While this isn’t Area 51, there are aliens lurking around the desert-luckily I found one of them to be friendly. Hot Salsa Interactive, a perfect name for this Scottsdale-based gaming company, released today a continuation of their game Zander Your Virtual Pet Alien with their next installation on the Apple store, Zander’s World.
If your kids are Jetpack Joyride lovers, then this game will give them a similar thrill. Hot Salsa continues with their family friendly style gaming platform where Zander explores new worlds and adventures with the player’s goal to fight off aliens and acquire gold coins to buy things for Zander.
The game launches with an up-tempo electronica music and Zander at the ready with his jetpack and fighting uniform…a white diaper.
As Zander’s journey begins, your tapping motion on the screen activates the jetpack moving him up and down to avoid obstacles and gather coins, simultaneously the smoke from the jetpack kills off monsters.
Users can acquire coins from their Mission by reaching a certain distance without dying and capturing additional gold coins along the way. While it will take some commitment to acquire enough coins for the store, the game does offer in-app purchases to reach the Zander space swag level and pick up a blaster packs, gadgets, powerups or clothes, even a blue gravity diaper.
Head of Games at Hot Salsa Interactive Sergio Bustamante II, told me that this isn’t his first go around with aliens. With 20 years of game development under his belt, he comes well-trained to fight virtual monsters from past employment at EA, Treyarch and Madden Studios, and he has worked on action-packed games such as Spiderman, Superman Returns and NHL. I was curious how he went from Spidey to Zander?
Aside from liking the family-friendly platform and heading up games with sequels, “Zander’s World is a very fascinating and exciting IP,” he said. “It’s an interesting world. As a player, you can explore the character, explore his universe and see the fun aspects of the game.”
Bustamante explained for this game, the team pulled inspiration from Zander Your Virtual Pet Alien and transferred many recognizable features and artwork into Zander’s World to keep that continuity.
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Every game developer knows, there has to be a way to make money, and the most popular is in-app purchases. Bustamante admits Hot Salsa isn’t shy about cross-promoting their games and providing incentives for players. “We do cross-promote our games, and product placement will appear of one of their games as a pop-up.”
From here, Bustamante said they will continue to update the game, fix the bugs and work on “game mechanics and features that we didn’t have time for.”
Hot Salsa is currently working on three additional games for release in 2014, a puzzle style, brain teaser and animal-lover.
As for Zander’s World you can get it on iOS devices and later in August for Android.
Download Zander here for iOS
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Graphics provided by Hot Salsa Interactive
