APP OF THE DAY: Ducktastic (iPhone)

On the face of things, Ducktastic is a pretty standard arcade game for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. You guide a duck on his annual migration flight, eating bugs along the way and avoiding the bullets of hunters out to make you their dinner.

Fun, but nothing we haven’t seen before.

That is until you realise that the game is using real-time data about the time of day and your local weather conditions to change gameplay on the fly. It’s a system they’re calling Weather FX, which affects the 18 levels depending on the real-world conditions around you.

In other words, play Ducktastic anywhere near the vicinity of a hurricane and your poor little duckie is going to get blown about like a plastic bag in a wind tunnel.

It’s an interesting concept, and one we’d like to see applied to other genres. Wouldn’t it be great to fire up a game of FIFA and have your little virtual versionof Old Trafford covered in the same amount of snow as is sitting on the real pitch in Manchester?

Click here to grab Ducktastic, and scroll down for some pics of the app in action.