is at least pretty cool. In terms of cosmetics, you can ‘colour’ the life patterns by adjusting the RGB colours of new cells  and by adjusting the relative fade speeds of Red, Green and Blue, plus you can work with a fairly wide cell size range, right down to the iPhone’s full screen resolution. A ‘pause’ control and a ‘Screen grab’ control aren’t strictly necessary but are nice to have anyway. Conway’s Life is an elegantly implemented diversion from the business of ‘real life’ and at a price point of free definitely deserves a little of your attention.

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Conway’s Life

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