As iPhone apps go, the world is light on football-friendly apps and games. Sure, there’s FIFA 09 and the old live scores / news reader app but overall mobile development in the football sector is sorely lacking.
That’s why it’s always good to hear about new football iPhone apps coming out, and we were quite excited when asked to review StatShaker, an iPhone app that promises you a new England Football stat everytime you shook your phone.
Ok, so not excited, but any excuse to pull out the old iPhone and give it a spin. Here’s how StatShaker panned out:
Features
StatShaker: England International Edition, does exactly what it says on the can. Shake the app and get a stat.
There are two modes – Random, which produces a random stat every time you shake it, and ‘Guess’, where you shake once for the Stat (i.e. question) and a second time for the Answer.
Playability
It’s good to know that Fabio Capello has the best win ratio of all England managers (topping the only World Cup winning manager England had by a good 10 percentage points) or that Owen Hargreaves has appeared 25 times for England as a substitute (a record).
Overall the stats would make for a fun discussion down at the pub or amongst friends, and the guys behind the game, Parrot & Miller, have a decent idea that I would *love* to see implemented for the Premier League as a ‘quiz’ game instead of just a ‘shake-stat-shake-stat’ app.
Since it’s the first iteration, we can excuse the slight repetitiveness of the stats (achieved after 30-odd shakes), as well as the viability of some of the stats (David Beckham has played more matches at a non-English club than Owen Hargreaves, and why is ‘most black players to play in a game for England – 7 – a stat?).
It’s a good base for an iPhone game, and I hope they add a lot more stats into it for the Premier League and for leagues / teams around the world. It could be a nice quiz game, or it could stay as a shaker – in either case, this one has the potential to be a hit.
Get StatShaker: England International Edition from iTunes now.
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